The College Hill Independent V.28 N.10

VOL 28 ISSUE X MAY 2 / 2014 BROWN//RISD WEEKLY

VOLUME 28 // ISSUE 10

NEWS 2 Week in Review

david adler, simon engler & sam rosen

8 Splinter Cell

abigail savitch-lew

FEATURES 5 Method Acting ellora vilkin

METRO 3 Zoned Out kat thornton

12 Junk Shop

vera carothers

ARTS 9 Paul Legault greg nissan

TOE TAGS 14 So Long, Suckas all of us

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, Abigail Savitch-Lew, Carly West, Sara Winnick STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Andres Chang, Amy Chen, Aaron Harris WEB Edward Friedman, Patrick McMenamin COPY Mary Frances Gallagher, Paige Morris BUSINESS Haley Adams COVER ART Polina Godz MVPS Casey Friedman & Kim Sarnoff

TECHNOLOGY 11 TL; DR

FROM THE EDITOR S April 19, Pembroke Field.

houston davidson

1 P.M.

LIT

Sleep Less. Residually drunk we watched you shotgun for home field advantage.

13 Download eli pitegoff

SPORTS 7 Tracking Shot zeve sanderson

4 P.M. Fuck More.

6 P.M. Die Faster. A mountain bike, a single speed, and a city cruiser ride two blocks to eat burritos.

Thanks, Indy.

–JPC, SPE & TR

OCCULT 17 We All Begin To Die eli petzold

EPHEMERA 6 Greetings

matthew marsico & molly landis

X 18 HAGS layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

о оо о

л лл л

Next:

я яяя

р р р

я яя р ял р р лл р рр яя ол ряя ря р лл я р р я л р р ряяя яя р о ряя яя о о р я яя о яо р яя яяяяя оо я р яяя яя рояя яяяяя р яя я о ол оя л яя яо оо яяяя о о оо о

я яяя

Let’s play

л - Brown я - Aero р - Archer я - Caecelia я - Century Schoolbook

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

THIS LAST WEEK

by David Adler, Simon Engler & Sam Rosen illustration by Sara Khan

TITLE ME It’s the 10th Anniversary of Mean Girls this week, and people are making a big deal about it. There are screenings on college campuses and retrospectives from major magazines. It seems weird, this level of fanfare over a movie that’s very good but no better. But a quick mental run through the movie’s highlights explains it all. The phone scene, quadruple splitscreened, Godfather II-style, where Regina and Gretch and the rest of the gang hold cordless landlines to their ears and talk shit. Mean Girls has aged so well because most of it now feels anachronistic: names of frenemies are written in a Burn Book that’s kept secret. Can we now even imagine humiliation that’s never meant to be public? If the movie came out today, we’d consider it quaint. Then title contains a knowing smile. These girls aren’t actually that mean. No one leaks naked pictures to Hunter Moore.

HIDDEN TREASURE There’s one scene in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie that h haunted me since I was 9 years old. The young protagonist Amélie stands on a tall rooftop overlooking Paris, gazing out over the city in late afternoon, and wonders,

+++

This week, the New York Times announced that the Obama administration has revived its search for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s secret fortune. Rumors suggest that Putin may have access to up to $70 billion, amassed as a result of his stake in a commodities trading company known as the Gunvor Group. According to an announcement from the Treasury Department, “Putin has investments in Gunvor and may have access to Gunvor funds.”

The hidden treasure could explain Putin’s lavish consumption. There are 58 aircraft, 4 yachts, 11 luxury watches, 20 palaces, 700 cars, and, according to a 2012 report, a $75,000 toilet at Mr. Putin’s presidential disposal. Maintenance of these items costs over $2 billion alone.

Yet the numbers do not seem to add up. Putin’s recorded income last year was just over $100,000, according to a recent Kremlin report. “I have seen some papers about this,” Putin remarked in response to allegations of a hidden fortune. “Just gossip that’s not worth discussing. It’s simply rubbish. They picked everything out of someone’s nose and smeared it on their little papers.”

The New York Times, for its part, investigated these allegations full force. And for good reason: if the rumors were true, Putin would be the world’s wealthiest head of state, and more than implicated financially with Russia’s oligarchs.

Yet this front-cover controversy belies a more shocking reality: there are simply shitloads—truly, shitloads—of money that we do not know about. And this quiet, hidden, extensive economy exists all around us, all the time, well beyond the limits of the Russian state.

Donald Sterling will soon have to sell the Los Angeles Clippers because his mistress secretly recorded him scolding her for posting photos she’d taken with Black people to Instagram.

TMZ, founded the year after Mean Girls’ release, obtained the audio, and the story exploded. The recorded rant is not the most racist thing that Donald Sterling has ever done. Twice he has been sued for housing discrimination, allegedly refusing to sell or rent to Black people because they “smell” and are “not clean.” The NBA never disciplined him for any of this.

People of color live in poorer neighborhoods than whites with comparable incomes, and this fact continues to drive racial inequality.

You can find a little humor if you imagine Sterling, his lady friend, Blake Griffin, and DeAndre Jordan on a four-way call. Juicy sweatsuits and bubble gum lipgloss.

“I just wish you wouldn’t make your friendships with them so public.”

“Who’s them?”

“Oh, sorry DeAndre! One sec.” CLICK In the end, Regina George gets hit by a bus and the Plastics disband. Donald Sterling will be gone soon, and Oprah might buy the Clippers. The NBA calls the crackdown historic, and we can all get back to a post-racial playoffs. Lindsay Lohan goes to rehab, and we joke about it on Twitter. –SR

“How many couples are having an orgasm right now?”

We move through a montage a young couple in climax here, this elderly couple in climax there; in an office, in a bathroom, in a bedroom. Amélie smiles mischievously at the camera. “Fifteen!”

Behind walls, Amélie reminds us, is a quiet, hidden, and extensive economy. +++

HIT AND RUN The average Chinese Ferrari owner is only 36 years old. He is young and he has made it. He is 17 years beyond adolescence. This is his prize: 562 horsepower and a leather interior so supple, so smooth, that he drives pantsless, balls out, just to connect. Skin on leather on chassis on tire. On the second Shanghai ring road, on the way to golf. It's for business.

Perhaps this driver attended last week’s Beijing Auto Show. He would have found himself in good company: nearly 24 million dollars of Ultra Luxury Cars were sold here in only six days. A parade: the Jeep Sundancer, a luxury offroader with gold rims; the Infiniti Q50 Eau Rouge, a two-door concept not yet in production—none of you can fucking have it; the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport.

He has spent days wandering 650,000 square feet of exhibition space. He is young and he has made it. He eats shrimp in the hotel and exhales. Here is my cheese, he thinks.

No one has moved it. +++ The Beijing Auto Show ended on Tuesday afternoon. The exhibition hall is empty and there is sunlight on the carpet.

You can’t take it with you, they say. Once it’s over, it’s gone.

The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport was priced at $6.4 million. It is the world’s fastest production car. Its top speed is 265 miles per hour. The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport was reserved and purchased before the first day of the Beijing Auto Show—before the first press release, even—by an unknown buyer.

The Bugatti Veyron is the world’s fastest production car.

It is far from average.

It has leather seats that feel amazing on the skin.

Once it’s over, it’s gone.

Unless you buy it in advance. –SPE

+++ So close your eyes, Amélie: forget the orgasm now, and just think about the money. Stacks under the bed, bands piled into the basement. Now move to Switzerland, to the Cayman Islands, into vaults and bank accounts brimming with cash.

Smile at the camera: “$21 trillion!”

James Henry, former chief economist at McKinsey, released this data back in 2012. This hidden fortune, he claims, is “protected by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries taking advantage of the increasingly borderless, frictionless global economy.” That’s the size of the entire economy of the US and Japan combined, owned by 0.001% of the world’s population. The hidden treasure is everywhere—stuffed into banks like UBS, Credit Suisse, and Goldman Sachs—no pirate’s map or CIA intelligence required.

At the end of the day, these are the pioneers of Amélie’s hidden global economy—not Vladmir Putin. –DRA

MAY 2 2014

NEWS

□ 02

Re: Zoning

by Kat Thornton Illustration by Casey Friedman

I sat in the cafeteria at 444 Westminster Street—the meeting space for the Providence Department of Planning and Development—and listened intently. Yet I couldn’t help but let my mind glaze over a little bit. Through the tedious presentations on overlay districts, parking requirements, R2, W2, 1A, and the like, I found myself thinking: this stuff does not apply to me as a Providence resident. I reminded myself of the reality being discussed here. City streets, residential homes, economic development, and public money. The stakes of zoning bureaucracy for effective and fair development are extremely high. The sentences lining poster boards around the room, once approved, will literally define the built spaces of Providence, Rhode Island.

Providence is reproducing its zoning ordinance for the first time since 1951, with the last general amendment having taken place in 1994. The Department of Planning and Development began current rezoning efforts back in 2007 when the city was in the middle of the comprehensive planning process. Bob Azar, the director of Planning and Development, told the Indy that the comprehensive plan “sets forth community vision for how [the city] wants to grow and change.” Zoning, a tool used to implement the comprehensive plan, defines the requirements for building height, car parking, bike parking, sign sizes, commercial functions, and the distances between a building and the sidewalk.

Homeowners, developers, and business owners are the primary stakeholders for zoning changes. But you too, dear reader, must live with the results. Development in Providence has largely been of indirect benefit to the community at large. It has often privileged developers over the general public, particularly those in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. To say it simply and concisely: paying attention to zoning is important. +++ Zoning systems force urban developers to take pause. They can strengthen historic preservation, earmark districts for commercial development, and ensure that developers can’t build structures that are too cheap, too ugly, or too uncharacteristic for determined standards. But its importance is not immediate. Zoning is a tool, not an end.

The needs and desires of individuals, places, and groups change over time. It’s not possible to permanently, holistically, and effectively dictate neighborhood development. There are

03

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Metro

always exceptions to the rules. If, for example, a resident wishes to affix a 20-foot-tall suit of armor on top of her house that reaches above the zoning-defined height limit of the neighborhood, then this resident must apply for permission from the zoning board of review. Such exceptions, called “waivers,” must pass a process that is both lengthy and public before they can become reality. This is particularly important when a large corporation wishes to construct something that would contradict the comprehensive plan for the neighborhood. Larger waiver requests, like a plan to construct a textile factory in a primarily residential neighborhood, must be brought before several commissions before they can gain approval. Residents are notified when zoning waivers have been requested in their neighborhood, and they can voice concerns during a public appeals process, where company representatives meet neighborhood residents face-to-face.

The DoP claims that it has been and will continue to be committed to community engagement during the rezoning process. One piece of Re:Zoning Providence’s main slogan (Re:Imagine, Re:Define, and Re:Vitalize) calls for the new plan to “create a tool that better reflects economic and cultural potential of our neighborhoods and the demands of residents and businesses citywide.” But it is unclear whether residents’ perspectives are being taken as seriously as the business perspectives. Top-level decisions in recent years have shown that the city’s main development priorities are to create clear paths for short-term business development, primarily in the downtown, while unemployment figures have increased in Providence’s peripheral neighborhoods.

DoP officials have emphasized the fact that proposed waivers are drafts, subject to revision based on public opinion before being sent to the city council, where additional public hearings will be held before the zoning becomes law. The way the process works,

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

after the first draft (publicly released in March) receives public comment, a second draft will be produced (slated for July), after which it will go through another 30 days of comments before being presented to the City Plan Commission (CPC). The CPC will review the board, and then will make a recommendation to the Providence City Council, which will hold its own public hearings in the fall before making a decision. If approved, the new ordinance will become law by winter.

PowerPoint presentations from public meetings are available on the city’s official rezoning website, but notes from public comment are not. And reporting on the process has been sparse. It is difficult if not impossible to know what residents have come to say at neighborhood meetings. Representatives from Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE) and the Olneyville Housing Association both told me they were uncertain about what new zoning proposals meant for the communities they worked with. The DoP has a designated email address to hear public comments, and there are comment sheets at the public meetings. You can also sign up for email alerts by signing in at the public meetings. But these channels of input are insulated and do not spread information among the public. What should be a dynamic process is top-down and confusing to anyone who does not have a specific, vested interest. +++ The funding for zoning overhaul came from a $2 million U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities grant awarded to Rhode Island in 2011. The Providence Department of Planning and Development was given roughly $900,000, which was split about evenly between a study on land use and transportation in the city and rezoning, according to Azar. One of the “anticipated project benefits” of this funding was sustained public engagement: an official press release states that the “utilization of a public participation strategy to reach target populations, engaging them in the planning process and ensuring sustained participation throughout the RPSD implementation.”

Fred Ordonez, executive director of DARE, told me the state reached out to his organization to ask for a proposal for how to efficiently spend this money at the state level.

DARE recommended education efforts, hiring a couple of community organizers for each target community for “folks to even understand what the hell’s in these plans: the lingo, the jargon,” he said. “Decision making has to be at these local levels. If people who are the targets of either rezoning or economic development or housing development are not included in these decision making processes, it’s just people who think they know best.”

The result is the increasing wealth, education, and health gap that has been apparent for the last several decades.

Ordonez, who has worked at DARE for five years and in local nonprofits for several years prior, said a lack of education about issues relevant to the community, particularly when it is shrouded in jargon, makes it hard for people to feel comfortable asking questions or even coming to the public meetings to begin with. “We know who’s at the table, and we know whose priorities they’ve had and always had, which is why it takes a lot to organize people,” he said. Regardless of the administration, “developers in this city have ruled this city for decades,” he said. “Money is power.”

The department of planning has emphasized their community engagement efforts at public meetings, citing a series of “charrettes”—multi-day brainstorming events in a particular neighborhood where visions for the community are brought together and articulated—as the golden example of their outreach. But Ordonez said all the people he has spoken to call these charrettes “charades.” “They were like a microphone that’s not even plugged,” he said, referring to them as “dead ends of input.” At the end of the proposal process between DARE and the state, Ordonez said the Rhode Island government decided to hire a consulting team to determine how they should spend the federal grant money and the community organizer plan was not adopted. The city of Providence also hired a Chicago-based consulting firm, Camiros, to manage the production of the new zoning ordinance.

residents to drive in for cheap purchases and drive out, like those in neighboring Hartford and Silver Lake, where car ownership rates are much higher. “For generations, Olneyville has fallen victim to the automobile,” Nickerson wrote. “First the highways, then the retail mindset that set in in the middle of the last century with places like the former Price Rite plaza, the car wash on Westminster, the Burger King with a drive thru and 60 parking spaces, and the gas station across from this site.”

At the public meeting, a large group of Olneyville residents held signs that read, “I live in Olneyville,” or “trabajo en Olneyville.” An interpreter helped make the meeting accessible for attendees whose first language was Spanish (though the poor sound quality of the room made it hard for anyone to hear what the representatives were saying). The representatives made their presentations, showing carefully designed architectural plans for the proposed buildings, and promised to construct brick walls with iron gates on the street, to create the illusion of a sidewalk storefront feel.

In 2004, there was a similar story regarding a potential Dunkin’ Donuts drivethrough in the West End. After a significant display of resident disapproval at public meetings, the Providence Zoning Board of Review denied Dunkin’ their application. The only difference between these two stories is that McDonald’s and Family Dollar have been granted a zoning waiver and will proceed with construction.

Martina Haggerty, principal planner for the DoP and the listed point of contact for public input during the rezoning process, was not present at the January hearing but said she understood that support for the development favored constructing something over the empty lot. The opposition, on the other hand, preferred to be more selective about incoming development and demanded that new construction stay in line with the zoning ordinance for Plainfield Street. Support pointed to minimum-wage jobs for residents, contracts for local construction companies, and something (especially something that wouldn’t contribute to gentrification) on a lot that had been empty for years. Opposition preferred respecting neighborhood development initiatives, as articulated in formal plans and maintaining a primarily pedestrian commercial thoroughfare. The problem isn’t necessarily with the establishments themselves. In an ideal world, residents and PCP members could have taken advantage of an opportunity to make two eager corporations change to fit local priorities. “I really thought that we could demand better from these developers,” said Christine West, a local architect and the chairwoman of the City Plan Commission.

+++ Think about recent business headlines that tout tax breaks given to corporations, flaunting the number of jobs expected to come as a result. Think about start-ups and the “Knowledge District.” Think of the Providence Place Mall, whose land was essentially handed to developers for free as a result of tax waivers. Think about the fact that despite public outcry, the land made available by the rerouting of Interstate 195 originally belonged to Wards 11 and 13 (representing Federal Hill, Upper South Providence, the West End, and parts of Downtown and the Jewelry District) but was redistricted into Ward 1 (Fox Point, College Hill, and Wayland Square). Think about Providence’s development model.

Community engagement in macro-level planning is critical. The authorities have acknowledged this by making it part of the stipulations for federal funding and by including it in their rhetoric. But if community engagement remains at this surface level, we can expect to see the perpetuation of a pattern of development that benefits the larger Providence community indirectly at best, and widens the wealth and education gap at worst.

KAT THORNTON B’14 has spent time in an ideal world.

+++ On January 28th, the department of planning held its monthly public meeting in the cafeteria of 444 Westminster. The room was a little more crowded than usual; representatives from McDonald’s and Family Dollar had come to appeal for a zoning waiver. McDonald’s and Family Dollar hope to construct buildings and parking lots on a razed lot near Olneyville Square, on Plainfield Street. The parcel (planning talk for a piece of land) lies across the street from a gas station, Olneyville New York System, and around the corner from music venue Fête and several residential homes.

Zoning laws for Plainfield Street require there to be no space between the sidewalk and storefront. According to most recent (2000) data, 41 percent of Olneyville residents do not own cars. The DoP had hoped that street side storefronts could promote a pedestrian-oriented commercial district. McDonald’s and Family Dollars both planned to build parking lots, which is the reason they had to apply for a waiver inorder to construct on the site. As Jef Nickerson pointed out in a blog post on Greater City Providence, filling this parcel with a McDonald’s and a Family Dollar would encourage non-Olneyville

may 2 2014

metro

□ 04

METHOD

by Ellora Vilkin

Acid belly, bone throat Ladies and gentlemen may I have your attention please.

Welcome to our skin chill theater, to our hands shake show.

Please, no neckback zing photography or recording of any quake knee kind. And finally, a reminder they’re watching to silence it’s quiet your cell phone.

Now please, relax okay and enjoy the show

To relieve his stage fright, Constantin Stanislavski devised a method of acting centered on attention, on focus so trained and intense it would burn. Burn the acid from his belly, the dry from his throat, make him flash hot cold then crystal. Performed correctly, the Stanislavski method, what some have called the “heated style” of acting, should feel almost vulgar. It should be a focus so absurd that (as Stanislavski said, by way of example) you could walk along the top of a citywall carrying a pot brimful of your mother’s blood and never spill it. This sounds difficult, and it is. But as Stanislavski explains it in An Actor’s Work, his textbook for actors, “The secret is very simple: to divert your attention from the auditorium you must become engrossed in what is happening on stage.” When people speak about the method or method acting, this is what they mean.

The method begins with your subtle body sighing. Let it be as if alone. Make yourself alone: Only when you believe no one else is there will you inhale and exhale for yourself and not for the audience. Be alone in spite of them. Imagine your body on the citywall, setting one foot before the other, swinging not-too-wide before planting firmly, inevitably, again and again. To begin there can be nothing but your body breathing.

Stanislavski understood acting as planting your mental images in someone else. Forget, forget, forget about the audience: speak only to your partner. You have made yourselves alone together, and so you could not be closer: everything must be done only for them.

The relaxation is not meditative but urgent. It is like weeping, loudly and violently, while driving on a busy highway. Your car is low to the ground. Passersby peer through the windows and you disregard them. You slow to pay the toll, hand quarters to an attendant, and you are not embarrassed by the wet on your face. Free of the sensation of being watched—or having liberated yourself precisely because you are being watched—you continue to weep, to give forth from a place knotted beneath the sternum, under the trapezius, at the base of the skull. You are not embarrassed: You may even revel in being seen. You enjoy that you are alone, and feeling this public solitude.

Successful practitioners of the method tend to earn a reputation for being serious. Philip Seymour Hoffman, for example, studied the techniques of Strasberg and Meisner, Stanislavski’s American descendants. “What it takes to be a great athlete is the same thing that it takes to be a great actor,” Hoffman told NPR’s Terry Gross in an interview following The Master, in 2012.

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FEATURES

“That kind of concentration and that kind of privacy in public and that kind of unselfconscious kind of experience are very similar, and that kind of pressure of the people watching and finding privacy in front of—and all that stuff. So, you know, I find it very similar.”

Hoffman had a reputation for combining, as critic Richard Brody put it, “a fury for acting and a virtuoso technique.” His performances were as sopped full of torment and tenuous joy as they were physically riveting—he invented gestures, voices, fully realized worlds of other-personness and filled them with elation, despair, charm so natural they seemed to be of his nature. When Hoffman overdosed in March after battling addiction for decades, editorials tolled the loss, pondering the link between his brilliance and his pain. “We don’t walk around our lives just constantly trying to delve into the understanding of ourselves… But that’s what actors do, you know?” Hoffman had said in the radio interview. “If you’re carrying that around and the emotional life of that around over a period of time, it can be burdensome.”

Unlike classical acting—where gestures are calculated to convey emotion or feeling—or like impersonation, the method arises from living the part. In Russian the word is perezhivanie, to experience, to undergo, to live through, in the sense you might say It was a formative experience.

For Stanislavski acting was about revealing emotional truths of the human experience. And so to really experience, you must be able to produce truthful emotion on demand.

Stanislavski was highly critical of actors who resigned to fall back on clichés like pretending to cry or affecting rage through raised voice and large gestures. He called these the actor’s stencil, trick, or “conventional external sign.” He writes, in The Actor’s Work, “In that case, why bother to think again? Or justify what you were doing using your own experience of life, your feelings, the things you have lived through in the real world?”

For method actors, artifice is a death knell. But to perform intense emotions—weeping, rage, lust—is taxing, burdensome. To do so authentically is harder still. If you know what is coming next in the role and have repeated it many times before, even if you only have to say “hello” to another character coming into a room, your reaction to their entrance may lack spontaneity.

And it is the task of the audience—never of performers—to wallow in anticipation.

“‘Acting is such a tenuous thing…A fragile, shy thing that a sensitive director can help lure out of you,’” said Marlon Brando. Like Hoffman, Brando was famous for combining an uncanny physical intelligence—friends bragged that he could mimic anyone after fifteen minutes—with intense emotional realism. He described his process to Truman Capote in a 1957 profile, notably his theory of the “sensitive moment.” Something would click for Brando around the third take of a scene. “‘By then you just need a whisper from the director to crystallize it for you,’” he explained. These moments of coalescence, of import, were Brando’s grail, and he admired the actors in whose work he found them. “‘Spencer Tracy is the kind of actor I like to watch,” he said. “The way he holds back, holds back—then darts in to make his point, darts back.”

Like Hoffman, Brando’s acting shared strategies with his life. “‘Do you know how I make a friend?’” he asked Capote. “‘I go about it very gently. I circle around and around. I circle. Then, gradually, I come nearer. Then I reach out and touch them—ah, so gently,” he said, grazing Capote’s arm with his fingers, like feelers. His method of making friends, like the acting he prized, relied on measured ebb and flow. Brando made friends like he made movies: He seduced them. “‘I draw back,’” he continued, “‘Wait awhile. Make them wonder. At just the right moment, I move in again.’” His acme, like Stanislavski’s, was acting as seduction: you make yourself, and so your partner, and so the audience, believe that you hate them, love them, need them to forgive you. “‘They don’t know what’s happening. Before they realize it, they’re all entangled, involved. I have them. And suddenly, sometimes, I’m all they have.”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

MUTINY IN PROVIDENCE Providence’s revolutionary socialists strike a separate path

It’s hard to foment revolution when you’re getting overthrown by your own comrades. Over the past few months, Providence’s revolutionary socialists have faced multiple charges of insubordination from their own organization. On February 17, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) expelled the Renewal Faction, a group formed last November to challenge a perceived lack of democracy, transparency, and effective strategy within the ISO. The Faction includes many members of the ISO’s Providence branch, a member of the Brown University campus branch, and a few members from Cambridge and other cities. With more than 80 branches in states throughout the country, the ISO is one of the largest US-based organizations with a mission to “participate in struggles for justice and liberation” in the present with the ultimate goal of bringing about a worker-led socialist revolution. The organization’s recent split brings to light complex questions facing members of the radical left concerning how to move a nation beset with class inequality toward a revolution. +++ The Faction leveled charges against nearly every aspect of recent ISO policy. The conflict began when Shaun J (last name withheld for privacy), a member of a Boston Branch and a persistent critic of the ISO, argued with other members and ultimately resigned from the organization. The ISO Steering Committee later denied Shaun J reentry, and so members of the Cambridge and Providence branches petitioned for his return. When the national group refused, the Providence and Cambridge members began developing a deeper critique of the ISO and declared their intention to form a faction in the ISO’s internal bulletin and on their own website.

The Renewal faction went on to argue that the ISO implemented a top-down approach that caused members to become disconnected from local struggles. The Faction further claimed that the ISO’s leadership was unrealistically optimistic about the potential for a mass radicalization of society. The 2008 recession caused the ISO’s leadership to “profoundly exaggerate the political break with neoliberalism and predict an immediate rise in class struggle,” the Faction wrote in its founding documents. Finally, the Faction targeted the ISO leadership itself—in particular, raising questions about its ossification. Providence Faction member Brian Chidester said many ISO members have served on the Steering Committee for over 20 years and become “stuck in a certain kind of mold.” Even the size of the organization was a subject of

MAY 2 2014

by Abigail Savitch-Lew illustration by Zeve Sanderson

controversy: members of the Faction said they’d been led to believe there were more than 1,000 members, but later heard there were only about 400 members paying dues.

In the weeks leading up to the February Convention, the Faction continued to raise new questions. When the ISO refused to publish all the Faction’s statements in the organization’s internal bulletin, the Faction released all of its documents, without redactions, on its public website. In one document made public, the Faction condemned the relationship between the ISO and the Center for Economic Research and Social Change (CERSC), the non-profit that publishes the ISO’s literature and organizes a yearly Socialism Conference. The Faction argued that because many members of the ISO Steering Committee also served on the Board of CERSC, the ISO was unduly influenced by the priorities of the nonprofit. Another document claimed that the ISO Steering Committee had mishandled a sexual assault case involving one of the organization’s members. “By instinctively disbelieving a woman who brought a sexual assault complaint against a ‘leading’ man; by exhibiting the same instrumentalism that puts survivors beneath the ‘promising futures’ of assailants, the Steering Committee’s actions have reflected the sexist and patriarchal logic of capitalist society,” they wrote.

A majority of the convention’s attendees believed the Faction had slandered members of the Steering Committee and should not have released internal documents. At the convention, ISO members circulated a referendum to ask the Faction to take down these latest documents or face expulsion. A majority of the convention members voted in favor, but the Faction refused to take down its postings. Convention attendees then voted to expel the Faction.

A few days later, the Steering Committee and National Committee responded to the Faction’s accusations in a post on SocialistWorker.org. “…After a case of sexual assault, the accused was suspended from the ISO, pending an investigation; resigned before the investigation was completed; and was formally expelled to make sure the accused could not rejoin the organization at a future date in a different locality,” the Committees wrote. “The Faction's accusation of a cover-up of sexual assault comes after a litany of attacks on the ISO that long before crossed the line of acceptable political discussion into the malicious use of the sensitive personal information to make baseless charges…” +++ William Keach, a Brown professor and a member of a Boston branch of the ISO—but not a member of the Faction—said that many of the issues raised by the Faction were already subjects of open debate within the ISO. He said the Steering Committee wanted to renew its ranks but that it was a challenge to find members prepared for leadership positions. He believed some of the Faction’s latest criticisms of the Steering Committee to be unfounded. “The expulsion, I think, had mainly to do with the fact that some members of the Faction had behaved [inappropriately] toward some members of the ISO, and had made public certain information about the ISO that put it in jeopardy,” Keach said.

But Keach added that questions about the ISO’s strategy were important ones to consider. “The left, generally, is very weak,” he said. “I think you have to start by recognizing that.

Not only is the United States not in a new period right now; it’s not going to be in the near future.” Revolutionary socialists, he added, are still trying to figure out a way forward from the unexpected lull that followed the Occupy movement.

While the recent split may seem to prove the dysfunction of the left, it could also give Providence’s revolutionary socialists an opportunity to formulate a strategy more befitting their own city and era. Fractures sometimes have the benefit of leading to new ideas—the ISO’s own history suggests as much.

The ISO formed when the International Socialists (IS) expelled a faction of its members in 1977. The faction that became the ISO disputed the IS’s focus on training students

to organize the industrial workforce. Once it separated, the ISO adopted “The Downturn Perspective,” the idea that it was the job of revolutionaries to keep socialist theory alive until national conditions approved. Through their strategy of building university chapters and joining a variety of struggles, including battles for women’s rights and against South African apartheid, the ISO gradually became one of the largest organizations of the revolutionary left. Were it not for the ISO’s split from the IS, the ideas of revolutionary socialism may not have continued to thrive in universities throughout the country. +++ Brown’s campus branch announced its resignation from the ISO on March 8, 2014. On April 17, former members drafted a list of principles to guide their new organization, now called the United Revolutionary Socialists. They debated key questions: What aspects of a future socialist society can we specify in advance, and what aspects should be left up to a proletariat democracy to decide? Should we mention that we are anti-Stalinist? Does it matter that most of our members are white and male?

While in some ways the group may continue to function as they did as an ISO branch, in other ways the group seems influenced by the Faction’s priorities. Brown student and expelled Faction member Ian G said he wanted the group to ramp up its involvement in local union struggles. “I want to be part of a socialist group that people join because they are going to win something out of it.” He said he was also interested in learning from other revolutionary groups with a track record of effective involvement in local issues.

Chidester, a Faction member from the former Providence branch, said that while former Providence members are not yet sure what form their next organization will take, he believes socialists “really [need] to start looking at our surroundings and [make] plans to make ourselves better rooted in the working class.” He added that he hopes to see the “re-founding of a broader socialist collaboration on a nonsectarian basis.”

In Providence, revolutionary socialists of different affiliations are starting conversations about how to collaborate.

Ron, a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, also hoped to move beyond sectarianism in an effort to renew socialism in Providence. “Who’s out there?” he asked.

“What do we have in common?”

ABIGAIL SAVITCH-LEW B’14 should not have released internal documents.

NEWS □ 06

VIDEO GAMES technology and the future of basketball

by Zeve Sanderson illustration by Kyle Giddon Up, up, and away Nestled high up in the rafters of every NBA stadium, six cameras are slowly transforming basketball. In 2005, the Israeli company SportVU converted its missile technology into a soccer player tracking system. STATS, a sports analytics company, purchased SportUV in 2008 and immediately adapted it for basketball. Installed in stadium catwalks, one camera is placed above each basket and two over each sideline, allowing them to capture the entire court twenty five times per second. STATS uses the images to convert every player into an X-Y coordinate and, by triangulating the shot trajectory, can measure the X, Y, and Z coordinates of the ball.

The data SportVU produces is massive. Kirk Goldsberry, a Harvard professor of spatial geography and a prominent sports analyst, wrote, “It was obvious this was the ‘biggest’ data I had ever seen. I’ll always remember my surprise when it occurred to me that everything on my screen amounted to only a few seconds of player action from one quarter of one game.”

The SportVU data set itself is meaningless until translated into “actionable intelligence,” Ryan Watkins, director of basketball products at STATS, told the Independent. It’s like in The Matrix—Neo watches a series of green digits cascade down a computer screen. “I don't even see the code,” says Cypher. “All I see is blonde, brunette, and redhead.” He can read the numbers.

STATS uses algorithms to convert the coordinates of players and the ball into motion—specifically, positioning, speed, and distance travelled. It also records shots, dribbles, and passes. At the end of every game, the company compiles a report to send to teams, which includes statistics like player arc comparison on makes versus misses, field goal percentage based on defender, and total distance run by each player.

SportVU was only adopted league-wide at the beginning of this season, but it is already transforming how organizations analyze the game. The Toronto Raptors Analytics Team developed a way to convert the data into a continuous video of circles moving around the court, just as the players did during the game. As circles take certain paths, a ghostlike unfilled circle moves in a different path—what the Analytics Team’s computer program calculates to be the optimal route.

At this year’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Dan Cervone, Alex D’Amour, Luke Bornn, and Kirk Goldsberry, the former two PhD candidates and the latter two professors at Harvard, presented a way to use SportVU data to compute “how many points the offense is expected to score by the end

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SPORTS

of the possession.” Applying “competing risk models” generally used in determining a person’s chance of survival, they can determine the expected possession value at every moment of a play.

Over the past quarter of a century, statistics have increasingly become part of the way people analyze basketball, but the statistical approach has been fundamentally limited—the measures in the box score only captured discrete outcomes, like a shot, assist, or rebound. But basketball can’t be reduced to a series of discrete outcomes. As Goldsberry writes, “Unlike baseball or football, [basketball] is a relatively continuous freeflowing sport. The actions within a game are hard to separate because they are chronologically intertwined, and every event in every game is influenced in part by preceding sequences of actions.” Advanced statistics, like Player Efficiency Rating and Wins Produced, are limited by the same problem, as they simply weigh already-measured statistics in complex formulas.

These measures can’t capture that made shots are often the result of a teammate’s ball screen, that steals are the result of a teammate’s defensive rotation, that a rebound is the result of a teammate’s box out. The SportVU data set, though, offers the ability to quantify movement, and by extension, every aspect of the game.

Heartbeats per minute x assists = win?

STATS is starting a revolution in the epistemology of basketball. Box score statistics always had an asterisk: basketball is team sport, and since they only measure individual performances, it takes expertise to really understand the game. Now, with the help of technology like SportVU, the previously unquantifiable is being quantified, and there has been a movement towards definite knowledge and away from intuitive understanding.

In an interview with basketball writer Zach Lowe, Brian Kopp, Vice President of STATS, underscored this distinction. An average NBA team scores an average of one point per possession; when James Harden, a guard on the Houston Rockets, drives the ball to the basket, the team averages 1.45 points per possession. “It’s a very complicated way of saying driving to the basket is good,” Kopp told Lowe. The Rockets' coaching staff, based off of countless hours watching practices and games, might intuitively understand that Harden driving the ball to the basket is good. Now they know it is, and by exactly how much.

A traditional understanding of the game will always be necessary, but its importance is fading. “Although big data is

very good at detecting correlations, especially subtle correlations that an analysis of smaller data sets might miss, it never tells us which correlations are meaningful,” psychologist Gary Marcus and computer scientist Ernest Davis wrote in a New York Times article in early April. A statistical analysis might show that LeBron James shoots a higher percentage when Chris Bosh is positioned to his left, but there probably isn’t a causal relationship. Bosh’s position doesn’t cause LeBron’s shooting accuracy; they just happen to be correlated. But determining Bosh’s position relative to LeBron’s shot may show how often Bosh obtains an offensive rebound, an important and probably causally related outcome. An understanding of the game is necessary to meaningfully manipulate and interpret the raw SportVU data, but expertise in statistics and computer science is becoming increasingly important.

Intuitive understanding may also be necessary to affect what Bill Russell said is the “only important statistic”: the final score. Statistics—even ones generated by SportVU— aren’t predictive; they can’t determine how certain plays will occur, just how they have in the past. But this is also true for coaches—their decisions are best guesses. Right now, coaches may still be better at predicting outcomes, but as the STATS’ database becomes more extensive and the analytics teams become more comfortable mining SportVU data, this may cease to be true.

Joakim Noah, the Chicago Bulls center, complained that big data can’t measure hustle, drive, or the desire to win. “It’s the guy who’s going to lift you up when you’re down, when things are going on at home,” Noah said. “They really can’t measure that.” Rajon Rondo, the Celtics point guard, echoed Noah’s complaint—“It can’t measure your heart,” he said.

This season the D-League, the NBA’s minor league, made some players wear small devices made by STATS. Attached on their back or chest, they measure, among other things, how hard a player’s heart is working.

ZEVE SANDERSON B’15 thinks SportVU cameras should be installed in more places.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THE WEIRD TRANSLATOR THAT EVERYONE IS a conversation with poet & translator Paul Legault

by Greg Nissan

Paul Legault is an interstitial poet. He marries a classic lyric sensibility with class-clownery.

Sometimes he speaks with the dead, cracking jokes about the living. He is, simply put, between: between the poetic forms of yesteryear and the digital experiments of today, between centuries, and between friends as if in a game of telephone.

The Sonnets, the first book from Legault’s translation press Telephone Books, co-founded and edited by Sharmila Cohen, is a collection of 154 translations and rewritings of Shakespeare by a vast array of poets. Legault’s own Emily Dickinson Reader, his latest out from McSweeney’s, features translations of every single Dickinson poem into one sentence of common-day English, both morbidly irreverent and attentive to Dickinson’s oeuvre. I encountered Paul’s work through the The Other Poems, a vast chorus of objects, animals, people and abstractions speaking phrases culled from Legault’s friends and surroundings. I video-chatted with Paul via Google Hangouts in the beginning of March. We began to chat and gesticulate about collaboration, parody, and form, as well as his new gig as writer-in-residence at Washington University in St. Louis.

The Indy: What are you working on at the moment?

Paul Legault: I’ve been editing this translation of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. I wrote a poem in response to each of Frank O’Hara’s poems, and went from there. I started writing that when I was leaving Brooklyn because I’d be giving up my lunch hours. I don’t have lunch anymore. But that's why I wrote them: I’d write them at lunch.

Now I’m juggling a bunch of different projects. I’ve been teaching, which has been really interesting and has bled into my own work. I’ve also been translating this Belgian poet, Sophie Podolski, with my partner Joseph Kaplan. That’s been really fun because it’s this one entirely handwritten book and she only wrote one book in her entire life. She died in an insane asylum when she was like 21. So it’s just this weird kind of object that we're bringing into English and I've been kind of re-illustrating some of her illustrations and paintings as well. I've been a little more exploratory in St. Louis. I’ve been writing an essay about Google Maps. I’m just writing vague statements about an architectural space on the Internet, really just my musings, but maybe it will cohere. Mostly I’ve been doing different translation projects, which is my general MO. The Indy: You said that teaching’s been bleeding into your work. I’m curious in what way, since I’m sure it depends so much on whom and what you're teaching.

PL: The students are full of brilliant ideas, so sometimes they can trigger a new idea in my brain. I’m teaching a course this semester on contemporary poetry and social media, so we’ve been exploring how different contemporary poets use social media or don’t use it, or how the audiences talk about their work on social media. That’s led to me inviting poets to Skype into class. We’ll read a new book of contemporary poetry each week and then we’ll discuss and respond to it. I end up picking books that I’ve already read and love, but I learn more about them than I knew. I feel like I'm back in school.

The social media class has been really interesting. I think it’s given me a lot of thought about reception and how a poet who has 5,000 Twitter followers is getting more notice than a poet who’s won a big award sometimes. It's not one-to-one, and the systems of exchange are different.

The Indy: I like the idea of Skyping writers in. I saw Josh Edwards and Corina Copp read in Berlin, but Corina was Skyped in. The Skype connection was perfect, but given the stark line breaks in her work, where it almost feels like a succession of fragments, it initially appeared as if a faulty connection was cutting off her speech at certain places.

Even though technology was functioning perfectly, it took an aspect of her work that on paper is very authorial and intentional and put it into this realm of, is this her or is it technical breakdown?

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PL: I like that idea because I sometimes feel it’s that technical breakdown that feels like the human quality. That pausing can feel like what makes the poem human. When you hear these little accidents when it’s being read, it feels like a human is reading it to you, but sometimes those accidents are given to the poetry by technology, and I think that's interesting as well.

Or sometimes you think they're given to you by technology when they're really given to you by this robot human, impersonating a robot. Corina doesn't do that— she's definitely a very human

human. But I know what you mean.

She actually Skyped into my class last semester, so we had a similar experience. It ended up that she was on my phone and I passed my phone around the room and people took turns talking to her. It's that kind of sloppy technology that always contributes to the class. I've been enjoying that advantage. Often it does lead to problems, but I’ve been willing to make accidents and explore that gap.

The Indy: On the subject of teaching, what are some books that you really love teaching and what are some works you've been recommending lately?

PL: I’ve been reading and re-reading this beautiful book called Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization by Buckminster Fuller. It took me a while to realize that Buckminster Fuller was a poet, but once I did, I realized that he’s a brilliant poet. He writes this kind of aerated prose. He has a term for it that's something like that. It's line breaks but he calls it something else, and then he wrote this beautiful history of industrialization that's lineated. It's impossible not to read as poetry.

I've been enjoying finding these hybrid texts that trace an interesting tradition to some of the things I’m seeing that are happening naturally between prose and poetry and theory. Buckminster Fuller was just such a kook, and I think we can all enjoy that kind of kookiness in our life. This kind of seriously insane optimism. It's a remedy to some of the other works I like to teach that are, I don't know, depressing. I try to read a lot and variously.

There are different strategies for reading. I have different levels of reading. I feel like I've been reading Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems for the past six months, because I’ve been reading the poem and then trying to reimagine it, then reading it, then actually writing it. Writing in the voice of Frank O’Hara, which is a form of reading. I’ve been reading a few books over and over, which kind of makes up for checking out a book from a library and only reading one essay in it. I've been trying to learn to read like I learn on the Internet with books and forgive myself for jumping around a lot between the two. I've been reading the work of my friends. And my dead friends.

The Indy: More on friends alive and dead: I want to ask about the role of collaboration in your work, whether it's collaborating with hundreds of other writers to compile The Sonnets, or with the Emily Dickinson Reader, sort of an indirect correspondence with her.

It seems like you're doing something similar with Frank O'Hara. How does collaboration, even in some of your other works that might not be as obviously collaborative, inform your work or your experiences writing?

PL: My first impulse towards poetry was a sort of classic isolationist approach. My first book [The Madeline Poems] was very much just poems written with my headphones on listening to classical music kind of lyri-

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

cism, which was broken into by other traditions and hopefully turned out alright. At the same time, I find that collaboration has been meaning a lot more to me as I go on. Like with The Other Poems, which was a kind of collaboration with all the people around me.

It was kind of a document of grabbing language from other people and putting it in the mouth of abstractions or objects or people or animals, taking that language and placing it into this little story.

I guess the Emily Dickinson Reader was another form of collaboration, but she was dead. She did give me my guide and my limitations, which I often need to start a project. I think everyone does. Just to know that this project is about, you know, this part of the Venn diagram. For me that project was fun because when I finished I knew it was done. I got to the last poem of her book and I knew it was done. And she did start to kind of haunt my life in all these ways which were I guess a form of collaboration [laughter], but more like I really had invoked her spirit—because all of a sudden I was in conversations with all these other Emily Dickinson megafans, and going to her grave and to her house. But I guess I'd already been doing that. I like going to her house. I like feeling like I am talking to her a little bit, even though it's a lie.

I didn't entirely notice the benefit of working with a dead poet until, well, my most recent book, which is about to come out in 2015 from Fence. It's a translation from memory of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror [by John Ashbery]. I'd read the poems and then try to write them from memory. That John Ashbery is alive gives it a certain tension of collaboration in which I'm waiting for the approval to come, whereas with Emily Dickinson I just optimistically guessed that she would approve, even though deep down I know that she wouldn't even have approved of her family collaborating to turn her work into a book. She wanted it all to be burnt after her death, but she was dead, so that resistance to collaboration was kind of a moot point. I am excited to hear what John Ashbery thinks of my version of John Ashbery.

Then collaboration in the sense of Telephone, definitely. It was my first kind of glimpse into the poetry community. I had just moved to New York. I was living with an MFA student at the New School. I ended up meeting a lot of the other MFAs in the program and I had just graduated from my MFA, so we were kind of like this social circle of imports who were baby poets and what baby poets like to do and should do is start presses. Small presses. Our friends had started a journal and it gave us this healthy competition, honestly. There was this kind of rivalry that was like, well, if they're gonna start a journal, we're gonna start a journal, we can do this. So Sharmila Cohen and I, we were at brunch, and we were talking about possibilities of starting a journal.

We were talking about this idea of a game of telephone and how that could be productive as a translator. Really our press just started as a journal that grew into a baby imprint, an imprint of a small press. But I do feel like it's been useful for me, in that it was a venue with which I could introduce myself to the poetry community and get to know them. We switched languages each issue, so I got to know German poets through the first issue and then French poets in Montreal, a specific group of French poets, and then a little bit of Brazilian poetry when we worked with Augusto de Campos. For me it was this opportunity to ask writers whose work I respected to work with me. That kind of collaboration helped to validate my own work. It was just two sides of the same coin.

I collaborate constantly with my partner-in-crime Joseph Kaplan. He's a designer and I'm a poet and those two interests go really well together. We make books. That's what makes sense to us. We both want to make books. He wants to do that part of making the book and I want to do that other part. Collaboration can sometimes be a really freeing exercise in which you aren't the name on the book, you know what I mean? If you're working with a group of people, I feel sometimes it's a more generous act. Sometimes writing doesn't feel like a generous act. Sometimes it feels like a very selfish thing.

But collaboration has let me see some other forms of working that feel like I'm helping a poet's legacy move forward. Being free to not be the only person working on something is really nice. It's less lonely. [Laughter].

people's response would be, "Oh! Like this one other person." Everyone had an example of that; it wasn't unheard of. But these examples created this tradition for me.

Also I was talking to my collaborator on Telephone, Sharmila, and she'd been focused on the work of contemporary Berlin poetry and really interesting German translation. We noticed that we had a lot to talk about, even though our approaches to translation were completely opposite in some ways. Hers was specifically about this one country,

this one language, and mine wasn't even about translation really. [Laughter]. So we spent time talking about where we met, because where we met was this interesting place where people are taking the strategies of translators and using them to create original works, which I think is what's happening across the board. People take other peoples' works and they remix them, they re-appropriate them. In poetry that's been happening for a while.

You have these kind of rebellious translators once in a while popping up, saying, “No! it's all about…", just creating a new work from the old. And the rebels are more interesting honestly. Not that I don't believe in the complicated process of attempting a literal translation and the benefits of that, especially for a book that's never been translated before.

But I'm always forgiving myself for taking liberties because, you know, Ezra Pound wrote Cathay using a Japanese dictionary to translate a Chinese poem. And nowadays we have Google translate, which is an endless, deeply interesting tool. It is constantly expanding and it allows for this weird translator that everyone is. Everyone translates things now.

The Indy: I think that's one of the reasons that I love reading translation, besides the generative techniques we discussed and its implications in breaking down national literary cultures; it's this way of rewiring things, making networks in different directions.

PL: Yeah, and I feel like poets can do this too. They just write a book and it shapes culture in a way, but there's a different kind of effect when you bring over the work of a great poet who’s already established as great and you infect America with it or vice versa. It's a powerful act. I have been thinking more and more how poets and artists are becoming publishers and curators and that's just one of the creative powers of language. Writing extends beyond writing into reading and translation does that so fluidly. I think it's a cool trend that poets would be active participants in that distribution of literature. And reading of it. There are a lot of venues that writers have to create and they're not all writing. I think it's interesting when people find those and operate in them. It's healthy.

The Indy: While we're talking about different forms of translation, I wonder, how does translation and philosophies behind translation configure into your work that's not actually translation?

PL: I guess I really started exploring these kinds of theories of translation and ideas of translation when I started Telephone. I had been thinking about them and I had been writing the Emily Dickinson Reader, translating Emily Dickinson from English to English, for which the word translation seemed right to me.

What was interesting when I said English to English translation was usually

MAY 2 2014

ARTS

□ 10

H.D. Davidman is running for public office... ...with the hope of defeating D.H. Benjamin of the incumbent party, FTRPRTY (not an acronym—pronounced with the elided vowels “Future Party”). FTPRTY is a breakaway party founded by a group of wealthy Silicon Valley investors and CEOs who, having “changed the world” with their technological innovations, have now turned their sights to “changing Washington.” Their slogan: “if government ran like a lean start-up, then it might be able to get something done!”

D.H. Benjamin is a young copyright/immigration lawyer who recently announced his intenion to run for re-election at the Alligator Alley Showdown and Design and Tech Festival.

Formerly a gathering of gator poachers, AASxDTF became a mecca for Silicon Valley types after Burning Man and South by Southwest lost their novelty. Just yesterday, Benjamin spoke via silent rave headsets to a large crowd in Seattle, Washington about his vision for the future.

Here, Davidman recalls the soaring rhetoric of the speeches of another era, takes the stage, and offers a rebuttal.

Good evening.

Today, May 2 in the year 201X, things are working. My computer, my television, my phone…all my devices are working. Not just working: working for me.

From when my eyelids open to when they set, that fruitful bevy of devices upon which I discharge my daily tasks functions with a complicit grace that merits awe. Might this be the immaculate experience of progress? Will this tide usher in solar-powered vessels to colonize the sea of daily life?

These small interactions, to borrow a phrase out of the elegant parlance of FTRPRTY, bare no signs of friction.

But what is this friction?

Friction is the not-working that either occasions or interrupts the machinations of technology. It is the malady upon which technology operates. It enters life from the rotten seed of dysfunction planted in the soil of entropy. It is to friction that Mr. Benjamin objects! We assiduously harvest our energies only to spill our produce on the turbulent road to market.

May we not correct this turbulence by paving this road? Must all roads produce friction? All this Mr. Benjamin demands to know.

D.H. Benjamin loathes friction. He paints himself as a modern man who sees in technology a way out of the degraded grasp of inconvenience, the depraved hold of conflict.

For Mr. Benjamin, technology is an infinite hammer in a world of nails. It arrives at the ready. Mr. Benjamin says that we must hammer the world until all its diverse timber is bolted in its proper place. These problems, according to the most basic axiom of the doctrine of technology, beg for solutions. This word “solution”—this is what our opponents claim to love. “We want solutions!” they cry. “No more argument, dysfunction, malfunction, partisanship! We want solutions!”

For Mr. Benjamin and his FTRPRTY, the nail wants the hammer more than hammer wants the nail.

+++ Yet here we must stand wary. Do not be seduced by the desire for an elegant transcendence, this false promise of technosalvation. Do not succumb to this blindness. This blindness cannot see that the world is far more than a puzzle endowed with great and elegant solutions.

Under the veil of this blindness, we may be led to solve problems incorrectly. We may even attempt to respond to problems where we merely imagine them to be.

Nowhere is this zeal to frame the world as a bug ready to be fixed more troubling than in the realm of politics. It is from here that Mr. Benjamin and the FTRPRTY party crave an escape route. "Politics is a prison," they say. They promise a way out.

Mr. Benjamin and his supporters talk about “smart government,” about “government 2.0,” about “disrupting Washington.” They tell us they changed the world—so they must be able to change Washington.

Yet how exactly did they change the world? More importantly, what does technology brings to politics?

“Connectivity.” Silicon Valley tells us that we can now engage with, and understand people all over this earth. Question this. Perhaps connection is good. But do not presume that such connection inevitably leads to democratic progress.

We connect with connoisseurs of similar passions—but what about those with whom our sensibilities differ? Are we really connecting with strangers?

“Creativity”—that’s what technology brings. Yes: Silicon Valley has done amazing work. But “creativity” makes for a nebulous value. Struck with the blindness, the FTRPRTY does not see how political creativity and tech sector creativity may be different beasts.

“Efficiency.” We are told: “Government gets things done tomorrow, Silicon Valley gets things done yesterday.” Maybe so. But the government may respond to priorities other than efficiency. Many of the mandates in politics are not efficient: patient deliberation, thoughtful analysis, and careful decisions.

For Mr. Benjamin, technology’s solutions stand in glorious contrast to politics. Politics is conflict. Conflict tires us, exhausts us, repels us. They claim it tears us apart, that it zaps our imaginative spark and productivity with bureaucracy and regulation.

For them, politics is friction.

Mr. Benjamin shrinks from it! To him, politics and technology appear as opposites. Conflict is bad and must be fixed. Technology fixes. Therefore, technology should offer the solutions to the problems in politics.

No! +++ Politics furnishes us with the tools for not only tearing apart, but also sewing together. We will always disagree in our firmly held faiths that furnish us with our morals, our cultural commitments, our personal goals. While this disagreement will lead to bickering inefficiencies, is it not also something worth protecting? Is it not the condition that allows the vastly different people of this world to live lives of meaning and direction?

Technology claims that it is a Way Out. In doing so, however, technology elides its own ideology with its values, interests, and particular beliefs. This savior arrives with quite a lot of luggage!

Technology is always a product of the social context that gives it life. Technology is made by people, determined by their priorities, and shaped by their interests. Before you can retrieve a virgin device from its impeccable packaging, it comes marked by the fingerprints of its maker.

The scions of technology deny this. They say, “We are not men of politics! We are men of solutions!” Not men of politics? Their ideology and their actions speak the opposite truth. The tech sector, for all its post-political hubris, seems to be thoroughly mired in the timeless mud of politics.

Silicon Valley takes stances. FTRPRTY could not otherwise exist. Some of these stances reflect how technology, in its Silicon Valley home, is fundamentally constrained by the dictates of a capitalist market. This is alright. Ladies and gentlemen, do not think that I am here criticizing such constraints: no, I am criticizing only the tech sectors’ eagerness to falsely disown them. They do not stand quiet on principal issues of our day—intellectual property, immigration, net neutrality, regulation, and surveillance. Their positions may or may not be right. But they are political and must be recognized as such.

Technology does not just solve problems. It creates them, too. We are losing jobs to automation. We are told that new jobs will return in the future. We are told to wait, to sit tight, to further educate ourselves. We are told about a wave of green jobs, the knowledge economy, the sharing economy. I do not want to be a pessimist, ladies and gentlemen, but when will these jobs arrive and what will they be? Will we be paid to dust the windmills, to swipe clean the solar panels? Will we cash in en masse on our own apps? Will we make a living renting out our homes and cars?

The giants of Silicon Valley, for their mighty wallets, employ too few. This is not malicious. It is the simple reality of the business model.

If we run a government like a start-up, if we legislate like we’re coding software for a dating app, we will not be solving politics! We will be ignoring politics! To do so reduces the ability for our democracy to ensure that societal arrangements are continually worked over and debated. This debate is not just hot air. This debate is what ensures that our society has a foundation around which to cohere.

We must challenge FTRPRTY's ideology before its consequences become too difficult to turn back.

I too stand in awe of the invention and vision of Silicon Valley. I do not stand opposed to technology. Such a position would be neither sensible nor coherent. FTRPRTY: I welcome you to play the eternal game of politics. But you should not wreck the board upon which it is played and then call the game won.

My name is H.D. Davidman, and I am running for…

Clapping.

by Houston Davidson illustration by Andres Chang 11

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Technology

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

COOKIE’S JUNK SHOP On the side of Route 3 in Exeter, RI is a low building painted tongue pink with white trim. A sign reading “Cookie’s” hangs over the door. Windchimes clink absently in the entry room, which is filled with junk. Through a low door is a room with a cluttered table that serves as the register. At the table sits Rhoda, the owner of Cookie’s. She wears a grey sweater that matches her hair.

One wall of the barn is devoted to paintings by a deceased woman whose family discarded them. “It is a pity,” Rhoda says, “the poor thing thought she couldn’t paint, but she did beautiful work.” Some paintings are hung askew, others propped against bedside tables and boxes. On the left side of the barn are glass cases of knick-knacks and racks of postcards curling at the edges.

At its back, Cookie’s opens into the cavernous “junk” room, which Rhoda leaves unorganized. Pick through the wreckage: a statuette of a praying gnomes, scraps of mirrors that reflect your legs back dusty, aged Ziploc bags of generic Christmas ornaments in cardboard boxes, a wicker doll house, a dismembered grandfather clock, talking-tina-esque dolls, a porcelain cookie jar shaped like the Pillsbury doughboy.

“I just leave all this stuff like this,” Rhoda says. “This is what they want, they want to be able to go through and think they found a ‘treasure’.” Her voice lowers to give the last word a touch of irony. I see a big roach scurry over a lawnchair.

The low-slung addendum to the barn houses the nicer items: jewelry, old photographs, clothing, purses, wallets. A 2-foot-tall Madonna is broken and glued back together and the figure Jesus is slung with a note written by Rhoda’s now deceased husband: “Think of me, sometimes.”

Her husband did not go to church, Rhoda tells me, but he used to say, “you know what? I talk to God every day.”

And he did; he would talk to God everyday. “There’s only two things you got to remember,” he would say. “There’s right and there’s wrong, and if you’re doing wrong, you know it.”

On the wall are clipped newspaper stories about the store. Next to the clippings hangs a framed photograph of her late husband, Anthony Francis Cook, known as Cookie since childhood. He is in a white bucket hat, smoking a cigar.

The chimes were Cookie’s. They have hung from the rafters for over thirty years. There are wooden chimes with owl heads, chimes made from seashells, and chimes with bells.

Back when the naval base was in Newport, “the girls used to come up, right, and everybody brought him one, that one is from California, the star…we even had Chinese ones.” They are not for sale. +++ Cookie was the youngest of eight children, growing up in a mining town in Pennsylvannia. When he was seven, after many in his extended family died in a mine explosion, he and his family moved north to Bridgeport, Connecticut.

When he was a kid, Cookie used to go down by the railroad tracks where the dump was and pick things up. In the dump, he found his first book. From then on, he read and read and read. He had books in the bedroom, books in the bathroom, books everywhere. Cookie got into the junk business because he loved to collect things. Nothing in particular, just stuff.

In Bridgeport, he ran a bowling alley and a market.

He worked in a machine shop for a time, where he lost two fingers. Rhoda grew up in a small town in Connecticut where

by Vera Carothers

illustration by Pierie Korostoff

both her mother and father worked for the mill. Even late into his life, Cookie’s siblings would come down for dinner on Sunday nights. They would have ten or twelve people at the table eating roasts, turkeys, and his brother’s macaroni. His mother lived to be 106 years old and his father 57.

Cookie was friendly with everybody in the neighborhood. “Ninety percent of the people came here just to sit down and talk to him,” Rhoda remembers. “He could talk from religion to politics. There was nothing he couldn’t talk about. He enjoyed doing that, he loved people.” He even liked telling stories that weren’t true. Once, he was caught telling customers that it was his birthday when it wasn’t. “One lady brought him a birthday cake and then the following day he had told someone else that it was his birthday,” Rhoda said.

“She brought him a cake and then the lady that brought him the first cake walked in and she said ‘I thought it was your birthday yesterday!’ and then he said, ‘I can’t remember when it is!’” +++ Cookie and Rhoda met in the shop in Coventry. She came in one day and returned several times, doing business back and forth. Eventually they started to date. They married in 1972.

She was 29 years old and he was 59.

They filled the Exeter store with goods from estate sales.

They bought whatever the deceased’s family didn’t want.

Rhoda remembers how Cookie would call up lawyers and ask eagerly, “Do you have a job for me, do you got anything, do you got anything?” “Cookie,” they’d say, “they don’t die every day, you know.”

Throughout their time in Exeter, Rhoda and Cookie would pull pranks on the customers. One time they brought a live mongoose into the store (in the form of a piece of mink fur inside a cage). When people went to feed it, Cookie would flip a tab and the fur would jump out and touch the customer’s hand. “They would scream!” Rhoda laughs. “One lady almost had a heart attack, so we said ‘Okay, not doing that anymore!’”

Cookie died in 2008 at age 98. If he were still alive, he and Rhoda would have been together for 43 years. Rhoda has been running the store for six years now with the help of her brother. “Knock on wood, I’m hanging in there, I mean it’s tough, you know you’re not gonna get rich doing it…” she says. This year was particularly difficult: she had to pay to redo the electrical wiring. Hopefully next year she will be able to fix the roof: “I’ll get there, like a turtle, but I’ll get there.”

MAY 2 2014

METRO

□ 12

THE NEW PULPIT

by Eli Pitegoff

The following is a brief window into a day of genesis: the virtual origin of a Facebook prophet. Posting as many as 2,000 words a day for the last two years, his status updates are, as he puts it, “relentless.” His aim is complex in its simplicity: spread the Truth.

His name and the wording and dates of his posts have been altered. +++ Isaiah Veritay changed his cover photo November 6, 2012 It was previously a photo depicting a Pink Floyd concert, the massive stage projecting an aqua blue, psychedelic light show behind the performers. Now it is a photo of the Beatles sprinting across the infield of Shea Stadium before a concert.

At the center of the photo—an inexplicable Orb of Light.

Bright-white at its center, orange and red toward its edges, with ring, encompassing nearly everyone in the photo: John Lennon to the right, mid-sprint, head crooked in its direction; Paul McCartney, on the left, staring motionless; the stands, a blur of commotion surrounding the hot center. The Orb, Veritay suggests, was a brief encounter with divinity. The music was cool, but the metaphysical energy sphere really stole the show. +++ Accompanying the new cover photo, an inaugural post: Isaiah Veritay shared The Truth Contest’s post.

November 6, 2012 “Parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself ). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy. He started by sharing posts.” – Michel Foucault Here, he marked his fracture, and found in Facebook his veracious lectern, his ongoing entry into www.truthcontest.com's online competition.

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LITERARY

+++ www.truthcontest.com “This truth contest is not a competition with a winner. It is simply the best way to find, check, and spread the truth… We cannot think of a better way to find, check, and spread the ultimate truth than an internet contest.”

“What could be more worthwhile than helping us find and spread the truth? Send this website to the people in your address book, twitter, facebook, print, place and mail flyers, and post links to www.truthcontest.com on web pages, web forums, and blogs. Invite everyone you can reach to participate in the Truth Contest.”

“This website was created by college students. © All Rights Reserved 2007-2014 Unifying Truth Project Privacy Policy” Truth is the prize, death the deadline. +++ The first post.

Isaiah Veritay November 6, 2012 “When you know the truth, you attain the supreme gravitational pull. You are no longer the Earth, you are the Sun. Life lives around you, you do not live around it. Others do not exist to boss you around (the sun does not sway to the pull of Jupiter). If someone tries to boss the Truth around, they get burnt (the Sun is hot). All that these bossy idiots can do is orbit around you. Nothing more. They do not have their own supreme gravitational pull like you do, because they do not know the Truth. The Truth turns you into the burning star.

The exuberant Glow. You’ll stop craving anything, requiring anything—you’ll simply shine bright, like a star, for all to see.”

Veritay’s commitment has yet to burn out.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

TOE TAGS David Adler

Julieta Cárdenas

Vera Carothers

Young David is poised at the precipice of a true, involved night.

It’s New Years Eve. LA lies prostrate before him. Fifteen-year-old bodies spill into the pool, silhouetted by the shimmering flats. Lena Grossman, tall and dressed in black, sits alone at the edge of the lawn. Girls like Lena never go for Valley boys like David.

The young owner of the house—the son of a Saudi Prince— is vomiting over the railing of his tiered lawn. David sees only the increasing juvenilization of global capital: a gaudy actor in the forward march of the transnational ruling class. Foucauldian, to say the least. A truly postmodern antihero.

Somehow, he’s ended up next to Lena. He has a way of taking himself where he wants to go.

“Hi, Lena,” he says. “Uh, hi” she says, disinterestedly, but maybe on purpose. Lena looks like his great-grandmother, Mildred Rashi Rachmananoff. Or like Mischa Barton’s younger sister, if she were Persian.

The countdown begins. 10, 9, 8,....eight APs; I’m unstoppable….. 7, 6,... Lena Grossman takes his hand on one side, Nicky takes the other. They face the pool… 5, 4,...three years til Yale…. 3, 2... one thought occupies his head as the new year dawns….1: I don’t have to choose.

I met Julieta in the early morning on the NYC subway. I could see that her aura was crystal; and she asked me, “Can I tell you that today I am a living poem?”

We walked up the steps together, us and her brown and white puppy. I asked her for a light, and it blinded me with its brilliant colors. She offered me tall rainbow cigarettes to match. I asked her, “How do I know?” She said, grinning, “You know.”

Intuition marks the spot. I know I’ll see her again, translating poems from English to Spanish to English to Spanish...

Vera is your best friend from summer camp. When she was 10 she convinced her cabin to run from the lake to the dining hall, naked. When she was 21 she convinced her housemates to run from Marcus Aurelius to the Soldier’s Arch, naked. She’s on top of a tree in the Nightingale Brown Garden. She’s riding a unicycle across the quiet green. Her prose is velvet cake. Her push-up count is 44+. Because of her, I will never forget the country highway, or the Woonasquatucket.

Houston Davidson

Joe de Jonge

Open Utah highway. The windows are down. This choice album is playing over the speakers. You gotta check it out, he says.

Houston Davidson is driving ninety miles per hour and he is drumming on the steering wheel.

He’s out here organizing for Obama. It’s 2012. But it’s not so straightforward. Read between the lines, you remember him saying, foot propped way too high on his knee. Something’s in there, in the language. And it’s not right—or left, maybe.

A coyote runs across the road. Fuck! He was on cruise control! He slams on the brakes. This is catastrophe. Houston is spinning out, hard and fast.

But damn, is he honing in.

i mean i liked the toe tag they wrote. it was a perfectly fine toe tag. i had a better toe tag when i was in middle school. i wanted to get a tattoo of it but i lost it. i was considering getting a new one on amazon. it is true what they said about loyalty. i mean i’m not going to lend you my pencil, but if you still need me to drive you to syracuse later to visit your great grandmother on her deathbed, i’ll do it. i’ve been thinking of investing in some property in syracuse, anyway. i am more loyal than most people. but I don’t know. most people suck. I mean I do like some people. I love my friends. and I love all dogs.

Drew Dickerson Drew hollers at you from the window of a car with a neutral American accent. He is aggressive and he is subdued. Drew likes his eggs runny, and to say good luck instead of goodnight. At the moment, he is under stress. “I’m just gonna slamma-lamm this thermos of joe, bang this one out in the next few hours,” Drew says. He is referring to his forthcoming study, Contemporary Fiction While Wearing Boxers in the Living Room. You believe him. Certainly.

Grace Dunham hey, i was walking down ives street when i passed that old portuguese run florist and on the offgreen moulding there was this pattern that reminded me of that little mestizo japanese patch on your backpack. anyways, on thursday i have to go to practice for this tribeca lesbian bocce league, but i should be back in providence by friday and i want to take you to this restaurant that’s the type of place where anyone living in providence in the early eighties would want to be seen, with gilded toilets, wall-to-wall cream carpeting, and a good-sized swordfish siracusa. is that weird? anyway, let me know.

Simon Engler Somewhere, right now, Simon Engler is enjoying himself. He is enjoying himself on purpose. He has spread continental, processed fish product over a stoned-wheat cracker and drawn himself a saline bath. We pan out. The bathroom is neat and feckless. On the walls are various and framed watercolor paintings, austere schematic drawings, and GIS images with their metrics coded in colored legends.

Beethoven plays. His (Simon’s) laptop is open atop the tub’s rim, playing a YouTube kill-montage from Gears of War: Judgment. It is the fourth installment in the Gears of War series. Now this, thinks Simon, is a Sunday.

- grace

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□ TOE TAGS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Mary-Evelyn Farrior

Aaron Harris

Mary-Evelyn was known in academia as the classical archaeologist who’d had a denarius made into a pendant for a gunmetal YSL necklace. She was known among students as being intimidating until one became acquainted with her puppy, Puppy, who was in the running to become the school’s official mascot. She was known by her son, August, for getting down to Motown as she cooked a mean sirloin steak.

I met Mev one afternoon in the European sculpture hall of the Met. I told her by a Rodin that I wanted to know everything about her. She walked away, knowing that I would follow, as she said, “Well, we’ve much history to cover.”

I met Aaron in a sherbert-colored apartment where he gesticulated with one hand and swilled a tiny glass of IPA with the other. His ginger samurai bun bobbed in time to the strumming of his girlfriend’s ukulele while a tiny white dog named Chebini licked his calf. He drew my soul, trademarked it, published it in the Times. He’s conceptual, barefoot, startlingly athletic. If Maurice Sendak and Quentin Blake had a baby it would be friends with Aaron Harris, AKA Eron Hare, AKA the best art director you never had.

Molly Landis

Claudia Norton

In green pants and white converse, Landis is critically chill.

Any chiller and she would be dead and/or boring, yet she’s managed to hit the perfect sweet spot. Speaking of sweet, I’m pretty sure Landis survives exclusively on candy bars, but her second stomach converts it all to protein, so its fine. Watching her eat a Kit Kat, and then throwing back a Dark N’ Stormy, it becomes clear that this is a woman who knows what she wants from life. And that’s a second Kit Kat bar.

Eli Petzold

Pool Boy (an assumption) - w4<3 - (nelson aquatic center) You: raging hard-on the lane ropes, using them as anal beads. Me: murdering the pool. You did what you wanted, the synchronized swimmers left. I continued my half mile, hoping I could catch you at the bike rack afterwards.

I saw people thinking that’s inappropriate, and “that’s scary.” It made me feel (on the bridge of my nose) a little upset.

And a little turned on. You splashed a lot when you did the forward crawl. It was nice. I liked that part.

When you disgusted the entire water polo team, I was like, “Oh, I can push back against the spatialization of power by reappropriating markers of regulation as objects of pleasure.”

Everything is different now. Your simultaneously corporal and anti-oppression based, non-hierarchical, horizontally-oriented restructuring of the buoyant and mass produced cast plastic blue and white floaters reminded me that the world is a dick for me to own.

Also, I like your ass. Sorry ‘bout it. Yeah. Come over and make a mug cake with me.

Eli Petzold once expressed anxiety to me about going book shopping with a mutual friend. “Impress them with your literary knowledge,” I said. “I don’t have much of that past 1200 AD,” he replied. Eli wades through the outdated, encouraging us to grasp magic and meaning. I’m living in Eli’s former bedroom next year. He’s an expert in the Occult but it feels reductive to talk about whatever ghosts of Eli Petzold (moons? jeggings?) may remain on his fire escape.

Once I went book shopping with Eli. There’s a word, petrichor, and he rushes over to show me something funny in a religious text he found.

Sam Rosen

Anna Rotman

The boys of the FUCK haus are grilling a skirt steak—it’s a monthly tradition—getting ready to hit the GCB hard.

“Nah guys,” Sam shrugs. “I love taking those Jaegerbombs to Poundtown just as much as the next guy, but, ya know, I gotta talk to Kels, do the goodnight thing. Plus this week’s a real moving target, and I need to put some extra hours in the sleep bank if I’m gonna bring home the bacon with that essay on the exploitation of the black body in the early NBA.” The boys are disappointed. “I know, I know,” Sam adds, “but then I gotta get to Beantown on Sunday because Kels’s best friend’s cousin is hosting her annual relay race benefit for her after-school reading program.”

Sam goes to his room and closes the door. He locks the door. Slipping on his white leather glove, he dials the secret code. Christina R. Paxson: (401) 863-2234. “Yes, President Paxson? Green light is go. The Corporation has my support.”

The Sovereign Avian Nation of A-Rot beckons and you walk: 120 km, transborder, somewhere up north. Your offerings: curried cabbage heated up in the Rock, a string of pearls harvested in Aquidneck, a tiny charm for her pet eagret Laurent. You heard she got her height and self-reliance from Thoreau, her MBA and lust for scotch at Wharton. Her fortress rears up, an exposed-brick-and-oakwood citadel with a clawfoot tub in the garden. A crisp red door swings open. “Hey guys,” she half-coos, head cocked and smiling like she expected you. She made reservations for 9:00. “I promise,” she laughs, “You’ve never had poutine like this.”

Abigail Savitch-Lew

Joshua Schenkkan

Doreen St. Félix

Thank-you notes; a metronome, halo-floating above her, keeping time with her patience; the “keepingit-real” surrealist: a lion sipping from a lion-sized pan of milk in a lion-sized apartment overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge; a printer which prints before you even hit command-P; a motorized skateboard that also flies; the guardian (á la St. Peter) of the gates to “the zone”; a co-op where everyone in the world lives; a sharp eye; the word on the tip of your tongue; an electric guitar that doesn’t sound at all like an electric guitar but is totally and self-evidently an electric guitar: emphasis on electric. Look, there’s this great party happening, all your friends will be there, and people you will be so excited to meet, and here is your invitation, Abby wrote it just for you!

The only thing bluer than Josh’s eyes is the tip of his e-cig. He has an earbud blasting Rich Homie Quan while he glosses the Butlerian relationality thesis and lets you touch his bicep. Before you ask, it’s real, he made it in his Vitamix with hemp protein and kale.

It’s a fairly banal smoothie, pretty utilitarian, but are you tryna get turnt tonight? He could have been a philosopher but there’s more money in K-Pop, and if God gave you that hair…. One more thing—have you heard the one about the elephant who couldn’t get his dick out of the flan? It’s actually kind of sweet.

Doreen glides by in gold hoops and perfect white Reeboks. A basic chick once looked at her. She could stab someone, actually, but she’ll write a lyric polemic instead, and she’ll publish it at the place that rejected your intern application last summer.

Bougie women inject whale placenta in six-week cycles to glow like Deaux does on five hours of sleep.

Meanwhile she eats gummy peach rings, braises goat for your ex-boyfriend while the Clintons favorite her tweets. Doreen is the antipope, the opposite of Buzzfeed, and she’s sorry, but she doesn’t have this number saved in her phone.

MAY 3 2014

TOE TAGS□ 15

Grier Stockman

Jonathan Storch

One night on a rooftop in Sydney, the crowd parts.

Only now do you realize that the party’s been boring. Grier is here, and, before you know it, you’ve confided in her your darkest secret.

Seated next to her on a silk divan, you learn that Grier climbed Everest last week. She owns a rare Picasso that she picked out of a rummage sale in Prague. The Dalai Lama once whispered in her ear, “The sun shines in your eyes.” Her laugh is the clinking of champagne glasses, the breeze on your skin.

She can beat you in a foot race, but you’ll never find that out because she’s already running.

Now when we say that this line is “Storchian,” what we are pointing to here is a politics of breathlessness. The only proper explication is a sigh.

Wrap your head around it, kids. I mean, this man could not drink metaphor. He had not the stomach for it.

What he was built for, what the exact sequence of words here would alchemize—had we the chemistry, if our brains were lucky enough to be worked by the spirit of aquemini —was the total cancellation of the body. It hurts to talk about it, but I went to him once.

The room was light blue; the mattress was on the floor; but he was not listening to Bob Dylan. I was fifty or fifteen—he effaced me so fully that I can't rightly remember my age. I knelt by the mattress corner, asked him to explain, the seven words connected by the conjunction.

Tucking his hands in his jeans and rolling his nose up, he looked at my stupid knees and just, he just sighed.

Dan Stump

Kat Thornton

Ellora Vilkin

The panopticon squints towards the only view that matters: a group of young students sitting behind their desks. Dan Stump, as a child, sits in the center while around him there is student activity; notepassing, ruler-tapping, nose-picking. Dan looks towards the Eye, Dan looks into the Lens, Dan breaks the fourth wall. And he just won’t look away.

I’ve never actually seen it: Kat’s eyes red and bleary, scouring the websites of the Providence CPC in the hours before dawn in search of city planning maps.

I can only imagine that this happens—how else does she find time to read those 80-page HUD docs she emails me during Thanksgiving dinner? That’s the only way she could fit the Indy in between translating Farsi poetry, reading for her socialist reading group, pretending her taste in beer (excuse me, ales) is superior to mine, and smoking the occasional Cuban unfiltered cigarettes. Sources indicate she loves to dance. Indy Metro cannot confirm her current status.

Voici, the constellation Ellora Mirabilis.

There is her face and there are her eyes—like reptile, like verdant—implanted in that completely warm exterior known as her face, known as the expanse of the sky. Look, her star winks on Washington, her line cuts the hemisphere in half, again. We are all the product of someone else’s dream, but according to the Tinder record, after her the men and women crumbled, “No more need for dreams!”

Only for Japanese yam and her, the woman who walked on but would not acknowledge the ground, did the lower consciousness exert its industry from that point on.

The Astronomer mapped the constellation Ellora Mirabilis in monument to her.

“It’s lovely,” she comforted the universe, “but you mean to tell me that after all of that, you think that I'm one of those girls who wants ‘art?’”

The Astronomer scrawled his signature-Champagne Papi-into the ether and half-stepping, sank into the eternal.

John White

Emma Wohl

Dear John, You are the sunshine to my state, the Carpenter to my West Fountain street, and the drunken to my stir-fried mussels. How are you doing, darling? The last time I read a letter from you, the words struck me so strong it left a ringing in my ears.

I cannot lie; your calmness brings me peace. Your positivity lightens my view. Your humor is like everlasting light.

Please write again soon.

Yours,

If Emma were a drink she'd be something with grapefruit in it. Sweet and tart, fizzy and effervescent with a kick. Always mix with whiskey or gin—never rum. If Emma were a shoe she would be a rain-inappropriate canvas flat, the kind that ends up lasting longer than your best waterproof boots. If she were a building structure, a metal fire escape, where she’d convene midday to smoke cigarettes and plot the downfall of the charter school system. She’s sometimes clumsy, but also invincible; she’ll scale from fire escape to roof faster than you can say maybe we shouldn’t—

Diane Zhou wh3n y0u’r3 l057 1n 7#3 d4rk c0rn3r5 0f 7h3 1n73rn37 4nd y0u 7h1nk 7h3r3’5 n0 w4y 70 54v3 y0ur53lf, y0u’r3 n07 4l0n3. ju57 5p3nd 4 f3w m1nu735 l00k1n6 4r0und 4nd y0u’ll f1nd h3r. y0u m16h7 7h1nk y0u’r3 7h3 0nly 0n3 wh0 f33l5 n0574l61c 4b0u7 y0ur 4d0l35c3nc3 0n 41m—ch4n61n6 7h3 b4ck6r0und c0l0r 0n y0ur 1nf0, ch4n61n6 7h3 73x7 c0l0r—y0u’r3 n07 4l0n3. d14n3’5 7h3r3 700. 5h3’5 4lw4y5 7h3r3. 4nd 5h3 4lw4y5 w1ll b3. b3c4u53 7h3 1n73rn37 15 f0r3v3r.

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TOE TAGS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

I'M GOING HOME singing towards death from The Sacred Harp

by Eli Petzold We have gathered together to sing about death. The sun shines through the windows of the Providence Friends Meetinghouse, brightening the spare and spacious room.

Four sections of pews face inward, forming a square: about a hundred people sit in the pews, and I stand in the center. In one hand, I hold my copy of The Sacred Harp, a collection of choral songs for four parts. I beat my other hand quickly up and down, keeping time, leading the group in song:

sense of the tune before proceeding to sing the words. In its very design, shape note singing brings a community together as equals. This is not a performance mode. Talent is not privileged. Neither is experience: shape notes are a didactic device; a group of singers is called a school. The emphasis is on learning: learning by doing, learning by doing together.

My thoughts that often mount the skies Go search the world beneath, Where nature all in ruin lies, And owns her sov'reign—Death!

Why should we start and fear to die?

What tim’rous worms we mortals are!

Death is the gate to endless joy, And yet we dread to enter there.

We are singing words written in 1707 by Isaac Watts, a prominent and prolific English hymn writer. This hymn’s text invites the pious singer, whose mind usually meditates on lofty, divine matters, to turn her gaze down and survey the created world. She finds a material world, utterly in thrall to Death—"owning" used here in the archaic sense, acknowledging the supremacy of something over oneself.

In 1785, Daniel Read, a New England composer, set Watts' words to a tune he called "Calvary," the tune which I have decided to lead today. As with most hymns of this period, the text and tune were composed independently of each other, and are interchangeable with other hymns written in the same meter. Despite the grim outlook of Watts' text, Read's tune is fast-paced, exciting, even lively. The parts begin at different times, sing the words with different rhythms. There is a "fuguing" section in which each part has its own entrance, each a bar apart, stacking upon the part before it. The basses enter to my right, the tenors in front of me, the altos behind me, and finally the trebles to my left— only to come back together for the final line: "And owns, and owns her sov'reign—Death!" As we come hurtling toward the final ending, I note the folks around me: old, young, friends, strangers. Most singers, familiar with the song, look up from their books; several clutch closed books tightly, sit on the edge of the bench, and send their song up and forward at the same time.

And then we arrive at "Death." I stop beating time, hold my palm up, and smile widely to those who have arrived. I relish in the silence for a short second, then take my seat in the tenor section. Some new shepherd will guide the flock through the land of deepest shade.

Most songs in The Sacred Harp treat death in some way. Some celebrate zealous yearning for heaven's ease, others provide comfort and counsel to the soul, fearful in the face her own mortality, or grieving the loss of a friend. Although the tradition has its roots in American Protestantism, and although the language is often distinctly Christian, the appeal to human mortality extends beyond the boundaries of religion. Everybody dies. Sometimes death seems nearer, more present.

Amidst the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Sacred Harp gained a large following among gay men, who found themselves suddenly confronted with the death of friends, and their own mortality:

+++

Originally published in 1844, the present 1991 edition of The Sacred Harp, the fourth major revision of the text, contains more than 500 pages of songs in four parts. Most of the songs are old American tunes, the oldest of which comes from the New England singing schools of the 18th century.

But The Sacred Harp and its accompanying singing tradition originated in the rural South where it has survived to this day. Only in the last few decades has the tradition spread from its ancestral homeland, not only northwards to its proto-home, but to regions of the country (and world) with no historical relationship to the tradition: Los Angeles, Cork, Bremen.

The Sacred Harp uses early 19th century shape notation: instead of round heads, shape notes have a triangle, circle, rectangle, or diamond for their heads. These correspond to four solfège syllables, Fa, Sol, La, and Mi. By indicating relative pitch, shapes allow songs to be sung at any key, and also facilitate sight-reading for those not trained in music.

At a singing, the group sings the names of the notes to get a

17

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Occult

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Jesus can make a dying bed Feel soft as downy pillows are; While on His breast I lean my head, And breathe my life out sweetly there.

Death could become a sweet, welcome sleep in the gentle embrace of a male savior figure. +++ Whether palpable or seemingly distant, death's imminence is unmeasurable, its inevitability unquestionable: Our life is ever on the wing, And death is ever nigh; The moment when our lives begin, We all begin to die.

We are all already, always moving towards death. We all die, but Sacred Harp singing would have us focus on the subject and not the verb: we all die. By singing about death together, we acknowledge our fundamental commonality. Apparent difference is blurred in the presence of equalizing death: oldtimers beat rhythm with arthritic hands beside punks with stick-and-poke arms; facial piercings, like cross necklaces, are simply the ornaments of choice.

The Sacred Harp works as a guidebook for harmonizing our private songs with those of our neighbors to generate something beyond us, but dependent upon us all the same.

Harmony as a metaphor for community reaches a pinnacle in the physical layout, the demographic makeup, and the lyrical content of Sacred Harp singing.

We are all already always singing our own songs towards death. In the center of the square, I feel the sheer force of harmonious song—a hundred voices assailing me on all sides. It is violent, fierce, but I absorb it. Mortality is only in individual bodies, I realize, in individual song. But this song…

ELI PETZOLD B’14 doesn’t care to stay here long

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Drink and learn about worldwide coffee from different parts of the world that grow and export coffee to places like the places you buy your coffee at.

Extension, by David Leventhal, Brown ‘95 and is part of Brown’s recognition of alumni as it celebrates its 250th anniversary. Danny Buraczeski’s exuberant jazz RepEtude and intriguing new works by Nadia Hannan and Sarah Friedland, both Brown ‘14. Brown dancers are joined by local guest artists in Anne-Alex Packard’s playful and evocative Angels in the Attic and inPut Up Your Dukes, New Works, World Traditions celebration of the music of Duke Ellington, directed

by Michelle Bach-Coulibaly.

Circus Performance

Pub Quiz Night

Friday May 2 Free Coffee Tasting

3 PM // New Harvest Coffee Roastery, 1005 Main St. #108, Providence

7PM // 1 La Salle Sq., Providence // $36-40

7-9PM // Wild Colonial Tavern, 250 South Water St., ProviThis isn’t a cute circus. This is like a raw and nasty circus act. dence This is like the real circus!

Bring a team of up to four or form one at the bar. Win fabYou’ve seen the movies and you know what I’m talking about. ulous prizes. Don’t come if you get competitive, it’s not like There will be pyrotechnics, people in bubbles, motorcycles, that, you know? bicycles, and a lot of elephants. It’s called Legends and it’s presented by Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey.

Best Music Show

Music Show

8PM // Fete Lounge, 103 Dike St., Providence // $10 Gavin Castleton, Happy Body Slow Brain, Herra Terra. (( and a ddoouubbllee record release ))

Music Show

8PM // The Parlour Music & Food, 1119 North Main St., Providence // $?

Blackstone RNGRS, Nightmom, Darklands, Stolen Jars

Monday May 5

Der Vorführeffekt Theatre: 9PM // Machines With Magnets, 400 Main St., Pawtucket // $7 Three Kinds of Wildness

Tuesday May 6

Open Sewing Circle: A night of making things 9 PM-1AM // AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence

Knitters, crafters, jewelry-makers, solderers, weavers, puppetmakers, cookie munchers and everyone welcome. Find a community of collaborators here if you want.

Wednesday May 7 Bike touring 101

6-8PM // AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence Sarah Thomas & Dallas Jamme of nomadiccycling.com and Matt Moritz, the Rhode IslandI Bike President and Adventure Cycling Trained Bike Tour Leader will present as part of the Rhode Island Bicycle Coalition Speaker Series

MEME Ensemble Final Concert

8-10PM // Brown University Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Studio 1, 154 Angell St., Providence beep

Thursday May 8 Sketchbook Club

Bloodpheasant, DEATH TO TYRANTS, Gertrude Atherton, The 8-9 PM // AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence // $7-10, no one turned away Invisible Hours

6-8PM // 225 List Art Building, Brown University, 62 College St., Providence

The play is 100% handmade and homemade, with exquisitely crafted puppets, intricately layered soundscapes, and unconventional theatrical lighting made from salvaged and repurposed materials gathered from around the neighborhood. Directed by Sarah Lowry, music by Travis Sehorn and Chenda Cope, designed, created, and performed by: Donna Oblongata, Patrick Costello, Cricket Arrison, Chenda Cope, and Travis Sehorn

The first thing you have to know is there’s no strict agenda.

Once you remember that now you can know that the sketch book club is a place for doodling, art project planning, eating pizza, and getting to know student-artists.

Saturday May 3 Spring Book Sale

12-4PM // Providence Community Library: Knight Memorial Library, 275 Elmwood Ave., Providence Don’t worry, all the money goes to fixing up the library.

There’s giving you the opportunity to choose from 1000 books. Fiction, house and garden, natural history, travel writing.

RISD Apparel Design Final Crit

9AM-4:30 PM // RISD Auditorium, 17 Canal Walk, Providence

Music Show

come see. hard work.

Smith & Weeden (CD release), Ravi Shavi, The Sun Parade

Splash Science: Ice Exploration

9PM // AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence // $7

Sunday May 4 Festival of Dance

2-4 PM // Stuart Theater, Brown University, 75 Waterman St., Providence // $15/adult, $12/staff, $7/student

10AM -12PM // Providence Children’s Museum, 100 South St., Providence // $9

Music Show

9PM-1AM // AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence // $6 Reverend Bastien, Reverend Dan and the Dirty Catechism, and Able Thought. Apparently it sounds like Tom Waits. I like Tom Waits, especially that one song Alice (but honestly only because my ex-boyfriend once told me that after we broke up he would listen to that song on repeat and think of me (As you can imagine, it’s pretty exhausting to date me!))

Forever//never This is my and Diane’s last list. Goodbye forever.

Use tools and color to investigate ice and how it works and forms and is.

Brown Dance Extension performs Mark Morris’ Italian Concerto with live piano. Italian Concerto was set on the Dance

The List

Get in touch: listtheindy@ gmail.com

This week in Listery: May 3, 752 AD Mayan king Bird Jaguar IV of Yaxchilan assumes the throne.