THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT Brown & RISD Weekly | V. 25 N. 8 | 11.09.2012
from the editors Where is the anti-social media? I inhaled Dakotas frequently. What would we do if the election were on Wednesday? I’m leaving the history, the history. Canada, Colorado—I’m your mouth-breathing love. Obsoletely nothing, just like their parents. Colors perpetuate forever, the centuries, amen. Growing up, I remember tears and slimy 2016. These morons jumping up and down, 7.9 percent and the failed fingers of prayer. Socialist, Muslim—local comic book store goes out of business. Obama Emoji. Obama Emoji. Guns, suffrage, and weed—mental straws sip cologne from the completo queer distance of Paris, France. Do horrible things, Michelle. Estoy SUPER feliz. Undocumented hearts, spew tears in my robotic direction. Regardless of depression, football is asylum. Another four years of oily nothing, another four years of chocolate owls. — GN
ephemera
news
the indy is
MANAGING EDITORS Raillan Brooks, Robert Sandler, Erica Schwiegershausen NEWS Barry Elkinton, Emily Gogolak, Kate Van Brocklin METRO Joe de Jonge, Doreen St. Felix, Jonathan Storch FEATURES Sam Adler-Bell, Grace Dunham, Alex Ronan, Ellora Vilkin ARTS Ana Alvarez, Olivia-Jené Fagon, Christina McCausland, Claudia Norton SCIENCE Jehane Samaha INTERVIEWS Drew Dickerson METABOLICS Sam Rosen LITERARY Emma Janaskie, Michael Mount X Drew Foster LIST Allie Trionfetti BLOG Greg Nissan DESIGN EDITOR Allie Trionfetti DESIGNERS Carter Davis, Annie Macdonald, Jared Stern ILLUSTRATIONS Diane Zhou PHOTO Annie Macdonald STAFF WRITERS Marcel Bertsch-Gout, Lizzie Davis, Mary-Evelyn Farrior, Megan Hauptman SENIOR EDITORS Belle Cushing, Mimi Dwyer MVP Christina McCausland COVER ART Robert Sandler
reachably yours College Hill Independent PO Box 1930 Brown University Providence RI 02912 theindy@gmail.com blog: theindyblog.org Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI press in Seekonk, MA. The Independent receives support from Campus Progress/Center for American Progress. Campus Progress works to help young people make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at CampusProgress.org
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WEEK IN REVIEW
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(C)M(Y)K
// emily gogalak, richard salame & kate van brocklin
// marcel bertsch-gout
metro
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SIGNS OF LIFE // megan hauptman
CHI-CHI // mary-evelyn farrior
advice
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ASK YOUR MOM // beehive
features
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IN CAMBODIA // dan sherrell
BRUTAL-BITCH // mimi dwyer
arts
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WILLIAMSBORG // greg nissan
MULLING IT OVER // lizzie davis
interviews
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GOOD GREIF // drew dickerson
literary
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HOME // nick gomez-hall
x-page
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PICNIC DATE // drew foster
STATUS // allison grosso
WEEK IN REVIEW by Emily Gogalak, Richard Salame & Kate Van Brocklin Illustration by Robert Sandler
Price Tags
Sexy, Six Feet Under
Bird Instincts
they say that some things can’t be bought, but soon they might not be able to say that about permanent residency in Hungary. The coalition government—made up of the conservative nationalist Fidesz and right–wing Christian Democratic People’s parties—has crafted a policy proposal whereby anyone who buys €250,000 in special ‘residency bonds’ would get to cut through the red tape and earn permanent residency in the country. Citizenship is more or less guaranteed after eight years of residency. If stuffed cabbage isn’t your scene, keep in mind that a Hungarian passport (or even just permanent residency) would give you the right to live and work anywhere in the European Union. The government hopes that this will lift some fiscal pressure—Hungary has the largest debt in central and eastern Europe at 78 percent of GDP—and maybe even give a boost to the private sector economy. Hungary is lagging behind its neighbors in terms of foreign direct investment and posted an anemic 0.82 percent GDP growth rate in 2010. Although the proposal hasn’t incited much public response inside Hungary, a similar program in neighboring Austria became highly politicized last year amid rumors that a leading opposition lawmaker promised to expedite the citizenship process in return for political donations. Other EU sovereigns are allegedly upset about the Hungarian government extending EU citizenship on its own authority in such a controversial manner. The nationalist Fidesz party has historically had an antagonistic relationship with the EU. According to Dr. Helen Szamuely, a scholar at the neoliberal think tank Bruges Group, the Hungarian program is “obviously being aimed at wealthy Asians—particularly Chinese.” Hungary wouldn’t be the first country to implement such a program. According to The Economist, “In most rich countries a hefty investment brings a visa that can eventually turn into a passport.” Britain has offered so– called ‘Tier 1’ visas since 2008 to individuals who invest at least £1,000,000 in government bonds. Australia asks for investments of between AUD 750, 000 and AUD 1,500,000 at minimum in government bonds for a visa. The Caribbean island of St. Kitts has dispensed with the investment charade and openly sells citizenship for $250,000 (sun and beaches included). For a bargain, check out the tiny island nation of Dominica: citizenship is priced at only $82,700, payable directly to the government. Even the United States has such a program. According to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, an investment of $1,000,000 will fetch a coveted green card in about a year. This program was signed into law by the senior President Bush in 1990, in the middle of an economic recession. Since then, the program has brought in over $1.5 billion from foreigners and created 31,000 jobs, at little cost to the US government. This September, Congress passed a re–authorization of the program with bipartisan support and President Obama signed the bill into law. - RS
what do shirtless firefighters, hot cops, scenic images from Yosemite, terriers, and naked Polish women have in common? Linder, a Polish firm that manufactures coffins, is trying to strike up new business by releasing a calendar featuring models posing next to its caskets. One image from the 2013 edition of the calendar—the fourth in the company’s history—has a blonde model reclining on a coffin, donning nothing but a skimpy thong and a snake draped around her neck. In another, a dominatrix is pulling the heart out of a man lying on a casket. Not all of the photos are topless, but they do have their fair share of bondage and splayed legs. “My son had the idea of creating the company’s calendar... so that we could show something half-serious, colourful, beautiful; the beauty of Polish girls and the beauty of our coffins,” Zbigniew Lindner, the firm’s owner, told Reuters. It’s an odd marketing technique for a coffin manufacturer, considering that (a) caskets are usually advertised via catalogues geared for funeral homes, (b) the people buying the calendar likely aren’t looking to buy their own coffin anytime soon, and (c) the qualities that make a good casket (weather proof, termite repelling, rust resistant) don’t have much to do with hot models. Nonetheless, the calendar has traffic up on Linder’s website, and the priests and nuns of Poland are pretty down. The Church and its doctrine has long been a centerpiece of Polish life, but changing times are challenging the faith. Ninety-three percent of Poles call themselves Catholic, but the proportion of actual churchgoers is steadily falling. People’s views on sexual taboos aren’t what they used to be and the calendar is a symbolic slap in the face to a Church that feels itself losing footing. In a public statement, a Church spokesman said, “human death should be treated with solemnity and not mixed up with sex.” The folks at Linder think differently. “We wanted to show that a coffin isn’t a religious symbol. It’s a product,” he said. “Why are people afraid of coffins and not of business suits, cosmetics or jewelry?” Apparently death isn’t as scary as a nine to five day at the office in Poland. In addition to getting a woody while looking at photos of wooden caskets, there’s one other perk. Whoever orders the Linder calendar will also receive a complimentary casket-shaped key ring. - EG
the wrath of hurricane sandy didn’t just flood New York subways and disrupt the lives of thousands of people on the Eastern seaboard—the storm also damaged the habitat of coastal bird species. Last week, Sandy swept away a rare visitor to New York’s Finger Lakes Region: a Ross’s gull. This small, dove-like bird is seldom seen outside of the Arctic. Many different species of birds get pulled into a hurricane’s spiral and then move into its calm eye to ride out the storm. “The majority of seabirds, if they are not too weakened from having flown for so long without food, will probably find their way back to shore quickly,” said avian expert Kenn Kaufman in Audubon. “They have great powers of navigation.” In a recent National Geographic interview, Bryan Watts, the director of the Center for Conservation Biology in Williamsburg, Virginia, outlined Sandy’s affects on bird populations. Among the groups of birds that have the highest risk of being affected are those that depend on coastal habitats, such as piping plovers, Wilson’s plovers, and least terns. Plovers are small, sand-colored, sparrowsized shorebirds with yellow-orange legs, a black band across the forehead from eye to eye, and a black ring around the neck. These species rely on barrier islands that were reshaped or destroyed in Sandy’s wake. Birds that live in low habitats—marshes, beaches, and dunes—are often displaced in storms of this size. Hurricane histories don’t have a good track record of being kind to birds. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo almost decimated red-cockaded woodpecker habitats in the Francis Marion National Forest in North Carolina. In other cases, species are inconvenienced for a short time but persevere, just as humans do. Disturbance is an essential element in ecosystem evolution. In beach environments, the natural disturbance of storms creates open sandy habitats for species such as the federally-endangered piping plover to nest. Storms set back beaches from progressing from open sand to dune grassland to shrubland—in a sense, storms revitalize beach habitats, just as fire renews forest back to grassland. While reports of injured or dead birds haven’t started coming in yet, they likely will soon. “They tend to show up in the days after a storm as they use up their fat stores trying to return to the ocean,” said ornithologist Drew Weber. “People should keep an eye out for stranded birds in parking lots and small bodies of water and take them to the closest rehabber.” - KVB
NOVEMBER 09 2012
NEWS // 02
DEBATE POLITICS Why You Don’t See the Green Party on TV by Marcel Bertsch-Gout on thursday, november 1, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped a surprise, last-minute endorsement of President Obama. The expression of support came in reaction to Hurricane Sandy, and while few expected such a claim from a Republican turned Independent, something about the aftermath of the hurricane and the idea of New York becoming an 8 million person Sea World™ seemed to have changed his mind. Watching his city crumble and seeking to cement his political legacy in the twilight of his term as mayor, Bloomberg backed the more environmentally friendly candidate, specifically citing climate change as his reason. “Over the past four years, President Barack Obama has taken major steps to reduce our carbon consumption, including setting higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks,” said Bloomberg. “His administration also has adopted tighter controls on mercury emissions, which will help to close the dirtiest coal power plants (an effort I have supported through my philanthropy), which are estimated to kill 13,000 Americans a year.” More than a hundred fatalities, hundreds of thousands left homeless, billions of dollars in damage, and the political sphere finally manages to squeeze out a comment about climate change this election season. Increased hurricane incidence and intensity raise awareness of the correlation with warmer waters caused by global warming. Hurricane Irene was a knock on the door, and now, Hurricane Sandy has lost its temper, yelling, “Is anybody home?” For the Democrats and Republicans, now more than ever, the answer seems to be “no.” Barely a murmur about climate change has been heard during the debates of this election cycle, a departure from debates of the past 15 years. For the first time since the 1988 vice-presidential debates, in which Lloyd Bensten and Dan Quayle were asked by curator John Margolis about climate change and fossil fuels. In 1988, when America was experiencing its hottest summer to date, global warming was topical for the first time. The issue remained at the forefront in 1992 when vice presidential candidate Al Gore confronted Dan Quayle and James Stockdale for promoting scientific uncertainty, but vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp censured Gore in 1996 for promoting “fear on climate.” Gore attacked Bush for repudiating the science in 2000; Kerry bashed Bush’s unscientific policies in 2004; and Sarah Palin lamented how climate change was hurting Alaska in 2008. Since then, the past 17 years have been successively hotter, and in addition droughts, wildfires, flooding, seal level rise, and ocean acidification have increasingly made life less predictable for the world’s inhabitants. But what much of the US electorate is not acknowledging is that there exists a party for which the answer to Sandy’s question is a resounding “yes.” During the second debate, as Obama and Romney were arguing over gas prices, Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential nominee, and her running mate, Cheri Honkala, were arrested for attempting to enter the debate site in what the Green Party called “Occupy the Commission on Presidential Debates,” in protest of the Commission on Presidential Debate’s refusal to let third-party candidates into the audience. The party had earlier released a statement that read “Stein and Honkala will walk from Nassau Vet-
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erans Memorial Coliseum at 2PM to the debate perimeter at Hofstra, where they will then attempt to walk through security checkpoints and reach the debate hall.” But before reaching the debate hall, they failed to outmaneuver police officers who created a blockade. The candidates sat down in the middle of the road in an act of civil disobedience, where an officer informed them that they would be arrested for blocking traffic. Honkala responded that she simply wanted to go to the debate, and both were arrested. According to the CPD, candidates who wish to join their widely broadcasted debates must receive above 15 percent of voter support in at least five national polls, creating a never-ending cycle: third-party candidates cannot get exposure because they don’t have enough support, and can’t get enough support because they don’t have enough exposure. Furthermore, as expressed in Stein and Honkala’s protest, third-party candidates have historically not been invited nor even allowed entry into the debate hall for fear of causing a “disturbance.” These policies have inevitably barred the Green Party from debating and expressing their policies to hard-to-reach audiences, the many Americans who simply switch on the debates once an election season. The Green Party’s four category platform addresses Democracy, Social Justice, Ecological Sustainability, and Economic Justice and Sustainability. The official party platform is well-rounded with an intensely humanitarian bent. It includes a Full Employment Plan, which promises that every able-bodied individual within US borders would be employed in environmentally-sustainable labor. It addresses abortion, claiming, “Women’s rights must be protected and expanded to guarantee each woman’s right as a full participant in society, free from… interference in the intensely personal choice about whether to have a child.” The party also presents a stance on immigration: “The Green Party accepts as a goal a world in which persons can freely choose to live in and work in any county he or she desires.” Beyond these politically contentious issues, the party lives up to its name in the Ecological Sustainability section: The human community is an element of the Earth community, not the other way around. All human endeavors are situated within the dynamics of the biosphere. If we wish to have sustainable institutions and enterprises, they must fit well with the processes of the Earth…Greens want to stop runaway climate change, by reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2020 and 95% by 2050, over 1990 levels. These are policy positions that have never been contested on broadcast television. Neither President Obama nor Governor Romney has ever had to address them in self-defense or self-promotion—never mind the fact that the Green Party was on 85 percent of the ballots on November 6, and that in a March 2012 poll carried out by Yale University and George Mason University, 72 percent of Americans agreed that global warming should be a priority for the next president, 83 percent thought that protecting the environment either improves economic growth or provides new jobs, and 92 percent thought that developing sources of clean energy should be a priority.
The importance of Stein and Honkala’s cause is reinforced by Ralph Nader, a former Green Party presidential candidate, in a November 2 interview with Al Jazeera: “There is no other way to reach tens of millions of people other than with the debates… You can go all over the country as we did, and still only reach two percent of the people you can reach if you got on one debate.” The exclusionary nature of the current Commission on Presidential Debates reaches further back than both Stein’s and Nader’s presidential bids and history shows that it is by design. The first televised debate was run by the League of Women Voters (LWV) in 1952. It took an open format, allowing the moderator to address pointed follow-up questions to candidates a means of cutting through rehearsed answers. Such a follow-up was something to be feared. But in 1980, Jimmy Carter refused to debate if Independent candidate John Anderson was present. Anderson remained, and the LWV televised the event anyway, a decision widely thought to have attributed to Carter’s loss and one that made the influential nature of the LWV’s position apparent. Subsequently, Democrats and Republicans began working together in 1984, rejecting hundreds of proposed moderators. In 1988, the campaigns of George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis drafted a secret Memorandum of Understanding which abolished follow-up questions and specified who could be present in the debate audience. The LWV adbicated the running of debates, decrying them as a “fraud on the American voter.” The current Commission for Presidential Debates (CPD) was founded in 1987 as a private, nonpartisan organization to set a standard for privately-funded presidential debating between US presidential candidates. Almost immediately, the two parties used their influence within the commission to conspire against other candidates. In 1992, the Dole and Clinton campaigns excluded Reform Party candidate Ross Perot, despite the fact that he received seven percent of the vote in polls (and 19 percent on election day). To this day, there exist memorandums of understanding. Just this year, Obama and Romney jointly worried that Candy Crowley might ask follow-up questions and violate the term mandating that “the moderator will not ask follow-up questions or comment on either the questions asked by the audience or the answers of the candidates…” Candidate Stein feels the stifling of her party’s voice acutely. In the 2000 elections, Ralph Nader brought a lawsuit against the CPD to attempt to thwart the 15 percent rule, but lost on the grounds that he “failed to provide evidence that the CPD is controlled by the DNC or the RNC.” Now, in the footsteps of Nader, Stein has recently brought a lawsuit against the CPD in late October, alleging “that the CPD, Democratic National Committee, and Republican National Committee, together with the Federal Election Commission and Lynn University, had deprived her of her constitutional rights to due process, equal protection, and free speech, as well as her statutorily protected civil rights.” The lawsuit pleads that “Dr. Jill Stein is not only equal under the law to the two ‘major party’ candidates, she is better, because she became a viable contender for the Presidency while being discriminated against by the defendants at every turn.” The suit has not yet been resolved. MARCEL BERTSCH-GOUT B’13 wants to see the duopoly felled.
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
PROPER NAMES The Exalted Cyclops of Rhode Island by Megan Hauptman // Illustration by Diane Zhou domin avenue, a small cul-de-sac backing up onto Georgiaville Pond in Smithfield, Rhode Island, sparked a historical bonfire this past August when it was discovered that the street’s namesake was once the leader of the Rhode Island Ku Klux Klan. The street, now host to eleven residences, was an open field in the 1920s, where the Klan would meet to don hoods, raise crosses, and initiate new members. John Algernon Domin, previously the Exalted Cyclops of the Rhode Island branch of the Klan, named the path leading to the former rally field after himself when he built his house there in 1935. Roger Schenck, who grew up near Domin Avenue, proposed a name change in August in light of the discovery. Schenk now lives in Honolulu, and as he is no longer a resident in Smithfield, his request was not considered by the council. After reading about the debate in the local paper, however, Smithfield resident and former town councilman John F. Emin submitted his own proposal. But at the end of September, after push-back from Domin Avenue residents about the inconvenience of changing the name, Emin withdrew the proposal. Susan Doyle, who lives in one of the eleven homes on Domin Avenue, subsequently took up the cause and submitted a third proposal; her suggested alternative was Harmony Road. john algernon domin served as the Exalted Cyclops, the regional leader, of the Roger Williams Klavern for two years in the late 1920s, the main decade of Klan activity in the Northeast. The irony of the chosen name of the RI Klan is inescapable—in a state founded on the ideal of religious tolerance, America’s most infamous hate-group based its persecution on religious, rather than racial, conflict. Domin’s branch of the Klan sought to band Protestants together against the Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants moving into the Ocean State at the turn of the 20th century. While the Klan in the South was primarily linked with Democrats and the rural poor, New England Klaverns were often associated with the Republican Party and drew their membership mainly from business and professional classes. Historian Joseph Sullivan estimates that 63 percent of the state’s known Klansmen held skilled or professional jobs, in part due to the group’s $15 annual dues—prohibtively high. New England Klan events incorporated the social trappings enjoyed by their middle class supporters; their rallies would sometimes include clambakes and chowder dinners. An 8,000 person rally hosted in Foster, RI in 1924 began early in the afternoon and featured baseball games, races, and contests for children throughout the day. As night fell, the festive mood shifted as the bonfires were lit and the crosses raised to initiate 200 new Klansmen into the group. Although Klan membership in New England was primarily rooted in growing anti-Catholic sentiment, racial prejudice was not totally absent from their agenda. Two fires (in 1924 and 1926) at the all-black Watchmen boarding school in Scituate, Massachusetts were suspected to have been perpetrated by Klan members, though no one was ever arrested for the crimes. Estimates of Klan membership vary among sources, but historian David Chalmers estimates that while in the 1920s, the Rhode Island Klan had between 12,000 to 15,000 members, by 1928, membership was down to around nine hundred. Descriptions of rallies in Smithfield and Foster number the supporters in the thousands,
NOVEMBER 09 2012
with attendees coming from all over Rhode Island and Connecticut. Rhode Island was not the only state in the Northeast where the Klan took hold. In 1924, Worcester, MA was host to the largest Klan rally in the region with 15,000 participants, and Klan members often attempted meetings in Boston, despite being regularly thrown out of meeting spaces on grounds of fire inspections ordered by Democratic Mayor James Curley. The Klan was more successful in traditionally Republican states further north, especially in Maine. In Rhode Island, two state Senators were believed to be members of the Klan, along with various police chiefs and town councilmen, mainly in rural areas. The Roger Williams Klavern attracted a fair number of political detractors, including Governor William Flynn, who labeled the group as “vicious” and denied them the right to continue to use the Providence Armory and other public buildings for their meetings. By 1923, a few years after the Klan started recruiting in the state, their presence had become visible and unsettling enough to prompt a Pawtucket state representative to introduce an act that would make “the covering of the face with a mask to disguise identity” illegal in groups of two or more people (excepting Halloween and New Years). The act, specifically targeted at the hooded Klan, did not pass. The demise of the Klan in Rhode Island came during Domin’s presidency, when the Klan took control of three companies of the local militia. The First Light Infantry, one of the five Rhode Island militias, was being considered for disbandment due to low enrollment, when in March of 1928, over two hundred members turned up for drills, sporting new rifles and even a machine gun. After seeing Klan members organize a local military dance, many suspected their involvement in this sudden swell of recruits. On St. Patrick’s Day, a reporter for the Providence Journal broke the story that not only were the new militiamen Klansmen, but the Klan was making all new militia recruits join the Klan first—giving the Klan control over the leadership of the militia. Chalmers suggests that the Klan saw in the dwindling membership of the militias a way to increase their own ranks as well as a chance to infiltrate the local military in preparations for a potential religious war. Domin testified before the RI General Assembly during an investigation into the presence of the Klan in the militia, stating that he had joined the Light Infantry for “good fellowship and exercise.” In his testimony, he denied that the Klan was “antagonistic towards Catholics or towards any church,” though he did believe that “no man should be elected President who kisses the hand of another man.” It was ruled that no crime had been committed in the Klan’s attempted takeover of the militia, but the state had all known Klansmen in the militia give up their arms to prevent Klan control of the militia. The public trial and investigation shamed public Klan leaders and dissuaded potential new members. By 1930, the Roger Williams Klavern had shrunk to under 100 members. in the 1930s, when Schenck was growing up on Stillwater Road, one street over from Domin Avenue, his father would tell the family stories of watching Klan members come from all over the state to burn crosses in Domin’s field. In an interview with Smithfield’s Valley Breeze, he recounted his father’s experience: “Klan members from Esmond and Georgiaville usually drove by with headlights
off and with drivers and passengers trying not to be seen, but they could not fool my father... he was able to recognize most cars from both villages.” Most of those who now live in the houses on the field where the Klan once met in hooded semi-secrecy don’t feel as strongly as Schenck about the name change. Many even actively oppose the motion. Nine of the eleven households on the street are against the change because it would cost time and money to change addresses on personal and financial records. These residents have submitted a petition to the town council asking for the discussion to be terminated, but the council has decided to hold off voting on the issue until after this past Tuesday’s election. Rema Tomka recently moved into 11 Domin Avenue, the former house of the Klan leader himself, but she doesn’t think his name should be wiped from the signpost. In an interview with the Valley Breeze, Tomka supported keeping the street name as it “provides an opportunity for residents to teach their children about such hatred. The history is there, and if you take it away it’s going to happen again.” Other residents agree with Tomka, recognizing that many other local streets’ namesakes have similarly unsavory pasts. In another article on the controversy published in the Valley Breeze, Robert Eposito points out that many members of the Brown family “were smugglers and slave traders—go after Brown University.” the past months of debate about the name change oscillate between arguments of convenience and of condemnation. Many Smithfield residents seem to agree that the state’s past doesn’t line up with our present values, but they disagree on whether Domin Avenue serves as a continued commemoration or a warning against future discrimination. The value of this debate seems to lie primarily in the discussion and investigation that it has stirred up—before this summer, many Smithfield residents were unaware of the Klan’s history in their town; whether Domin’s name continues to grace a street sign or Harmony Road holds sway in the town council vote, the controversy has started to peel back the layer of forgetting that often divides the past from the present. The white-robed, hooded Klansmen that once convened at and flattened the grass of Domin’s fields are no more than ghosts to the street’s current residents, but their presence is at least felt and remembered. MEGAN HAUPTMAN B’14.5
talks to ghosts.
METRO // 04
BIG R Cicilline hangs on by Mary-Evelyn Farrior Illustration by Diane Zhou
on tuesday, david cicilline staved off Republican Brendan Doherty to win re-election to Rhode Island’s 1st District Congressional seat. Rhode Island’s 1st Congressional District occupies the northern and eastern portions of the state, encompassing Providence, Bristol and Newport County. Only one Republican, Ronald Machtley, has been elected to represent the district in nearly 70 years. The incumbent Cicilline served as mayor of Providence from 2003 to 2011 and was elected to Congress in 2010. He has been endorsed by President Obama; in a radio ad, Bill Clinton called him “one of America’s most innovative and effective mayors.” But despite his experience and party support, Cicilline’s public approval is low. In late October, WPRITV calculated that Cicilline had the lowest approval rating out of all of Rhode Island’s legislative representatives, with 59 percent of the people in his district believing he is doing a poor or fair job. Even this percentage is up from the 65 percent negative he received in the station’s February poll. His low approval stems largely from his coverup of Providence’s poor financial condition in 2010, during his first run for Congress. The challenger came in the form of Colonel Brendan Doherty. Doherty served in the Rhode Island State Police after graduating from Rhode Island College in the early ’80s. In 2007, Governor Carcieri appointed him as the eleventh Superintendent of the State Police. Although he had long been an Independent, Doherty became an attractive candidate to the Rhode Island Republicans soon after his 2011 retirement—a perfect contrast to Cicilline, perpetually tagged by opponents as a career politician. “Soon after he retired, some people—I don’t know who— approached him and told him he should consider running for office. Political people, they saw potential in him,” Robert Coupe, political director of the Doherty campaign, told the Independent. In early 2011, Doherty declared his candidacy.
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The race was identified by many, from the Boston Globe to WRNI, as one of the most vicious contests the state has ever seen. Each major candidate fundraised over $1,000,000. The National Republican Congressional Committee sponsored ads attacking Cicilline for the clients he represented as a defense attorney, while Doherty was hurt by association with the national Republican Party. A local group called “Democrats for Doherty” was chaired by former State Representative Joanne Giannini. The group was filled with past 1st District mayors and citizens, many of whom would not have considered Doherty if it were not for their dissatisfaction with Cicilline.
Other disaffected Democrats gravitated to progressive Independent David Vogel. Running his entire campaign on less than $100, Vogel nevertheless received nearly six percent of the vote. He spoke with the Independent the week before the election. “Depending on who you speak with, either I am a Democratic plant in order to strip votes from Doherty, or I am ruining Mr. Cicilline’s chance,” he said. “Either way, I basically tell them to shove it.” The anti-Doherty website launched by the Rhode Island Democratic Party shows a collage of national Republican candidates and presidents, along with the words, “Republican Brendan Doherty is no different. He’s just another member of the Romney Republican party.” Doherty’s campaign was aware of the danger of association from the start. “The Rhode Island Republican Party is often brought down by the national Republican Party, which is dominated by people who are more conservative than the average Rhode Islander,” Coupe told the Independent. “We are tied to the more conservative wing of the party, who don’t understand what it’s like to be from Rhode Island.” Cicilline’s commercials call Doherty “not the right choice for Rhode Island,” while Democratic Party Chairman Ed Pacheco called Doherty’s attack advertisements on Cicilline “un-Rhode Island-like.” Their strategy proved successful, with Cicilline winning 53 percent of the vote. Doherty received a mere 41 percent—a much lower number than the polls anticipated. “The challenge for Doherty, even though it looks like he has momentum, was that you have to get a lot of people in district who will vote for Obama to then say, “I vote Democrat, Democrat, and now I am going to vote Republican,’” said Professor Wendy Schiller, professor of Political Science at Brown University. “No matter how much he tries, there is a big R next to his name.” MARY-EVELYN FARRIOR B’14
tells them to shove it.
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
LISTEN IF YOU WANT Dear Beehive, WHAT SHOULD I DO IF I THINK SOMEONE IS CUTE BUT THEY ALREADY DID SOMETHING EMBARRASSING?
Some embarrassing things are endearing: missing your mouth while drinking, stepping on someone’s heel, having to pee all the time, earnest voicemails. Some embarrassing things are gross: chocolate stains on clothing, making kissy noises on the phone, making kissy noises while eating, fat tongues. And some embarrassing things are no-gos: using the wrong ‘your,’ baby talk, a serious Twitter. ONE TIME MY SNOT CAME OUT BLUE, BLACK, AND RED. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
IS IT OKAY TO MAKE FUN OF SOMEONE FOR DOING A
Snot codes: Blue = good luck and productivity. Red = a ruddy countenance. Black = try to move your ass more.
JUICE CLEANSE?
So far, 2012 has been all about quitting bad habits and pushing toward living a healthier lifestyle. The juice cleanse business is drawing in customers like fruit flies. But 2012 is almost over and we aren’t baby birds.
HOW CAN I BALANCE A RIGOROUS SCHEDULE AT SCHOOL AND A SOCIAL LIFE AND MAXIMIZE MY SMALL BUSINESS’S PROFITS?
HOW DO I GET PEOPLE TO STOP CALLING ME BY A NICKNAME ONCE IT’S REALLY CAUGHT ON?
I can relate! My name is Beehive. Look at my birth certificate, it says Beehive. Look at my passport, it says Beehive. Look at my credit/debit/bank cards, they all say Beehive. Beehive. Beehive. Beehive. That is my name. I like it a lot and I’m really happy to be beckoned by it. Ted, on the other hand, is not my name. I don’t like being called Ted. No, I cannot give you a detailed and rational explanation as to why I don’t like it. I just don’t. Don’t call me Ted. The worst kind of people are those who, after learning this, continue to call me Ted just because they think they are being cute. My brother’s boyfriend has gotten away with this so far because I like him and think he’s otherwise a great guy.
What’s your small business do? Small businesses are like small animals: you can’t treat them all the same.
IS SUBWAY™ GOOD FOR YOU?
Subway™ is famous for its nice, healthy sandwiches. Wheat bread is a better option than white bread. According to the food pyramid, humans should consume more grains than anything else. And, you should consider your veggies and fruits. Obviously, don’t forget to eat your ‘green’ veggies.
ANY GOOD PICK UP LINES? HOW DO I GET MY BOYFRIEND BACK?
Change yourself. The static individual is an illusion. And boys like good change.
NOVEMBER 09 2012
“Hey.” “What do you like to do in Providence?”
ADVICE // 06
WAR AND FORGETFULNESS Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge by Dan Sherrell // Illustration by Diane Zhou nuon chea, the genocidaire, tells the court he needs a hat. The air conditioning, apparently, is making his head cold. After a five minute deliberation, permission to retrieve the hat is granted. Hundreds of eyes follow the octogenarian—former Brother Number Two of the Khmer Rouge, second only to General Secretary Pol Pot—as he totters out of the glassed-in courtroom on the arm of a bailiff, returning shortly with a blue and white wool cap pulled defiantly low over his eyes. I watch him sit back down and try in vain to muster the outrage that the occasion deserves. I feel nothing. This man was partially responsible for the murder of over two million innocent people. I stare harder. He looks small, with bloated cheeks and skin like a potato’s. Two million is the equivalent of murdering every last person in the town where I grew up 143 times over. Zero valence. A purely numerical understanding. How can I grapple with genocide when its perpetrator is sitting right in front of me? When he’s an old man with sneakers and a head cold? I look around at the hundreds of others seated near me in the gallery and wonder how they’re faring. Every seat in the room is filled. Khmer schoolchildren, Buddhist monks, reporters from every major foreign news outlet, relatives of those killed—all of them have come to this administrative building 40 minutes outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia to witness the first day of preliminary hearings in what many are calling the biggest war crimes trial since Nuremberg. Outside the media is hosting a circus. All the photographers barred from the gallery snap photographs of the building’s drab exterior while journo-types prowl for an interview. For my part I’m here on behalf of the Phnom Penh Post—a minnow of a bilingual newspaper based out of the capital where I’ve been interning for a few months. On trial in Case 002 at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodi (ECCC) are four former leaders in the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, responsible for causing the deaths of an estimated 2.2 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979 in a merciless, ludicrous attempt to establish a Marxist-Leninist agricultural utopia. Inaugurated in 2006, the ECCC was created after the Cambodian government requested United Nations assistance in prosecuting senior KR officials, “those believed to be most responsible for grave violations of national and international law.” In 2010, Case 001 tried and convicted Kaing Guek Eav (alias Duch), director of the regime’s infamous
07 // FEATURES
S-21 prison, from which only seven of the 14,000 imprisoned managed to escape alive. After a three-year trial with a price tag of almost $80 million, the ECCC took its first steps toward enacting justice against the KR and vindicating the regime’s victims. Duch was sentenced to 19 years in prison—farcically lenient but still effectively a life sentence for the aging sociopath. Case 002 got off to a halting, controversy-ridden start in 2011, and it may be years before a verdict is reached. Being tried along with Nuon Chea are Khieu Samphan, 79, former Khmer Rouge Head of State; Ieng Sary, 85, former Deputy Prime Minister for Foreign Affairs; and Ieng Thirith, Sary’s 78-year-old wife and former Minister of Social Affairs. The sheer feebleness of the elderly autocrats lends a degree of absurdity to the proceedings. While the bench wades slowly through a list of procedural matters, Ieng Sary shuffles to the bathroom with the help of his walker. At one point, Ieng Thirith appears to fall asleep in her seat. The mantra “Never Again” feels blunt and opaque here. The question I’m asking, that I can’t stop asking, is: “How, Ever?” Misplaced idealism, latent class warfare, the time-worn hubris of dictators. Paranoia, loathing, blatant hypocrisythe KR elite who made it their mission to massacre the educated, urban, ‘new people’ and return the country to ‘Year Zero,’ were very careful to disguise the fact that many of them had been educated in Paris. Ieng Thirith, for example, was a Shakespeare scholar at the Sorbonne). The study of genocide was inaugurated long before the KR first came to power. Historians’ explanations for their atrocities seem all too familiar, fulfilling our general rubric for genocide so well that they have an almost desensitizing effect. Murderous autocrats exploited misplaced political ideals in a quest for personal gain. It is, at first glance, maddeningly predictable. But the terror perpetrated during the Pol Pot years was unique in a way that still manifests itself, everyday, in Cambodian society. This was not Hutus killing Tutsis or Nazis killing Jews. Under the KR, no consistent ethnic or religious differences separated the party faithful from the people they killed. And as much as we’d like to imagine that genocide comes to a clear end, that victims and perpetrators separate and move on, when the regime fell, KR cadres and labor camp detainees moved back to the same streets in the same villages. Cambodians had to pick themselves back up again, even if that meant holding hands with the enemy, or
at least acquiescing to rebuild alongside him. For better or worse, Cambodia never fully tore itself apart. And in the years since the Vietnamese army toppled the KR in 1979, zones of political and ethical ambiguity have grown up around this reality. Many former KR, low enough in rank to maintain some degree of retroactive deniability, now occupy positions of power in Cambodia’s current constitutional monarchy. Prime Minister Hun Sen, the controversial leader who has dominated Cambodian politics for nearly three decades, was himself a member of the KR, although he denies being anything more than a foot soldier. During Pol Pot’s reign he fled to Vietnam to join forces that would later depose the KR, halting the genocide but continuing with injustices of their own against the Cambodian people. Due perhaps to his history, Hun Sen has publicly called for a halt to all trials after the completion of Case 002. Allegations abound that Hun Sen’s government has put pressure on the court not to pursue Case 003, and in the months the investigation has been open, judges have failed to examine a number of alleged crime sites or even question the suspects, former KR naval commander Meas Muth and air force commander Sou Met. The former now lives in a cushy retirement in Battambang province, giving regular donations to his local Buddhist pagoda (more irony: the KR banned all religion and persecuted those accused of worship). Until recently, the latter was a top commander in the Cambodian army. The fourth and final case, intended to prosecute unnamed mid-level KR cadres, is unlikely ever to begin. Drawing the ire of international legal scholars and Cambodian human rights activists, government officials have insisted that exhuming those skeletons could “spark unrest” and “plunge the Kingdom back into Civil War.” This is how it goes: history gets buried and the feathers of the powerful remain unruffled. Stability and justice are pitched as mutually exclusive. All this is a testament to how deeply Cambodia’s past is embedded in its present. a few weeks after the trial, my friend Ravi and I are at a bar in downtown Phnom Penh, talking family. Born to an American mother and a Khmer father, Ravi moved to Lowell, Massachusetts at age six, where his father became the first Khmer elected official in the United States (Lowell City Council), and Ravi slowly forgot how to speak Khmer. During the KR years, his father was placed, along
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
with thousands of others, into one of the regime’s forced labor camps where workers (slaves) were supposed to grow rice and build infrastructure in a burst of inspired proletarian do-gooding among comrades. What they got instead were meager rations, arbitrary beatings, and back-breaking toil. Many of his family members were killed before the regime finally fell in 1979. In the chaotic interregnum of the early ’80s, he made money smuggling various goods across Cambodia, from Thailand to Vietnam and back, all by bicycle, dodging itinerant bandits and KR patrolmen. Two decades later, the man has made a new life for himself in the states. Next year he plans to run for a seat in the State of Massachusetts House of Representatives. Next my friend tells me about his uncle, a former Khmer Rouge cadre who moved to Long Beach, California in the ’90s. “Yeah I only found out last year,” he says. At first I don’t believe him. “What’s he like?” My friend shrugs. “Nice guy.” Does he talk to your father? Does he talk about his past? How awkward are family barbeques? Yes, no, not very. “It’s really not a big deal, somehow” he tells me. Many Cambodian family trees are similarly gnarled. Brother turned on brother during the KR’s Orwellian purges of imagined ‘subversive’ elements, but once the fighting ended they were still family. Faced with the impossible task of moving on, perhaps some have mirrored on a small scale what Hun Sen’s government is using its corrupt leverage to enact nationally. That is, to choose familial stability over dredging up past wrongs, to swallow memory for the sake of harmony. This begs the troubling question: do people here really want to forget? It’s hard to say, and many Khmers would probably have a hard time providing a clear answer even for themselves. But while Ravi’s family chose the path of tacit reconciliation so that life could be lived, it seems the nepotistic ruling party is advocating a similar amnesia in order to protect its own members from judicial scrutiny, scared that a widening scope of justice could mean a fall from grace and political predominance. not long afterwards, Ravi and I embark on a multi-day trek through the Cardamom Mountains, a vast swath of as yet untouched forest in the country’s southwest. The Cardamoms are remote. We drive for six hours to get
to an unmarked dirt road turnoff that takes us 20 potholed kilometers up to a river where we hire a boat to ferry us upstream to get to the village where we begin the trek. We sleep in hammocks and eat fish and rice three meals a day. The scenery is breathtaking and the leeches are insatiable. Along with us we have a cook, Seang Ny, and a guide, Somnang, an irrepressible 25-year-old who goes by “Lucky.” Lucky is a reformed poacher, with impeccable English and a working knowledge of, for example, who 50 Cent is. Seang Ny, 44, is of another generation. Cheerful and detached, he speaks no English. Between cigarettes, he remarks to us off-hand (through Lucky’s translation) that he’d been a soldier in the Cambodian Royal Army. It doesn’t really register at first. Later that night we sit around the campfire trading war stories. Lucky and I talk girls, Seang Ny talks bombs. He mentions, almost as an aside, that he once fought Khmer Rouge in these very mountains, as recently as 1999. Far from disbanding in 1979, the Khmer Rouge fled to the country’s remote west, which they controlled sporadically for decades, perpetuating the violence until finally suc-
cumbing to factionalism and penury in the ’90s. Even today, the Thai border town of Pailin remains a haven for ex-KR cadres, Cambodia’s version of Argentina for the Nazis, except that it’s only a six hour bus ride from the capital. Encouraged by our curiosity, Seang Ny describes ducking behind the giant mahoganies for hours, jumping out to chuck grenades into the forest, sometimes fighting at night by the light of a lantern. On our final day we pass an otherwise unremarkable patch of dirt in a thicket of tall grass. Seang Ny points. “On that spot I shot a Khmer Rouge soldier,” he says. “Bazooka…amputated both legs.” We look down at the spot he’s pointing to. It’s just dirt. And Nuon Chea is just an old man. Memories are turned into stories are turned into objects, and the violence seems to wax surreal as it recedes into past. At one point I ask Seang Ny, through Lucky, whether he knows any former Khmer Rouge. “Yes,” he says. “My neighbor.” I ask him if that’s strange and he tells me no, they’re friends. It’s also possible that they fired rounds at each other in the swamps and fields we’re now walking through. Somnang pipes in with a clichéd tautology: “people are people.” The conversation is dropped. Tour books love to extol Cambodia as “a land of contrasts,” spouting something about “the transcendent beauty of Angkor Wat and the harsh realities of the killing fields.” What they don’t understand, and what Cambodians seem to innately, is that these are not contrasts. Rather, they are two sides of the same human coin. This ad hoc ethical relativism is used not as a definitive explanation so much as a salve, a socially pragmatic tool for individual forgiveness. But Hun Sen’s government is supplanting private forgiveness with public forgetting. When Pol Pot first came to power, he declared 1975 to be ‘Year Zero’, the symbolic end of a shared historical memory and the beginning of a new history controlled by the state. The KR ransacked libraries and murdered historians, obscuring the past to erect a new future. By stymieing the KR Trials and preventing the investigation of past wrongs, Hun Sen has adopted Pol Pot’s legacy, repeating history by erasing it. DAN SHERRELL B’13.5 is,
at first glance, maddeningly
predictable.
NOVEMBER 09 2012
FEATURES // 08
providence is a film set. Its two-dimensional skyline reads like a greatest-hits list of the last century’s architectural design principles—the 1913 Turk’s Head building and its resemblance to Daniel Burnham’s Flatiron building. The 1919 Renaissance revivalism of the Hospital Trust building. The beaux-arts tackiness of the 1922 Biltmore. The 1927 art deco Bank of America building, which was not, as it turns out, the basis for Superman’s Daily Planet. The city has architecture to spare, but it’s not founded in any cohesive time period. Downtown sprawls out into old factories, into Victorian and colonial homes on College Hill and the West Side. Everywhere is history. “It’s like a toy city. It’s like a city from a train set,” said James Hall, the executive director of the Providence Preservation Society, an organization dedicated to saving the buildings of Providence’s past. “It’s knowable. Like a perfect, small museum.” “That encourages ownership,” he said. “It’s not known for much else now... Architecture is one of the only things we’ve got.” Hall is right—it’s been a rough century for Providence. Once the shipping capital of the nation, then the site of its first mill and an industrial juggernaut, Providence was a place where things happened first, and in early 20th century, it threw its skyline together like any other city destined for greatness: fast, cheap, and unplanned. Providence brought sterling-silver cutlery and costume jewels to the masses. High-profile organized crime ran it for 50 years. The city always had a knack for shams, for fronts, for looking like something that it wasn’t, exactly. How does one preserve the architectural character of a place like that? industrial decline and the depression hit the city hard. Its story, since then, has been one of fitful recuperation. People won’t come back. The money won’t come back. The first attempt to rehabilitate Providence (and there have been many, under many names, all failures) came in the years after World War II. Providence was ailing—it lost 17 percent of its residents between 1950 and 1960, the highest rate of attrition in the country. “The US had just saved the free world,” said Hall. “There was a sense of the future.” The government turned to saving its cities. Its tool was modernist architecture— the new movement in the US that favored clean lines, flat roofs, synthetic materials; that flouted history in favor of progress; that meant everything from ranch-style glassy houses to imposing concrete brutalist monoliths. It was cantilevered balconies and form that bespoke function. It was the utilitarian cleanliness of the future. The Urban Renewal Administration, famous for its slum
09 // FEATURES
Mod ern in P rovid
by Mimi Dwyer // Illustration by Robert Sandler clearance programs, gave Providence a grant to raze old neighborhoods and build new ones with these principles— the misguided idealism that gave birth to Pruitt-Igoe and the Cross-Bronx Expressway. The URA relocated Providence’s highway to cut right through the city, so that suburbanites could get off anywhere to go to work. This was standard practice. But Providence got a second URA grant, thanks to the 1956 formation of the PPS—one to save Benefit Street, home to the city’s oldest buildings, including its Victorians, which were, at the time, resoundingly out of style. “Providence was unique in that respect,” says Hall. “It set the trend for including preservation in the renewal mix.” The reports that resulted from these grants—1959’s “College Hill: A demonstration grant study of historic area renewal” and 1961’s “Downtown Providence 1970”— overlap more than you’d expect: preservationists wanted a city that could be both old and new, and modernists, usually dismissive of history, built Providence with context in mind. Their buildings abound in the city, if you know where to look. on its creative capital website, Providence calls Benefit Street the city’s “Mile of History,” brags that it is “densely packed with beautifully maintained historic properties… that are sure to impress both historians and casual tourists.” But Benefit is not so much a well-preserved remnant of industrial wealth in Providence as it is an imagining of what that wealth might have looked like. By the ’50s Benefit was dangerous, fit the bill as a slum. The Urban Renewal Administration wanted to level it. A group of wealthy Providence women formed the Providence Preservation Society to stop that—they saw value in the street’s decay. “This is a town of great patriotism,” Hall said, “and we were looking back to our colonial past as this rosy time… Those buildings had to do with Americanism and patriotism.” While the PPS rallied, in fact, the Rockefellers commissioned Colonial Williamsburg’s architects to restore the First Baptist Church—there was something inauthentic
to history in Providence. But unlike Williamsburg, the PPS was “making a neighborhood for people to live in,” Hall said. “Specific people, that is.” PPS published “College Hill” in 1959. It outlined a calculated plan to reshape Benefit Street as a gem, so that “architecturally valuable houses which have been allowed to become slum dwellings can be rehabilitated in a renewal scheme and changed from neighborhood liabilities to important civic assets.” This meant erecting horse-posts, placing plaques. It meant demolishing triple-deckers that housed factory workers and immigrants, demolishing an entire mill complex on the north end of the street. It meant and relocating old houses from all over the city to line up neatly alongside each other. Success would be an understatement. Legend has it that Happy Chace, a wealthy housewife, bought 12 Victorians on Benefit, installed plumbing, painted them bright colors, and promptly resold them. The project placed PPS at the cutting-edge of preservation, as it were. Hence the lack of convenience stores on Benefit—they were razed. Hence the sense that, when you walk up College Hill, the confusion of the city calms itself into a period piece—it is one. But the plan also made provisions for a Providence history of the future. It proposed that the defunct 1780s Golden Ball Inn be rebuilt as the Golden Ball Inn II, with a cocktail lounge and parking for 180 cars. The Inn was never built, but mock-ups depict tourists reading casually on its broad, checkered terrace overlooking the city. The exposed overhangs and support beams it proposes are hallmarks of midcentury design—a hotel of revamped modern luxury from which, the drawings show, a woman in sandals and a tweed suit might photograph the quaint steeples and gingerbread houses below. “downtown providence 1970” came out two years after “College Hill.” It called for a city of the future, too, but saw the past as one of Providence’s many handicaps.
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
County headquarters. Russillo built the edifice with sloped roofs, narrow windows, a long ranch style. This vestige of scout earnestness, its troop emblem inlaid into the floor of the building, has been vacant for several years. A “Will build to suit” adorns it. So many of Providence’s modernist buildings are empty. The Fogarty building, which housed the state welfare office through the ’80s and bears an uncanny resemblance to DC’s FBI complex, is a late-modernist brutalist building that the PPS has campaigned heavily to save. The I.M. Pei plaza, Cathedral Square, housed the Catholic Chancery, its church and apartments all facing inward. It never got any traffic at all. “An example of failed modernism,” says Hall. It’s beautiful and empty.
nism & Pr eser denc vatio e n
“The downtown area is now partially ringed by a highspeed expressway, and in the next few years the loop will be completed. This freeway will thus be a modern crossroads where drivers will decide whether to turn off and into Downtown Providence, or remain and travel further to another marketplace,” it reads. “The downtown Providence of 1970 will be determined by what the people in this area do in the future. The downtown Providence of today has been determined by what people have done in the past.” The plan outlined a litany of modern goals for Providence—seven new multi-story garages, a helipad because “direct heliport access to the nerve center of the state is of obvious benefit.” High-rise apartment complexes for subsidized housing and a new Civic Center for “conventions such as Ice Capades.” Famous modernists— Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph, I.M. Pei—were contracted. It was the last-first time that Providence spent big in the hopes of going big—since then, said Hall, the city has built “the architecture of reassurance—not challenging in any way.” Think of the blandness of the Westin. What does it look like, again? The plan was influential, even though Providence could only afford pieces of it—a relocated train station that’s since been relocated again, a Providence Place Mall that wound up destroying small commerce downtown. The modernist plan for Providence backfired—it left the city emptier than ever. People kept driving when they passed it on the highways. Much of “Downtown Providence 1970” has been destroyed, starting with Providence’s second revitalization effort in 1982, when modernism was just plain old: Philemon E. Sturges’s 1963 Bonanza Bus terminal, in all its futuristic spaceship glory, went down with the Convention Center and the Westin—its function was outmoded. A similar circular Gulf gas station went down in 2005. The Outlet Department Store, and its garage and skybridge after it. The JJ Newbury five-and-dime, once the elaborate beaux arts headquarters of the Providence Journal, was resurfaced with gridded teal metal and eventually destroyed. The diamond-shaped ridges of the IBM building on North Main has been resurfaced with red brick. So what remains? You have to look. On Broad Street, for example, there’s Dexter Manor, a 1962 classic modernist high-rise in the style of Le Corbusier, and local modernist D. Thomas Russillo’s 1965 Boy Scouts of Narragansett
NOVEMBER 09 2012
“mostly it’s the dorky optimism. The belief in technology, upward mobility, equality. All this stuff—the moon race, the auto industry, highways. The future, The Jetsons, new materials, new ways of building things, polyester… It was this myth that we were a classless society, than anyone could become president, anyone could go to college or get a better job. There’s an attraction to that belief—that anything is possible and nobody is holding me back but me.” This, says Robert Stack, is why Providence now needs to save its modernist buildings, too: few as they may be, they mean something important to a city long defined by its decline—the last time the city built with its eyes on unlimited potential. Stack founded Mid-Century Modern Rhode Island in 2011 as an organization devoted to preserving modernist buildings in and around Providence. It collaborates with PPS to highlight the city’s hidden modernism— the remnants of an architectural movement devoted to progress, to rejecting historical precedent for something that might, it was hoped, be better. Or else only slightly uglier. In any case: now modernism is cool. “A lot of people credit Mad Men with creating this hype,” he said. Modernist preservation groups exist in places like Palm Springs that are famous for their modernism, places where corrugated metal houses and glass walls first showed up in the US. But they are bizarre for an old New England town like Providence. “On the surface,” Stack said, “It might seem ironic to be a preservationist of things that had no sense of the past.” But all of Providence’s architecture might be said to exist this way—disconnected from time and context, and also defined by it—even its modernist buildings. While modernist buildings tended to deny history, in Providence they mixed metaphors—the Providence Public Library on Empire got a new wing in 1953, a steel structure with flat limestone surfaces and marble trimmings that clashed with the building’s 1896 Renaissance style. Philip Johnson’s List Art Center has a grid across it to match the Rockefeller Library and the Hay. Paul Rudolph, the brutalist who worked exclusively in concrete, built his one redbrick building in Providence—Beneficent House, a subsidized high-rise off Weybosset—to blend it sheepishly with the city around it. He hated it, but it’s unlike anything else he did. Perhaps Providence modernism deserves saving for what Stack calls this “contextual” bent. Perhaps it’s worthy in and of itself. The paradox now is that forward-looking modernism is part of history. It is kitsch. Now, the mid-century buildings that came out of Providence’s last glimmer of optimism cross the fifty-year threshold for eligibility in the National Historic Register. They begin to decay. Providence must decide if its wellpreserved architectural history, its knack for looking like what it isn’t, includes a movement that came long past the city’s prime—a movement now too old to be new but still too new to be traditional. In the end Providence was never a modern utopia—no city was. The movement fits a place with a past in pretending.
the Independent. Rather than preservation, “A camera and an architectural historian can save what needs to be saved of it. I would deny that they are important landmarks. They are landmarks, but not important ones.” “There is not a lot of coherence in downtown’s style,” he said, “partly because the relatively small number of modernist buildings disrupts it. But the many traditional buildings are of many varieties, and they demonstrate the extent to which classicism introduces a commonality even among different traditional styles, and this results in a sort of variation on a theme that allows even diverse styles to play nicely together.” This coherence, Brussat’s reasoning goes, should be maintained because it makes Providence pleasant and beautification brings jobs back to the city. Brussat and his allies see the rosy colonial past that inspired the PPS’s founders. “He’ll rail on that the color of streetlamps should be yellower because it reminds him more of Victorian London,” Hall said. But unlike Providence’s first preservationists, the architectural future and past are incompatible in his view. There’s certainly a revitalized interest in modernism in the city—in 2011, the RISD School of Architecture published a biography of Ira Rakatansky, Providence’s first modernist, who designed homes on the East Side in the 1940s. They were boxy and windowed, with carports and frameless doors that melted into ceilings—novelties, weird homes for eccentric professors. They all remain. The coherent eclecticism of Providence is a product of the passing of time—modernism will fit in the future. “Generationally, we tend to find our parents’ era questionable but embrace our grandparents’ and think it’s fashionable,” Hall said. “My generation didn’t care about modernism. I lived in a modern house but loved Victorian architecture. I used to think as a kid about adding a mansard roof to it. Your children will adore the architecture of your parents because it’s just distant enough to be cool and exotic.” It’s cool, yes, but for Providence it means something. It means something for its copycat skyscrapers, its reconstructed streets, its failed revitalization. Providence’s modernism is not a blip in the city’s past like any other. It grew from the schizophrenic layout of the city at large. For the people who shaped Benefit it meant the future alongside the past. Now that its idealism rests tainted in history books, perhaps the question of preserving the city is how Benefit might look with its mills and triple-deckers intact. was resurfaced with gridded teal metal and eventually destroyed. MIMI DWYER B’13
david brussat, the Providence Journal’s conservative architecture critic, wants modernist buildings in Providence eliminated: “I think they are ugly,” he wrote in an email to
FEATURES // 10
I WANT TO PUNCH HIM IN THE FACE Discomfort Comedy and the Ironic Generation by Greg Nissan // Illustration by Diane Zhou the film opens with a familiar sight: the mid-30s hipster donning a blank expression, a trendy button-down that snags on his porcine belly, and a pair of jorts cut three inches too short. He adjusts his sky-blue Ray-Bans, claws at his unkempt beard. This is Tim Heidecker, the cult comedian of Tim and Eric fame, who has a talent for offending his audience. In Rick Alverson’s new film The Comedy, which opens in theaters on November 13, Heidecker portrays the sardonic and inept Swanson, an aging Williamsburg scenester whose life is a mix of unbridled sarcasm, flaunted privilege, and crippling boredom. The film gained the reputation of the most polarizing film at Sundance 2012, with many viewers walking out. Perhaps it was the title, which implies none of the darkness of the film, or Heidecker’s strikingly realistic portrayal of entitlement and insincerity, but its reputation is not surprising—this movie is incredibly uncomfortable to watch. Heidecker is no stranger to discomfort comedy. Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job is both a brilliant satire of humor and a revolting collage of corporeal weirdness. It’s a mushy stew of ’80s public access TV aesthetics and bathroom humor. Tasha Robinson of the AV Club describes the show as “a kind of staring contest where the comedians are betting the audience will flinch or blink first.” Tim and Eric is indeed a litmus test of squeamishness, a drastically different kind of discomfort humor than The Comedy. The former attempts to gross the viewer out with its surreal, disgusting images, while the latter dispenses of surprise and
11 // ARTS
absurdity in favor of a more profound discomfort—that of being confronted with incorrigible, base people. The Comedy is unsettling in its realness. Heidecker moves away from the shock-value oddities of Tim and Eric towards the egregious social blunders of Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, another staple of discomfort comedy. Both are barely scripted, detailing events rather than dialogue. The conversation that does arise in this approach makes the discomfort all the more salient. When Larry exits a handicap toilet to find a disabled person waiting outside, there’s no snappy back-and-forth dialogue, just Larry’s mumbled obnoxiousness and the other man’s unfettered rage, leaving plenty of room for uncomfortable interruptions and silences. While David dissolves any chance of resolution in a Curb episode through his misanthropic, self-centered pursuits, Heidecker’s Swanson is even more flippant and while both characterrs are unapologetic, Swanson lacks David’s charm and wit. Swanson is one of the most brutal characters I’ve seen in a long time—he justifies Hitler and jokes about being a rapist while hitting on girls, viciously berates the nurse who changes his dying father’s diapers, and sings a racist song to a taxi driver about not giving him a tip (since there’s no satellite radio where he can listen to ‘black music’). He is joined in the taxi by Eric Wareheim and James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem (an engaging contextual addition—he and Bill Murray are archetypes of the aging hipster). Opportunities for self-reckoning occur repeatedly as the movie goes on, but
Swanson manages to remain unchanged. The film doesn’t sound funny. It sounds pretty awful. There’s a whole branch of reality shows that stem from Candid Camera, in which an unknowing participant is put in an absurd and uncomfortable situation and we casually observe their reaction for entertainment. The discomfort is contained within the scene, and we’re given a true moment of schadenfreude as we laugh at the misfortunes in the show. In discomfort comedy, however, the discomfort is aimed elsewhere—at the viewer. In a show like Curb Your Enthusiasm or a film like The Comedy, we’re not impassively watching an awkward situation. We’re in one, and others’ misfortune definitely does not delight. While The Comedy is very much an indictment of irony as the main mode of life—Swanson treats nothing with sincerity, and the result is a need for increasingly extreme transgressions to combat his desensitization—one cannot appreciate this movie without irony. We have to realize that Swanson’s transgressions are meant not only to offend us, but to stand in for a judgement, inseparable from the film’s discomfort—that irony is a crippling mechanism of privilege. Swanson can only achieve the luxury of distance from reality due to his inherited wealth (from his father) and inherited nonchalance (from his surroundings). He is the sublime realization of a type of asshole to which we’ve become very accustomed. I found myself howling at his absurdity, loving the character as a perfectly realized version of what I and many others unreservedly hate.
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
We become the butt of the joke when watching The Comedy. No wonder so many people walked out at its premiere (and the movie’s trailer suggests the filmmakers were quite proud of such a feat, daring viewers to watch as a test of their endurance). It forces us into a strange tension between wanting to laugh in order to recognize Swanson’s absurdity or cope with the awkwardness, and not being allowed to laugh for fear that we might condone this atrocious behavior. I didn’t feel empathy for the characters that Heidecker berates in the movie for that very reason— he’s so one-dimensionally an asshole that he seems to be shrugged off, and I felt just as assaulted as the characters inside the movie. This displacement of assault—from the character who actually receives it in the story to the audience—is accomplished by the bizarre and twitchy pacing of this genre. Tasha Robinson elaborates on this displacement, of tension as well as assault: “Discomfort-humor shows too often tend to be about the long, uncomfortable pauses and the moments drawn out to the point where the audience is supposed to be debating what they want more—to break and flee, or see the characters break and flee.” Discomfort comedy is all about making the audience a character, and generally not a happy one. I never know whether or not I should recommend comedy of this kind, because when discomfort is aimed at the viewer, so much depends on the context of watching. The feeling ceases to be contained within the characters or the situation, and reaches out of the film to be felt by the viewer;
NOVEMBER 09 2012
the viewing experience becomes unpredictable. AV Club’s Steven Hyden recalls an especially uncomfortable comedic moment while watching Two And A Half Men (a show decidedly not of the discomfort humor genre) with his grandmother, “there was this painfully off-color joke where Sheen contemplated having sex with the pregnant woman, ‘Just because there’s a bun in the oven doesn’t mean I want to butter it,’ Sheen concluded dismissively. It haunts me to this day that my grandmother laughed at a wacky quip about ejaculating on an unborn fetus.” What separates discomfort humor from other dramatic forms that manipulate discomfort is that the discomfort is not contained in the story; it’s the central external product of the film. That’s why I felt a similar effect when watching The 40-Year-Old Virgin with my mother (a terrible idea)—there is a tension external to the film, one that we’re forced to deal with rather than nodding along and empathizing. We feel bad for ourselves. Alverson elaborated on the effect he wanted the audience to feel in an interview with Tribecafilm.com: “Doubt. Confusion. A nagging discomfort. I want people to leave with a new sense of alertness because of those feelings. I think they are very important experiences that are eschewed by most movies and media because they don’t lead to excessive, instantaneous comfort.” While The Comedy is a deft satire of the pitfalls of the ironic lens, a pertinent critique in 2012, the lack of development is an important aspect of its identity as discomfort comedy. We’re given no moment of catharsis as a reward for being so patient
through all the offenses, no development that comments on how awful Swanson is. We have to deal with Swanson’s actions, since nobody in the film does. Perhaps the most brutal scene is when Swanson enters a Brooklyn bar as the only white guy. He proceeds to claim his need to “represent Williamsburg” to a group of black guys. He talks about his respect for “the hood,” how they’re “tough” and “cool” simply because they’re black, and a handful of other offenses. The group casually insults him in response, barely responding to his absurd racism or his desperate attempt to seem cool, as he’s miles beyond incorrigible. Part of the strangeness of this movie is that it seems to ask, what happens when you want to punch someone in the face, but you can’t, and no one else will? While directors often play with this desire to scold a character on screen, it impetus feels all the more visceral when nobody in the film seems to care, so immersed are theyt in their own ironic aversions. In this way, The Comedy and other pieces of discomfort humor can be studies of indignation. It’s an external study, one that results from provocation. The Comedy has two narratives: the detriment of the ironic generation, which the film depicts, and how we deal with such frustration, which the film only suggests. GREG NISSAN B’15
is a kind of staring contest.
ARTS // 12
MUSICAL CHAIRS Textual Improvisation with Nico Muhly by Lizzie Davis // Illustration by Diane Zhou at age 31, nico muhly is already heralded as the premiere composer of his generation. The Providence local has collaborated with artists from Meredith Monk to Sufjan Stevens and Diplo and appears to be just as at home in small experimental music venues like Le Poisson Rouge as in Carnegie Hall. Muhly’s compositions combine his classical Julliard training with the minimalist practice pioneered by his mentor, Phillip Glass, and a strange kind of millennial pop sensibility that gives rise to a sound which is both a result of and definitive of music’s present state. My first taste of Muhly’s work was his 2008 album Mothertongue, a sonically dazzling series of suites layered with explorations of language, identity, and compositional conventions. Within moments of hearing vocalist Abigail Fischer rapidly reciting the alphabet over an escalating, twinkling base of intertwining strings, synths, and drones, I joined the the ranks of Muhly’s acolytes. Since then, Muhly’s released a flurry of incredible, boundary-pushing work including several EPs of dronebased pieces and two operas. When Muhly returned to Providence to participate in a two-day residency at Brown with past collaborator, pianist and Cage-affiliate Bruce Brubaker last month, I had an opportunity to talk to Muhly about contemporary opera, cross-genre collaborations, and the benefits of trying to know everything you possibly can.
THE INDEPENDENT:
I read in an interview with The Believer that you sometimes start off composing a piece by filling bars with words and drawings instead of notes, then build off of that. Do you primarily work straight from vague ideas and feelings to paper while hearing the sounds in your head, or do you ever play out ideas as they come to you?
NICO MUHLY:
I almost always start vague and then zoom in. I’ve found it to be enormously useful to have a kind of itinerary of the piece at hand before I start even worrying about notes and rhythms. One of the dangers I fell into when I was younger was having all these pods of ideas that I would just throw into some order and call it a piece.
INDY:
Is it easy to go back and forth between arranging orchestration for Grizzly Bear and Usher and composing works commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera? NM:
I feel like writing music and arranging music and all of that needs to be as easy as possible, in terms of one’s flexibility to pop around between things. Just as it’s easy to hop on a plane and be somewhere else and get right to work. INDY: What
initially attracted you to writing operas?
Do you think that growing up in Providence affected you musically?
Opera is the kind of last frontier for me—combining all these different things on a stage is an extreme expression of a lot of the musical/artistic concerns and is a giant Olympic exercise in organization.
NM: Yes.
INDY:
INDY:
I had great music all around; I had a teacher, Kevin Sullivan, who, in addition to being classically trained, was involved in the jazz scene around AS220 downtown and was kind of a key figure in my musical development. Also, a lot of my parents’ friends were musicians and artists, so there was always a sense that one could grow up and be a musician without that being something shameful.
NM:
From the perspective of someone who writes very avant-garde works, both musically and in terms of subject matter, what kind of innovations are keeping opera relevant?
you moved to New York City, you traded the downtown Providence scene for working for one of the premiere figures of the famed Downtown music scene, Phillip Glass. What was that like?
Fortunately, I don’t have to worry at all about how my music fits into the context of opera as a whole. There’s something grotesque, I think, about composers thinking about how their music is contextualized. That’s the job of critics. In opera, the music informs everything—it’s the beginning and the end of what you see, and even if the staging works against the music, the music is still the context against which everything else bounces.
NM:
INDY:
INDY: When
Philip is heaven! He is incredibly hard-working, and the main thing I took from him is the ability to be completely selfless about collaborative projects. If something doesn’t work, you throw it out, and if something works, you learn to fight for the work, not just for your own involvement.
NOVEMBER 09 2012
NM:
INDY:
Speaking of forms, during your conversation with Bruce Brubaker about authorship and appropriation in contemporary music, you mentioned how, contrary to what some people assume, having the framework of a commission to compose what feels liberating to you. Do you feel the same way about the framework of the conventions of music theory? Does a deep understanding of music theory impose any sort of limiting framework at all?
NM:
There is nothing to be lost by understanding music theory. I completely and totally reject the idea that “the less you know the better.” It’s no longer cute, I don’t think, especially in the context of a major university, to not be in a constant state of trying to know everything about everything. Even if what you want to physically do isn’t directly relevant to, you know, learning Brucknerian harmony or reading late Henry James or whatever, there’s no reason or excuse not to do it if you have the opportunity to do so. Similarly, there’s no excuse for classical musicians to outright reject pop music as being something wasteful to listen to; it might not make you a better interpreter of Brahms, although I would argue it might, but it will certainly make you an asshole. Which is, of course, not the goal. Moral of the story is that everybody needs to study everything and learn everything, from now until the end of time.
Do you think opera is relevant?
NM:
I think opera is wildly relevant but I don’t know if I have a really organized answer about why. It’s just amazing as a form.
ARTS // 13
JOURNALING An Interview with n+1’s Mark Greif Interview by Drew Dickerson Illustration by Sarah Grimm
in the fall of 2004, the first issue of n+1 was released, a triannual literary magazine featuring essays, criticism, and fiction with editors Mark Greif, Keith Gessen, Chad Harbach, Benjamin Kunkel, and Marco Roth at the helm. They were young. They were and remain, according to Kunkel, “angrier than Dave Eggers and his crowd.” Issue one was titled “Negation” and offered only negative definition. Now in its fourteenth issue, the journal has received blurbs from the likes of Malcolm Gladwell and Jonathan Franzen and has put out a number of small books—the most recent of which, The Trouble is the Banks, is available November 13. The book collects letters from the website Occupy the Boardroom, letters from ordinary citizens to their bank executives detailing their problems and experiences within the financial system. It is well-bound and the order form allows the buyer the option to make a tax-deductible donation. The Independent spoke with Mark Greif over the phone at his New School office. Our conversation began after multiple false-starts. THE INDEPENDENT: The Trouble
is the Banks is the second book n+1 has put out about Occupy Wall Street. I was curious: what is the publication’s relationship or obligation to the movement?
I don’t know if we have an obligation or not. I think that four years ago when Obama was running for president for the first time, people—friends of ours—actually criticized us, saying: “There’s a long historical connection between small magazines and a kind of political stance. And you all, n+1, have been all over the map politically. Maybe on the left, but eccentric in some ways. Here Obama’s running. Here’s your chance to do what your obligation should dictate that you do and get him elected. Endorse him.” Funny, because I think all of us were certainly voting for Obama. But we also had this strong feeling that it wasn’t our obligation as n+1 or as a magazine because speaking well of Obama, and endorsing him as a candidate was something that you could find everywhere else in the world. I guess the reason that Occupy was very exciting right from the first days in Zucotti Park was that we could recognize it as the kind of parts of life that get called ‘political’ that really do interest us. They involve a set of unknowns—possibilities that feel like they have not already been exhausted in what other people already have to say or already know. The thing that both the Occupy Gazette and this book, The Trouble is the Banks, have in common is that each of them, rather than expressing things we think we know, helps us to get answers to things we don’t know. Insofar as The Trouble is the Banks is a book that collects what MARK GREIF:
15 // INTERVIEWS
people want from American democracy whom you never hear from—who don’t get to be in the newspaper, who are not on television, but who are writing these eloquent letters from all over the country—each of them made sense as an n+1 project as something that fulfilled whatever obligations that had been set in our own initial agenda for ourselves. INDY: It seems to me that the strength of projects like Occupy the Boardroom and the “We Are the 99 percent” Tumblr is in the particularity of any one account. But the rhetoric of Occupy—“we are the 99 percent,” at least in that sound-bite—it seems like identity politics are being denied or bracketed. It’s this weird confluence of a lot of different issues. Is there a tension between the categorical unity of Occupy and the individuality of the occupier? MG: I think it’s funny because, generationally, so many of us have been so steeped in identity politics—especially in college. I feel we’re so used to constantly thinking about potential confrontations or confluences of these things that people are surprisingly chill about it. Just as one of the things that marked Occupy was that you could feel the very gentle but very deliberate will of people to hang out in that same place as a common movement who, if they argued details or doctrine, would definitely disagree. In much the same way, I felt like you were in a space where people were so used to thinking about differences of identity or subject-position that they had reached a state of mind or were remarkably calm and gentle about trying to be with other people, who, if pressed, would likely articulate very different backgrounds and identities from which they were coming. And I think that was a hard thing for traditionalists especially to deal with when they wanted particular kinds of public statement from occupiers. Because points of doctrine and the kind of factionalism of doctrinal difference did mark the way that parts of the ’60s ran, for better and for worse. The very fact that people, especially when they looked out to the media, acted so deliberately unconcerned about these matters was disconcerting to a certain set of expectations. INDY: You use the past tense in talking about Occupy. Is The Trouble is the Banks an attempt to narrate a past event or does it treat the movement as ongoing? MG: I have the feeling that, and not happily do I say this, the event feels over. The event of Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement. I don’t know if it will return as something that you can give a date to. It’s certainly true that you see a lot of groups working under different names
who understand themselves to have come out of working groups in Zucotti Park or Oakland or all over the country. With The Trouble is the Banks I think the goal is to capture the sense that the underlying conditions that made people go out and camp out in squares and parks actually haven’t changed very dramatically. The kind of deeper wishes that people have to improve politics in America and also to improve the rules and laws for banks in America have not gone away. They kind of have to continue on their own, to be talked about and have demands made about them, regardless of the vicissitudes of larger scale, more ambitious social movements. I think of The Trouble is the Banks as coming out of the Occupy moment because that’s what made these people who met in Zucotti Park and created the original website ever try to collect these voices from all over the country. But those voices where people are saying: “Look. Here’s why my bank sucks. Here are the things that were done wrong.” They need to be heard right now by the people who are sitting in rooms working out the details of Dodd-Frank implementation. They need to be heard by politicians who have to decide what their priorities are. Probably they need to be heard most of all by the average citizen who feels alone with his or her thoughts. The Brown student who’s like: “Are my parents still the only ones who have an underwater mortgage?” No, these are large scale patterns and experiences that Americans are still having regardless of the success of different movements to speak to them. INDY: Do you think the little magazine or small press is particularly well situated to start these conversations? MG: I
think so. There’s a mystique around the small magazine, that it often has wider effects than its circulation would suggest. I think there’s still truth to the mystique insofar as it’s very inexpensive to do a magazine and it’s very inexpensive nowadays to publish a small book. There is a good world of independent bookstores that will stock it and if people need to hear the words in that book, they’ll buy it. If your goal is to keep certain kinds of thoughts alive that don’t get spoken elsewhere or if your goal is to just find a place for people to say things that everyone must be thinking but are somehow unsayable in the newspapers and publishing houses, then the small magazine and the small book become the only place to get that kind of thinking and conversation going. INDY: Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like n+1 as a magazine and institution is very centered around the academy. I’m calling you at New School right now. All of
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
the founding editors went to Ivy League schools. What sort of perspective does that offer? MG: I think, very explicitly from the beginning, we wanted to try to make a magazine that stood between the university and what gets called “the literary world.” I was a grad student when we started the magazine and I was like, “God. Graduate school is the worst. Really I should be a writer and to do that it seems all I can do is publish book reviews.” Which, at that time, you still could do. The other editors— Keith Gessen, Ben Kunkel, Chad Harbach—they were all working on novels or short stories and thinking about the gap between their lives alone trying to write fiction and the really dignified and grandiose, meaningful visions of the novel that they had learned about in college. That’s the thing: they too could only publish book reviews. It meant this life of a double dissatisfaction. You could do things in the academy, which is definitely where I have my day job and where I’m very happy, or you could do things as an independent novelist—which is where those guys wound up, making enough money to live, although they had to take a lot of other jobs along the way. Yet it felt like the two did not adequately come together in a third place where you wouldn’t have to pretend your ideas only came from some new book or record that you were reviewing and you wouldn’t have to do these endless, redundant literature reviews like in academia and you also wouldn’t have to suffer the journalistic or fictional fate of not getting to say something titanic. So I think you’re absolutely right. The university creeps in in certain ways. But the goal, originally, was to have it be suspended between these two worlds. INDY: Would
you describe n+1 as a young person’s maga-
zine? MG: It’s embarrassing for me to describe it as a young person’s magazine because now I’m old. But the answer is definitely yes. I think that if I can say it without embarrassment or fakery it’s because there’s been an effort to try to hand it to younger editors. People who were formerly our interns. And also I guess it always had the young person’s vision on an insistence on the new and a kind of generational revolt, or generational overthrow whenever people became too settled as writer or thinkers, in a kind of narrow definition of what art counted, what phenomena mattered. That consciousness of a young people’s magazine, whatever it would be, always cut against a kind of wish, right from the beginning, that a certain generational continuity be restored in the ways that people had fun or the ways that people had fun for nerds. Intellectuals’ fun.
NOVEMBER 09 2012
Talking about books and ideas. I remember when I was still in college, one of the best things that ever happened to me was someone took me to a Paris Review party. Not that I was a huge fan of the Paris Review. But, as it turned out, I was really a fan of their parties. What struck me was: “Oh my God. I’m going to see actual writers. I’m going to see actual literary people.” Here was George Plimpton and here was Norman Mailer and here was a crowd of people and they seem to really enjoy getting 20-year-olds drunk. They actually had this aesthetic of intellectual hospitality where, when new people showed up in New York like me, they felt it was their obligation to let them come to a party and hang out. But I said, “All of these people are like 80 years old. They belong to a world we lionize, these small magazines of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s but, curiously, they’re still doing it. And they really should be moving around with walkers and canes, if they’re not already. How come the people who are 40 aren’t doing this? What happened to those intervening layers?” This sounds particularly bizarre, but I think there was ambition from the earliest days to create a place that would still be having parties and still be having conversations and times when people would be sitting around a table that would still welcome the 20-year-old who showed up in New York and wanted to talk about ideas. INDY: As I understand it, the Paris Review of today is relatively young. MG: I guess I would be more inclined to say that the rejuvenation, in the literal sense, of the Paris Review is a real event. It’s something really particular. It really happened because Lorin Stein took over there. The whole group there is of people who are a lot closer to our heart or beliefs at n+1 and what a magazine like this can do. And Lorin himself is somebody who was always a kind of collaborator in another world. He used to be at FSG (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) when we were trying to figure all this stuff out too. I remember Keith, Lorin, and I would try to figure out how n+1 could ever publish books at FSG. And it seemed like this impossible task. But it was fun. That’s what you do. You sit around saying: “This is impossible. How are we going to do it?” I do think something really particular has happened. I look around and you see the newly revived Paris Review and you see all these younger people with whom one often both likes and disagrees with. I often disagree with their vision of parts of literary life. But I like them.
INDY: What
parts?
MG: Well
it’s funny because the Paris Review has always had a vision of literature—and it’s one that I think the new Paris Review sustains—which is focused on literature as a kind of autonomous sphere and art as something that may make life worth living, I believe that too, but needs to be kept more independent from criticism and more independent from the flow of things we think of as non-fictional. I think n+1 is more devoted to trying to figure out the ties and effects back and forth between the world of art and all the other things that bother you. And it feels like you see this aesthetic autonomy sometimes extended to publication itself and everything becomes hyper-precious. Do you guys still exist in as an antagonistic relationship with the McSweeney’s publishing empire as you used to? INDY:
MG: I feel as a point of honor I should maintain our antagonism. Because actually, even sometimes when you like the people, there is something really valuable to keeping real disagreements alive. If they’re real. Kind of the way we all think, certainly the way I find myself thinking, is through alternatives and getting to look at the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and going: “Well…clearly the Beatles got it right about this, but the Rolling Stones got it right about that.” The more people seriously mark out divisions, the better the world works and advances a little bit. So yes, I would maintain my very strong antagonism to the McSweeney’s project even though, The Believer especially has been a place where a lot of our younger writers and interns will publish pieces that are great. And it’s certainly the case that even I will pick up The Believer and read pieces from time to time. Yet I do think their orientation is still different from ours.
INTERVIEWS // 16
ONCE A HOUSE IS BUILT BY NICK GOMEZ-HALL ILLUSTRATION BY ADRIANA GALLO
Once a house is built, the idea is that it’s finished. Most houses get lived in for a while and then just sit there getting more and more run down until eventually everyone just gives up and moves to Arizona. I am a married man now, but before, I used to be a carpenter. I built small houses for people who said their houses were too big, and big houses for people who said their houses were too small. Sometimes people with medium houses would come to my workshop to talk to me, but before they could say anything I would say, “No, your house is the right size.” The housing business is a hard one. You can be a fine carpenter but things still might not work out. That was the case for me. The wind was always just so much stronger than my work. I spent hours and hours on roofs that were blown away by chance gusts, tiles that cracked under a few heavy steps, pipes that burst under just a little too much pressure. I dealt with the inevitable death of my houses in different ways. At first, I tried to take control. I decided that
17 // LITERARY
every time I completed a new portion of a house, from the smallest cabinet to the most elaborate staircase, I would engrave on it, in small lower case letters, a short note about the way that it would eventually fall apart. On the inside left wall of a brick mantle, a tornado, after just eighteen months of infrequent use. The ornate wall moldings of a master bedroom, scratched by cats, and then a fire; what a shame. French doors connecting the living room to the formal dining room, windows broken by children, wood splintered and fallen into neglect. I continued this for some time, hoping that predicting my work’s eventual death, accurately or not, would help me let go, would allow me to build without inhibition or anxiety. I thought that knowing how my houses would fall apart would make that one moment when I finished the last bit of paint trim and stepped back to take it all in, to gaze upon a completed house in all its glory, perfectly intact, would make that one moment that much better. But it never did. I found myself doing poor work on purpose, cutting corners on construction, ignoring glaring stylistic flaws. I reasoned that if it wasn’t going to last forever then there was little point in trying.
Eventually, I stopped building houses altogether. As I mentioned before, I met a girl and we got married. I thought having someone else around would keep my mind off of houses, and it did for a while. But lately, I’ve started to sneak out at nighttime and revisit the sites of all my old houses. The stately Victorians, the simple cottages, the narrow Brownstones. They’re all dilapidated and empty, abandoned by sad families who’ve moved on to Arizona. I walk through my old houses with the coldest feeling in my throat, noticing every scuff, every rupture, every hole, every crack, and every burn, until I just can’t take it anymore. I gather all the broken appliances and worn pieces of furniture that have been left behind and take them out to the backyard. I find toaster ovens, couches, toilets, mirrors, rugs, televisions, desks, and refrigerators, and I pile them up in the dirt yard as high as they’ll go. When there is absolutely nothing left inside the house, I strike a small match and I light the pile on fire. Sometimes I stay through the night and into the early morning, watching the flames climb high into the sky and then sink slowly back to the ground.
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
salon: sustainable design of the future 5–7pm // athenaeum (benefit st) better world by design co-founder and ted fellow tino chow in conversation with kipp bradford. bwbd is a collaborative platform to encourage the free sharing of ideas across disciplines and professional levels.
jon cohrs lecture 6:30pm // cit 103 (risd) a ‘reframing the real’ research group lecture by the brooklyn-based visual artist. cohrs employs humor & absurdity in his public engagement, site-specific interventions. his recent work includes omg i’m on tv (an analog pirate tv station) & the spice trade expedition (a film about artificial flavoring).
precious knowledge: film screening 6:30pm // libertalia (280 broadway st) part of libertalia & the latin american student organization at r.i.c.’s november film/discussion series. latino identity in the context of class struggle across borders, cultures, & communities. translation available for the discussions after the films.
megadeth 8:30pm // lupo’s // $44 ha. it’s metal’s favorite strawberry blond. doors at 7:30.
ri historical society: annual book sale 10am–3pm // 110 benevolent st. hundreds of books. come & get them.
italian zombie double feature 7pm // granoff center (brown) // $10 arkham film society presents a “trash filled night of film.” includes “a crazy trailer show.” who wrote this advert?
bach to the future 9pm–7am // manning chapel (brown) sakiko curates an evening of revisionist baroque. it’s everyone i’ve ever wanted to make out with in the same room, making shit. because the first erotic filmic moment you (read: i) ever had was hearing the tocatta to the undulating lines and divine curvature of french horns in fantasia’s opening sequence.
ami dang, run dmt, father finger 10pm // dungeon c (olneyville) // $ (b)ach, lieber! providence does it again (namely has multiple sonic gigs happening at once that make my heart pant). father finger is candied vocals, reverberating babe-like over dark synth grooves. don’t know too too much about the others. & don’t care. call me ishmael. and this my white whale.
family see + sketch: the poetics of nature 2pm // risd museum families enjoy a close look at a work of art together (today, thomas cole’s “genesee scenery”) through lively discussion, followed by sketching and activities in the galleries. all materials provided. talks are 30 minutes; ages 6+ with adult companion. free.
angel olsen, high aura’d, katie miller 7pm // 186 carpenter st. gallery angel olsen has some unreal pipes. protegée of fellow pipester, bonnie prince billy. high aura’d has a new record and lake effect snow tropes. katie miller is everyone’s favorite farmer. who also makes sound. yeah!
the adventures of robinhood (1938) 1pm // cable car cinema // $5 tots, $7 adults close to the 75th anniversary of its release and yet still the most exhilarating version of the legend committed to film. errol flynn defines megababe charisma. good for the kiddos to learn about. part of the providence children’s film festival.
in the know? email listtheindy@gmail.com this da y in lis tery 1888 mary ja ne kelly , jack t ripper’s he last kn own vic is foun tim, d on h er bed.
salon: dress & the dandy in proust 5–7pm // athenaeum (benefit st) professor of clothing & textiles at bard, michele majer talks in the first installment of proustfest. “dandyism is not...excessive delight in...material elegance.” come hear how this unfolds (har) in proust.
as220 industries open house 6–7:30pm // mercantile (131 washington st) come meet the folks who use it & ask questions. maybe you want to be a member!? includes orientations to the various spaces (printshop, 3d printing/laser cutting lab).
coalition to defend public education 7-10pm // libertalia (280 broadway st) come to the meeting. it matters a lot. hosted by providence’s friendly anarchists. same time/place tomorrow for a weekly potluck.
experimenting in nature’s laboratory: viollet-le-duc on mont blanc 1:10pm // b.e.b. (231 south main st) a risd-sponsored lecture on science paradigms and built space by professor of architecture and design at university of michigan’s taubman college, amy kulper.
brew your own mead 5pm // lippitt park farmer’s market learn the intricacies of brewing your own local honeywine. hosted by basement brewhaus. with tasting events to follow in december & january.
action speaks: fdr’s 2nd bill of rights 5:30–7pm // as220 for this week’s installment of the panel-radio show, marc levitt talks about whether the gov’t can/should guarantee economic security. recently, levitt has come under scrutiny for racist/patriarchal journalism. come if you have an interest in (journalistic) ethics.
panel with renowned thriller writers 6:30pm // salomon 101 (brown) huh? goosebumps! featuring steve berry, david baldacci, nelson demille, lsa gardner, and r.l. stine. book signing & reception to follow.
fall dance concert 8pm // ashamu studio (77 waterman st) // $ a series of short dances choreographed by various student dance groups. $15 for adults, $12 for seniors, $7 for students/staff/ faculty, $5 general admission floor seating. also 8pm friday/saturday; 2pm sunday.
this is gruesome but it’s working 7–9pm // list art center (floor 2) closing reception for the lovely jess daniels’ senior art show. drawings and fabric-based sculpture. stitches on stitches on stitches.
noose, taboo, russian tsarlag, timeghost 9pm // dusk (301 harris) //$5 tsarlag is back & i’m slavering. a curatorial treat by the gent whose mouth traffic goes: metal in/audio out. get ready for weirdo acapella, textile erotics, bent light, & screamcentric metal. all money goes to the artists, not the jerks at dusk.