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in Review 2 Week david adler & barry elkinton

FEATURES

en PB MV

NEWS

FROM THE EDITORS Zosimus. Gelasius. Peagius. Adeodatus. The pope’s name says a lot about his agenda, his relation to the Church’s tradition. Will he be a reformer? A conservative? An alien? A Peanuts character? (see: Pope Linus). The most popular papal name is John, with 21. Unfortunately, only one pope was named Hormisdas. 13 chose the name Innocent. A bit defensive, guys.

Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was elected on Wednesday as the new pope of the Catholic Church.

Apparently my resume seemed inadequate. I have experience with comically large hats and male pattern baldness, but peeking out of tiny windows and shaking my jowls over St. Peter’s Square is a weak spot of mine. Bergoglio chose Francis (the first) as his moniker, quite a stretch from his Argentinian name. It’s been heralded as a groundbreaking decision due to St. Francis’s untouchable status. Others are confused as to why this is less groundbreaking than Pope Sisinnius, the William Henry Harrison of popes, whose name was “whack as shit” according to one 8th century layman. What would your papal name be? Conon? Formosus? Bono?

Pope John II started the tradition in 533, abandoning his birth name of Mercurius. Mercurius. He abandoned the name Mercurius! He’s definitely the kind of guy who would tuck his gut deep into the waist of his trousers, belt over belly button. Offer him a glass of Pinot Noir at a holiday party and he’ll say, “Oh Heavens, no. My bladder isn’t much larger than an acorn and to be perfectly forthright, I’d like to get home in one piece tonight. I’’ll save it for a consubstantial moment, but may the good Lord thank you for your kindness!” It is helpful to imagine all popes at holiday parties.— GN

EPHEMERA

9 13

1,000 Words

emma janaskie & kate van brocklin

Zombis

doreen st. felix

SPORTS 12

E.S.P.N-e-thing parker brothers

ARTS 11 16

Joy Stick

milan koerner-safrata

Pepperoni Cowboy nino mora

SCIENCE the Drill 8 Here’s marcel bertsch-gout Impact 15 Deep becca millstein

LITERARY Gontran-Damas 17 Leon benson tucker

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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

18 Crackparty sarah harrison

WEEK

IN THE

FUTURE “The Future isn’t what it used to be.”

by David Adler & Barry Elkinton Illustration by Nino Mora

(YOUR) MISSION TO MARS

THE FUTURE WILL BE WORN

private finances will be key to the future of space exploration. We’ve known that for a while now. National governments just don’t have the bankroll these days, and rich dudes really seem to like launching things into space. It’s kind of like owning an ice hockey team, but with rockets.

What we didn’t know, but probably should have guessed, is that reality television will be along for the ride. At least that’s the idea behind Mars One, a Dutch organization planning to send four astronauts on a televised one-way trip to Mars by 2023. The plan is simple: by creating a massive international media spectacle, kind of like the Olympics, the group hopes to raise enough money for the mission.

According to the organization’s website, every step of the process, “from astronaut selection to training, from lift-off to landing” will be put on television. Viewers around the world will get to vote on which astronauts get selected. Once there, the astronauts will be there for good— regular shipments of supplies will be provided— while their lives are continuously broadcast back to Earth.

As always, there are the naysayers. In December, Wired gave the project a 2 out of 10 on its Wired Science Private Space Company Plausibility Score, citing doubts about whether reality television can raise the billions of dollars required to finance the mission. Then there’s the issue of technology. Granted, the one-way aspect makes things a whole lot easier; we’ve gotten pretty good at landing things on Mars— it’s the whole getting back to Earth thing that everybody wants to avoid.

Still, even if Mars One dodges that headache, the prospect of keeping four humans alive on Mars indefinitely remains a tricky matter. Sure, they can live in their landing vehicle, and yes, supply drops are hypothetically possible, but the margin for error still seems pretty slim.

In recent months, though, the project has been gaining steam. In late January the first round of investors and sponsors was announced. A few million down, a couple billion to go. Then, on March 11, the group announced it had awarded its first technology contract to Paragon Space Development, who will be working on life support systems for the project. This seems like an important first step.

Technological and monetary questions aside, all that really remains is astronaut selection. In February, a Huffington Post poll found that seven percent of Americans would volunteer for a one-way trip to Mars, so there should be plenty of willing candidates. The group says that 1,000 people have already applied. And they’re not looking for specialized knowledge—the selected astronauts will get eight years of training—but rather just general awesomeness, with a special emphasis on the capacity for self-reflection. So think about applying, or, at the very least, block out your Tuesday evenings for the next decade. 8pm EST, be there! –BE

back in 1946, detective dick tracy dragged his trench coat through Chicago’s dark alleyways and whispered through the side of his mouth into his 2-Way Wrist Radio: “HEY CHIEF, BETTER SEND OVER THE EXAMINER AND THE PHOTOG.” Two decades later, in the pilot for the television show, the 2-Way Wrist Radio became the 2-Way Wrist TV; the Chief ’s face was just one button away. But, alas, the show was never picked up, and Tracy’s watch became just one of the many aspirational technologies of the mid-century, the stuff of science fiction and comic strips. Flying cars and jetpacks and house-cleaning robots—anachronisms all. But, turns out, Dick Tracy is back. * * * Breaking: On wrists and noses and eyeballs and torsos, the future will be worn.

ABI Research announced earlier this month that there will be 485 million annual purchases of wearable computing devices by 2015. Mobile technology is yesterday; welcome the rise of corporeal technology.

MARCH 15 2013

Wear your calories: (i) Jennifer Darmour’s Move—a pilates shirt that vibrates at the hips and shoul ders when you are in the wrong body position. Redefining the word “niche,” wear the Move to work for a more interesting day. (ii) Oakley’s Airwave Ski Goggles—built-in GPS, enhanced display of terrain, connects right to the iPhone for urgent email queries. Remember: these are for the slopes only.

Wear your health: (i) Frog Design’s Airwaves—a pollution mask that filters air while measuring its quality to generate data on global air conditions. (ii) Second Sight’s Argus II—mount a tiny video camera on a pair of glasses and implant a microelectrode onto the eye to give blind patients color and move ment. Our very first (USDA approved) bionic eye.

Clearly, wearable tech is finding its identity somewhere between assistance and indulgence. The New York Time’s application on Google’s Glass headset flashes breaking headlines depending how you tilt your head. Apple’s upcoming “smart watch” is an iPhone on your wrist, the 2-Way Wrist revival.

All of it is pretty cyborg-y, or, at least, a stride toward it. Clunking around, metal and flesh, flesh and metal. But let’s not forget about the Dick Tracy tragedy—we all certainly thought we would be riding Segways by now, didn’t we? Turns out, some shit we just don’t need, and most of it, really, is too ugly to wear.—DA

NEWS

02

REMNANTS Preserving National Bodies

by Mimi Dwyer Illustration by Robert Sandler hugo chavez is dead. Cancer took him, finally, after months away from his country, after surgeries in Cuba, after the obligatory press photos—Chávez reading the late-edition newspaper, Chávez bald, Chávez sick, yes, but still alive, with the date to prove it, flanked by his daughters, a smile on his face.

Hugo Chávez is dead, but he is not dead. The last of his prolific Tweets reads, “I go on, anchored in Christ and confident in my doctors and nurses. Towards victory always!!

We will live on and we will overcome!!!” The punctuation is characteristic; so is the sentiment. The man was nothing if not vivacious. He extemporized for hours, surprised his supporters with fully furnished apartments. On his weekly state-televised program, Alo Presidente, Chávez belted folk songs on the good days and berated his cabinet members into tearful submission on the bad.

Hugo Chávez is dead, but his body remains. Since his passing on March 5, two million have paid their respects to his corpse at the Venezuelan military academy. At his funeral his successor and second-in-command, Nicolas Maduro, laid a replica of Simón Bolívar’s sword over his casket as thousands of mourners looked on. Bolivian president and admirer Evo

03 NEWS

Morales was in attendance; so was Sean Penn. Mahmoud Ahmadenijad clasped the hands of Chávez’s grieving mother as Maduro led the crowd in chanting Chávez’s name.

Commentators wondered whether Maduro could take the helm of a regime so dependent on its cult of personality. In some ways, he doesn’t need to—in a televised eulogy, Maduro promised that Chávez’s body would be “surrounded by crystal glass forever.” He will be embalmed and put on public display for as long as his flesh permits. In the tradition of Vladimir Lenin and Ho Chi Minh and Eva Perón and Kim Jong-Il, the Venezuelan populist will be immortalized in death for all to see.

The death of a despot should be cause for celebration, the death of a hero and luminary a national trauma. Hugo Chávez was neither of those things. He antagonized the US and mounted a radically leftist, perhaps antiquated platform for his people—but he was no ruthless despot.

In some ways it’s easier with the villains—rulers like Idi Amin, the sadistic Ugandan absolutist, are laid to rest in secretive, ill-attended funerals, their bodies hidden in unmarked plots or else destroyed. Saddam Hussein was hanged in a closed room on an American military base called Camp Justice; you can hear his neck snap in the YouTube footage. In the hours

after Muammar Gaddafi’s assassination, his corpse lay supine and mauled on display in a meat shop, where onlookers kicked it and spat on it. Eventually, two appointees of the new Libyan regime buried the dictator and his son in a classified desert location, where they melt into the earth.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, the adage goes—don’t speak ill of the dead. Figures like Chávez pass, and their threats are nullified. This is a man who called Gaddafi a “revolutionary and martyr” and fed state oil money into his election campaigns.

Venezuela’s poor loved him fervently though he led the country into food shortages, electricity rations, and rampant inflation.

But he also decreased the country’s inequality, spoke for the marginalized—his legacy is ambiguous. Besides, even the worst tyrants soften in memory, grow into heroes, especially in countries nostalgic for better days. Their funerals take the first step towards writing—or revising—their histories.

So how does a country inter the remains of leaders who marred its soil and murdered its people? How does it commemorate the ones who lifted it up and taught it to be proud? And what becomes of the bodies of those who did both?

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

vladimir lenin

Died 21 January 1924 Buried 28 January 1924 Lenin was, for the most part, gone long before he died. After a 1918 assassination attempt he suffered a series of strokes that left him paralyzed and bedridden. His role in the Soviet government declined; he was a figurehead and symbol, a fallen icon in a wheelchair. He deteriorated. Rumors circulated— he had syphilis, he’d been poisoned. Just before he passed, he requested that no memorials be erected in his honor. Lenin wanted to enter the earth like a common man.

But his government did not oblige. At the funeral, mourners passed through the streets in a subzero processional, tears freezing on their faces. Maybe that’s why the Russian cosmists, who believed in the immortal human and the eternal power of the body, clamored to cryogenically preserve Lenin for future resurrection. Preparations were made. The requisite equipment was imported. But the government didn’t go through with it.

Instead, Soviet neuroscientists removed Lenin’s brain to examine it and isolate the source of his genius. The lead morphologist in the case, Oskar Vogt, determined that the pyramidal neurons in the third layer of Lenin’s cerebral cortex were abnormally large and hence responsible for his brilliance.

The government had its doubts.

Lenin’s body was embalmed and placed on display in a bulletproof glass sarcophagus coffin in Moscow’s Red Square, where it remains today. Periodically, to preserve the taut skin of his sleeping face, he’s immersed in a glass bathtub filled with embalming fluid for a month. His pyramided mausoleum is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Visitors have bombed it twice.

This summer, more than twenty years after the fall of Soviet communism, culture minister Vladimir Medinsky mounted a campaign to take Lenin’s body off display and entomb it for good. According to some polls, less than half of the Russian population wants to keep the memorial in operation. “Maybe, indeed,” Medinksy said, “many things in our life would symbolically change for the better after this.”

For now, the leader’s body lies bathed in pink light in a deep internal chamber, lines of viewers passing through, leaving flowers.

benito mussolini

Died 28 April 1945 Buried 2 September 1957 When his regime finally fell, Benito Mussolini was executed by firing squad alongside his mistress. They were loaded into a truck and discarded in a Milan plaza amidst a heap of other bodies. The people smashed their faces in, defiled their bodies, assailed them with bullets. Partisans strung them up by their toes on meat hooks. They hung there all night, until the government yielded to the pleas of a horrified archbishop and placed the couple in a state morgue. By that point, The New York Times reported, Mussolini’s body had become “a shrunken, ruined, virtually shapeless thing.”

Mussolini was deposited in a common grave, no fanfare, and remained there for a year until a group of fascists exhumed his body in the dead of night. “Il Duce is again among us,” read a letter left with the open coffin. “The time will come in which Benito Mussolini…will parade through the streets of Italy, and all the roses of the world… will not be enough to give extreme greetings of the country to this great son.” The fascists placed his body in a 40” by 24” trunk, too small for any human that hadn’t been desecrated, mangled. They shuttled it from convents to monasteries around the country with the aid of priests sympathetic to the cause.

When Italian authorities recovered the body they made its new resting place a national secret. Fearing an uprising, they told his family that the body would be returned “in due time.”

Its location during those years remains a mystery.

In 1957, the government exhumed Mussolini once more, presented his corpse to his pleading wife. His family gave him a Catholic funeral in the stone tomb he’d built for himself, 160 miles north of Rome. Italian newspapers ignored the reburial, and, The New York Times reported, “government quarters

MARCH 15 2013

voiced confidence that the Neo-fascist emotionalism would soon fade and that no ‘Napoleonic’ myth was in the making.”

The government quarters were wrong. Today, far-right politics hold increasing sway in Italy. Mussolini’s face graces wine bottles and t-shirts and his grave draws huge swaths of tourists, between 80,000 and 100,000 people annually. A fascist Catholic priest gives sermons there every day.

eva perón

Died 26 July 1952 Buried 10 August 1952 Eva Perón never ruled Argentina. She was its First Lady, the wife of Juan Perón, the country’s military president or its dictator, depending whom you asked.

Evita was a B-Movie star gone politician who rose from nothing to the most powerful woman in Argentina, maybe Latin America. She was ruthless. She was beloved.

She succumbed to cancer at age 33. Twelve people died and two thousand were injured in her fourteen-day military processional, a ceremony previously reserved for presidents.

Even now, the anniversary of Evita’s death is a national day of mourning and an eternal flame burns for her in Buenos Aires— shortly after her death, Argentina appointed Perón the Spiritual Leader of the Nation, a position created especially for her, and which she holds in perpetuity.

So she would not leave them, so she would live forever, or so they could cling to their power without her vibrancy and charisma, the Peronists removed the blood from Evita’s body and replaced it with glycerin. She was embalmed and covered with a hard plastic shell; plans were drawn up to make a memorial larger than the Statue of Liberty. But before its completion, a military coup overthrew the Perón government and Juan fled, leaving his wife’s body behind. The junta stripped her body from the government office where it had been displayed. They made it a crime to utter her name, even to hold a funeral image of her pale countenance. In secret, Argentines would pray to her body for its numinous curative powers.

The junta tried to hide her body, stuffed it in the drabbest of offices, no windows, underground, but somehow the people always found it. Flowers and candles abounded, like they sensed her, like she spoke to them.

Eventually, the wary and exasperated junta shipped her to Milan, buried her secretly under a false name. Pope Pius XII read her burial rites. For sixteen years she moldered there, her encasement damaged but her frail skin intact. When they found her, she’d only decomposed a little. Juan Perón, exiled in Madrid, rejoiced. They were reunited. She would live with him in his mansion. So durable was Evita’s encasement, in fact, that Juan would pack her corpse with him on trips for company and inspiration.

When Juan returned to Argentina in 1973, though, he brought his new wife instead of his old. The new woman, Isabel, would be president one day. She’d been a nightclub dancer, a nobody, like Evita. She had none of her charm and all of her ambition.

When Juan died a few months later she summoned the corpse from Europe. She needed it. In the palace she would stand over the body for hours, eyes closed, hands raised, absorbing her power.

mao zedong

Died 9 September 1976 Buried 18 September 1976 Chairman Mao’s body crumbled while he still lived inside it.

His heart failed, his lungs collapsed. He could barely eke out his own urine. Jiang Qing, his fourth wife, refused to heed doctors’ orders as he lay on his deathbed. She insisted he be turned to his right side, though they said he could not breathe that way. He turned, grew blue. His organs failed.

Chinese tradition holds that leaders should be cremated immediately after their deaths. The leader of Red China should have been sprinkled back into the loam—news outlets waited for the official announcement. But something was different with Mao.

The first sentences of his eulogy, given by prime minister Hua Kuo-feng, emphasized the centrality of Mao’s body to his legacy: “Chairman Mao devoted his whole life to and is linked by flesh-and-blood ties with the masses of the people,” he said.

The doctors botched the embalmment job. Mao’s face swelled, distorted by formaldehyde. An emergency plastic surgery corrected the features before the leader went on display in his Tianamen Square mausoleum, styled off of Lenin’s tomb.

But four years after the burial, China’s new reformist government issued a decree prohibiting the erection of any new memorials to Mao. “There have been too many portraits, quotations and poems of Chairman Mao in public places. This number is lacking in dignity,” it read. It wanted to convert his countless memorials into public service buildings.

It didn’t. He remains there, corrective, propped, though murmurs circulate that he’s made of wax.

augusto pinochet

Died 10 December 2006 Buried 12 December 2006 Chilean despot Augusto Pinochet died awaiting trial for the atrocities committed by his government. He was old and decrepit and Chileans clamored for his blood—“We are really sorry he escaped without punishment,” one former prisoner told The Calgary Times, speaking from a mouth left mostly toothless by torture.

Chile denied Pinochet a state-sanctioned funeral, but the Military Academy of Santiago issued him a massive sendoff.

Twenty thousand attended the service, filed past his body.

Some fainted out of grief, some from relief. The coffin had a plexiglass window onto the dictator’s face—he was really in the box.

A boy named Francisco Prats waited hours to see him.

Prats’ grandfather had been head of the military in the Allende government that Pinochet overthrew in 1973. Pinochet exiled Prats’ grandfather to Argentina, let him live there for a year, cowering, then blew his body to pieces with a car bomb in broad daylight on a Buenos Aires street.

Prats sidled up to the body, looked at its closed eyes. Then, he spit on its face.

Chaos ensued. Guards grabbed Prats. Pinochet’s son gave a furious and uncomfortable eulogy in his father’s defense.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Don’t speak ill of the dead. The funeral ended, Pinochet was helicoptered away and cremated in private, where no one could mar his tomb. They say that’s what Pinochet’s secret police did with the bodies of those he murdered: burned them, then sprinkled them from helicopters over the earth. The country is a gravesite. The bodies are lost, buried namelessly or turned to dust.

Raul Zurita, the Chilean poet, writes of the Atacama Desert where Pinochet held his prisoners, the desert that they never left: Speak of the whistle of Atacama the wind erases like snow the color of that plain —————————————————————— A postscript: in Miami, Fidel Castro has died every few weeks since he took power in 1959. The detractors to his revolution— conservative Cuban emigrants, the deposed elite—can’t wait for him to die. He is always dying. He is not dead, and for that reason, a generation of Cubans refuse to return to their home country, even to visit. Their land is no longer their own. They’ve been extracted from the national body, an absence left in their stead. What does the absence of a people mean to the presence of a corpse? And what of a body that refuses to become one?

“I die tomorrow and my influence may actually increase,” Castro told Ignacio Ramonet, the coauthor of his autobiography, in 2005. “I may be carried around like El Cid—even after he was dead his men carried him around on his horse, winning battles.”

MIMI DWYER B’13 stood over the body for hours.

NEWS

04

Classical Education One Teacher’s Approach

a parent calls anna to ask about her daughter’s D in 10th grade English. Anna explains that what Jasmine* turned in was OK, but that she mostly didn’t turn things in. Between bites of carrot, Anna responds; “Oh, she failed most of her classes?

That’s too bad. She’s a nice girl. What happened?” Jasmine’s mom blames their puppy. “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

Jasmine’s mom insists, she wants to take the puppy back. “Well, if you really think it’s such a distraction. You know her best.”

Anna decides to arrange a different kind of intervention.

She wants to sit Jasmine down with her mom, teachers, and guidance counselor so they can devise some short- and longterm goals. But at her computer, Anna can’t figure out the school’s new email client. “Fuck this. Why does this have to be so fucking complicated? I’m just trying to do my job. It’s not right to take away the puppy, right?” She calls me over to help.

“No, no, no, I already tried that. Oh maybe it’s this button— no? Fuck. I bet she loves that puppy.” anna has been teaching for fifteen years. She spent a couple of them at the American School in Madrid, but mostly she’s taught here in Providence.

Anna’s now in her fifth year at Classical, one of three public high schools on Westminster Street. It’s the best in the city, and students are tested before being admitted. Pick any metric. Its four-year graduation rate (98 percent) far outstrips citywide and state averages (66 percent, 77 percent). On the standardized test administered to 11th graders across New England, 98 percent of students at Classical scored proficient in reading last year, 49 percent in math, and 74 percent in writing. Compared to students in the rest of Providence, who are kneecapped by the test (56 percent reading, 12 percent math, 36 percent writing), this is huge.

Classical even ranked #652 on US News & World Report’s 2012 list of best public high schools nationwide, second in the state only to Barrington. But while Barrington ranks as one of the least diverse schools in RI (99.4 percent white), Classical tops the chart as the state’s most diverse (42.3 percent Hispanic, 26.5 percent white, 18.4 percent Black and 10.5 percent Asian).

Barrington, too, has high property taxes that lavishly fund its schools, whereas a majority of Classical students qualify for free and reduced price meals, which marks their family incomes at or below 130% of the federal poverty line.

I sat in on some of Anna’s English classes during the fall. Her students dabbled in new genres and wrestled with phrases like “dominant ideology.” She advertised local spoken word events, passed out applications for summer writing conferences, and planned trips to the theater. They dissected Lana Wachowski’s speech about transgenderism. They had debates about Arizona’s Mexican-American studies controversy and race-based affirmative action.

When I remark at her stamina, Anna explains it’s part of her strategy. Establishing standards early on, where “you’re commenting a lot on essays, you’re checking homework. And then you kind of let up. There’s no way I can all year long read essays or homework that closely. But they have to believe it.”

Students are genearlly bright and determined, but Classical is the exception, not the rule. Anna says, “At other schools, kids are coming mad or aren’t always coming. And then there’s discipline, which is a real problem, like kids saying ‘fuck you’ to your face. That doesn’t happen here.”

Anna doesn’t really care, then, about all the studies that suggest a highly qualified teacher can move grade-level mountains. The problem in comprehensive public schools is poverty: “We need to address why kids are hungry and help them with the fucked up shit that’s happening at home.”

Though her students consistently pass the AP, Anna knows she’s not another made-for-TV movie. “When I started teaching at [Oliver Hazard] Perry Middle School in the Hartford Projects,” she remembers. “I cried like every day out of frustration that I couldn’t get anything done. Like, there was this fight, and I saw it was going to happen, and I said, ‘Run.’ Could you imagine that— telling a kid to run?”

Even at Classical, Anna has a particular style of classroom

by Kurt Ostrow

Illustrated by Lizzie Davis management that doesn’t work for everyone. It seems as if she’s trying to facilitate a college seminar. She doesn’t ask students to quiet down; she starts talking, and the kids fall in line. She has to ring a bell or hiss a little, but not often. She doesn’t repeat or reformulate what kids volunteer, no matter if they’re hard to hear. And Anna’s remarkably lax about cell phones: I often see kids text, but she rarely calls them out on it. one sunday night in October, I agree to help Anna grade journal assignments. We meet in the lobby of a Brown library.

She lugs in two crates stacked with marble notebooks. All quarter, her AP students had to write critical responses to news articles; they pasted the articles and then analyzed them for both speaker-purpose-audience and ethos-pathos-logos. “We want to get through all these tonight,” she tells me, “so just make sure they have the right number of entries and then write one comment on the entry they starred. If they didn’t star one, too bad.”

In her AP classes, Anna assigns the journals and six essays in the first quarter alone, a marathon for her and her students.

This year she also dared her creative writing class to write 10,000-word novels. Things start to add up: “I have 60 MLK essays to read and their stupid fucking novels, but the thing is that they’re really good. I tried to whip through them, but I got through 3 of 16 because they’re really, really good.” Working at Classical, as her refrain goes, means “the easiest days but the hardest nights.”

I worry some of the students’ grammar isn’t where it should be, especially for 11th graders at Classical. “Yeah, it’s sad, isn’t it? But what can I do besides write ‘see me’ on their papers and try to talk some of it out? That’s not enough. They obviously need intensive one-on-one attention the school can’t afford and I don’t have time for. And they need to be reading a shitton on their own because that’s the only way you get better at writing. But they’re not, and how do you get them to?” These aren’t rhetorical questions, but I don’t have answers. Anna can’t possibly make up for 10 years of inadequate, underfunded schooling in one—even with bright, capable students.

After a couple of hours, we finish up, and she thanks me for helping out. When I say it was fun, she rolls her eyes. We’ve looked at too many sloppy definitions of ethos to still be having such a good time. anna graduated from brown in ’94. She took a class her senior year with Ted Sizer, who’s famous in the field of education for his creation of the Coalition of Essential Schools, meant to shift the focus away from standardized tests and toward individuated project inquiry and performance assessments.

“I had no idea what to do after I graduated, but I knew that it wouldn’t be a job that wouldn’t exist in a more rational and just society,” she explains, “I wanted a job that would exist under socialism. Not because I thought that I would live to see the revolution or anything, but because at the very least, my everyday existence should be based on something that was real.” So, three years after she graduated, Anna went back to Brown for a Master’s in Teaching.

Even for a socialist, the job doesn’t pay much. Anna often signs up to cover classes so she can make a little extra money.

Anna admits she’s not only tired but also broke: “We just don’t get paid enough for the amount of shit we have to do.” But maybe, she hopes, that will change.

In the spring of 2012, Brown’s Political Theory Project hosted an event called “Teachers’ Unions: The Problem or the Solution?” In the Problem corner: Rod Paige, former U.S. Secretary of Education under George W. Bush. Weighing in for Solution: Randi Weingarten, president of the powerful American Federation of Teachers. The two played nice and found plenty to agree on. The kids, it turns out, are our future.

*Names have been changed to protect the students’ privacy.

05 METRO

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

During the Q&A, Anna stood at the mic and called Paige a liar. She excoriated him for juking test score stats to fabricate the so-called Houston Miracle, a collection of charter- and data-driven reforms that later served as the basis for No Child Left Behind. And she told her story.

When the Providence Public School Board voted in 2011 to pink slip all of its teachers and re-hire the ones it wanted, Anna resisted. She was the final speaker from the audience the night of the vote. With an overfilled gym of sympathetic teachers behind her, she told the Board, “If attacked, I will fight back.

We will not be able to do everything [in the classroom] that needs to be done because we need to organize and fight back.”

So she organized. As Founder and President of Providence Teachers for a Democratic Union (P.T.D.U.), she assembled a bloc of teachers dissatisfied enough with their union reps to run against them. They disagreed, for example, with the decision of existing leadership to support RI’s Race to the Top application; they believed these federal dollars continued to overvalue test scores and undervalue teachers. Though P.T.D.U. lost to the incumbent union, they did succeed in making some noise.

After Anna was through with her question, Paige parried with indignation. Weingarten applauded her pugnacity but ultimately came to Paige’s defense. Anna brings the same strong moral voice to her activism that she does to her classroom. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Or maybe there’s no difference at all.

anna tabs through photos online. “Imagine these correspond with an article written in a magazine,” she tells her AP students. “I’m not going to tell you what the article’s about.

But try to figure that out and what argument it’s making based on what you see.”

In class, she pulls up the pencil-skirt photo from Anne MarieSlaughter’s explosive Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” The kids get that the photos are about working moms, but they’re split on what the article’s stance would be.

“The baby in that briefcase is cute,” one girl volunteers. “Sure, and so what’s that an appeal to?” There’s a weak chorus of “pathos.”

The phone on the front wall rings, Anna answers, and students start hushed conversations about math test questions and questionably flirtatious texts. She hangs up the phone.

“OK well I want you to keep thinking about the images” and rushes over to her desk “but I have to go now” and throws a few things in her purse “be good for the rest of class” and walks out the door “don’t forget about the homework” and turns back from the hallway to shout, “I think it’s written on the board.”

She emails me back the next day to explain what pulled her out of class: “My baby had a seizure, but he’s fine. Drama!”

Anna met her husband, Rafael, in Spain while she was teaching there. They got married and moved back to the States together, where he’s working on a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies at Brown. They have two young kids, with whom they speak only Spanish. “I’m worried he’s going to get a job at Whateverthefuck University in Whereverthefuck,” she says.

“And I don’t want to live in Whereverthefuck. But I would like to be able to not work and be on his benefits for a little while.

Maybe I could waitress. I think I would love that for a long time before I hated it.”

doing,” Anna sees many teachers struggling to treat their students like people. “The yelling that you hear when you walk down the halls, that means a lot of teachers just don’t get it.

They don’t get it, and it’s key,” she says. But Anna doesn’t cave to the popular reform narrative eager to fault teachers, either: “How do you really get to know 130 people? You do your best, but ultimately, many will fall through the cracks. The system is not set up to treat everyone in a humane way.”

Anna says she does her best to minimize the difference between her “real self ” and her “school self.” She thinks “that gap can make the job suck,” especially when you often go a whole day with no time to talk with someone older than 18.

So she may not say fuck or shit around students much, but she tries to build rapport with them by being unaffected.

Lauren walks in after Vero, and she’s crying, her eyes puffy and red. She walks over to Anna. “Aw, hey, what’s wrong?”

Lauren doesn’t say anything, so Anna continues to hug her.

“OK, everyone, talk about your novels or something.” They walk out of class, and Anna shuts the door behind them.

I ask the remaining seniors in the room what they think of Ms. Kuperman. One echoes, “She doesn’t create this stupid gap between you and the teacher—authority or whatever. We’re considered actual people.”

I quickly realize her students don’t know how exhausted Anna is, or, if they do, they don’t care. They believe in all her deadline extensions that the department chair probably frowns on. They appreciate that she makes so much time to relate and chat, which a no-nonsense charter school would scoff at. “Other teachers don’t even know how to use a phone or computer. They’re like from the 7th century. Anna gets us because she is us.”

Anna and Lauren walk back inside. They sit at the two empty desks left in the circle. “OK, so what is the update on your novels?” Most of them groan. Olivia plays with the koi on Anna’s iPhone. “Oh shuut uup. Jacob, let’s start with you.”

KURT OSTROW B’13 bets she did love that puppy.

“should i go by vero or veronika in college?” Vero asks.

Anna, who’s also Russian and also speaks Russian, says, “Vero!”

“But won’t people in college who aren’t Russian think that’s a weird name?” “No! Vero is beautiful! Are you kidding??” The case looks closed.

Anna likes to say that good teachers see their students holistically. But the same way members of the administration don’t “talk to you like a person, can’t just ask you how you’re

MARCH 15 2013

METRO

06

PROVIDENCE PLACE From the Geography Desk

by Benson Tucker

place is all of the things that make somewhere have the same characteristics year after year. These maps illustrate some financial elements of place that constitute the local framework for wealth, poverty, and the segregation of the two.

LOW-INCOME HOUSING michael stumpf b’13 used data from a 2006 affordable housing bond to map federal lowincome housing subsidies. He found discouraging patterns in their dispersion across the city.

Low-income housing tax credits provide developers with a subsidy for offering housing to people earning under 50 or 60 percent of a county’s average income. These different thresholds correspond to different fractions of the available housing units: a development where 20 percent of residents make less than half of the area median income would be eligible for tax credits for each of those units. These thresholds suggest an agenda of promoting mixed income levels among residents of the same place.

However, that’s not how the program plays out in Providence. Most developments getting credits are 100 percent low-income, and receive credits for every unit. Since lowincome eligibility is based on the county average, there are individual neighborhoods where most residents are below the low-income line. That’s where the affordable housing ends up.

Describing his findings, Stumpf wrote in an email, “Rhode Island’s Five Year Strategic Housing Plan has contributed to an increased concentration of affordable housing within poorer neighborhoods.” Subsidies, then, aren’t accomplishing something qualitatively different from the market, just making it more extreme.

Elmwood (shown in the southern detail) is one such neighborhood, and, sure enough, it is home to several developments receiving credits for all units. Yet housing in Elmwood is largely affordable even without the subsidy, since most of the people living there earn low incomes. Figuring out how to promote low-income housing outside of predominantly low-income areas remains a challenge.

The maps also show that the tax credits are more dispersed in poor neighborhoods than in wealthier ones. Using a “spatial clustering” metric, Stumpf quantified the points’ spread within each neighborhood and found a direct correlation between concentration and land value.

The cause of the clustering, Stumpf writes, is that in wealthier neighborhoods “developers constructed large apartment complexes with a minimum number of affordable units in order to qualify for LIHTCs.” What’s more, Stumpf explains, the credits “tended to be in neighborhoods with already low amounts of residential zoning.” That is, the housing credits provided affordable housing not only where land prices were already low but also where residential areas most abutted commercial and industrial uses.

Areas near: banks AFS

Streets closer: to AFS to banks

Tax credits are marked by diamonds, and darker shading indicates wealthier areas. In the two details, Census tracts are labeled with their median family income.

Map data courtesy of Michael Stumpf UNDERBANKING comparing traditional banks to alternative financial services like check-cashers and payday loans, Ian Trupin B’13 realized how little overlap there is between each banking type’s territories. “AFS [Alternative Financial Services] is a blanket term including money orders, check cashing, payday lending, tax-refund anticipation lending, pawnshop lending, and rentto-own programs,” Trupin explained. Takes on AFS tend to fall in one of two camps: consumer advocates point out exorbitant fees without any path to financial stability, while others (including some economists) argue that AFS provide a valuable service for emergency situations.

The question of why people turn to AFS is not entirely speculative, though. A 2009 survey found that physical convenience was the number one reason that “underbanked” people— those who use AFS despite having bank accounts—turned to these businesses. This question of convenience led Trupin to analyze the ways that banks and AFS fit into the Providence landscape, mapping the institutions’ immediate surrounding areas before turning to the city’s street network. In the street map, each bit of road is shaded according to whether a bank or an AFS is the shortest driving distance; the broken-up lines, where an AFS is closest, cover most of the city.

According to Trupin, the maps show that “the areas of the city which are most conspicuously dominated by AFS are characterized by lower income and minority-majority neighborhoods.”

But a comparison with Newport News, VA—where underbanking rates are nearly twice as high—showed that street convenience doesn’t explain differences in underbanking rates.

In Newport News, 44 percent of streets are closer to banks than AFS, while the figure in Providence is only 37 percent.

The issue, then, goes deeper than geography. On its website, AFS industry leader Ace Cash Express gives some other reasons why their customers choose them: “For [many] Americans, the business model of the traditional bank does not work....The lack of a nearby branch, or multilingual tellers and limited hours of operation, further contribute to the disenfranchisement of these Americans. Some simply do not feel welcome or comfortable inside a bank.” For a real understanding of AFS, we should also examine how banks might be keeping people out.

In Roman Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown, a cop recounts his days working in Chinatown.

When trouble broke out, they would sit on their hands, unable to say for sure who were the heroes and who were the villains. The complicated questions of affordable housing and AFS risk leaving us similarly confused, complicity washing through the whole process. The better lesson might be that institutions aren’t good or bad based on their mission statements so much as through their role within larger systems.

BENSON TUCKER B’13 is lost in space.

Maps courtesy of Ian Trupin

07

METRO

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Alberta’s Black Gold Tar Sands Prospects in Canada

by Marcel Bertsch-Gout Illustration by Paola Eisner

there are places in alberta, canada, where dredged-up mud spans the horizon as far as the eye can see. Puddles of unidentified surface moisture nest in between black and grey plateaus of earthly carnage. Welcome to the Alberta tar sands, an oil reserve that singlehandedly makes Alberta the thirdlargest oil despository in the world. According to Alberta Energy, its approximately 170 billion barrels of potential oil are topped by only Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

It’s difficult for a casual observer to grasp such a huge volume and what environmental consequences would follow its extraction. That the country is willing to drop out of a covenant as respected as the Kyoto Protocol might signal that its fixation on oil booty is going a little too far. Canada left the international emissions limiting treaty in 2009 in anticipation of the greenhouse gas output that might come out of its tar sands. The move is indicative of a broader crisis of dwindling oil supplies. Private businesses are reaching into nooks and crannies to for fuels that were previously viewed as too expensive to obtain. Desperation has made the financial burden easier to swallow, though they are far dirtier and more destructive to extract and purify. The Alberta tar sands are a prime example of this. They are Canada’s very own ticking carbon bomb. And to fully grasp what’s at stake, it’s important to understand what exactly makes their extraction so environmentally destructive.

The tar sands underlie around 140,000 km^2, or the size of Florida. This is 20 percent of Alberta, and extraction permission has been granted for 84,000 km^2 of this, or 12 percent of Alberta. 3,000 km^2 of this land is draped in boreal forest, a mixture of coniferous vegetation and wetlands, and it is considered to be the largest intact forest on earth. Also falling within range of extraction territory is the Athabasca river and the territories of three indigenous tribes­—the Dene, Cree, and Metis.

The tar sands themselves are a combination of clay, sand, water, and bitumen. Bitumen is the oil component of the sands, the “black gold” that oil companies are after. But this bounty does not simply gush forth of its own accord; the Government of Alberta Department of Energy defines it as “a thick, sticky form of crude oil that is so heavy and viscous that it will not flow unless it is heated or diluted with lighter hydrocarbons.” It cannot be easily recovered by pumping from a well, and instead has to be removed from sands using either open-pit mining (which is usually used for mining coal), or in situ methods.

According to the Pembina Institute, a non-profit environmental policy research group, open-pit has so far been responsible for 52 percent of the extraction of the Alberta tar sands.

This type of extraction is destructive: it involves burrowing into the earth and removing “overburden” or any boreal forest,

MARCH 15 2013

bedrock, and whatever else might be in the way of the oil. On average, open-pit mining requires clearing about six times as much area as in situ mining, or 9.4 hectares per barrel.

The second method, in situ, is responsible for 48 percent of the extraction thus far and consists of drilling multiple wells into deep oil sands deposits and then injecting high-pressure steam underground. This steam heats the bitumen so it can flow to a well and be pumped to the surface. Although in situ methods require less clearing, they emit two and a half times more greenhouse gases on average than open-pit techniques, or 91 kg-per-barrel. The vast majority of the tar sands have been leased for in situ extraction. Neither method is ideal, especially considering that, as Forbes reported, by the time bitumen is refined and delivered to gas stations, it has already accounted for two to three times as much greenhouse gas per gallon of fuel as gasoline refined from conventional crude oil.

All in all, according to Greenpeace, the tar sands have the potential to put out 420 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per year by 2020. To put this into perspective, physicist Myles Allen of the University of Oxford in England predicts that the world can only afford to put one trillion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere by 2050 to have any chance of restraining global warming below two degrees C, an increase almost universally considered by scientists to be the “point of no return.”

A source of fossil fuels with this much potential for environmental havoc has understandably caused much controversy within Canada. Canadian activists have managed thus far to bar the creation of a pipeline within Canada that would carry extracted tar sands to international waters, eliciting an openletter response from Canada’s Federal Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, in which he complains of “radical groups” seeking “to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.” The Canadian opposition makes the prospect of piping the tar sands down to Texas refineries where it can be shipped out onto the gulf or consumed by the US— the best hope for bringing the product to hungry Asian markets. But first, the State Department must give its approval, and the State Department is deferring the decision to President Obama, giving him the unique opportunity to make a momentous, unilateral decision on a major environmental issue. In his speech at the February 17 Keystone XL protest, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune drove this point home when he insisted, “President Obama holds in his hand a pen and the power to deliver on his promise of hope for our children. Today, we are asking him to use that pen to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and ensure that this dirty, dangerous, export pipeline will never be built.”

Thus far, Obama has twice thwarted the completion of the pipeline, refusing to capitulate to the more hasty decision-

making processes of the Republicans on the grounds that all environmental impacts needed to be considered. In particular, Nebraska’s Ogallala aquifer—one of the world’s largest—was endangered by the previously suggested plans.

Republicans have in turn attacked Obama, claiming that he is denying jobs to eager, hard-working Americans.

Republican estimates have ranged from 7,000 to 100,000 total potential jobs. Yet Bloomberg reports that Robert Jones, the Vice President of the company attempting to build the pipeline, TransCanada, claims that permanent jobs would be “in the hundreds, certainly not in the thousands,” and while TransCanada spokesman Shawn Howard estimates 13,000 temporary construction jobs, the US State Department estimates 5,000 to 6,000, and Cornell Global Labor Institute School of Industrial and Labor Relations puts estimates at 2,500 to 4,600. Despite the uncertain numbers, the political turmoil is about more than just jobs.

The issue of energy security and independence from OPEC still looms large for both Republicans and Democrats. Both sides are wary of the grip Saudi Arabia and Venezuela will have over American energy. Professor Dawn King of Brown University’s Center for Environmental Studies weighed in on the effects of Venezuela’s recent turmoil, saying “Chavez’s death might be the only thing that could offset [the completion of the pipeline].” A US-friendly Venezuelan leader could make rejecting the Keystone XL less of an energy security risk.

There is also the fear of upsetting relations with Canada, seeing as staunchly conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper is already smarting over Obama’s two rejections.

Realistically, the Alberta tar sands will continue to be extracted at some level regardless of whether or not Obama lets the State Department allow the pipeline to cross the CanadaUS border. There are too many countries salivating over this oil and there are intra-Canadian pipelines that may eventually succeed in leading out to international waters. Unless environmental movements muster the support they need, the carbon ticking time bomb will most likely make its way out of the ground, leaving a trail of greenhouse gases as it goes. It’s only a matter of who, when, and how quickly.

MARCEL BERTSCH-GOUT B’13 keeps it low-energy.

SCIENCE

08

From Water

by Emma Janaskie and Kate Van Brocklin Photographs by Kate Van Brocklin “And have you seen the water that you drink? Is it you who brought it down from the clouds, or is it We who bring it down? If We willed, We could make it bitter, so why are you not grateful?” (Qur’an 56: 58-70).

“In the garden is no idle talk; there is a gushing fountain.” (Qur’an 88:11-12) “For Allah loves those who turn to Him constantly and He loves those who keep themselves pure and clean.” (Qur’an 2:222)

Door to a hammam in the Rabat medina.

Fez medina.

The Qur’an is a quiet text. At a gathering, it is forbidden (haraam) for everyone to read the Qur’an audibly at the same time. The Islamic procedure for purifying the body before prayer is called wudu, meaning “full ablution.” It is unlawful for someone not in a state of wudu to carry a Qur’an or to touch it, a requirement that extends to the binding, the carrying strap attached to it, and the container that holds it. The laws surrounding the sacred text restrict its readership to a special faction.

In most traditional Middle Eastern communities, non-Muslims are prohibited from entering a mosque. Outside eyes look at the threshold of these holy sanctuaries, but can never see the elaborate domes, minarets, fountains, and prayer halls inside them. Mosques are more than centers for prayer; they are forums for discussion, disputes, and information. The internal mechanisms of Muslim society take place behind these doors, walled off to the non-Muslim public.

Walking through a labyrinthine Medina (old city) in Morocco, one walks past social hubs unknowingly. Medinas were originally built to protect citizens from invasion, as well as to disorient and slow down foreigners. Hammams are hidden to the naked eye. These Turkish steam baths exist behind humble keyhole-shaped doors, often located near mosques, since it is customary for Muslims to wash themselves before they pray. Hammams used to be the only place people could come to bathe and scrub. These bathhouses are places of interaction. Neighbors navigate warm rooms together, perspiring in the hot, dry air. They come to wash, but also to gossip and listen.

They turn the rusty knobs of the spigots, mixing searing water with glacial runoff in their large tubs. Women and men, in separate hammams, lie down on white-tiled floors and scrub each other down with abrasive loofahs and savon noir. This space is hidden from foreign gaze. –KVB

09 FEATURES

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The photograph is seductive: we are informed only partially by the set of images it presents, and so we are compelled to fill in the gaps with our own thoughts and ideas and preconceptions. This projection, this “leaning of our sensitive and personal organism,” as Max Kozloff calls it, forges a kind of empathetic relationship between what’s represented and what we feel about what’s being represented. The photograph grants us the privilege of holding the world in our hands, eliciting a reaction at once visceral and startlingly personal.

The photograph’s indexicality suggests its virtually unimpeachable “truth” quotient: everything in the photo had to be there, arranged in that way, in order for that specific photograph to exist. But despite the presumed veracity of what they represent, photographs never totalize, they never give us enough. Instead of revealing to us the “truth” of the framed world, indexicality ups the stakes of the very real possibility that we might misapprehend and fetishize it. What is given-to-be-seen for the camera—the doorsteps of the places we’re not allowed to broach, the shadows obscuring the bathing body—always belies the fullness of what is hidden from us. We can’t know what it’s like to be in that space or in that body just beyond reach, but it is crucial all the same to remember that those spaces and bodies shape the landscape of the framed world. If the final image is always developed from its negative, from that which disappears, we might say that the invisible, as the very condition of the visible, is the most radically powerful mark of the photograph.—EJ

Mausoleum of Mohammed V in Rabat.

MARCH 15 2013

Bou Inania Medersa in the Fez medina.

NEWS

10

SELF-AWARE GAME Look, You’re Inside the Machine

by Milan Koerner-Safrata Illustration by Diane Zhou

eminent game designer tim schafer recently asked himself a question: “Are games art?” His response: “Oh man, who cares.” But as this concept gains momentum, gamers are eager to find larger forums for canonical, concept-driven games.

In March 2012, The Smithsonian staged an exhibition called “The Art of Video games” which explored “the forty-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium.” Later that year, MOMA adopted 14 games into its collection with the intention of aquiring forty in total. The Smithsonian stated “visual effects and the creative use of new technologies” as its focus, and the MOMA clarified that it chose “a design approach.”

In categorizing the videogame as art, interactive design and graphics are favored over the system of play. I see this as a loss.

While museums continue to grapple with the intricacies of the genre, exploration of video games for affective and expressive purposes will progress. One example is Spec Ops: The Line.

Released in 2012, the game does not try to be fun, rather it exists to subvert the medium.

Spec Ops: The Line is a third-person shooter game by Yager Development—a studio of modest size—with cinematic graphics and functional gameplay. The game narrative follows a Special Forces team investigating a rogue battalion sent to Dubai to evacuate civilians from a series of devastating sand storms. The premise draws heavily from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and to some extent from the Vietnam Warera film adaptation Apocalypse Now. The title is one of many in a trend of modern-warfare shooters, a genre currently dominating mainstream gaming. Spec Ops is a reboot from a series of the same name, likely dug up for the purpose of entering this market. As such I wasn’t able to discern anything unique from the launch trailer. The action appears comically over the top, the content gratuitously violent, and the tone mistakenly serious. I quickly dismissed it: a modern warfare title in a sea of modern warfare titles. Yet after its release, many game reviewing websites praised Spec Ops for being a smart, provocative shooter. Though the game copies the modern warfare genre down to a T, it’s evident after playing Spec Ops that it does so with ulterior motives, and to brilliant effect.

The team at Yager Development intentionally made the combat unsatisfying, the action ridiculous, and the gameplay repetitive. This aesthetic is a bait-and-switch. The game’s feel cozies the players up to the familiar escapist shooter gameplay, only to surprise them with severe moral repercussions for their in-game actions. Less interested in the narrative safety of modern shooters, Spec Ops depicts the psychological horrors of war—not simply as mimesis, but by forcing the player’s hand. At various times in my play-through I caused civilian casualties under the game’s direction. My efforts to combat the rogue battalion, either by cutting Dubai’s water supply or by dropping white phosphorus mortars caused disastrous collateral. The guilty conscience the game attaches to killing is anathema to the desensitization and ennui characteristic of combat in games today. In certain scenarios I had to decide between a greater or lesser evil. In one instance, I had to choose whether to intervene in the execution of a civilian or to leave undetected; in another, in another, I had to choose whether to fire into a lynch mob.

Spec Ops pits the gamer’s desire to win against a conception of what is ethical. For example, the game makes the player scavenge for ammunition; arbitrarily, the best method for this is to execute a fallen enemy while he is down. In one set piece, I was firing a rifle at enemy soldiers while they broadcasted back the names and details of those I’d killed. As the narrative progresses, the player’s conscience becomes increasingly fraught. I began to feel mistrust of the protagonist and a wariness towards combat that I had never felt from a game. The avatar becomes increasingly psychotic and his motives for killing are suspect in the context of the story. The extent to which the avatar represents its player is seldom explored in shooters.

11

ARTS

Consider the mute protagonists that populate Halo, Call of Duty, and Killzone. The avatar’s motives are often a vehicle to justify gameplay, and the player’s role is little more than piloting. Spec Ops’ ending inverts this. At the finale of the slaughter Spec Ops offers no justification for the atrocities I performed, effectively turning around to shout “it was you that did this, none of it would have happened if you hadn’t played this game”. It then shows a cutscene epilogue evaluating the horrible in-game choices I made—putting the responsibility fully on me. The lead writer admits one ending is simply when players “can’t go on… put down the controller.”

Though Spec Ops tries to have it both ways by creating a monstrous game and shaming the audience for participating, the paradox challenges presumptions common to the genre. First is the idea of shooter games as entertainment, and the action of shooting as a mere game mechanic. Unless the guilt trip goes over the player’s head, Spec Ops won’t be fun. My feelings towards the excessively gruesome, morally questionable combat left me reluctant and distanced from the avatar instead of enjoyably immersed. If the gameplay is good, shooting can be incredibly engaging; it demands a level of strategy and dedication. Spec Ops—in the most dull way possible—puts a clunky gun in my hands and sets me on a linear path of senseless killing. And yet, halfway into the game it tells me, “you probably shouldn’t have been doing all that shooting.” It’s unheard of to encounter a game that makes itself purposefully redundant. I stopped enjoying the game and simply decided to become complicit so that the narrative would run its course. This fundamental inversion of killing— from a game mechanic to a moral choice—is the primary way that Spec Ops undermines the genre. The game mechanic necessitates that the player must become better at killing. The moral framing offers no reward for violence despite the fact that it remains the sole means of progression in the game.

This catch-22 is tricky. The need for the player to win takes primacy over any sense of loss they might feel from the action. Except for a select few scenarios, the game requires you to kill people. The full effect of the narrative coincides with the apathy that most games have associated with killing. The bait-and-switch works to create cognitive dissonance, since the player is complicit in the slaughter. But is this fair? If you like the game’s message, your victory is moral. If not, the game causes you to regret things you might formerly have been comfortable with. Spec Ops shrewdly enters the genre against the grain at a time of over-saturated, thoughtless content.

Yager Development challenges the homogeneity of modern war games by interrogating their shared moral assumptions.

Is it a game? Yes. Is it fun? Not particularly. The game putters along with lackluster gameplay, and I’d wager the narrative feels heavy handed to most. But it isn’t trying to replicate the prose of Heart of Darkness. What makes Spec Ops an exemplary piece of interactive design is how it imitates the feeling of war’s psychological horror—not vicariously—but experientially. The general player response to this is well represented by the user reviews on Metacritic. The reviews oscillate between appreciation of the narrative and ire at the gameplay. Many rebel against the psychological payload that results from the game’s narrative linearity.

The fundamental takeaway from Spec Ops is “did I have a choice?” It begs the question, “Was I responsible for what the game coerced me to do?” The greatest realization is that the avatar might not represent you, but rather you on the game’s terms. And when the player is alienated from his avatar, he might be bound to stop participating. But this hypocrisy is exactly what Spec Ops tries to elucidate. Though the game fools the player into thinking his play is simply a response, it brings about the realization that he has agency within its world. This idea of a reactive game-world is powerful because it stops seeing the interaction as “directed” by the game and puts the onus on the player. This system calls for the player to engage with how the play-space is constructed and to be conscious of how this provides or restricts agency. This results in an appreciation of the reasons why one enters game worlds—it goes beyond mere entertainment. Was I brought into this game world to be taught, challenged, entertained?

As far as the inception of games into art institutions, aspects of graphics, technology, aesthetics, and interactive design should not be sieved away as disparate artistic facets of the medium. The total expressive effect of games must be considered.

This still hasn’t stopped MILAN KOERNER-SAFRATA B’15 from playing Call of Duty.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

by a Cohort of Gamers you can’t win ‘em all, but you certainly should try. The object of games is to succeed. Move through various occupations, like College, Farming and Big Business, or, alternatively, follow the rules. Retirement is a privilege earned. If a player is told to lose ½ of his Fame when he has no fame points—he loses nothing. No player may sell, loan or give away his fame points, his happiness points, or his occupation experience.

Girls can also play these games, just more carefully, and with the help of a calculator. Questions will be answered gladly if proper postage is enclosed.—AR Rule of Thumb Outstretch your hand, give a thumbs up. Look at your nail bed closely. What color is it? Find an object of the same color and destroy it.—RS

Name that Person Have a friend describe a fake person, then give that person a name. The point is to come up with the best name.

Person: A 17 year-old female Italian Olympic downhill skier, who recently released a pop-electro dance hit.

Name: Ludovica Rizzoli de Dulcebuono; or, to the nation, simply “Vica.—GD

The Kim Sarnoff Game Everybody always has fun with Kim Sarnoff.—KS Mouth Full O’Nickels

Get What You Want Add someone’s name to sentences that include the words “anyone,” or “guys.”

“Does anyone have any water, Rafael?”—AR

Ask people on the street if they have a nickel. If they give you one, pop it in your mouth and walk away. If they ignore you or say no, give them a nickel and walk away. The winner is the participant whose mouth tastes the most like metal. The judge will passionately kiss all participants to discern the winner.

The judge should have at least one noteworthy achievement, such as a degree in marketing or a published book of Catullus translations.—GN

Dad Tunnel Pass out the Capri Sun, the orange slices, and the post-game Krispy Kreme. Two lines of dads face each other, each dad with hands held high against another dad in the opposing line. All run through the dad tunnel.

Tunnel can be: (i) Celebratory: “Woo hoo! You guys are the best! Way to go!

Chug that Capri Sun!” (ii) Shaming: “Ya better get outta the tunnel! Bad, bad job!

Gimme that Capri Sun!” (iii) Educational: “A carrot a day keeps the doctor away! Capri Sun has calories!” —DA

Drunk Dial Redux Go to a cosmology lecture. Sit there and wonder. Go home and record your thoughts. Get drunk. Call the lecture at their home phone. Tell them your thoughts about space in a voicemail. Spend the next day wondering if you fucked up.—RB

Miniature Tanks Clear a good amount of space in the center of a room. All players form a circle, facing one central point, and descend to the floor. On their hands and knees, heads lowered, all players begin chanting “MINiature TANks, MINiature TANks” (caps for emphasis), moving the arm/leg combination of each side of their body forward on each emphasized beat. Players converge on the center of the room. The chanting does not cease. A contest of willpower plays out as collisions multiply.

Players who are knocked over (losers) are gently trampled by their stronger peers (winners).—BT

MARCH 15 2013

Dad Bargains When your dad comes back from Costco or the Hanes outlet with a major bargain, he will ask you to guess how much he paid. The game is to guess a price that is significantly higher than what you guess is the actual price, but no so high that your dad knows you are intentionally overestimating to boost his confidence. A pair of sensible chinos? $28 is a great “guess.” 20 tins of Altoids (so good for the car)? $16, but you know it’s really in the single digits. Similar restraint is required when acting surprised at what a bargain was had. Do it right, and there may be a new belt in your future.—SR

SPORTS

12

OF MINDLESS MEN

by Doreen St. Félix

Illustration by Katy Windemuth she has no photograph, but when Marie Jane recalls the morning the zombi broke down the side door of her home, this is how she pictures him: wearing sun-bleached denim jeans, his dark sunglasses teetering on the bridge of his nose, a straw hat, the smell of frying pork and shallots sneaking through the open doorway, a fresh boot-print on the floor, her dying brother on the floor, a finely-pressed denim shirt with very little blood on it and standing in the zombi’s hand like a flowering stalk of sugarcane, a machete.

In 1965, she fled from her home in the southwestern pocket of the Artibonite Valley in central Haiti to an apartment on Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn—two days, four hours and fifteen minutes after her brother was killed. This was eight years after Dr. Francois Duvalier assumed the oath of office and declared himself “Papa Doc” of the Caribbean nation. In her late forties with three children, Marie Jane was a woman. When the henchman decapitated her ten-year old brother, he was just a boy. His murderer was one of the 25,000 paramilitary forces formally called the Milice de Voluntaires de la Sécurité Nationale (MVSN) who terrorized the island country from 1957 to 1986, spanning the regimes of both Papa Doc and his son Jean Claude Duvalier, called “Baby Doc.” To the Haitians who survived the reign of terror—and the estimated 60,000 that did not—Papa Doc’s unofficial nickname for the goon squad, Ton Ton Macoutes, struck nerves in their bones.

The story of the Ton Ton Macoute, Haitian Creole for Uncle Gunnysack, is said to be as old as the mountains. Haiti Noir, a 2010 anthology of 18 stories edited by Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat, has a traditional telling of the Ton Ton Macoute fable. Like Santa Claus, Ton Ton Macoute is a giant who lugs a large, burlap gunnysack over his shoulders.

But this Old Man with the Bag is the antithesis of the crimsoncheeked St. Nick—his cheeks are sallow, his voice sharp like rocks and his gunnysack is full of obstreperous children he will eat for breakfast. When he comes for you, he comes for you in the night. Uncle Gunnysack’s legs are two floors high and he smells like goat entrails. He abducts whining children during the night and leaves peace for their parents in the morning.

Parents worldwide have been frightening their children into finger-laced submission with variants of the Boogeyman tale for centuries.

In the Haitian version of the story, Uncle Gunnysack is also a zombi, forced into the labor of abducting children by an absent yet omnipresent Vodou god. African Vodou, the religious tradition slaves brought with them when they were shipped to the island of Hispaniola in the 17th century, conceives of two parts to the human: the husk of the body, and glittering within it, the divine particle called the ti bon anj, Haitian Creole for “little good angel.” Because the slave master views the body as the commodity, the slave recognizes true value in the soul. The zombi is dislocated from his good little angel by his master, and acts without agency, without soul. Thus, he can be a slave.

Uncle Gunnysack was born in the sugar fields. Uncle Gunnysack springs from a warped reconciliation of traditional African beliefs towards the soul and the soulless brutality slavery wrought upon the Haitian body. His story is the etiological tale of Haiti, a country whose roots are born out of the peculiar institution.

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the story, my aunt marie jane tells me, is said to be as old as the mountains. Her skin is not quite the color of mahogany, it is milkier than that, less flat than that. But the darkest powder foundation she can ever find at the pharmacy two blocks down, on the corner of Pitkin and Atlantic, is mahogany.

So when my aunt tells me the story, which she has countless times throughout my life, I always notice the way the makeup discolors her, especially around the thin skin on her eyelids.

“Men can smell sugar anywhere.” She explains the big issues to me in terms of sugar. It’s what gives you Type II diabetes, which you would get at 75 years old (like she did) if you ate too many sweets. Sugar is the secret to perfectly fried pork. If it spills in the dark corners of your pantry, sugar is what attracts ants. It is in our blood. “White gold,” is how she describes sugarcane.

Sweetness was intoxicating enough that, though she could not say it out loud, I think Marie Jane saw how it drove men to enslave other men. How men would work and whip other men mindless because of it. How for hours under a red sun, sweetness forced the other men to bend over, pulling it in stalks from the earth. The sugarcane plantations were no longer there by the time she was born in 1919; by that time, the dirt was dead. And yet in Haiti, the toxic relationship between the master and the slave reproduces itself on more lush, dangerous terrain—that of the mind. The Duvaliers didn’t need whips to be masters, and the Ton Ton Macoutes didn’t need to shuck sugarcane in order to be slaves. In a 1966 televised interview with Miami journalist Ralph Renick, the charming Papa Doc lightly waves away the accusations of terror enacted through the Ton Ton Macoutes. “They are just volunteers. They do not get, what you call, salaries.” In his closet, Duvalier is said to have held the head of Blucher Philogenes, an opponent who attempted a coup against him three years earlier.

Slavery of the mind is what she tries to tell me. It’s too big to see the whole of it, and too sharp to grab it in between her fingers. So she tells me fairytales. Uncle Gunnysack and his burlap bag and the bad children inside. It is not a fable or a story but when she attempts to shape it like that, when she sanitizes the history, we can hold slavery in our hands. She gets to the point in the story where she must reveal that Uncle Gunnysack is a zombi that has been abducting children against his will. I am supposed to gasp. I always do. When she comes in contact with the word zombi, she says it quickly, she shoos it away from her, from us. zora neale hurston lingers. Her Southern drawl sticks to the second syllable too slowly but she has the pronunciation down almost perfectly. The absence of the “e” in the Creole spelling of zombi is crucial; my aunt lingers over the “zom” in a buzzing hum and strikes the “bi” firmly, like tapping an invisible drum. Twenty years before Duvalier clinched the Presidential election, Hurston—author and amateur anthropologist— won a Guggenheim fellowship to study folklore in Haiti and Jamaica. She took a couple of cheap, cotton dresses and a pearlhandled pistol with her. She brought back an account of ecstatic encounters with those she called “the living dead,” included in her book Tell My Horse. Hurston was a storyteller and she copes with the concept of zombi by making it literature. During a radio interview on the Mary Margaret McBride Show, with the host and a man named Vincent, on January 25, 1943, Hurston

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

spins her homily on her travels: McBride: Well I never heard you talk about ‘em [the zombies], did you, Vincent?

Vincent: No, I haven’t.

McBride: Talk about the zombies, just a wee little bit.

Hurston obliges Mary and her friend Vincent: Hurston: Well, a zombi is supposed to be the living dead.

People who die and are resurrected. But without souls. They can take orders and they are never supposed to be tired. They are supposed to do what the masters say without cease. I, uh, naturally it would be futile for me to attempt to explain everything. I do know that people have been resurrected in Haiti but I do not believe they were actually dead. I have met them. I believe that it was suspended animation.

McBride: Hmm, could be.

Hurston: There are too many proven cases of this for it not to be true.

Hurston speaks of the houngan, a vodou high priest, who uses a concoction of potent plant extracts—“probably from Africa”—to arrest his victim’s consciousness and transform him into a mindless zombi, a husk of free factory labor. She is careful to distinguish him from the bokor, a lower priest ordained by the houngan, who can possess humans with spirits, creating a conscious, violent second class of zombi. Here, she is describing—unknowingly, prophetically—Duvalier’s henchmen, the Ton Ton Macoutes. Or she is weaving the contents of Tell My Horse. Often, Vincent chuckles and Mary gasps.

In 1937, Hurston took a photograph of a woman she believed to be a zombi. The woman was called Felicia FelixMentor. Her family claimed her soul was removed by a local houngan, trapped in a glass bottle, and that a factory owner had been using her body for labor for over thirty years. In order to verify the family’s claim, the Public Department of Health sent American Dr. Louis P. Mars to a farm in the foothills of the Puyloreau Mountains, where the woman called Felicia lived. He examined her over the course of several months in early 1938.

In a paper in the Haitian Record of Anthropological Science, Dr. Mars concluded that the woman was schizophrenic and that the case roused “mass hysteria in the untutored Haitian peasant…who does not understand the scientific basis of many natural events.” He doesn’t mention the zombi. If Hurston romanticized the zombi as a sensational object for her book, Mars dismissed the idea entirely.

When I ask my aunt about the infamous photograph of the woman called Felicia, a haunting sepia-tinted thing that was published in Time magazine in 1937, her voice drops. She does not need to look at it. “The eyes are the worst,” she says. “They are the eyes of a slave, the eyes of a dead person who cannot see.

That’s why, in a twisted way, we were happy that the Ton Ton Macoutes wore such dark sunglasses.” from the beginning, papa doc thought he was a god. Baron Samedi, the Vodou god of death and the giver of life, chooses who can return to lan guinée—a green heaven figured in the actual country of Guinea in Africa. Though apples and rivers and birds abound, there is no sugarcane in lan guinée. Duvalier fashioned his appearance exactly after Baron Samedi. He was rarely seen without his dark glasses and sharp tuxedo jacket; what American editors at Vogue headlined as surprisingly “hip,”

MARCH 15 2013

near-French sartorialism was actually a sign of the leader’s hypnotizing cult of personality. He even wore a silky top hat.

A visionary, Papa Doc and his son after him harnessed the zombi as cultural capital in a way neither Hurston nor Mars could have conceptualized. The zombi is not mystique.

The zombi is not psychological defect. Duvalier’s zombi is the perennial slave. Although he may kill, the zombi is also a victim.

And Duvalier chose his victims carefully. Reverend David Aponte, a Latino historian, traces Duvalier’s process in his article “The Ton Ton Macoutes: The Central Nervous System of Haiti’s Reign of Terror”: the dictator sent his loyal officers to villages with populations that were illiterate, poor, and Vodouiste. There, the officers culled for potential henchmen.

Some were as young as ten when they were chosen. Officers outfitted forces with denim jeans and denim shirts, shiny sunglasses, the rubber-heeled boots many had never seen before in their lives. In glinting machetes, Duvalier gave them what shined like power. In the heart of the Haitian peasant, Duvalier roused what rang like glory. To the history, to the foundational image of the disempowered slave, Duvalier returned what felt like a soul. Decades after her brother was killed, Marie Jane thinks of both her dead sibling and his murderer as victims.

Luckner Cambronne, one of Duvalier’s top henchman, told the British newspaper the Independent, that a “good Duvalierist is prepared to kill his children and expects his children to kill their parents for him.” He said this in October of 2006.

Before the Ton Ton Macoutes went on killing sprees, houngans loyal to Papa Doc huddled them in empty fields to incite spiritual fervor. They delivered what was called Le Catéchisme de la Revolution, or Catechism of the Revolution.

Darkly, slowly, the houngans began by recalling the violent oppression Haitian slaves suffered under white masters before the Revolution of 1804, invoking a history none knew but all were born with. The crowd of henchmen, wielding their sharpened machetes, would participate in riotous chants, shouting “Duvalier, oui! Les Etats-Unis, non!” Some would faint from the excitement. The houngan ended the political zombification with the Lord’s Prayer, translated here from the Creole: “Our Doc who art in the National Palace for life, Hallowed be Thy name by present and future generations.

Thy will be done at Port-au-Prince and in the provinces.

Give us this day, our New Haiti, and never forget the trespasses of the anti-patriots who spit every day on our country; Let them succumb to temptations, and under the weight of their venom, Deliver them not from any evil.” francois duvalier died in his bed in February of 1971. On January 30, 2013, the Haitian Justice Department formally brought charges against Jean Claude Duvalier, now 60, for human rights violations committed during his 1971-1986 reign. Duvalier missed three trial dates before finally showing up to court in Port au Prince on February 28. If convicted, the son of the visionary behind the Duvalier dictatorship will face up to five years in prison.

DOREEN ST. FELIX B’14 will not die in a bed.

FEATURES

14

Sun Falls Down

Russian Asteroids from the Ground Up

by Becca Millstein

Illustration by Michelle Lin “I looked up at the sky and suddenly the sky lit up with a bright light and something that looked like the sun fell somewhere to the south of Yekaterinburg,” Sergei Bobunets, 2013, Chelyabinsk, Russia “The morning was sunny, there were no clouds, our Sun was shining brightly as usual, and suddenly there came a second one!”

Chuchan of the Shanyagir tribe, 1926, Tunguska, Russia Night did not fall over Western Europe for six days in the summer of 1908. On the night of June 30, 1908, a strange fire was reported to have appeared on the northern horizon of Antwerp, Belgium. On the same night, Vart Land, a Stockholm evening newspaper, reported a “strange illumination” which spread across its midnight sky. Two days later The Times of London described a “strange light in the sky” which two sisters living in Huntingdon, England had observed at midnight on July 2. The light ruddied European skies for the next six days, filling the headlines beginning in Scandinavia and ending in America on the New York Times front page: “LIKE DAWN AT MIDNIGHT: LONDON SKY SEES SKY BLUE AND CLOUDS TIPPED WITH PINK.” Scientists from all corners of the world made wild conjectures as to the source of the glow. Some hypothesized that the light was caused by “auroral displays,” others, “important changes on the sun’s surface, causing electrical discharges.” The “remarkable afterglow” flickered day after day, maddening meteorologists, astrologists, astronomers and light sleepers with its unexplained, unceasing glare. The glow illuminated Ireland, England, and Scotland as citizens easily read newspapers outdoors in the nighttime. It remained hovering as farmers in the north of England plowed all night in their fields to prepare for a coming storm. Evening darkness and it’s full moon gradually eclipsed the bright blush on June 5th. A thorough explanation for the perennial dawn did not arrive until November 6, 1927.

HOLE FROM THE SKY Walk far enough through the forest surrounding the Stony Tunguska River in middle of Siberia and you will reach a wide clearing. The clearing is shaped in the rough outline of a butterfly and the trees lining the clearing are laying on the ground with their unearthed roots spreading towards you and their tops pointing into the woods. Fly above the forest that covers the middle of Siberia and you’ll pass over a blighted garden of horizontal, leafless trees repelling like iron flakes from a magnetic pole. Six miles above the forest in the middle of Siberia, you will occupy the space of sky that, 104 years ago, cradled the golden blast of the largest asteroid to ever approach the Earth.

The journey through the forest was first attempted by Russian meteorologist Leonid Alekseyevich Kulik in 1921, under the charge of the Soviet Union. After World War I, Kulik was plucked from his position at the Mineralogical Museum in Leningrad, then St. Petersburg, and chosen by the USSR to lead an expedition to locate and study the meteorites that had fallen within the boundaries of the Soviet Union.

While preparing for his expedition, Kulik came across a highly inaccurate, highly curious account of a meteor explosion in Tunguska, Siberia in 1908: ...a huge meteorite is said to have fallen in Tomsk several sagenes [roughly ten meters] from the railway line near Filimonovo junction and less then 11 versts [roughly seven miles] from Kansk. Its fall was accompanied by a frightful roar and a deafening crash, which was heard more than 40 versts away. The passengers of a train approaching the junction at the time were struck by the unusual noise. The driver stopped the train and the passengers poured out to examine the fallen object, but they were unable to study the meteorite closely because it was red hot.

This was the first that Kulik, a leading meteorologist, had heard of the Tunguska Event. Puzzled by its lack of publicity, he continued his search through local newspapers from the summer of 1908 in hopes of finding a more illuminating description. He found that the Siberian newspapers revealed hardly more insight into the event than did those of the UK

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or USA. Kulik finally came across a detailed account of a paper dated July 26, 1908 describing a “subterranean shock which caused buildings to tremble,” and quoted eyewitnesses who said, “before the first bangs were heard a heavenly body of fiery appearance cut across the sky from south to north... neither its size nor shape could be made out owing to its speed and particularly its unexpectedness.” From these accounts, Kulik was able to estimate the enormity of the asteroid and began his expedition searching for the site of the Tunguska impact.

When Kulik made his first visit to Tunguska in 1927, he attempted to interview some of the Evenki, an indigenous Siberian people, and was met with silence. When Kulik asked Evenki Ilya Potapovich, an Evenki who had previously been questioned about the event by ethnographer I.M. Suslov, to bring him to the site of the fallen asteroid, Potapovich refused, telling Kulik that none were allowed in the “thunder god’s home.” In the eyes of the Evenki, the meteorite came as a punishment from Odgy, their god of thunder, and they were desperate to conceal and protect the area of the impact. They regarded the “thunder”— which set fire to their forest, slayed thousands of reindeer, and decimated their food storage—a visitation of Odgy’s wrath to their forest. Almost 20 years had passed since the event and none of the Evenki had approached the clearing in the woods. But Potapopvich could not resist when Kulik offered him flour, cloth and building materials, and the two, along with Kulik’s research team, set off to look for the site. For five days they journeyed deeper into the Siberian forest, and on March 27, 1927, Kulik climbed Shakrama Mountain to set eyes upon the barren, butterflywinged valley.

Kulik was astounded by the odd pattern and direction of the stripped trees and was eager to explore, but the Evenki guides would allow him to go no further. The skeletal forest was sacred, and if the Evenki allowed it to be trespassed upon, Odgy would again curse them with thunder. Kulik had no choice but to take a good, long look from above, and turn around to head home.

DASHBOARD DESTRUCTION Three weeks ago on, February 15th, and less than 1,500 miles away from Tunguska, the strange light returned to Russia once again. This time, however, there was no mystery as to it’s source. Hundreds of car dashboard cameras, surveillance tapes, and cell phone video cameras captured the flaming trajectory of an asteroid soaring above Chelyabinsk, Russia.

The asteroid entered the atmosphere at 40,000 mph and, before the atmosphere absorbed most of the object’s energy, had 20 to 30 times more kinetic energy than the atomic bombs detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 1,500 people

were injured by the shattering of windows, 7,200 buildings were damaged. And in the eager eyes of Natalia Gritsay, a regional tourism official, “Space sent [Chelyabinsk] a gift.”

Plans for a “Meteor Disneyland” are currently being drawn up by the tourism committee, headed by Chelyabinsk mayor Andrei Orlov. At an emergency brainstorming meeting, Orlov gesticulated wildly as he explained his vision of a lakeside attraction where visitors could pay to dive for pieces of the sunken asteroid. Other suggestions included an “annual cosmic music and fireworks festival” and a “pyramid with a beacon at its tip that floats on the lake.” Gritsay declared, looking contentedly over the flock of visitors pawing through the snow for asteroid bits, “We need our own Eiffel Tower or Statue of Liberty.”

On the morning of June 30, 1908, S. Semenov, a Evenki farmer, watched the sky split in two from his porch. He felt the fire on his skin and clothes. The force of the explosion threw him from the porch and onto the shuddering ground.

Chuchan, of the Shanyagir tribe, was sleeping by the river and was woken by his brother, “Can you hear all the birds flying overhead?” There were very few close-range witnesses to the largest asteroid event to ever occur on civilized Earth and those that saw did not dig up their buried recollections until many years later. The unearthly power and light of the asteroid roped and tightened around their voices and preserved their memories in a mixture of fear and awe. The Evenki respected the “heavenly body” that wreaked havoc on their land, understanding that its force was untamable. They did not question its source but declared it divine and the site of its invasion unvisitable.

In Chelyabinsk on February 15th, 2013, they captured the strange light. They captured it on their cameras and they captured pieces of it in their hands. They captured it in their city meetings when they decided that the world would know Chelyabinsk as the city that owned and celebrated the second sun. An asteroid of this magnitude can be predicted to enter our atmosphere roughly every one hundred years. In a hundred years we may capture the objects before they capture us and never see the fire burn through the sky again. In a hundred years, in the middle of the Siberian forest of rootless trees, the butterfly patch will remain unexplored, unstepped upon, eternally marked upon the space where a strange light once fell.

BECCA MILLSTEIN B’13 is a cosmic music festival.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

AN EXCERPT FROM...

FEBRUARY 15 2013

ARTS

16

From the Collection Graffiti

by Leon Gontran-Damas Translated from French by Benson Tucker

leon gontran-damas was born in 1912 to multiracial parents in French Guinea, which he left for Paris in 1929.

He helped create the NĂŠgritude movement in French poetry, a reaction against racial oppression and the loss wrought by assimilation. Ultimately, though, his poetry speaks broadly to the weight and churn of modern life across its many dominations, and Damas can be located as much in the wake of Surrealism as within that of colonialism. Later in his career he held positions with UNESCO and the journal Presence Africaine as well as with Georgetown and Howard Universities. He died in 1978.

LIKE A ROSARY slips by endlessly for the rest of a soul my nights take leave in fives in a haunted monastery’s silence

I REMEMBER AGAIN DESPITE THE SARCASMS OF SOME Despite the sarcasms of some despite the indulgence of others and to the great displeasure of some and to the great displeasure of others it pleases my heart laid for an instant bare to post on these walls and other places of the city to shout lungs bursting upon the roofs of the city down with ALL long live NOTHING

I remember again the wasted year where I might have been able just as well to suck and the thumb and the index of the cassocked sorcerer instead of swallowing the host my faith my god hands folded

with which some with which others seem with with all their sarcasms with with their indulgence

17

LITERARY

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FRIDAY MARCH 15

SUNDAY MARCH 17

WEDNESDAY MARCH 20

comparing cities // watson institute, brown university New York vs. LA. Boston vs. Albany. A conference on comparative urban studies. 5:30PM.

“seeds of change” // seaport world trade center, 200 seaport boulevard, boston The last day of the Boston Flower Show. There will be a bocce court plus also a crowd pleasing miniature garden where one inch represents one foot in scale and a begonia does a good imitation of a Japanese maple tree. $20.

10AM-9PM.

manicures and margaritas // cactus grille, 800 allens ave., providence $5 manicures, $6 manicures. Tarot readings are also available. We’re there. 6:30-9:30PM.

// room 106, smith buoanno, brown university A groundbreaking documentary which tells the story of 9 girls in 9 different countries.

Voiceovers by Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez. 5:30PM. girl rising

made for eternity // waterman gallery, risd museum Mummies, amulets, small bronze statues of gods, and other Egyptian objects made between 3700BCE-250CE. 10AM-5PM.

SATURDAY MARCH 16 a show // fete kounge, 103 dike st., providence Casual City (a band) with Atlantic Thrills, Boo City, Bor. I went to Fete last week. There’s a LED map of Providence on the wall. $7. 9PM. intimate geographies // granoff lower lobby, brown university Skin as topography. Macro photographs and layered maps by Sarah Friedland. 1-4PM.

in the know? e.g. how to organize your computer room? email listtheindy@gmail.com @list_easy

MONDAY MARCH 18 robotalk // science center, 3rd floor sciences library, brown university When robots evolve, people listen. John Long, author of Darwin’s Devices, discusses his work making robots that look and behave similarly.

He then applies “evolutionary pressures,” and makes them compete for mates and other resources. 4PM.

TUESDAY MARCH 19 the rite of spring // providence performing arts center, 220 weybosset st., providence Opening night. The Joffrey Ballet performs the 100th anniversary of this masterpiece. Seasonal! $20-85. 7:30 PM.

cyberpower // watson institute, brown university The term “National Cyber Security” is increasingly used when discussing the overall security challenges nation-states face in cyberspace.

This is an opportunity to find out more. Lunch will be provided. Register online. 12PM.

THURSDAY MARCH 21 scrapyard challenge // risd cit building, 169 weybosset st., providence DIY workshop. Build circuits from “junk.”

No electronic skills necessary. Register online.

1-5PM. habits of living // granoff center, brown university Networked conditions of our time, e.g. (?) is this a PDF? Wendy Chun. Register online.

Keynote 7:30PM. Opening reception 9:15PM. guns in america // room 117, macmillan hall, brown university A panel discussion on the cultural legacy of guns in the United States. 4PM.

this d The ay in l 44 B ides o ister y fM CE assa , Juliu arch s ssin ated Caesar , du h.