The College Hill Independent V.28 N.07

VOL 28 ISSUE 7 APR 4 / 2014 BROWN//RISD WEEKLY

VOLUME 28 // ISSUE 7

NEWS 2 Week in Review

kyle giddon & alex sammon

5 BlastSim

sophie kasakove

METRO 3 Body Check Mika Kligler

7 Labored

Abigail Savitch-Lew

ARTS 6 Different Andies eli pitegoff

9 Munni Badnaam Hui maya sorabjee

12 Fish Outta Water ashwini natarajan

LIT 15 Clean Sheets julieta cárdenas

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 Abigail Savitch-Lew

SPORTS 4 ¿Student /Athlete? zeve sanderson

FEATURES 13 Arithmetic sara winnick

REALITY TV 17 Dingleberry Road tristan rodman

OCCULT 11 Never Made addie mitchell

EPHEMERA 14 Clear Skies

matthew marsico & molly landis

FROM THE EDITOR S Providence receives an average of 47.18 inches of precipitation per year. April is its third rainiest month. The first Providence rain I experienced ruined a rainproof pair of shoes that I owned. Since then I’ve found a great pair of rain boots, but now I’m sick of wearing them.

I’m from a part of Florida that receives about 55 inches of rain per year, but most of that falls in the summer. In Florida, it rains in short, strong, once-daily bursts. You can tell a while beforehand that the rain is coming and plan accordingly, knowing that it won’t last long. In Providence, rainfall is spread pretty evenly across all months, all seasons.

And when it rains, it stretches on for days.

Providence has a drainage problem. There’s a puddle near my house that seems to form independently of weather patterns. On sunny days it’ll be so large that I have to cross the street. On the rainiest days it’ll be small enough for me to unwittingly step right over it. It doesn’t make sense, but neither does the fact that I persist in walking down that side of the street.

One of my best friends has had more a-passing-cardrenched-me experiences than she can count. They’ve all occurred in Providence. One of the times was on her way to work, and she didn’t have a change of clothes. I have learned that there is no such thing as taking too much caution around roadside puddles.

Some of my friends blame bad days or moods on Providence rain. I think they’re often not wrong in doing so.

But at the end of the day, when I sit in bed listening to rain fall on the roof, it’s not so bad. -JW

X 18 I Spy 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

THE WEEK IN SUSPENSION

by Kyle Giddon and Alex Sammon Illustration by Casey Friedman

PULLING THE TRIGGER There was a time, not long ago, when Arnold Schwarzenegger served as the governor of California. A state towing a deficit in the billions elected a man whose foremost accomplishments came as a computerized hitman from the future in the iconic Terminator film. “His primary purpose is murder,” proclaimed the late ’90s trailer. His political trajectory is even less believable than the premise of the movie franchise.

The Governator served two terms in office, with mostly unspectacular results. By the time he left office in 2010, numerous watchdog groups had pinned him among the country’s worst state executives.

Four years later, Schwarzenegger is gone but not forgotten from California state politics. His lasting impact has not come in the form of philanthropy or banner legislation, but rather as mentality. California’s politicians have never been less gunshy. +++ Earlier this week, California State Senator Leland Yee was indicted on multiple corruption and gun trafficking charges.

On March 28, state legislators voted to suspend Yee from his post (with pay), the 164-year-old institution’s harshest levied punishment.

Building off of Schwarzenegger’s affinity for big guns and explosive violence, Yee unknowingly settled an arms deal with an FBI agent. At stake: $2.5 million worth of weaponry, including but not limited to “shoulder fired automatic weapons and missiles,” shipped in by Muslim separatists in the Philippines, according to recordings presented during the indictment hearings. There’s something to be said for standing on the shoulders of giants.

The irony is almost hard to believe: Yee is one of California’s most ardent anti-gun advocates. He recently campaigned and voted for the state’s proposed assault weapons ban.

Getting put in time-out is rarely a pleasurable experience, but Yee finds himself in esteemed company. He is the third California state Senator to be suspended indefinitely due to criminal accusation this year alone. Senator Ron Calderon faces corruption charges of his own, while Senator Rod Wright awaits ruling on a voter fraud case. 7 percent of California’s state Senate is currently facing felony charges…

And it’s only April. –AS

APRIL 4 2014

SOLID STATE The traditional barrier to interstellar travel is distance— beyond our solar system, everything is just too far to reach in a single lifetime. But this hasn’t stopped the cosmophiles from brainstorming.

One proposed solution is suspended animation, in which a cosmonaut would enter a period of bodily stasis, and then reawake after thousands of years, somewhere far, far away.

One might think this is the province of science-fiction writers. But this week we learned we’re one step closer.

On April 2, surgeons at Pittsburgh’s UPMC Presbyterian Hospital announced clinical trials of suspended animation in human beings. After a patient arrives with traumatic wounds, surgeons will insert a catheter directly into the aorta in order to remove the patient’s blood and replace it with a chilled saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops cellular activity. Soon after, the patient will have no brain activity, and no blood. They will be, by most conventional definitions, dead.

“We are suspending life, but we don’t like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction,” says Samuel Tisherman, a surgeon leading the trial, “So we call it emergency preservation and resuscitation.”

Usually, the brain can last for only five minutes without oxygen before irreversible damage occurs. But because the cells of supercooled patients need less oxygen, doctors think that patients can survive for up to three hours right in front of death’s door. The absence of cellular activity will give surgeons a chance to repair the trauma, and following the surgery the saline will be swapped out for the patient’s blood.

Suspended animation was first used in animals in 2002, when the technique was successfully used to revive hemorrhaging pigs.

“After we did those experiments, the definition of ‘dead’ changed,” said Peter Rhee, who led the animal testing. “Every day at work I declare people dead. They have no signs of life, no heartbeat, no brain activity. I sign a piece of paper knowing in my heart that they are not actually dead. I could, right then and there, suspend them.”

Keep at it, nerds. –KG

NEWS

□ 02

BAD GIRLS GOOD WOMEN Providence Roller Derby

by Mika Kligler illustration by Andres Chang It’s a Monday night, and I’m at the Ocean Club, an indoor roller rink in Narragansett, Rhode Island. The sign outside the building reads: FUN P ART Y GAMES. The Y is upside down. Inside, under dim fluorescent lighting and a partially concealed disco ball, a Daytona 2: Battle on the Edge arcade game sits next to a snack bar.

Rhoda Perdition, a pink-haired roller derby vet of 10 years, is directing Danielle through the skills assessment section of her tryout for the Providence Roller Derby League (PRD). Danielle is nervous—she failed her first assessment, and, one month later, is back for a second try. She weaves slowly between cones, her skates grinding loudly on the track when she stops. She sucks in air through pursed lips, and her knee and elbow pads look straight off the shelf, not yet scuffed.

On the other half of the rink, Shotz of Petrone leads 13 women through a warm-up. Rhoda and Shotz, a broad-shouldered military police officer, are co-coaching tonight’s league-wide practice. Many of the women on the rink are members of the Rhode Island Riveters, Providence Roller Derby League’s most elite squad. The Riveters play nine months out of the year, and the women practice at least three times a week. +++ Roller Derby in its modern incarnation—think all-female teams, violent body checks, and intense team spirit—emerged in Austin, Texas in 2001. According to Rhoda, it was thought up by some “fly-by-night rocker guy” as a kind of circus “sideshow.” That guy, Daniel Eduardo Policarpo—a musician known almost exclusively as “Devil Dan”—later dropped Texas roller derby to work on a screenplay about a guitarist he calls “El Fuego.” But the women he recruited to fulfill his derby vision transformed his idea and ran with it. They formed a company called “Bad Girls Good Women Productions,” dubbed themselves "SheEOs," and launched a DIY all-women cult craze. Now, roller derby is the fastestgrowing women’s sport in the world, and male and co-ed leagues have also emerged. The Women’s Flat Track Derby Association is currently made up of 344 member leagues internationally, and Roller Derby was under consideration for a spot as an event in the 2020 Olympics. Even Hollywood is in on it—in 2009, Ellen Page starred in the derby-centric movie Whip It. Gameplay is fairly simple. Two teams face off, each with four "blockers" and one "jammer" on the oval track at a time.

Jammers are tasked with point scoring. In two-minute bouts, they fight their way through the pack of blockers, earning a point for every member of the opposing team they manage to pass. The team with the most points at the end of the two 30 minute periods—scores run into the hundreds—wins.

The Providence Roller Derby league was founded in 2004 by a Brown student named Sarah Kingan (a.k.a.

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Sarah Doom) as the first all-female flat track league in New England. “Back then,” says Rhoda, who is an original member, “it was just a bunch of dopes getting together and skating.” Doom has since moved on to Boston, where she founded another league—Rhoda calls her the “Johnny Appleseed” of Derby—but PRD has thrived in her absence.

Over the past 10 years, Rhoda has helped the league grow. PRD is currently made up of three home teams that compete locally and two travel teams that compete at the national level, one of which is the Riveters. The Mob Squad, the Sackonett River Roller Rats, and the Old Money Honeys are collectively made up of about 40 skaters, and compete in the regular league season, which stretches from February to November. In the national arena, the Riveters are solidly average, occupying 95th place out of 181 ranked teams.

In a state as small as Rhode Island and a city as small as Providence—Rhoda keeps accidently calling it a “town”—it’s hard to get the kind of competition and to draw the talent needed to rise in the rankings.

This doesn’t mean PRD’s bouts are any less intense, or the women any less driven. In November, the Roller Rats matched up against the Old Money Honeys in the league’s championship match. The match, housed in downtown Providence’s cavernous Convention Center, brought in a raucous and surprisingly family-oriented crowd. Though I sat on the floor behind a young punk with blue hair and a fresh tattoo, I also saw a young boy holding a cardboard sign lettered OMH (Old Money Honeys) over his head, and an elderly woman asked me to move so I wouldn’t block her view. For the most part, the skaters appreciate that roller derby is not as fringe—or as campy—as it once was.

The women make a point of emphasizing the sport aspect, as opposed to the camp aspect, of roller derby. Roller derby “has its roots in camp,” Rhoda says, but “in a way the campy aspects of it, like the personas and the outfits…are less prevalent [now]. It’s embarrassing to lose to a team in tutus.” Athleticism trumps affect. The skaters, it seems, are slightly peeved by the stigma still attached to roller derby—it has nothing to do, they argue, with staged sports like prowrestling. “Some guys,” Rhoda says, referring to the men in her martial arts class, “are like, ‘I would rather become a figure skater and wear a sparkly outfit than join roller derby.’ But I think if they put on a pair of skates, we’d make them hurt.”

Roller Derby’s theatrical reputation dates back to its heyday as a made-for-television production in the ’60s and ’70s. It’s evident, though, that today’s roller derby is athletic and unstaged. During Monday’s practice, the women link arms and sling each other forward. They practice blocks, jamming their shoulders again and again into one another’s chests. They sprint around the track and they fall hard.

Boones Harm, a soft-spoken skater with metallic gold ducttape on her elbow pads, points to a constellation of faded bruises on the inside of her arm. “It’s a real sport,” Boones and Shotz both tell me, sharply.

+++ I talked to Boones before practice, as she laced up her skates near the Ocean Club’s snack bar. “[Roller derby] makes me feel better about myself,” she told me. When I asked her if she’s had one particularly memorable moment of glory on the rink, Boones shook her head. “It’s all been pretty glorious.”

“Who you are on the track and who you are off the track definitely meld, after a while,” Rhoda says.

Later, driving back to Providence after the practice, Rhoda and her partner Delta, also a member of PRD, tell me they mean this in more ways than one. “A lot of people,” Rhoda says, “have never been in a situation where they have a super physical relationship with other females…So some people start feeling things they’ve never felt before, and are like, ‘does this mean I’m gay?’ And in some cases, yes…and in some cases, ehhhh, you’re just a little derby gay.” Delta laughs appreciatively.

Maybe it’s because roller derby is intentionally and selfconsciously an all-female sport, or maybe it’s because of its feminist ties—derby is a by-women-for-women institution that addresses themes of third wave feminism, including trans rights and sex positivity—but roller derby women, more so than most other female athletes, are often stereotyped as gay. Last year, for instance, the Huffington Post ran an article titled “Does Roller Derby Make You Gay?” And when Advocate.com ranked the "Gayest Cities in America," they used the number of roller derby leagues per city as part of their equation.

This typecasting does not seem to bother Rhoda and Delta—in fact, they give me an elaborate rundown of the difficulties of intra-team dating. Boones and Shotz weren’t too agitated either; earlier, both mentioned that though it’s true people are often drawn to derby for its stereotypes—gay women in campy outfits hurtling violently around a track— their skewed perceptions quickly dissolve after watching a bout. Shrugging off the stereotype seems to be the norm among derby women; roller derby is a sport that celebrates spunk, guts, strength—sexual orientation is largely irrelevant to the goals of the team.

At the end of practice, when Rhoda tells Danielle that she has passed the assessment, the women whoop and clap, even though Danielle, flustered by her success, has already left the track. She is one of them now, part of their fierce and tight-knit pack. Once she’s drafted onto a home team, she’ll be christened with a derby name. It’s not yet known what she’ll bring to the league, but for Rhoda and the others it’s clear what the league will give to her. “In everyday life women are supposed to be agreeable and accommodating and always open,” she’d explained to me earlier, “so if you’re assertive, you’re a bitch. And you know, for a lot of women, roller derby is something that they’ve never felt before in their life. A stage where you have permission to not be nice.”

MIKA KLIGLER B’17 is eagerly awaiting El Fuego.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

STUDENT UNION labor organization in the NCAA

Student-athlete. The ordering stresses the primacy of scholastics over sports, and the hyphen suggests they are two parts of an inseparable whole. It’s a celebration of the confluence of academics and sports—the amateur ideal. But the term was not created to simply be a descriptor. Sports economist Andrew Zimbalist argues that it was crafted to help universities “fight against workmen’s compensation insurance claims for injured football players.” His argument has chilling evidence.

In 1955, Ray Denison played football for Fort Lewis A&M, a junior college in Colorado. On a kickoff against Trinidad State Junior College, he sustained a head injury, and a day and a half later he died in a nearby hospital. In the wake of his death, his widow filed for workmen’s compensation benefits. It seemed to be an innocuous attempt to help support herself, but Ms. Denison’s contention that her husband was an employee of the college had enormous implications.

If considered employees, would college athletes be eligible for benefits for all debilitating sports injuries? Would they be granted other rights afforded to employees, like unionization?

Understanding these possible ramifications, the school challenged her claim in court, arguing that he wasn’t an employee but instead a “student-athlete.” The case, with Fort Lewis A&M as one of the plaintiffs, ultimately reached the Supreme Court, which ruled he wasn’t an employee because his scholarship didn’t constitute payment and “the college did not receive a direct benefit from the activities, since the college was not in the football business.” +++ As sports became more profitable in the past decade, this tension between amateurism and employment re-emerged.

Polemics about the broken system have flooded the sports media—“The Shame of College Sports,” “The $6 Billion Heist,” “The Death of College Amateurism,” to name a few. Then, in January of this year, Ramogi Huma, a former UCLA football player; Luke Bonner, a former UMass basetball player; and Kain Colter, a former Northwestern quarterback, formed the College Athletes Players Association (CAPA), a labor rights organization aiming to unionize college athletes. Their stated goals include better injury protection and profit sharing. With the help of the Steelworkers Union, which covered the legal costs, CAPA submitted a petition to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to represent Northwestern scholarship football players.

Last week, the Chicago Regional NLRB ruled that CAPA was a legitimate union. To meet this standard, players must be “employees” of the University “within the meaning of the National Labor Relations Act.” In an athlete to university dynamic, the NLRA asks for the relationship to be primarily an economic one as opposed to an educational one. CAPA argued that the athletes are at the school to play a sport, for which they are paid in the form of a scholarship and from which the school earns money. Peter Sung Ohr, the director of the Chicago Board who heard the case, agreed.

The ruling is 24 dizzying pages of minutae. It describes team rules about social media usage, tardiness, and mandatory attire; the schedule of pre-season training camp, in-season practices, and post-season workouts; and expectations for academics, finances, and team culture. The effect is a sense of over-regulation. CAPA members’ admissions to Northwestern were based mostly on athletic performance. They spend 40 to 50 hours a week playing football. They are told which classes they can and cannot take. They are under almost the complete control of the athletic department from enrollment through graduation. They are, in short, athletes first and students second. The University earns a tremendous profit from their performance. In the past decade alone, Northwestern has made $76 million in profit from its football team. It’s hard to argue the University isn’t in the football business. +++ This case is important, but its application is limited. The unionization ruling doesn’t apply to walk-ons, who make up a

APRIL 4 2014

by Zeve Sanderson illustration by Casey Friedman

quarter of the Northwestern football team, because they don’t earn scholarships. Walk-ons can’t be employees because they aren’t paid anything.

In fact, few of Northwestern’s athletes beyond the football team could be considered employees under the recent ruling. There are nineteen varsity teams at Northwestern, but only two—football and men’s basketball—are revenue positive. The other 17 actually lose money and are subsidized by the two profitable teams. Can the relationship between a scholarship athlete in men’s soccer or women’s lacrosse and the University be economic without profits? Within the logic of the ruling, generating clout or status for the University doesn’t amount to an economic relationship—only money does.

Ohr’s ruling not only misses a quarter of the football team— it also might not apply to roughly 90 percent of the entire athletic department. It’s not surprising that all three of CAPA’s founders played football or men’s basketball.

This imbalance is also seen in many of the most prominent economic critiques of college sports. There is historian Taylor Branch’s racial critique—mostly white administrators make money off the hard work of mostly black athletes. sociologist Sarah Michele Ford’s Marxist critique—a system is in place that allows universities and the NCAA to exploit athletes for high profits. Sports journalist Jonathan Mahler’s capitalist critique—athletes aren’t getting their fair share because the market isn’t free. These critiques are all rooted in

the disparity between the money made by universities and the lack of pay for athletes. The reality at Northwestern is true for most Division One programs: only football and men’s basketball make more money than they spend. As in Ohr’s ruling, most athletes are left out of the perception of the problem, which means they may be left out of any solutions—even as they face many of the same issues as higher-grossing athletes, like long practice times, limited academic freedom, and team rules that demand their attention on the field first and the classroom second. +++ Ohr has been criticized for his lack of understanding of college football. His descriptions of recruitment, practices, and game days are almost ethnographic, and his rhetoric is sometimes laughable: “While the Employer’s strength and conditioning coaches are allowed to monitor these workouts, various team leaders, including those players on the team leadership council, attempt to ensure that attendance is high at these optional workouts during this and the eight other discretionary weeks throughout the year.” It’s not just that his tone is legalistic; the idea of a captain’s practice—a staple of college sports—seems truly novel to him.

Ohr’s distance is what makes his perspective so unusual.

Unlike many writers who cover college sports, he doesn’t make any normative claims about college football, maybe because he doesn’t seem to understand it. Unlike Branch and Ford, he doesn’t bring in academic theory. Unlike Mahler, his opinion isn’t rooted in economics. Instead, he considers the National Labor Relationships Act of 1935 and legal precedent.

On its face, Ohr’s ruling is simply about unions. He looked at the facts of the case and the relevant legal doctrine and made a decision. But beneath his legalism is a radical consideration of the problems facing college sports. His entire decisions rests on a single word: primarily. Are Northwestern football players primarily students or primarily athletes? Is their relationship to the university primarily economic or primarily academic?

Thus far, critiques of the economics of college sports have focused on how money should be distributed. Branch, Ford, and Mahler have a scale, with the profits of the institutions on one side and the payment for athletes on the other. But Ohr’s scale reformulates the issue. On one side is the athlete’s time commitment to sports; on the other is the quality of the education the athlete receives. This imbalance—between athletic commitment and educational quality—is the root of the problem.

According to Northwestern and the NCAA, Ohr’s ruling seems to dismiss the educational component of an athlete to university relationship completely. It’s just the opposite. Ohr’s diagnosis of the problem offers a possible solution: shift the balance towards academics, and the athletes are no longer employees.

The economics won’t go away, and they shouldn’t. A “full” scholarship doesn’t cover the cost of many living expenses (like extra food, simple entertainment, and travel home), and some athletes come from families that can’t provide any economic support. Medical coverage rarely extends beyond graduation, even for injuries with life-long effects. Increasing academic standards would do nothing for these problems, nor would it have done anything for Ray Denison’s widow.

Unionization may be an effective response to these issues, but given the ruling’s logic, unionization would be limited to two sports.

Northwestern will appeal the case to a higher labor board, and if the ruling stands, it will go to the federal courts.

Mark Emmert, the President of the NCAA, said the case will eventually reach the Supreme Court. Perhaps they should save themselves the trouble and start fulfilling the balance promised by their beloved term. Student-athlete.

ZEVE SANDERSON B’15 is forming his own union, only for walk-ons.

SPORTS

□ 04

RUNNING THE NUMBERS predicting suicide bombings

by Sophie Kasakove illustration by Tristan Rodman Zeeshan-ul Hassan Usmani communicates best in numbers.

The 35-year-old Pakistani is the founder and CEO of GoFig Solutions, an IT firm that has produced a software program that forecasts when and where suicide bombings might happen. GoFig’s BlastSim, a suicide bombing simulator, has the potential to permanently alter the state of international terrorism response and control. +++ Over the past decade, suicide bombings have ravaged Pakistani cities and villages, claiming over 6,000 lives and injuring another 16,000, according to Usmani. The recent spike in attacks in Pakistan is sharp: the number of attacks jumped from nine attacks in 2006 to 57 in 2007 and has remained in that range ever since. In 2013 alone, 660 Pakistanis died from suicide bombings, which averaged two per day.

There is no single motivation for suicide bombers in Pakistan. A recent wave of attacks orchestrated by Sunni extremist militant groups has targeted religious minorities such as Christians and Shiite Muslims. An increase in attacks by the Pakistani Taliban has coincided with worsening tensions between the Taliban and Pakistan's government over the past year, as peace talks between the two groups have repeatedly failed to produce results. The bombs used in these attacks, referred to as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), are often made from fertilizer and other simple materials that are easy and cheap to transport. According to Bruce Hoffman, Director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University, IEDs usually cost no more than $150 to make.

Usmani recognizes the accessibility of these weapons, and admits that his goal of “ending suicide attacks” is a lofty one. But he doesn’t think it’s impossible. He first began his work against suicide bombing as a Fulbright Scholar studying at the Florida Institute of Technology in 2004. Frustrated by the lack of reliable data on suicide attacks in Pakistan, Usmani founded a website called Pakistan Body Count, the first running tally of suicide bombing and drone attacks in Pakistan.

The website compiles a range of data on suicide bombings in Pakistan spanning the past decade—from eye-witness accounts and police reports, to x-rays and postmortem reports.

The goal of the website, Usmani told the Independent, is to provide researchers and policymakers with a one-stop online resource. And as more data accumulated, Usmani felt increasing urgency to prevent the body count from rising. Pakistan Body Count now has the largest database on suicide bombings in the world.

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+++ BlastSim’s model generates a comprehensive simulation of a suicide bombing with an augmented version of the information on Pakistan Body Count. The software accounts for differences in types of bombs, age and gender of victims, and population density of the area.

Usmani first publically demonstrated the software at a TEDx talk in 2010. Explaining each step of the simulation with a strikingly casual tone, Usmani drew dots representing victims of the attack and assigned them all ages and genders.

Then, he planted another dot representing the attacker among them and selected a bomb type from his software, which includes models for every type of explosive in the world. “What kind of bomb do you want to make?” he asked the audience. “TNT, C4, RDX, you name it.” The audience laughed uncomfortably.

Usmani’s software shows the number of people killed and injured, and details the specific types of injuries suffered by victims, complete with example photos from previous attacks.

In the event of a real-world attack, the software can determine the type of bomb used based on the injuries sustained by the victims, narrowing down the suspected terrorist groups according to the explosives they are most likely to use. Usmani highlights certain patterns in the data from previous attacks: common days of the week, types of locations, the weather.

Using these patterns, Usmani has predicted features of 72 percent of suicide attacks in the past several years.

The software is available for sale to law enforcement agencies, the United Nations, governments, NGOs, and large commercial and financial institutions. So far, BlastSim has been sold to 15 customers from counterterrorist organizations and police forces in five countries. In March 2014, GoFig Solutions won the World Startup Cup, where they competed against over 400 promising startups from 57 countries.

Usmani believes that this award and the media attention that followed will grant him the legitimacy he needs to make a change in Pakistan.

crazy things.” At one conference in Nashville, an audiencemember interrupted his talk by shouting that “someone like him” shouldn’t be allowed to work on these issues.

The obstacles against gaining civilian support in Pakistan, on the other hand, are amplified by the Pakistani government’s apparent unwillingness to acknowledge the accuracy of Usmani’s predictions. Usmani estimates that only 30 percent of his predictions have been recognized as legitimate

by Pakistani law enforcement (though it's unclear how official recognition might change policy). Even when the government has acknowledged Usmani’s claims, no significant steps were made to prevent the attacks. “Pakistan is about a hundred years behind the rest of the world in terms of using technology for peace,” Usmani said.

Usmani attributes the government’s reluctance to accept his predictions in part to a prejudice against research and security efforts of civilians unaffiliated with the military or law enforcement agencies. There are indeed many risks to using this software: the possibility of a faulty prediction, of the information getting into the wrong hands, of knowing that an attack will happen and failing to stop it.

When I ask Usmani what it’s like to tell people there will be an attack and have no one listen, he shakes his head. There are nights he can’t sleep, he says, nights where he plays out the attack in his head and knows that there’s nothing he can do about it. “I just have to keep telling myself that if I weren’t working on this, there would be even less hope for change,” he says. “If I keep at it, someday, people will have to stop and listen.”

SOPHIE KASAKOVE B’17 can’t predict a thing.

+++ Usmani told the Independent over a Skype call in March that reactions to his software have been mixed. When he presents in a civilian setting, he said, people don’t understand his work and only see “a Pakistani guy with a big beard working on

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

TWO ROOMS Andy Warhol’s photographs at the RISD Museum

by Eli Pitegoff illustration by Tristan Rodman The Rhode Island School of Design Museum’s most recent display of Andy Warhol’s photography is an art exhibition with an identity crisis. Somewhere between art works and artifacts, the selection of 105 color and 52 black-and-white prints in Andy Warhol’s Photography comprise a unique view into Warhol’s relationship to the medium of photography.

Whether the alluring images that Warhol produced while living in New York City in the 1970s and ’80s are elucidating historical objects or museum-worthy artistic compositions varies among the different pieces in the exhibition. The Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program gifted this modest collection to the RISD Museum as a part of a 2007 donation of over 28,500 images to upwards of 180 educational institutions. An unspoken question pervades the adjacent Buanno Works on Paper (BWP) and Tsiaras Photography Gallery (TPG) rooms in which the work is displayed: what am I looking at?

tion at a restaurant, sharing a bottle of champagne. And, just as importantly, it offers commonplace episodes of New York City life, like the candid photo of a spectacled woman folding linens in Flea Market.

In contrast to the formally unsophisticated black-andwhite photos, an array of Warhol’s earlier color Polaroid prints hangs in the adjacent TPG room. The instant color photos are divided, like the black–and–white prints, by subject matter.

In uniformly white picture frames, those prints that portray single sitters cluster in a rough rectangle along one wall. Prints depicting other subject matter, such as close-up shots of nude

+++ The black-and-white prints are organized based on their nominal subject matter. Cityscapes such as Union Square and People on the Street comprise a distinct cluster in the BWP. Photos that hone in on architecture, including Building and House (1981), occupy a secluded corner. Images depicting society events have their own exclusive cluster. The largest grouping of 35mm prints is the collection of informal portraits of sitters, whose titles allude to their celebrity status and degree of familiarity with Warhol. Among these we see an informal dinner portrait—Keith Haring, Juan Dubose and Joe Deitrich (ca 1983)—a candid snapshot of two attractive twenty-somethings—Unidentified Man and Woman (ca 1980)—and a grinning man in a leather jacket holding an umbrella—George (ca 1984).

Warhol took the snapshots and spur-of-themoment portraits in the BWP with the 35mm Minox point-and-shoot camera. The camera’s automated features and compact size allowed him to capture life outside his studio with newfound ease. He began shooting with the Minox in 1976.

From banal strolls down a city street to exclusive celebrity-filled events, Warhol seized moments from his reality with a “roll of film a day between 1976 and 1987” according to one wall text. A minute fraction of the roughly 150,000 black-and-white negatives that Warhol produced in this twelve-year span hang in a patchwork of framed gelatin silver prints on the BWP’s white walls. +++ Though many of the painted works that brought Warhol renown fixate on the cult of celebrity, his 35mm photographs shift his exclusive scene to the context of an unexceptional, pedestrian city. In many ways, the contextual banality only accentuates the allure of the celebrities and exclusive social gatherings he depicts. Herein lies the most interesting aspect of the gelatin silver prints—their content rather than their formal qualities. In taking these snapshots, Warhol “certainly was not interested in creating pictures that exhibited traditional craft or skill,” according to an exhibition wall text. They are compelling in the way that the Rich Kids of Instagram Tumblr is compelling. They capture the allure of high society: an exclusive network that would otherwise be inaccessible to the masses. They offer access to the renowned artist’s urban reality circa 1980—one filled with encounters with the cultural elite, as depicted in the impromptu dinner portraits of William Burroughs and Victor Bockris: four prints sharing a frame depicting the two dressed casually, in animate conversa-

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Even though the Polaroid section achieves the quality of end-product artwork, the dye-diffusion prints also possessed a unique function as platforms for art pieces of Warhol’s other preferred mediums. The color prints lend themselves particularly well to translation into the high-contrast, two-tone silkscreen for which Warhol gained renown. A notable example of their broader creative function in this exhibition is the series of 1971 prints depicting Miguel Berrocal. The Spanish sculptor is portrayed in seven photos, wearing, in each, a fashionable three-piece suit and gold watch. Though the exhibition makes no mention of it, Warhol translated one of the seven photographs into an iconic 40x40 inch half-tone silk-screen in 1982.

Considering the seven Polaroids on display in contrast to his later work silk-screen offers a rare glimpse into Warhol’s creative process. One sees which Polaroid he chose over the other six, how he cropped the original image, replaced its color with a gray scale, and shifted the tilt of the figure’s head slightly while maintaining the position of his cigar-holding hand. While the Polaroid prints on display may hold their own in an art exhibit, the black-and-white prints do not carry the same significance. The only line of continuity between the pieces of the two exhibition rooms is that the black-and-white prints were also used as potential fodder for a variety of Warhol’s artistic pursuits. He used both the types of prints as source images for silkscreens, paintings, and drawings. He included others in his books of photography, such as Andy Warhol’s Exposures (1979) and America (1985). +++

male bodies and vernacular objects, occupy their own walls respectively.

The collection of Polaroid prints is the product of a markedly different artistic pursuit from the black–and–white work displayed in the BWP. Unlike the casual documentation of life outside the studio, the Polaroids on display represent a formal departure from compulsive documentation of reality.

Around 1970, Warhol began using Polaroid’s SX-70 Big Shot camera. His obsession with the camera had to do with the unique way it distorted its image; it lacked the capacity to show a refined gradient of tones. Its reductive quality generalized color and tended to omit slight to moderate shadows. As Warhol put it, the Polaroid got “rid of everybody’s wrinkles.”

Coupled with manicured studio lighting, a white background, and heavy make-up (primarily on female sitters), the SX-70 allowed Warhol to render a markedly idealized representation of his sitter. Through the production of dye-diffusion prints he was able to correct the perceived physical imperfections of his sitters and distill a form of beauty that was unattainable in reality.

Beyond any other pieces in the exhibition, the Polaroid portraits demonstrate complex formal qualities—qualities that render their place in an art exhibition self-evident. They are compelling for the way they uniquely manipulate the medium of photography, and set new precedents for the craft.

Despite the opportunity to use the collection for its significance as artifacts of Warhol’s artistic process, the exhibition glosses over how and which pieces he used as intermediary steps in his artistic process. The wall texts briefly and vaguely allude to this function of both the 35mm and the Polaroid prints, but they do not draw connections. The viewer is given no way to distinguish the images that Warhol left alone from those that he manipulated in significant ways. That this work was used for his other artistic pursuits is a “fun fact.” How he manipulated certain images that the exhibition gives us access to (e.g. the Miguel Berrocal Polaroid prints that he later used toward a silkscreen project) opens up the possibility for a novel and important study of Warhol’s artistic career.

The thematic organization of Andy Warhol’s Photography misleads its visitors. Where such a treatment might work for the formally complex Polaroid prints, it risks misconstruing the new black and white photography collection as uniformly something more than creative fodder that didn’t make the cut—whether for use in a photography book, or for use in the process of creating a piece of art in a separate medium. And for those photos that did make the cut, so to speak, there is inadequate documentation of their significance to Warhol’s artistic process. Such a treatment of Warhol’s 35mm photographs is, at best, arbitrary. At worst, it disregards a historical reading of Warhol’s relationship to photography, which yields the most productive understanding of the Museum’s new collection of his work.

ELI PITEGOFF B’15 got rid of everybody’s wrinkles.

Andy Warhol’s Photography is on display at the RISD Museum until June 29.

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A LABOR MOVEMENT union battles of disenfranchised workers in RI

by Abigail Savitch-Lew

Adrienne Jones, a bartender at the Providence Hilton, says she was regularly required to work 15-hour days without breaks. She tried and failed to negotiate her hours so she could spend more time with her seven-year-old son. Hotel managers also refused to honor her request for floor mats behind the bar. Krystle Martin, who worked in the hotel’s restaurant, says that when she was pregnant she was forced to carry heavy buckets and ordered to move faster. And, according to union organizer Andrew Tillett-Saks, Hilton housekeepers are forced to clean upwards of 22 rooms a day—and frequently even more, specifically when they receive doctors’ notes putting them on light duty.

Tired of high turnover rates, meager pay, and abusive treatment, workers at the Hilton decided to follow the lead of the Renaissance hotel workers, who have been fighting to unionize for over a year. Both hotels are owned by the Procaccianti Group, a national real estate and hotel management company that holds over $5 billion in assets. The Hilton workers campaigned to join Unite Here 217, the Rhode Island and Connecticut hotel and foodservice workers’ union. On February 18, they submitted a petition to the hotel requesting a unionization process, signed by 75 percent of the Hilton’s employees. The hotel’s managers refused to accept the petition. Jones was fired about a week later, days before she would have worked for the Procaccianti Group for six years and thereby qualified for health benefits, paid vacation, dental and vision insurance, and a 401(k) plan.

“I’ve given this company all my loyalty, a lot of heart, a lot of my blood, sweat, and tears and this is how they thank me,” Jones told the Independent. “The second I became a little squeaky, that I opened my mouth, I was terminated.” Two other workers in the campaign were fired and five others disciplined in the weeks that followed.

The process through which a union gains representation in a workplace is riddled with opportunities for employers to intimidate workers against joining. The dysfunctional and underfunded National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) takes months to hold a union election, giving employers time to spread anti-union propaganda and sometimes hold workers in fivehour long staff meetings to pressure them not to unionize. If workers petition to unionize without an election, through a process called the Card Check Verification system, they are completely at their employer’s mercy to accept. While public sector unions are under attack, private sector unions have all but disappeared, their decline facilitated by deindustrialization and anti-union federal and state policies. Nationally, membership in private sector unions has fallen from over 30 percent of workers in the 1960s to less than 7 percent today—and 9 percent in Rhode Island.

But workers at the Hilton and the Renaissance—the majority whom are female, women of color, and immigrants—are turning to unionization as a pathway to economic justice.

“Unions—not to sound racist—were just for the white people. Now that people have become more understanding of what unions stand for, [they are] more accepted among women and among minorities,” says Martin. But, she adds, you can’t really call them “minorities” anymore.

Labor union demographics are changing nationally. Immigrants only made up 8.4 percent of unionized workers in 1994, but grew to 12.6 percent by 2008, according to a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Latinos represented 5.8 percent of the union workforce in 1983, and 12.2 percent in 2008. The number of women in unions has also increased: from about one third of the unionized workforce in 1983, to more than 45 percent by 2008.

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Population shifts are partially responsible for changes in the demographics of union members; the increase in immigrants and Latinos in unions is almost proportionate to their increase in the overall workforce. But it’s not the only factor: women’s share in the union workforce increased by more than three times their share in the total workforce. As manufacturing jobs disappeared, the service sector expanded, and the job market became increasingly stratified between high-paying professional jobs and low-paying service jobs.

The latter disproportionately employs women and minorities, and service sector unions have seen the most growth. In addition, union representatives say that some unions have begun specifically focusing their energy on organizing minorities and fighting for immigrants’ rights, reversing some of the “nasty stains”—as Unite Here 217 organizer Andrew Tillett-Saks calls them—of racism and sexism in the history of the labor movement. +++ Those nasty stains go back to the rise of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) at the end of the 19th century. The AFL gained power by organizing workers in “high-skill” industries, in which employers were more likely to concede to worker’s demands due to the high cost of replacing workers. It was a compromise through which white male craft workers obtained a measure of power, but one that left out minorities and women, and obscured calls for greater social change. And the AFL lobbied in support of anti-immigrant legislation, perpetuating racist sentiment among union ranks.

The power that white- and male-dominated unions secured in the union heydays of the mid-twentieth century began to dissipate as global multilateral free trade agreements encouraged companies to move their factories elsewhere. Providence’s Gorham’s Silver manufacturing company fired thousands of workers, eventually relocating to New York.

Brown and Sharpe, a machine tool manufacturing company in North Kingstown, fought to renegotiate its contract with workers and soon after went bankrupt. Both factories had involved strong unions dominated by male white workers.

In the ’80s and ’90s, with unionization in the manufacturing sector declining faster than manufacturing itself, the service sector began to constitute the bulk of union organizing. The Rhode Island branch of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, for instance, began with 1,000 butchers in the 1930s, grew to 6,000 members in the 1970s, and today boasts over 12,000 members.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the fastest growing union in the country, has played a prominent role in organizing women and minorities in Rhode Island. In 2002, after janitors went on strike in Boston, workers founded Local 615, the New England branch of the SEIU for property workers. In 2005, Local 615 launched the Justice for Janitors campaign in Rhode Island, holding marches, fasts, and strikes to pressure corporations throughout the state to raise their standards for contractors and to allow workers to unionize.

SEIU is also supporting an ongoing battle for wage increases at Rhode Island’s fast food restaurants, and last year, Rhode Island’s home-based childcare workers joined SEIU after a 10 year campaign.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FOR ALL

Scott Malloy, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island and a former representative for the Rhode Island transit union, said that after the Civil Rights Movement, younger generations of white labor organizers were more likely to recognize the importance of employing anti-racist, anti-sexist principles in their policy agendas. “The idea of women’s liberation, the idea of civil rights were things that really fit into the labor movement’s framework,” he told the Independent. In the 1980s, Malloy and other transit union workers signed a letter encouraging the Rhode Island Public Transportation Authority to hire more female workers. Unite Here 217’s staff changed from completely male and white to mostly female and minority and began using translators at their events. Even the infamous AFL reversed their anti-immigration position in 2000.

The efforts of labor organizers have been met with the leadership of minorities and women eager to improve their working conditions. Undermining longstanding myths that minorities, immigrants and women could not be organized because they were too willing to work for little pay, these groups have in fact been easier than white men to organize, union representatives say.

“It seems that white middle-class America does not have that sense of community that Latinos have,” says Joe Renzi, an organizer for Rhode Island’s branch of United Food and Commercial Workers. “They’re stronger than other groups are because they have that sense of community.

They talk with each other. They work with each other better.” Tillett-Saks says that while racism and sexism caused white male workers to compromise with employers at the expense of others, minorities and women tend to be easier to organize because they “don’t have any of these fucked-up delusions” that employers are their friends.

Service-sector workers help to challenge the prevailing stereotype that unions are political machines for the Democratic Party and not actually interested in improving workers’ lives.

In February, workers at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee voted against joining the United Automobile Worker’s union, causing conservative analysts across the nation to claim that workers have enough legal protections to no longer require unions. But that claim sounds ridiculous if you work at the Providence Hilton.

“The hotel’s trying to make people believe that the union is a business,” says Martin.

“They’re trying to call us, the employees, a business. ‘The union wants your money.’ No. We want our money. We want our wages. We want fair treatment. The union is not a business.”

The logistical barriers to unionizing have prevented a larger movement from taking off.

“How workers are going to join unions at a rapid rate, or how they’re going to be organized into something else is not clear,” Tillett-Saks says. “The system for workers to join unions in this country is completely broken.”

If they can overcome these challenges, immigrants, women, and people of color stand to benefit from safer jobs and better pay. Compared to their non-unionized counterparts, unionized Latino workers earn an additional 50 percent, Black workers an additional 28.9 percent, and women an additional 33.7 percent, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Education at the University of Maine.

Unions can provide more than economic security—they can be the first step toward political power. Councilwoman Carmen Castillo, who took office after organizing employees at the Westin Hotel and becoming a union steward and executive board member of Unite Here 217, credits the union for providing her with skills that helped her run for office. She says that in addition to helping workers gain economic security, participating in a union can give immigrants the opportunity to learn English and study the workings of the political system.

Historically, unions have often been the backbone of campaigns for legislative changes. “[Unions have been] the vehicle for how public education was forced, how social security was forced. It’s been a huge voice for all workers, has leveled the playing field for everybody in this country and created a middle class,” says Roxana Rivera, the director of 32BJ Service Employees International Union District 615. One hopes that the calls for unionization at the Hilton and the Renaissance are first steps towards real economic justice for all workers in the state. Perhaps the recent spate of dismissals at the Hilton shows how much their demands strike at the heart of corporate power.

ABIGAIL SAVITCH-LEW B’14 began to dissipate under free trade agreements.

+++ Organizing in the service sector is full of challenges that have kept many unions at bay for a century. Service-sector jobs require less training so employers find it easier to replace workers who make trouble. Getting in contact with the employees at several small-sized workplaces is more difficult than organizing a town factory where everyone is in one place. Many workers in the service sector work part-time and have high turnover rates; because they don’t intend on keeping the job, they are less likely to join a union campaign. It’s especially difficult to organize undocumented immigrants, who are afraid to lose their jobs and become targets for intimidation by employers.

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KYA ITEM body politics in Bollywood

by Maya Sorabjee illustration by Sara Khan

The set is doused in red light. Men are spread out across the floor, lounging on cushions, downing drinks, waiting for the show. Then Munni, supposedly a prostitute, appears on the balcony wearing a green ghagra choli, smiling. Surrounded by a devoted posse of male backup dancers, chest heaving, she breaks into song: “Munni badnaam hui / darling tere liye” (“Munni was defamed / darling, for you”). The men are delighted by the excessive performance. The audience at the cinema smiles along with them, taking in the color, the raunchy lyrics, and the absurdity of a scene featuring countless dudes, but only one woman.

From 2010’s Dabangg, this is an item number, an archetypal song-and-dance in mainstream Indian cinema. It has nothing to do with the plot of the film (then again, few songs really do) and its mission is to glorify a beautiful “item girl.” The seductive vamp shimmies across the screen for a few minutes, every second carefully choreographed to lure in cinemagoers. It’s catchy, it propels its actress to stardom, and it works as a safety net in case the film is a flop, which it sometimes is. During the month of its release, the item number gets itself stuck in the heads of the entire country. Of the 1.1 billion Indians with mobile phones, a sizeable chunk just made “Munni Badnaam Hui” their ringtone. +++ In 2007, the state of Maharashtra, home to the Bollywood industry, decided to ban sex education on the grounds that drawing penises and vaginas would turn students into wild fornicators instead of responsible adolescents. Last December, the Supreme Court reinstated a colonial law banning homosexuality in the country. In Mumbai, people engaging in benign public displays of affection (cuddling on a bench, for example) are routinely met with fines and threats of jail time. In private—and supposedly progressive—high schools, girls can be sent home for displaying an inch of bra strap. Moral policing in India is all the rage.

Everyone is angrily wagging their fingers at each other, preaching, be chaste! Resist temptation! Have some shame! Meanwhile, the Hindi film industry, with its copious item numbers, gives us an entirely different picture: veritable wonderlands of gyrating, midriff-baring women framed by the hands of men stroking illicit skin; a land where the male gaze is considered a compliment. But all this foreplay only leads to an anticlimax—since India’s independence, the notorious censor board has let only a handful of scripted kisses reach the big screen; the contradictions are endless. And somehow, the two contrasting narratives of Bollywood and real life wind up at the same virtuous ending: a happy marriage between the hero (always male) and the item girl, who, as it turns out, is an excellent cook.

India may have its issues with class and religion, but cinema manages to cut across them all.

Each region has its own burgeoning industry, eager to harness the energy of a billion. Churning out movies at an unthinkable rate (over a thousand per year, to be precise), the Bollywood industry in particular seeps into every crack of the subcontinent and beyond, managing to please both the wealthy non-resident Indian community and the likes of rickshaw drivers and chai sellers. It is mass appeal, embodied in three-hour chunks of glittering costumes and dubbed vocals, and it deftly penetrates the subconscious of anyone in the vicinity of a television, radio, billboard, or mobile phone. But as it grows, evolving each year into a more extravagant entity, Bollywood presents an increasingly false image of the India it celebrates.

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+++ Screenwriters in the Hindi film industry are notorious for unabashedly faking the plotlines of Hollywood, and not doing a very good job at it. 2004’s box office hit Dhoom was an over-thetop hybrid of Ocean’s Eleven and The Fast and Furious. But even though its plot effectively fell apart by the end, the movie and its sequels, shot in Durban, Rio, and Chicago, demonstrate the Western influence on the Indian film industry. 2011’s Ra.One got Akon to record songs for the soundtrack. English is liberally thrown into screenplays. Even the names of big Indian film hubs ape their American counterpart: Bollywood, Tollywood, Ollywood (B for Bombay, T for Telegu, O for Odisha). And the movie stars who like to wiggle around in seas of male extras continually cite Western progressivism and female empowerment when defending their item numbers. But this is the same Western influence, with its loose morals and obscene miniskirts, that Indian leaders blame for the nation’s rape epidemic. “Foreign culture is not good for India.

Women in foreign countries wear jeans and T-shirts, dance with other men and even drink liquor, but that is their culture,” said BJP minister Babulal Gaur, in a press conference a month after the December 2012 gang rape that spurred massive public outcry. Gaul could just as well be describing a Hindi blockbuster. And so, India has another paradox to add to its list: it decries lust in real life, but loves it on screen.

Though the mainstream film industry may claim to celebrate women with item songs, the protagonists of the movies are always male, guaranteed to get the girl before the credits roll.

Even the label smacks of objectification: she is an item, a thing, so she can be owned. The real-life counterparts of onscreen lovers aren’t equal either—Indian lead actresses typically earn ten percent of what male stars do. Nandita Das, an Indian director and activist, delivered the keynote address for Brown University’s Feminist & Women’s Media Festival last month, in which she brought up the harmful way mainstream Indian cinema can alter notions of women.

“There is this practice of standardizing beauty—that looking good means to be thin or a certain skin color,” Das said. But the same judgment is never wielded upon the men.

The contradiction between the filmi and the real world becomes particularly troubling in light of the Indian treatment of gender. India was recently ranked the worst G20 nation for women, with infanticide, child marriage, dowry deaths and ritualized violence forming an incredibly toxic environment to live in. The sex ratio is noticeably skewed towards men in almost every state; even today, girls are considered burdens to the family.

This drastic imbalance is obvious when a woman walks down the street in any Indian city, on a sweltering afternoon, wearing shorts. Always outnumbered by men, she can feel a dozen eyes unabashedly gawking at her legs. Bollywood suggests that women should enjoy the voyeuristic, invasive behavior of the loitering men on the street, some of whom make their cinematic fantasies clear as they whistle and yell out “kya item!” (“what an item!”). The semantics gets stickier: these casual forms of sexual aggression are called “Eve teasing.” Meanwhile, a female politician in the Maharashtra State Women’s Commission, Asha Mirje, proclaims that women who wear suggestive clothes and go to the movies at night are inviting sexual assault. To be female is, by default, to be a tease.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

+++ “I know you want it but you’re never gonna get it / Tere haath kabhi na aani” (“I’ll never be within reach”) – “Sheila Ki Jawani” from Tees Maar Khan (2010) But the admonitions of the Bollywood temptress aren’t to be respected; they are to be conquered. A Bombay-based couple working under the moniker The Transhuman Collective sought to demonstrate the dangerous gender stereotypes of the industry by making a YouTube video called “No Country for Women.”

“Being in the media industry ourselves, we could see only shallow content being produced, whether in advertising, news, or Bollywood,” Soham Sacar, co-founder of the Collective, told the Independent. “But Bollywood, being the biggest influencer of our culture, is going towards a dangerous low.” The fourteen-minute compilation of clips starts out with a heaving, bellydancing pastiche of item numbers, all with the same ratio: one woman, a dozen lascivious men around her. After a while, the musical clips are interspersed with news footage of sexual violence. The songs continue to play over the new images—gangs of men molesting a girl, chasing another down the street—taking on new meaning. The Bollywood ratio stays the same.

Does this fantasy notion of women on big screen affect the treatment of Indian women in real life? As sex in India remains taboo, images of the item girl tempting the boys and baring her stomach could possibly be the only way many Indians grapple with the complexities of human sexuality. Could it be that Bollywood teaches people to think that, because women wear shorts and bikinis, they are somehow asking for it? +++

+++ The average length of a Bollywood film clocks in somewhere around 135 minutes; they are automatic sagas. They only dabble in one genre. Colloquially termed masala films, they attempt to spread across every type of cinema—action, romance, drama, comedy, it’s all in there. As Bollywood forcefully dances and lip-syncs its way into the Indian collective consciousness, its flabby substance also detaches itself from reality—everything, of course, except its fantasy ideas about women.

But everything has its alternative. In the 1950s, the Parallel Cinema movement began in Bengal as India’s answer to Italian neorealism. It was an alternative that rejected the song-anddance routines of mainstream cinema and used naturalism to tell the true, honest stories of the country. Satyajit Ray’s 1963 film Mahanagar (The Big City) is the story of a middle-class woman in Calcutta grappling with the consequences of her own financial independence as she begins work as a door-to-door saleswoman. At its heart is a familiar Indian narrative, adjusting to circumstance, and it tells it quietly, without frills.

We could hope for the resurgence of a parallel movement, a cinematic platform that exposes the everyday battles of women or accurately reflects the problems faced by the majority of Indians consuming these movies, the middle class. Unfortunately, India’s alternative cinema of today is left perpetually on the fringe, at the mercy of distributors who prefer the more lucrative appeal of Sheila and Munni. A few indie films come out each year, get critical acclaim, and then leave as soon as they came, always drowned out by the noise of the item number.

MAYA SORABJEE B’16 is not asking for it.

Yet film is, and always has been, a form of escape separate from the real world and not to be taken seriously. Das cites this reason for the lax attitude of the typically uptight Indian censor board when it comes to popular Indian films—that it’s all just mindless entertainment. But even if the shallow movies of the mainstream industry do exacerbate a preexisting culture of rape, imposing our own moral standards on Bollywood or any of its counterparts could put us in the same camp as the sex-ed textbook banners and prowling policemen. We can’t blame Bollywood because we can’t prove that its projection of women has directly led to violence. And while “No Country for Women” certainly implies a strong correlation—with a group of male teenage interviewees innocently replying, “If they wear skirts like Rakhi Sawant, why won’t we tease?”—India’s gender troubles find their roots far beyond modern cinema.

Das believes that it ultimately boils down to freedom of expression, the tolerance of intolerance. “In terms of holding Bollywood accountable—I don’t think we can, because we’re a democracy and there is respect for personal space,” she said. “That’s where self-regulation and responsibilities come in, but unfortunately we’re at the mercy of their way of thinking.” She references the same freedom that allowed her to star in Fire, a 1996 Hindi film about a homosexual relationship, which was released to condemnation from the Indian moral brigade.

While it’s a stretch to pinpoint the industry for the way Indian society—historically patriarchal and violent long before movies were made—treats women, it is clear that mainstream cinema studios don’t do much to help create an image of the independent female. With an aesthetic that is increasingly glamorous and just as superficial, Bollywood exaggerates the lives of an elite sliver of society while still managing to seduce the entire population. And there isn’t much hope that it will change. “The power of Bollywood is so massive that the people making it and the ones who see it are blinded by it,” said Sarcar. “It’s sad that people working inside the industry don’t take a step backwards and see how they are influencing the masses.”

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LIKE A MAN IN THE DESERT a woman drinking Jodorowski's Dune

by Addie Mitchell illustration by Layla Ehsan

I will present you with some facts about the documentary film Jodorowsky’s Dune:

I will present you with some facts about Alejandro Jodorowsky’s life:

Jodorowsky’s Dune, a 2013 documentary film directed by Frank Pavich, allows Alejandro Jodorowsky—psychedelic filmmaker, actor, comic artist, musician, and spiritual guru—to recount the story of how in 1974, Jodorowsky, already renowned in the underground for his cult classic films El Topo and The Holy Mountain, began the two-year project to adapt Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune.

The documentary treats the viewer to snippets of Dune through samplings of Jodorowsky’s thick tome of meticulously compiled storyboarding and artwork.

Because Pavich’s documentary merely scatters scraps of miscellanea from the project, it is near impossible to piece together the actual narrative of Dune. It is both in spite of and precisely because of the broken form in which the audience receives Dune that the span of the project’s meaning dizzily approaches a staggering infinity. Jodorowsky’s version of Dune would have starred Salvador Dali, Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, and the music of Pink Floyd. Dune would have run 14 hours long. Dune would have physically altered the minds of all who watched it like cinematic LSD. Dune would have been Jodorowsky’s magnum opus. Dune was never made.

Towards the end of the documentary Alejandro Jodorowsky explains the mode of his filmmaking: to adapt a novel and translate it to the moving image, a medium with the stunning capacity to have its own personhood, its own beating heart, one must “rape” the text. Jodorowsky provides the analogy of a new bride.

If you treat her delicately with love, you will have no sons; if you take her and rape her, then you will produce something real, a new life.

Paul Artreides, the main character of Jodorowsky’s adaptation of Dune, serves as a textual embodiment of the unified, collective spiritual love Jodorowsky intended his film to spread. His mother, unable to conceive with her husband, pricks his finger, transforms the drop of blood into semen with the power of her love, and impregnates herself. Here, Jodorowsky describes an intended tracking shot of the blood drop traveling through her vaginal canal to the uterus where Paul is alchemically conceived. He is special because he is not the product of physical pleasure, but rather spiritual love. He is a spiritual king. Paul was to be played by Jodorowsky’s eldest son Brontis. In interviews, now-grown Bontis sits quietly with sad eyes.

Dune ends when Paul’s throat is slit. As he lies dying, his last words begin emanating mid-sentence from the body of a woman. People across the planet Dune begin to proclaim in the voice of Paul, “I am the collective man, he who shows the way.” And so the hero of the film lives beyond the destruction of his body. Pavich and Jodorowsky each seem to suggest that, just as Paul’s death allowed him to disperse his message of universal unity, so too did the cancelling of Dune allow fragmented motifs of its ideology and art to manifest themselves in the scores of future sci-fi films that borrowed from the artifacts of Jodorowsky’s pre-production process. Individual bodies, each director seems to assert, are better subsumed by spiritual collective will.

Jodorowsky reiterates throughout his interview in Pavich’s film that he painstakingly and intuitively hand selected people of the highest integrity—spiritual warriors—to work on Dune. Jodorowsky slips in a quick anecdote about how he traded egret-sleek, Amazonian Amanda Lear—according to the film, a surrealist’s muse because of the uncertainty of her birth gender—a role in Dune in exchange for Salvador Dali’s precious time, melting, drooping on sizzling sand.

He says, once again, his film would have been a spiritual quest.

Jaime, Jodorowsky’s father, physically abused his wife Sara. Jaime once accused Sara of flirting with another man and subsequently beat and raped her. Because Alejandro held this memory for Sara, she would always tell him “I cannot love you.” This is the narrative of Alejandro’s conception, a story he has made a part of his public biography.

Jodorowsky claims that he raped acid-fried actress Mara Lorenzio on camera in order to create a realistic act of sexual violence for a scene in his film El Topo. This, too, is a story he has made a part of his public biography.

11

□

OCCULT

I will present you with what I felt watching the documentary film Jodorowsky’s Dune: What a blessing it is to be aware and in the now.

Cobalt blue sky, burning red sand of the planet Dune. My real, live woman’s hands raise, involuntarily in praise, to Jodorowsky as his incisors descend wolfishly from bearded upper lip; clasp my real, live woman’s chest tight to plug and palpitate my own aura. It slips as burning red sand through my clenched fingers to meet the third instance of burning red that is his billowing energy.

I hear a handful of bespectacled, be-balding real, live audience-men around me speak in awe of Jodorowsky’s power as a director; as Jodorowsky’s comic book series The Incal, spawned from his work on Dune, flashes across the screen, one real, live audience-man ahead of me whispers to his date—an interception and assertion—as she stares steelily ahead, “I am going to lend you that book.”

My matching glasses blur in sympathy to the audience-man, and I also sneer assertions that I do, in fact, know some things more about the spiritual-man the movie is communing with us about. I have a full woman’s head of purple hair, though, and so I grimace at everything I hear myself say aloud. I am mouthspeaking and I am body-sitting and I am aura-palpitating still.

Arching to meet Jodorowsky across the divide of the paper screen and prickles of colored light, I let my hands drop, open like Mary or some plastically welcoming flight attendant, onto my lap. A little beam of hatred shoots a seam through the cold movie theater air, parasitically attaches itself to the real, live woman on the date and the woman who sits next to me. Hatred is wrong maybe—instead I feel a clenching of the heart, as when my dad tries to recommend an album and I sit silent and still seething how he misses the point that music is an in-the-moment exchange of energies, rather than a terse exchange of product.

I hold this spindly, gristled leash of anger in the air between two invisible fingers, as if my aura held a long unsmoked cigarette in its hand, cocked back over shoulder, elegant but fierce. I burn that cigarette right on the skins of the two real, live women next to me. I am burning but touching them all the same, holding hands with them. My admiration only laps at Jodorowsky on screen. It occupies more space than that brittle thread—feels bigger, such that one might at first mistakenly proclaim it spiritual love—but it does not touch.

ADDIE MITCHELL B’15 was conceived out of too much vodka love, the old fashioned way.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

PLAYABLE ART Computerized sounds echo across the room and Chinese characters flash across screens. Faces hang over them, brows furrowed in confusion. This is Art Video Games in China, an exhibit at the Ace Hotel in New York, which closed at the end of March. The exhibit featured video games from independent game designers based out of mainland China. The exhibit, which was designed to resemble a Chinese video game club, marks a shift in Chinese gaming history.

Art Video Games in China was curated by Bryan Ma, a New York-based video game designer. Ma worked for the American video game company 2K Games in Shanghai for six years, where he discovered the Chinese indie gaming community. Upon a first encounter with each game of the neon-lit arcade, the selections seemed uniformly whimsical. But there is more to Art Video Games than this: as representative of China’s indie gaming movement, the games on view at the Ace puncture the trends of mainstream Chinese video games by emphasizing choice and contingency

over immersion and goal achievement. A slowly burgeoning Chinese indie video game scene is underway.

The Chinese government censors and controls all video game content. Game consoles were banned in 2000, but the ban was amended in January; gaming consoles are now produced in the Shangai Free Trade Zone, but are still not allowed to be imported. In 2004, the Ministry of Culture created a committee to approve foreign online video games entering the Chinese market. The committee screens the games for apparent threats to national unity, security, and social order.

In 2013, American-made BattleField 4, a first-person shooter, was banned for allegedly threatening national security; in 2004, Swedish-made Hearts of Iron was banned for depicting Taiwan, a Chinese-governed province, as under Japanese control.

The mainstream Chinese video game industry is dominated by online gaming companies. NetEase, Giant, and Shanda dominate the domestic gaming market. These companies are enormous: NetEase and Shanda’s yearly revenues are $7.3 and $6.5 billion respectively, and Giant was acquired by an investment company for $3 billion. Typically, these corporations create multiplayer role-playing games in which users guide personalized avatars on fantastic journeys.

Players of these games—like NetEase’s Fantasy Westward

APRIL 4 2014

Journey and Giant’s Zhengtu Online—are meant to attain a perfect level of difficulty and ease, an idealized equilibrium between demand and capability.

In Fantasy Westward Journey, China’s most popular multiplayer game, players encounter magical monsters and evil magicians, traverse flaming mountains, and use virtual currency to buy mystical weapons. Player engagement engenders an addicting quality to the game and substantiates its commercial viability. Taking on the persona of his avatar, the individual is engrossed in a world of violence, riches, and extravagance. The goals are obvious, the state of flow easy.

In Giant’s Zhengtu Online, players raid royal cities, summon creatures from the netherworlds, and combat evil warlord kings. As in Fantasy Westward Journey, these are definite goals, and gamers are confident that rewards will be given for their successes in them. By executing tasks of varying complexity, players of differing levels are always able to find the right balance of challenge and capability, and they are immersed.

But independent companies are budding through the surface.

Local Chinese groups, like Coconut Island Studio and GAMEGOU, have started to create stand-alone software as platforms like Microsoft, Android, and iOS enabled them to independently create video games unregulated and uncensored by the Ministry of Culture’s approval committee.

The games in Art Video Games in China do not seek exclusively to entertain. In Yi Wang’s Fish, players guide a goldfish to escape a rock-filled aquatic space from an aerial, disembodied perspective; the critter wiggles through tiny crevices, rebounds off rocks, and brushes against glowing sea anemone in an effort to escape the maze. This game is highly personalized and contingent; it “captures something about being in a space rather than being forced into tropes of normal games,” Ma told the Independent. Being contained, even trapped, prohibits challenge and reward. Moreover, Fish lacks competition and a clear narrative, central aspects of mainstream video games. There is no goal for his endless feats of escape, for the fish exists in the present, and the game is devoid of closure and spatio-temporal continuity.

The Well, by Peng Bi Tao, provides an even more abstract experience; in a monochrome virtual world, the player, an outlined black silhouette wearing a conical hat, travels across a reflective lake on a wooden raft in search of a village. But once the player finds the village, he cannot depart from the raft. There are no obvious hints, yet there are visual motifs indicating the passage of time and changes in the environment—flying birds, rain, a darkening day—that do

Chinese indie video games at the Ace Hotel

by Ashwini Natarajan Illustration by Casey Friedman not impact the outcome of the game even as they mislead the player. The game does not require constant engagement and feedback; rather, it demands meandering around the virtual space to discover its disparate elements—which, in this case, are necessarily futile. This quality of the game frustrates the player, almost serving as a deterrent. The Well negates the state of engagement that mainstream gaming narratives engender.

Instead of attaining a balance of challenge and ability, the gamer cannot qualify his ability and is inundated with challenge––an apparently fruitless challenge. As indicated by the inapproachable village, the gamer cannot trust the virtual world, and the virtual world cannot trust him.

+++ Local reception in China poses numerous challenges to indie game designers working to monetize their products within the domestic market. There are numerous barriers to publication, and games are usually downloaded illegally.

Mainstream online multiplayer games are downloadable for free and console games can be bought as cheap pirated versions, so there is less incentive to pay substantially more for indie games. As a result of global and local challenges, the indie games lack a substantive identity, rendering them commercially noncompetitive. There is no clear audience for these games that is large enough to create substantial growth for the industry.

As a stand-alone art exhibit, the array of video games at the Ace Hotel poses questions about the future of Chinese indie game development. Can video games serve as art when they must be in dialogue with mass-market demands? Are games even supposed to be enjoyable in the conventional sense of gaming engagement? These questions arise when video games, like those of Art Video Games in China, break the immersive intentions of commercial games.

For now, indie video games in China will still be considered a rarity. Rather than presenting a commercially viable alternative to mainstream video games, these games remain largely critical works. Your experience with indie Chinese games will likely be confined to the dark gallery with floating faces. And don’t worry—the faces are just as puzzled as you are.

ASHWINI NATARAJAN B’16 can be illegally downloaded.

ARTS

□ 12

MENTAL

MATH

by Sara Winnick illustration by Julieta Cárdenas

Thirty. Maybe twenty-five.

The length of my parents’ unburdened lives.

Ten. Less than.

How old I was when I thought that 30 or 25 years was enough of life to live, unburdened.

Greater than.

The value judgment I approached but never reached when comparing the length of my parents’ unburdened lives to the length of mine (zero). ×.

The size of the burden of a mentally ill son. ×.

The size of the burden of a mentally ill brother.

Infinity.

At less than ten I thought, “If I ever really think about him—his life, his future, his problems, his parents (my parents)—I will start to cry and never stop.”

14.

How old he was when he sat at the kitchen table, leaning away from his math homework and my graying father.

7.

How old I was as I stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the family room, listening to the pre-algebra tutoring session.

And Answers: 1. No. (Immediately.)

2. No. (Eventually.)

3. What is the burden of the death of a beautiful, healthy baby boy when compared to the burden of the life of my beautiful, unhealthy, adult brother? What is the burden of: “He would have been six and playing basketball. He would have been thirteen and kissing girls. He would have been eighteen and going to college.” When compared to the burden of: “He is six and not socializing. He is thirteen and depressed. He is eighteen and psychotic. He is twentytwo and shaking.” What is the burden of: “He is twentyseven and when we die he will have to move into a home run by nurses, smelling like hospitals, that he will hate, he will hate, he will hate.”

June. July. August.

The months of seizures. Of jerking arms at the kitchen table. Of broken plates. Of jumping shoulders. Of “Don’t you think you should go lie down?” Of “I’m calling Mom.” 2005.

The first seizure, the month of August, the floor of my parents’ bedroom. He was sitting, legs crossed at the ankles, back against the baseboard, elbows at right angles, reading the paper. I stood in the doorway between my parents’ room and the hallway, holding the phone, planning a day at the pool with my less than fifteen-year-old friends.

13 ÷ 2.

The math problem he was stuck on.

9-1-1.

What the phone needed to be dialing instead of laying flat in the palm of my hand.

6½.

The answer I gave.

“Give me the fucking phone.”

What I remember my father saying.

IIIIIIIIIIIII I traced thirteen invisible tally marks with my finger on the white plaster wall between the kitchen and the family room. I divided my imaginary lines into imaginary groups, realizing I could break numbers in half.

“Give me the fucking phone.”

Not possibly what my father said. My father is not the type to swear.

“Brilliant.”

How I would have described my answer.

“Shut up.”

My father’s response from the kitchen.

The Awful Questions: 1. Would I want him to die?

2. Would I have wanted him to have never been born?

3. Would I have wanted him to die before he grew up, while he was still a baby?

13

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FEATURES

Memory.

The way his body quaked and jerked, the way it overtook him, overtook his brain, overtook his body.

Movement.

His eyes rolled back and his tongue stuck out. It started in his left arm, his left arm, his left arm, pulled backwards and forwards three times as if by invisible strings, forced straight from its right angle. His body followed his arm, unbent and re-bent by the sharp tugs of those invisible strings by unforgiving invisible hands. Unfolding his previously bent body, uncrossing his previously crossed ankles, twisting them again.

Distance.

There were only centimeters between the back of his head and the baseboard of my parents’ bed.

Memory.

There was a span of time when he was skinny with dark circles under his eyes, when he listened to rap music and wore mostly black.

Movement.

He was sitting on the black iron railing on the front steps of our house. The railing was thin and frail—you couldn’t balance on it. He was sitting and then he was sliding and then he was on the ground and his knee was bleeding. The scar bruised and the skin turned dark. This was the time when he swore often.

Distance.

There were those years that he hated me.

Memory.

There was that car ride in Cape Cod, after the campfire, driving home with my sister and my mom. Just the three of us in the car. I remember it was raining, but it could not possibly have been raining because we were driving home from a campfire on the beach. It was August.

Movement.

I was in the back seat of the car, feeling the safety of driving home with my mom and my sister through the rain (although it could not have possibly been raining). I can’t remember how the conversation started.

Distance.

I can’t remember how it finished. There was a CD, we were listening to music, it stopped.

Memory.

My sister and mom were talking, somehow talking, about him. I was listening.

Distance.

I know I learned something about my big brother in the backseat of the car in the not-rain on the way back from the beach. I think it was important.

Movement.

I try to remember I can remember I can’t remember.

It was raining it wasn’t raining. The CD stopped.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The average [oil painting]...was produced more or less cynically: that is to say the values it was nominally expressing were less meaningful to the painter than the finishing of the commission or the selling of his product...

Landscape, of all the categories of oil painting, is the one to which our argument applies least.

The sky has no surface and is intangible; the sky cannot be turned into a thing or given a quantity. And landscape painting begins with the problem of painting sky and distance.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.

—Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

—John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Fig. 1 - LED streetlights in Los Angeles, CA And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat Went heaving through the water like a swan; When, from behind that craggy steep till then The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct, Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, And growing still in stature the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned, And through the silent water stole my way Back to the covert of the willow tree...

—William Wordsworth, The Prelude

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

—The opening line of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the novel which introduced the term “cyberspace.”

Fig. 2 - The Forum Shops at Ceasar’s Palace, Las Vegas, NV

The mall’s centerpiece, however, is a soaring, barrel-vaulted ceiling of sheetrock and plaster painted with a faux sky finish, tying together the facility’s “street market” atmosphere. Per the mall’s original design, the ceiling’s painted clouds and blue sky brighten throughout the day and dim to a soft glow in the evenings, simulating the time of day. This popular effect was originally made possible by high-wattage incandescent fixtures controlled by hundreds of dimmers. Building management later replaced these fixtures with blue, amber, and white fluorescent lamps, which increased energy efficiency and allowed for simple color transitions but lacked light intensity and quality.

—Philips Solid-State Lighting Solutions, Inc., “The Forum Shops at Ceasar’s Palace” (see Fig. 2) (Fig. 3 - Cory Arcangel’s “Super Mario Clouds V2K3,” on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art But a growing body of evidence links the brightening night sky directly to measurable negative impacts on human health and immune function, on adverse behavioral changes in insect and animal populations, and on a decrease of both ambient quality and safety in our nighttime environment.

Fig. 4 - In the climactic moment of the recent film The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, an arrow is shot through a force field simulating a sky.

It is this opening which saves our protagonist’s life, and, it is implied, foments revolution against a dystopian, totalitarian ruling class.

—Darkskiesawareness.org, “What is Light Pollution?”

This study shows a statistically reliable reduction in crash risk due to the presence of fixed lighting, thereby corroborating for the first time the implicit assumption that measured or calculated improvements in visibility probably translate into improvements in traffic safety.

—Lighting Research Center, “Does Street Lighting Improve Safety?”

A large group of picnicking children is struck by lightning. Four girls and four dogs are killed. Twenty-three children suffer burns, cataracts, macular holes, tympanic membrane rupture, and skull fracture.

At the church service, the pastor organizes his eulogy around the trope of being called. God reached down with a finger of light, etc. But the positive charge originated in the ground and climbed an invisible ladder of electrons skyward.

APRIL 4 2014

—Ben Lerner, Angle of Yaw

EPHEMERA

□ 14

ROOT OF

There is nothing I fear more than the meandering pace of light, marking its celestial time across the lawns of our neighborhoods, yes moving also in crawling drips from our shoulders to our feet in the summer’s sticking dust that waves itself over everything eventually, in the course of a day. Some hemlock please, some quick choking here, in the bed across from yours. Brother I love you, for your skin, always soft and clean, you sleep, the way you breathe as you sleep. All the ephebes look at your hips in jealousy because they have never held bones so perfect. Your teeth, I feel them in your mouth with my finger, I touch the parting above your lip, hallowed by a spirit that has kept you clean, and young. I love you and so I cannot let anyone near you. My protection is not selfish, I promise, you are just too unspoiled, I will stay pure for you, will you for me? I will, when I bleed spread my blood around where you sleep to ward away all evil, and dilute my blood with my saliva in my cupped hands and make small marks on your face. A stain of purple hyacinth under the trampling herds of lambs, and marks over your eyelids which are frozen purple hyacinths thawing in the summer.

15

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LITERARY

On the beach, we went yesterday and the days before that, after I came back from the green spaces of school we went everyday; in paths carved from long wheat and wild berries made by the tractor when it still worked, the one path marked by sinewy bodies of the wheat in its summer prime, bodies that were tall and deep with soft and fluffy heads, that in the night seemed like real walls, like they had linked arms and now made a shield that red rover could not knock over, but were a chain that softened in the dusk, that hour when everything is melted beeswax and where light clinging to the last bits of reflectivity begins to pull apart matter, the hour in which it is easy to cry while walking back to the house, looking back until the beach becomes lost and the wheat bodies begin to hum in deference to the pain of childlike wonder, that I had, that you might have had. On our way there growing by the wheat I took the wild berries and mixed them in between stones and then with saltwater painted the wood that had many years before us become the shack behind the wall of stones, where we changed our clothes and sometimes was also the dwelling in which we would find ourselves asleep. We walked here last summer, and the cold spring before that. You loved me then, you were so devoted to me, all my fears you cupped in your hands and poured outside, you bathed me, telling me to not look down because the water had made a bloody stream of me, and then lifting me out, placed my feet on the tile and cleaned the blood off me. I fainted after looking down, and you carried me to bed and placed towels under me where I was bleeding and you looked––in my true memory––worried but also amused, “That was an outright swoon. I thought it only happened in Victorian novels, not to real girls.” And now we are here; you are sleeping and the sunlight does nothing to take away the stale grayness of disuse and discontentment, and we are both confused, but at least my eyes are open and they face you.

Last summer was so beautiful, wasn’t it? You remember, don’t you, how the light really did do something to my hair and we walked on the rocks out to the cliff submerged in water, staring down into the ocean that was unmistakably ocean, deep and scary, on the cliff where teenagers would jump off, which I did only four times in my life, for which you were there for only three? On the way there, to the cliff, from the beach we went through shallow waters that then suddenly became deep. We had to grow accustomed to all terrain; I made my feet bend around the edges of rocks which had silky backs but sharp edges, to grasp with my toes the seaweed which promised security, and then finding the beginning of the deep water letting my body go forward, a frog stroke that let me keep my head above the water, finally reaching the outwards growing cliff which became a large giant, that then became our large giant as we climbed it. On the shore we put things we found in our pockets. I wondered if you were just doing it for my benefit. I swam farther than you on most days, and licked my lips carrying the taste into dinnertime when we ate the things we made, laughing and rubbing food on ourselves, chasing each other, you know how to scare me and that I scare easily, but please don’t hide behind doorways, that really terrifies me, what if our fingers get caught in the hinges and we lose our fingers? You couldn’t even laugh because you were really having such a good time that it made you a little serious. But I grinned like a fool, the only way I knew, despite my nervousness and later dug my head on your shoulder, you patting me to sleep on the sofa, our book put facedown on your lap, thank you. Alone the both of us at night walks, us and our cigarettes, you know on the road lined by the smaller road that is the place where child-flowers grow and tremble in the nighttime breeze. As we pass by they are rocked to sleep, they say to me that we lull them.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

MALLOWSby Julieta Cárdenas

You now smoke more than I do, this year, no one understands things as well as you, ever. I still surprise you, don’t I? Then why is it that this summer you just sleep, and spend your time away from me, only talking to me when there is nothing else with which you can reasonably occupy yourself? Always the piano, you bang on it hard or long, or both, and I grow tired of it and cannot escape it even in the other rooms, I just want to place my hands over yours and make you stop. I would rather not care, but it really does make me mad to be silenced by music. Or you write, I understand that, I do, but I haven’t felt that committed to something in a while, and it makes me bitter, I can’t understand why we can’t be occupied at the same time, it happens so rarely, so that it is the case that one of us is usually left to wait. We were so beautiful last year, endless grains of sand, how many kisses, how many? My skin grew white with the trauma of your lips. In meadows where horses have grown sleek among spring flowers, dill scents the air.

The meandering pace of light, an old glass pane, on morning skin it walks its octopus limbs, covering my full stomach and I feel sick and dry, the light is not good, something is wrong. Waiting for you to wake up today, because it is not until you do that the day starts.

It is a cool morning for the summer, so why don’t you love me today? We go to the beach and I lay there on the sand and read, I try to read, I am so mad at you, not looking or playing with me, not asking me what I am reading, not reading yourself. Since when do you play with sand, you aren’t very good at it, you should know you have no sense for those things. I haven’t been able to think very well lately. I feel upset but I don’t know why. I was so still at school before I saw you again, so the quietness you carry with you disturbs me even more, my head is so still, and yours so disengaged with what I am feeling, how did you still and quiet your mind, you selfish little beast?

APRIL 4 2014

“It hasn’t been quiet, I have been thinking a lot, about the Greeks you know, and I have a complicated relationship with them. I just don’t know where to put them.”

“But you said the things you don’t know where to put are the only things that interest you.”

“You sound calm today.”

“Don’t say that. Since when do you care about how I am? You slept with someone else, someone so very disgusting. She’s a slutty and fat whore.”

“You are smarter than that.”

“You don’t even like the way she smells, her smell is disgusting to you. It’s not like me, look at my face, you look for my scent, you told me you like being there, your head between my legs, you slept with her, that careless bitch––what about my arms and my stomach, which you have seen grow? Now they are here for you. I feel strange. I’ve told you I have melted.

And you have been ignoring me.”

“You fell in love at school.”

“That’s not true, and if it is then it happened with more than one person––it happened with everyone. You forgot about me, even if it was just for a moment, it means you forgot about me for years in that moment; a whole world happening then disappearing, how could you? At night I try to tell you everything in my head, I eat imagining you eating with me, I just want you to be next to me always, it wasn’t my fault. Don’t feel atoned for your confession––I do not forgive you. When I scream it is not only for your attention and for you to hold me, it is because there is something that is hurting me everywhere, I have been so still this summer, I have not screamed. I have just been looking at things and everything has grown to be dusty, it has all stopped for a time, and I have been patient. You, if you hate me please do it strongly, please leave a mark on my body that comes from you, please don’t just be quiet.”

“I needed to know what another body felt like.”

“Fuck you. Of course you are laughing. You can’t take me seriously, as if I will never know you, but I do, I fucking know you, please just love me, even if you don’t love me because I am strange and sick. We have lived the same way for so long and I have nothing else but only that you love me or that I die.”

“No, I just––see that’s exactly what I love about you, we can read the same things, we have lived in the same places, eat at the same table, have been born of the same womb, but we will never understand each other.”

“That bothers me so deeply.”

“It bothers me too, I just can’t show it the way you can.”

“I don’t try to show it the way I do.”

“Neither do I.” “You have lines starting to form on your forehead.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“They aren’t strong lines.”

“It’s chilly tonight.”

“Yeah, but it’s nice.”

“Let’s walk to the end of the road and then go back to the house?”

“Yes and then you can read to me.”

Come on, like we did last summer. Our hands would twist, running through strands against what I had come to know as the ether. Things were humming, and I smell root of mallows, your lilies and violets and your hand tying them to stones has scented them even more sweetly. Clap your hands under grains of sand. We had exhausted ourselves, and sat on the broken tractor smoking another cigarette and smiling at each other before going back inside. I touched everything as we walked back and up the stairs. I held on to the memory of everything I touched including his face when I sat on the tractor and he stood beside me, I pressed my fingers with their deep memory on my head, I blessed the night because it had blessed me.

LITERARY

□ 16

Two summers ago, I worked for a man who places stock music into reality television episodes, in Los Angeles, California.

I produced cue sheets—spreadsheets attributing sound clips so that composers get paid—for Tia & Tamera, a Style Network program that follows the daily lives of two former stars of Sister, Sister.

I was really, really deep in this shit. Armed with a printout of every sound file played during an episode of Tia & Tamera, I calculated the length of each clip, attributed its composers, and catalogued its name. My brain organized itself into Excel blocks. This was my rhythm.

Nonsense took on meaning. I could tell by title alone whether a track was a Maurice Chevalier Davis or a Craig Damster; whether I was hearing “Let’s Hear it for NYC”—an instrumental ripoff of “Empire State of Mind”—underneath Tamera’s meetings with fashion magazine editors, or “Sneaking Past Guido,” a pizzicato ditty appropriate for hatching a scheme.

Below: one of my cue sheets.

17

□

REALITY TV

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Friday, April 4 RISD Graduate Open Studios 7-11PM // Various locations

Trading card edition! Tour the studios for one night, visit all sixteen studios and collect a trading card at each, collect all 16 cards for a free drink ticket at the after party at the Salon.

7-8PM 231 South Main Street and 161 South Main Street 8-9PM MetCalf 7-14 North Main Street 9-11PM CIT 169 Weybosset Street and Fletcher (graduate studios in CIT) Open Call for Acts: The Mental Health Monologue 6-8PM // Wilson Hall, Room 103, Brown University, 75-91 Waterman St, Providence If you have something creative about mental health to share, you can share it during the open call for acts for The Mental Health Monologues: an open mic night on the theme of mental health. Based on your audition, you could have a chance to win performing on April 19th, 6-8pm in the Faunce Underground. All forms of creative expression are welcome.

Claudia’s Birthday yay // I love my life!

Saturday, April 5 Rhode Island Robot Block Party 11AM-4PM // Pizzitola Sports Center, 235 Hope St., Providence

This is a free community event and it will feature robot demonstrations and exhibits from industry, universities, community organizations, and public, private, parochial, and home school groups across Rhode Island and the region!

Astrology Readings 12:30-6:30PM // Mother Mystic Spiritual Apothecary, 179 Dean St., Providence // $40/reading Shirley Prisco is here for you. She is a professional astrologer certified by the National Council of Geocosmic Research, an international organization devoted to education in the field of astrology.

She’s been doing this for over 20 years!

Stand Up! March Against Sexual Assault 12:30-3:30PM // Main Green, Brown University, Providence So basically Brown has a not good sexual assault policy and it’s up for review next semester and this is an action in preparation for work around that. At around 2:30 Jaclyn Friedman will be giving a keynote.

Music Show 9PM-1AM //AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence //$6

After \ Devouring: An Evening of Dance April 3-5 at 8 p.m. // Ashamu Dance Studio, Brown University

Gymshorts, Downtown Boys, Power Masters and Miami Doritos

So this is two shows in one. First it’s After the Multiplex and then it’s The Process of Devouring, choreographed by Sarah Friedland and Nadia Hannan. My friend John is in the first one and he said “After Saturday’s performance there will be a talkback with the choreographers and dancers”. Reserve tickets on eventbrite. I have tickets for Thursday AND Saturday.

Book Release: Floating, Brilliant, Gone 6PM // The Salon, 57 Eddy St., Providence // $7 Franny Choi is a pretty great poet and she’s having a book release party. There will also be “opening acts,” Korean food, and dancing. You can get tickets on eventbrite.

Sunday, April 6 Triangles 7:30PM // 269 Thayer St., Apt 2, Providence

Dan Ruppel Ph.D. Theater and Performance Studies (will be talking about the play that is called the first American play, but is not really the first american play, nor did it even really look like a play.)

Julieta Cárdenas Ph.D. in Swug life Swag. jk. B.A. History of Art and Architecture (will be presenting on what can happen in the ambiguously regulated immersive worlds of Second Life and its ilk and what questions this raises for ethics.)

Brandon Shaw Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Dance Studies (will be talking about ...dance.)

Monday, April 7 Cooper Holowski - KATABASIS 7PM // RISD Auditorium, 17 Canal Walk, Providence

Katabasis is a 40 minute video piece by Cooper Holoweski that is screened with an accompanying live score preformed by 3 musicians.

Stand Up! Workshops and Discussions on Sexual Assault 1-5PM // Wilson Hall, 75-91 Waterman St., Providence Workshops include LGBTQ+ Community and Sexual Assault, Date Rape Drug Education, Healthy Relationships, Rape Culture, Communities of Color and Sexual Assault, the MPCs, Masculinity and Sexual Assault ( which is actually a panel), Bystander Awareness, and Self-Care for Survivors.

Degrees of Separation 2:30-3PM // RISD Museum, 224 Benefit St., Providence You might wonder: “What is the relationship between artists and the people that they paint?” Elizabeth Berman is going to help you figure it out. She will also explore various examples of unconventional portraiture and paintings from the 15th century to today.

THIS WEEK IN LISTERY:

April 6, 1930

Gandhi raises a lump of mud and salt...

the list Wednesday, April 9

How the US and Europe Struggle to Preserve Freedom and Combat Racism 3-5PM // Petteruti Lounge, Stephen Robert ‘62 Center, Brown University, 75 Waterman St., Providence

Tuesday, April 8

Assembling the Dinosaur- Evolution and Capitalism at the Turn of the 20th Century 12-1PM // Campus Center, Room 229, Brown University, 75 Waterman St., Providence This is going to be pretty awesome. and there’s going to be lunch. Main question: “How and why did dinosaurs emerge as the most visible and sought-after display objects in American natural history museums around the turn of the 20th century?” Lukas Rieppel, who will be presenting, is a new hire for the History department. He’s brilliant, engaging, and present. Rieppel is going to connect the discovery of dinos with the emergence of corporate capitalism during the late 19th century. Key phrase: cultural resource extraction Screening of The New Black 7PM // Cable Car Cinema & Cafe, 204 South Main St., Providence // $9.75 “The New Black is a documentary that tells the story of how the African-American community is grappling with the gay rights issue in light of the recent gay marriage movement and the fight over civil rights. The film documents activists, families and clergy on both sides of the campaign to legalize gay marriage and examines homophobia in the black community’s institutional pillar-the black church and reveals the Christian right wing’s strategy of exploiting this phenomenon in order to pursue ananti-gay political agenda.” I feel like the use of the phrase “the black community” is a little confusing. I didn’t know there was only one? If you go to the Wednesday screening you can ask the director Yoruba Richen in a Q&A session following the film.

Join the Program in Judaic Studies for a lecture, as part of the Anti Semitism & Islamophobia lecture series, by Erik Bleich (Middlebury College).

Chitra Ganesh Lecture 4-6PM // Metcalf Auditorium, Museum of Art Chace Center, 20 North Main Street, Providence Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh will discuss her work in relation to contemporary art and visual culture in India and South Asia, as well as her plans as the first Kirloskar Visiting Scholar at RISD in Fall 2014.

Nacho Average Wednesday Karaoke 8PM-1AM // Lola’s Tequila Bar & Cantina, 525 South Water St., Providence $3 nachos and $4 Margaritas.

Thursday, April 10 Wheeler School Sale 10AM-8PM // The Wheeler School Gymnasium, 407 Brook St., Providence

Come by clothing and more. There’s a ‘boutique’ section. Everything is ‘gently used.’ Don’t you want to be ‘gently used’ too? My number: (650) 743-3073