The College Hill Independent V.25 N.6

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT Brown & RISD Weekly | V. 25 N. 6 | 10.26.2012 “If you’re going to go big, you might as well invest in the litter box industry” p. 11

from the editors A sly Final Fantasy gamer once told me that if you talk to the sleeping carbuncle in Mag Mell once a year for seven years, it will awaken and begin spouting historical secrets. When I spoke to the carbuncle, it whispered the legends of its ancestors. In Coventry, RI lived an enormous serpent with a deep red gem embedded in its forehead. The snake’s jewel shone coral by day, garnet by night. In the cedar swamp around what is now called Carbuncle Pond, the Mohegan and Narragansett tribes would stay awake for nights, following the red light.

On August 18, 1897, Foster B. Chidester, a wood-turner from Jersey City, died in his home when a carbuncle on his neck compressed his windpipe, strangling him. Seven years later, when a 19-year-old boy in Utica, NY committed suicide by drinking carbolic acid and chloroform, the newspaper said his mind had been unbalanced by a carbuncle. S.J. Hart, an Upper West Side retiree, was killed when a carbuncle on his neck ate nearly a quarter-inch into the flesh. The handful of mourners at Karl Marx’s funeral saw that he died covered in the things.

When the Mohegan and Narragansett finally killed the serpent of Carbuncle Pond, its gem became their talisman. For years the red stone warned them of danger, until white settlers arrived to seize it. When all but the chief had been killed, he stood alone above the red-stained ground and hurled the stone into the blue-dark waters of the pond, where it sunk fast and bloody to the bottom. — EGV

ephemera

news

2 the indy is

MANAGING EDITORS Raillan Brooks, Robert Sandler, Erica Schwiegershausen NEWS Barry Elkinton, Emily Gogolak, Kate Van Brocklin METRO Joe de Jonge, Doreen St. Félix, Jonathan Storch FEATURES Sam Adler-Bell, Grace Dunham, Alex Ronan, Ellora Vilkin ARTS Ana Alvarez, Olivia-Jené Fagon, Christina McCausland, Claudia Norton SCIENCE Jehane Samaha INTERVIEWS Drew Dickerson METABOLICS Sam Rosen LITERARY Emma Janaskie, Michael Mount X Drew Foster LIST Allie Trionfetti BLOG Greg Nissan DESIGN EDITOR Allie Trionfetti DESIGNERS Carter Davis, Lizzie Davis, Mary-Evelyn Farrior, Jared Stern ILLUSTRATIONS Diane Zhou PHOTO Annie Macdonald STAFF WRITERS Marcel BertschGout, Mary-Evelyn Farrior SENIOR EDITORS Belle Cushing, Mimi Dwyer MVP Drew Foster COVER ART Robert Merritt

reachably yours College Hill Independent PO Box 1930 Brown University Providence RI 02912 theindy@gmail.com blog: theindyblog.org twitter: maudelajoie Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI press in Seekonk, MA. The Independent receives support from Campus Progress/Center for American Progress.

Campus Progress works to help young people make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at CampusProgress.org

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WEEK IN REVIEW // mary-evelyn farrior & joe de jonge

ATTENTION SHOPPERS

TEXTBOOK GRINDING

SO HOOD

7 12 13

15

DANGEROUS RANKINGS // grace dunham

STATION TO STATION // shira atkins

CIGARETTES // sam adler-bell

// christina mccausland

EPILEPSY // greg nissan

TO THE MAX // drew dickerson

literary

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LAST NAME CLARK // doreen st. félix

x-page

// belle cushing

features

SPIRIT FINGERS

interviews

// doreen st. félix

food

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9 11

// marcel bertsch-gout

metro

4

arts

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BYE BYE // drew foster

Week in Review

by Mary-Evelyn Farrior & Joe de Jonge Illustration by Diane Zhou Winged Woes earlier this year, London’s Tate Modern hosted contemporary artist Damien Hirst’s first major retrospective on British soil. Frequently cited as the world’s wealthiest living artist, Damien Hirst is known for his involvement in the avant-garde Young British Artist movement of the late ’80s and early ’90s. His eponoymous exhibition, showcasing his most important works from over the past two plus decades—including a diamond-covered skull and a room full of carefully arranged pharmecuticals—ran from April to September and attracted an average of 3,000 visitors a day, making it the most visited solo show in the museum’s history.

The retrospective ended a month ago but is still stirring up controversy among animal rights activists. The problem at the moment is not the shark or pregnant cow or various other animals Hirst has famously placed in crystal blue formaldehyde over the last 20 years, but rather the butterflies used in his In and Out of Love installation at the Tate Modern. This past week, The Guardian revealed that approximately 9,000 butterflies were killed during the five-month course of the show.

“In and Out of Love (White Paintings and Live Butterflies)” takes place in a windowless room hung with white canvases. Butterfly pupae were initially glued to the canvases, and Hirst hoped that the butterflies would emerge, live, reproduce, and pass away due to natural causes within the exhibition space. Visitors were invited to enter the room and witness the entire life cycle of the insect. Plants and rotting fruit were supplied for the butterflies’ sustenance. According to the Tate’s description of the piece, “the themes of life and death as well as beauty and horror are highlighted, dualities that are prevalent in much of the artist’s work.”

However, the combination of the contained, humid environment and visitor traffic made it impossible for the butterflies to sustain their natural life cycles.

Many of them were injured when brushed off visitor’s clothing or trampled while standing on the ground; dead butterflies were quickly taken away by the security staff on duty. Each week approximately 400 live butterflies were added to exhibition to maintain the visual effect Hirst had envisioned.

Butterfly expert Luke Brown was hired at “considerable cost,” according to Hirst in The Daily Mail, and supplied the exhibition with select members of the Nymphalida family. They were chosen on account of their somber colors, ability to survive on rotting fruit alone, and relatively long lifespan—typically nine months in the wild. However, most of Hirst’s butterflies did not make it past a few days or even a few hours.

The exhibition is being heralded as a butterfly massacre. A spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals told The Telegraph, “Damien Hirst’s quest to be edgy is as boring as it is callous. It does not matter whether Hirst killed the animals himself or sat by while thousands of them were massacred for his own unjustifiable amusement.” In a public statement, Hirst defended his installation and said, “Perfect living conditions were replicated and this resulted in many butterflies enjoying longer lifespans due to the high quality of the environment and food provided.” — MEF

OCTOBER 26 2012

Brussels’ Big Day It’s been a rough year for the European Union (EU): a debt crisis, austerity measures, talk of breaking up. But Eurocrats woke up to some good news on Friday, October 12. The EU had won big. Eight million Swedish Kroner and the respect of monetary unions the world over. The Nobel Peace Prize was theirs. Finally, the Norwegian Nobel Committee had recognized Europe’s tireless work towards “the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy, and human rights in Europe.”

No, Norway is not a member of the EU. Yes, Alfred Nobel was Swedish. All other Nobel prizes are awarded by Academic institutions in Stockholm, but the Norwegian Nobel Committee, appointed by Norwegian Parliament, awards the Peace Prize.

After what should have been a wild night in Brussels, the seat of the EU, some Eurocrat realized that, well, this was a little awkward. Who would win the free trip to Norway? Who would get the honor of accepting the prize on behalf of the EU’s twenty-seven member states? Who would get to thank their mother in the acceptance speech?

In 2005, the last time the prize was awarded to a group, it was to the International Atomic Energy Agency. That time the Norwegian Nobel Committee was considerate enough to also give it to Mohamed El Baradei, then the Director General of the agency. This time around they copped out, leaving the EU on its own to decide who will accept the prize in Norway on December 10.

A week after it was awarded the prize, the EU announced that it would be sending three members to Oslo—the Presidents of the three main legislative branches of the EU: the European Commission, the European Council, and the European Parliament. This, like a hyphenated last name, only delays the pained discussion—who will give the speech? Will it be Commission President Jose-Manuel Barroso, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy or Parliament President Martin Schulz? The Independent is eager to find out. — JJ

NEWS // 02

WALMART Has Sprung a Leak Belated upheaval in the world’s largest retail chain

by Marcel Bertsch-Gout // Illustration by Robert Sandler walmart does not take union action lightly. It does a lot to warp its two-million-plus employees’ perception of their rights from the moment they are hired. Aggressively anti-union training video rhetoric initiates a culture of fear among new employees, further spurred on by anti-union antics like Walmart’s banning of union representatives from handing out fliers outside its stores, or, simply firing union-sympathizing workers. The chain does not hesitate to stifle fledgling activism by closing entire stores either, as employees at a Quebec-based store found out. These are all illegal practices as outlined by the National Labor Relations Act, but the legal cost of these actions hardly offsets the benefits of unorganized labor, and thus Walmart has continued to throw its weight around. In view of these difficulties, the recent spate of strikes Walmart is experiencing is not to be brushed off.

Some salaried workers at Walmart began a strike on Tuesday, October 9, in Dallas, Miami, Seattle, Laurel, and numerous cities in California. It was the chain’s second ever multi-store strike, mushrooming from the first ever multi-store strike the previous Thursday, a one-day ordeal confined to southern California in which no concrete concessions were made. Marching circles could be seen on the black tarmac contiguous with the storefront, along with signs whose words leaped off the paper. “On strike for the freedom to speak out,” one read. Another: “respect our freedom.” The most prominent demands insisted that Walmart respect rights to collectively bargain, raise wages, and address substandard working conditions.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems as though the October 4 and 9 strikes were the culmination of a string of strikes that were set off in June, when a strike broke out at C.J.’s Seafood, a provider of seafood to Sam’s Club, a Walmart subsidiary. The strikers were guest workers from Mexico, in the US on temporary work visas. They had been forced to work—and often locked in the factory—between 16 to 24 hours a day, generally from 2 AM to 6 PM, on less than 60 percent of minimum wage, or $2 for every pound of crawfish peeled. In instances when they refused to work, they were threatened with a shovel used to stir crawfish, and in one case their families were threatened. During sleep hours, they were shuttled into company-controlled, vermin-infested trailers. After one failed 911 call, a worker managed to pluck up the courage to contact the National Guestworker Alliance, revealing the scandal and awarding $76,608 in back-pay and permanent visas to 73 workers.

When the Department of Labor confirmed labor abuses, Walmart repudiated business ties with C.J.’s Seafood. But this withdrawal was not a legal imperative.

As C.J.’s Seafood is not technically under the jurisdiction of Walmart, the retailer was not obliged to take any responsibility for the human rights violations that occurred. Yet they were certainly responsible for them in part because Walmart’s size meant it was far and away the largest purchaser of seafood from this supplier, allowing it to economically bully until it received prices that were untenable, save for desperate measures.

After the C.J.’s Seafood strike fizzled, a second strike at an NFI-owned Mira Loma warehouse broke out in September, in which workers claimed they were working in temperatures of up to 120 degrees with no access to clean water or regular breaks. Management allegedly retaliated when they protested abusive conditions by driving a forklift at them. This strike rallied 65 workers that protested for 15 days and marched 50 miles to Los Angeles. Despite many sources stating otherwise, the warehouse was a subcontractor of Walmart’s which had to follow Walmart regulations, but without holding Walmart legally bound to any abuses. In addition, the subcontractor was responsible for the workers in tandem with the temp agency from which they were hired. Worker jurisdiction can be tricky in this way, but it is no hapless legal accident—it is a strategy for extensive companies like Walmart to shirk responsibilities. Initially, Walmart spokesman Dan Fogelman claimed that these workers claims were “unfounded,” but, after the incident received

03 // NEWS

media attention, eventually promised “a protocol of random inspections by third-party inspectors.”

This second strike seemed to have resonated with nearby Walmarts. It culminated in an October 4 strike at a Walmart-owned retail store, which quickly fed into the most recent, larger October 9 strike. Vocal Walmart worker Evelin Cruz told Salon that she believes that the NFI warehouse strike was “what really led us to do something.”

The Walmart strikes had fed off each other’s valor, a pattern that was perhaps necessary considering the endemic antiunion culture present in Walmart stores. It was this unusual, extreme grassroots mechanism that led to the current strike’s unorthodox potency.

Walmart may have gotten what they wanted in preventing union-organized striking, but the recent retail strikers have circumvented union contracts altogether. They were led by outfits like Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart), Warehouse Workers United, and Warehouse Workers for Justice, which are union-funded, but organizationally autonomous groups which do not engage in collective bargaining, but rather help workers organize to protect their rights, and advocate for policies and regulations to improve job quality and safety. Barry Eidlin, a former labor organizer and sociologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes the Walmart strikers’ affiliation with these groups to be an essential breakthrough. In a phone interview with the Independent, he called it “turning back the clock on labor relations” to times before unions were legal and remarks that “the fact that groups of marginalized workers are now willing to risk going on strike without traditional union protections and outside of traditional collective bargaining relations shows how broken the current labor rights regime is in the U.S.” This old, but in the current labor climate, pioneering strategy allows workers to circumvent bureaucratic bargaining guidelines, in which an official bargaining unit must be established, and contracted with an employer and union, before workers engage in collective bargaining and agree on a union contract. Labor abusive superstores, and their poster child, Walmart, essentially have a lock on this process. OUR Walmart, by contrast, has no officially sanctioned process and simply involves signing up for mailers and workers getting involved on their own terms.

The activism involved is more hands-on for the employees themselves. In an article for CounterPunch.org, Eidlin wrote he believes that the archaically harsh labor situation is being met with aptly archaic methods of worker revolt and seems optimistic that “in combining the risky and disruptive tactics of old with new organizational forms, the latest round of organizing at Walmart could be just the ticket.” But he also warns that “the risk is that what they’re doing is very novel but also very risky because they are going outside of the established legal framework and so the endgame isn’t necessarily clear. It is not clear what workers can do to institutionalize the gains they win. How are they going to make sure whatever gains they win today aren’t just taken away tomorrow as soon as everybody is not looking?” A leaked memo distributed to Walmart management embodies both Dr. Eidlin’s optimism and his caveat. While it stridently censures striking workers, it instructs managers not to discipline associates. It also says that these gains are not “institutionalized,” meaning they could be rescinded as soon as the media spotlight turns elsewhere.

Most recently, Walmart employees are using their newfound solidarity to threaten action on the busiest day of the year, Black Friday, if Walmart does not stop retaliating against workers trying to organize. This could include “non-violent action, from flash mobs to strikes to public awareness,” said Colby Harris, a Walmart worker and member of OUR Walmart, in an interview with the Huffington Post. In response to this threat and to the recent uprisings, Walmart’s spokesperson, Fogleman, insists that Walmart “has some of the best jobs in the retail industry—good pay, affordable benefits and the chance for advancement,” and has repeatedly brushed aside outrage to insist that every one of Walmart’s stores is “open for business.”

MARCEL BERTSCH-GOUT ‘13

denies ever having favored the

color blue as a child.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BUMP AND GRIND High School Crackdown

by Doreen St. Félix Illustration by Diane Zhou middletown high school is on an island. It’s the only public high school in this almost beach town on Aquidneck Island, with more than 700 students in its student body. MHS is on 130 Valley Road. To reach it, you have to drive by streets named Johnny Cake Hill Road, Plymouth Avenue, and Serenity Drive. In Middletown, there seems to be a Prius in every driveway. The school building rises several floors up from the expansive, kelly green lawn. On the eastern wall, popping out against a blue background, is “HOME OF THE ISLANDERS,” printed in dull white paint.

Most of MHS’s students participate in those traditions sacred to the suburban American high school. In the spring, they crown the Prom King and Queen. In the fall, they cheer on the Islanders. On Friday October 12, the varsity team clobbered the Lincoln Lions 61-8 during the annual Homecoming game. From the stands, students, alumni, and even teachers belted out the school’s fight song victoriously. Eventually, the sun set and Gaudet Turf Field grew quiet, but football still lingered in the air.

“At MHS, Homecoming Week ends with a school dance,” says one sophomore. By 8:30 the next night, the school’s streamered auditorium was filled with over 400 students. Yet just an hour later, after chaperones and school administrators shooed everyone out, the auditorium was empty. Since the incident, the story has made considerable waves off the island; media outlets across Rhode Island have latched on to the convenient news bite. The Newport Daily News reported that Principal Gail Abromitis canceled the event because “the student-led protest against the school’s new no-grinding policy was unsafe.” The Providence Journal reported the students assumed a “dangerous mob mentality.” The Middletown Patch, a local newsletter, spun the event as “a real life Footloose.” The varied reports show, however, that there has been some disagreement between authority figures and MHS students as to what really happened that night. “I don’t know, though,” says the Middletown sophomore, “I don’t think anyone really gets it.” the new york times offers an official definition of grinding. It comes from the popular website Urban Dictionary: “Basically the boy gets behind the girl, puts his hand on her hips and they rock from side to side. It’s supposed to mimic sex and teachers hate it.” Many of the other dozens of vividly-worded definitions on the website specify that grinding often simulates sex in the position called doggy-style, with the female grindee bent against the male grinder at an angle near or exactly 90 degrees. The number of definitions for grinding—over 50 entries—speaks to the ambiguity of the term.

This fall’s Homecoming Dance was not the first time administrators policed dancing at MHS. Kyle Brasher, a sophomore who spoke with ABC6 news, remembers a rule enforced the year before: “They called it modified grinding.

We could bend at a 45 degree angle.” Principal Abromitis began this school year with a more heavy-handed approach towards the popular style of dance. The 2012-2013 edition of the Middletown High School handbook defines grinding vaguely, as “sexually explicit dancing that will not be tolerated.” On the day of the homecoming dance, Abromitis made a school-wide announcement reiterating the ban and warning the students that the vice-principal and chaperones were tasked with “Grind Patrol.” The motto offered was “face to face with a little space.”

When MHS students started grinding anyway at the dance, Grind Patrol immediately began breaking up couples. “If you can’t dance how you wanna dance, then there’s nothing for you to do. So everyone just sat down on the floor and kind of started protesting it.” Marybeth Hicks, columnist for The Washington Times, reports a different picture of student behavior, saying that students were “performing simulated sex acts” and then “staged a profanity-laced sit-in, culminating in a police-supervised

OCTOBER 26 2012

exit from the school gym.” On October 15, Rosemarie K. Kraeger, the district’s superintendent, released a statement: “The Middletown High School Homecoming dance was shortened because of unsafe behavior by students who did not agree with the no-grinding rule as outlined in the Middletown High School handbook. The decision was made out of an abundance of caution and after several warnings were given to the students.” Several local Sunday morning talk show hosts stoked the media fire further, ranting over the “distasteful” type of dance that they “never did in [their] day.” “Honestly, it’s plain foreplay,” said one guest host as she sipped her fake coffee.

For the sake of clarity, I will refer to the type of dance at MHS Homecoming as “textbook grinding.” It more or less aligns with the Times official definition, though students report people were bent over at a large range of angles. Textbook grinding traces its origins to the ’70s dance craze called “the bump”, where partners would hit their hips together on the alternating beats of a song. Bumping hips would easily escalate to more intimate variations of the dance, including the low bending we see in textbook grinding. Provocative dancing in general, of course, has been around since people have had hips. It follows, then, that the prohibition of this so-called provocative dancing has been around since people have had parents.

In the early 19th century, the waltz was considered a most scandalous activity. British Romantic poet Lord Byron published a poem under the pseudonym Horace Hornem admonishing his wife “Mrs. Hornem” for her promiscuous contact with her waltzing partner. “Judge of my surprise, on arriving, to see poor dear Mrs. Hornem with her arms half round the loins of a huge hussar-looking gentleman I never set eyes on before,” laments the speaker. In the ’20s, fuddy-duddies sniffed at the swing dancing associated with jazz music. Those who danced the jitterbug were loose, with even looser morals. In the ’80s, a number of American high school administrators banned the “street dance” we now know as break dancing.

Textbook grinding, according to Kam Ayala, his friends at MHS, and most kids across the country, is just dancing, rather than the “simulated sex” the media often presents it to be. To the average suburban adult, the act is so horrifying that she can only tiptoe around it with exaggerated euphemisms. On her blog On the Republic, Hicks calls it “dirty dancing” and “soft-core pornography.” The journalist, however, takes the bizarrely head-on, sanitized approach: “In grinding, dancers in groups of two or more rub body parts together, especially males rubbing their crotches against a female’s buttocks,” reports Richard Salit at The Providence Journal. The introductory clips to the news story are of a familiar stock; boys in baggy pants thrusting, girls in mini-skirts receiving, their faces blurred by the inexplicably green haze of the familiar Night Club.

The overwhelming angle taken by the media equates grinding with the rebellion—eternally oriented toward sex—seemingly encoded in the teenager’s DNA. School administrators “crack down” on dancing that has gone “too far.” One parent comment on the Middletown Patch article says “children need to learn respect.” The inevitable link between a dancing style and purposeful rebellion may not be as crystalline as reports claim. The Middletown sophomore, who wishes to remain anonymous, remarks on the discomfort. “It’s pretty hilarious.”

While some adults are reticent, or perhaps unable to define what grinding is, they know it when they see it. MHS’s vice-principal began pulling apart gyrating students around 9:15 pm. According to student attendees, just fifteen minutes later, the dance was canceled. Bans on grinding are popping up across the country, in schools like Pleasant Valley in Illinois and Union Grove in Milwaukee.

One high school in Kansas even had students sign a “no grinding” contract before attending their spring dance.

Concerned parents cite such spiking statistics as teen

pregnancy and sexual harassment as evidence of the need to control so-called sexually explicit dancing. Hicks confidently pinpoints where kids “learn” how to grind: mainly from the entertainment media trifecta known as MTV-BETVH1. Hicks also identifies Youtube as a culprit.

When I asked the Middletown sophomore how kids learn how to grind, I could nearly hear shrugging over the phone. “It’s not something you learn. No one even watches music videos anymore, I just listen to music on my iPod. Everyone just does it.” Another student, who claims to be involved in petitioning MHS administration to lift the ban for the next dance, responded to Hicks’ post. “Grinding doesn’t have to be dirty,” reads the post, “The [MHS] administration was narrow-minded in that they did not acknowledge grinding to be a safe, standard, and acceptable way to dance.” As she entered the driver’s seat of her Prius parked in front of the campus, one MHS parent expressed frustration over the persistent coverage. “Kids being kids and now they want to plan a community meeting about it.

It’s just an occasion to moralize and I’m not biting. I think everyone involved needs to grow up.” Then she slammed the door, put the key in the ignition and drove away. it’s hard to imagine a world where textbook grinding will be welcomed into the American suburban home in the way other previously frowned-upon dance crazes have been. It will probably never sneak its way into the country clubs on Aquidneck Island. The Cool Moms and Cool Dads who sign their kids up for break dancing lessons won’t arrange for grinding lessons in the future. Kam’s mother Darlene Ayala, however, told ABC6 news that she sees the situation like this: “If they’re going to be strict [at MHS] and they don’t want to throw a party, I will rent a hall for the kids myself.”

DOREEN ST. FÉLIX B’14 pokes

it out like her back broke.

METRO // 04

Limoncello and Sour Cream Local Flavor at the Hood New England Dairy Cook-Off

by Belle Cushing Illustration by Adriana Gallo in ballroom d, carpeted and windowless, all the chairs face five kitchenettes. Mirrors above each cooking station reflect the mise-en-place: a range topped with a pot or skillet, stacked mixing bowls, knives in a row. On one, canned mandarin oranges. On all, cardboard cartons emblazed with the letters HOOD. Girls in toques and checkered chef pants set ingredients on the tables while audience members filter in, holding blue grocery bags and munching on pizza.

Behind each table, an apron-clad contestant waits. The five competitors are here to cook, and one will win $10,000.

“Hey,” co-host Chef Rick interrupts the Hood® brand manager who is explaining the rules of the event, “when the winner takes the check outta here, how’s he gonna fit it in the ATM machine?”

“Well,” comes the response, “it’s gotta be a big bank!” the contestants are competing in the Fourth Annual Hood® Dairy Cook-Off, a New England-wide cooking contest hosted by dairy manufacturer and distributor HP Hood LCC. Amateur cooks have one hour to prepare an original recipe and present it to panel of judges who will select the grand prize winner. All recipes must contain one of Hood®’s products—in most cases, some combination of heavy cream, sour cream, buttermilk, or cottage cheese.

The live competition has been going on all day, and the names displayed at each station represent the five recipes and their cooks that have made it to the final round: Jean Dziedzinski, Late Summer Layered Crustless Quiche; Kevin Towle, Heaven and Hell Chowder; Forrest White, Acorn Squash ‘n Blossom Fritter with a Vichyssoise Shooter; William Gillard, Ocean Bounty Creamery; Mary Jo Fletcher LaRocco, Cranberry Limoncello Tarts in a Gingersnap Hazelnut Crust.

It is, as host and New England TV/radio personality Billy Costa affirms, “a pretty swanky place.” After three years in Portland, ME, the Cook-Off has, celebrating its New England scope, chosen Providence as the next location, and the contest is taking advantage of the city’s culinary disposition: Johnson and Wales students have vetted the hundreds of recipes to choose the thirty semifinalists; at the judges table sit one former and one current faculty member, plus a JWU alumna; and the girls in toques are JWU culinary students. Making a nod to the mall just adjacent to the Convention Center, Billy pronounces Providence “the perfect location for this event.”

The emphasis is on New England, on old family recipes, on seasonal ingredients like cranberry and squash.

But beyond Johnson and Wales’s participation, signs of Providence’s generally assertive local food scene are absent.

No food trucks offer sliders or cupcakes outside the convention center. The bloggers at the press table aren’t looking to capture mouthwatering close-ups; they run mothering blogs, on couponing and cooking with kids.

As the camera crew sets up in anticipation of the competition’s launch, Billy assures the crowd that the Patriots were winning when last he checked. Everyone seems relieved. a cowbell rings. The cook-off has begun!

It is a nudge, not an explosion. The contestants have an hour to complete their dishes before presenting to the judges, but they are opening their Tupperwares slowly. William, a contestant from Maine, leans back on his heels and looks about idly. Billy ambles up to Forrest’s table, where the Vermonter proudly announces his dish.

“Ah, vichyssoise,” echoes Billy. “Don’t you just love say-

05 // FOOD

ing that? Vichyssoise.”

Forrest emphatically identifies the acorn squash, potatoes, and leeks as Vermont products, but Billy wants to know what the Hood® products are (cream, both sour and heavy).

Hood®, which began as a Boston-based dairy distributor before expanding to production at farms around New England, now comprises twelve brands including Brigham’s and Heluva Good dips, as well as processing and selling rights to such labels as LACTAID®, BAILEYS® Coffee Creamers, HERSHEY®S Milk & Milkshakes, and Almond Breeze® Almondmilk. As for the products that actually boast Hood® in red and white, there are over thirty-five of them—low-calorie, reduced-fat, and flavor varieties included.

Strips of bacon appear in the mirror above Forrest’s station. Down the line, Jean’s bacon is already sizzling.

“Let’s have a big round of applause for bacon,” calls out Billy. “Am I right?” The crowd agrees that he is probably right. Chef Rick thinks we need smellovision. fifty minutes to go. A stick of butter is in William’s pan, but the heat does not seem to be on.

Billy sidles up to the next table, where the contestant from North Kingstown is moving at a considerably faster pace than her neighbor.

“What are you making, there, Mary Jo?” Mary Jo swats the host’s hand away from the cookies she is pouring into a food processor. “It’s written right there on the sign!” This is Mary Jo’s fourth cook-off. Her recipes have consistently gotten her to the semifinals but she has never won the grand prize, and tonight there is a level of urgent professionalism at her table that doesn’t match William’s casual can-opening or the cheery vegetable-patterned plates Forrest will serve zucchini fritters on. The food processor begins to whir.

Billy shifts to read the sign, speaking over the machine’s buzz. “Ah, gingersnap crust! Don’t you love gingersnap? I love gingersnap.”

The smell of bacon reaches Billy from the other side of the room. “Bacon smells good.”

It is summarily agreed upon that bacon is amazing. forty minutes to go. William’s butter has melted.

“His butter isn’t sizzling.” The woman on my right is referring to the stick of butter idling in William’s skillet, and in fact, the scallops seem to be resisting browning. The women next to me are not here to support a particular competitor. They, like many of the spectators—mostly middle-aged women with their husbands or children or both—have come simply to watch and cheer on fellow home cooks. No one seems particularly miffed that all that is visible from the audience are preparations reflected upside down.

Other audience members are semifinalists who stayed to watch after having been eliminated during the morning’s semifinals. The rest are family and friends. Mary Jo’s son Dante watches from the second row, and she looks over at him in between bustling to and fro. When Billy tries to give him a little airtime, the boy buries his face in his dad’s sleeve. twenty-five minutes to go. The judges are hungry, which shouldn’t be a problem for the one on Weight Watchers. She has saved all her points for tonight. Accompanying the Johnson and Wales affiliates are the Hood® VP

of Quality Systems & Regulatory Affairs, and the creator of the local food site Eat, Drink RI. The five judges will grant points based on taste, creativity, and presentation. Mary Jo’s tart shells have come out of the oven to exclamations from the panel, and another appliance is whirring. thirteen minutes to go. William is ready.

Which is fine, even though there is still time on the clock. There will be no throwing down of utensils at the clanging of the cowbell, for Ballroom D is no Kitchen Stadium. They are not professional chefs, after all, and the competition feels like a block party pie contest or a dog show. Regional cooking competitions came long before shows like Iron Chef and Chopped, without secret ingredients or martial arts. Newport hosts a chowder competition every June. The International Chili Society compiles information on chili competitions ranging from “Sam’s Town Chili Showdown” in Robinsonville, Mississippi to “Chili on the Green” in Fairfield, Oregon.

They are hardly iron chefs, and the impetus to watch or participate in the local cook-off is not what makes it enjoyable to watch celebrity chef battles or play Iron Chef America on Wii. Today’s regional contestants may fancy themselves Bobby Flay, channeling some of the spectacle of increasingly popular (and stylized) televised chef battles— one judge was a one-time contestant herself, on the Next Food Network Star, and her inclusion in the panel has garnered a lot of excitement—but the initial popularity of these shows perhaps stems from more deeply rooted tradition at church hall chili joints. six minutes. Kevin presents his chowder (“with a little cayenne, a little chipoltee”) to the judges. He calls it Heaven and Hell. It’s hyperbolic, but he has caught on to the power of branding that the event not so subtly intimates. As the Hood® name evokes a reliable simplicity, the name of a dish must have durability beyond presentation to the judges.

Orange Kiss-Me Cake, Tunnel of Fudge, French Silk Pie. These all entered the American culinary lexicon as Blue Ribbon Desserts when they won the oldest and most established of American cooking contests, the Pillsbury BakeOff. What began in 1949 as a celebration of the brand’s eightieth birthday has become an institution, with spots on the Martha Stewart Show, a national blogging community of home cooks, and a $1 million prize. None of the winning women or men (it took until 1996, but a man did win) are remembered, but the snappy dish names are. The prize winning recipes are disseminated, to be replicated in millions of households across America, or, in the case of the Hood® Cook-Off, across New England; the semifinalist recipes are published online with no mention of the home cook who created each one.

A sampling of past semifinalists does not lend itself well to quick ten-times repetition: Noggy Berry-Buckle; Fruity Brickle Breakfast Biscuit Blintzes; Eva’s Cheesy Spinach Palacsinta; Sassy Shrimp Court Bouillon; Maple Mini Rice Pies; Mystic Magic Chocolate Tart; Citrus-Lime Holy Guacamole; and Crispy Apple Pie Ravioli with Spiked Whipped Cream. zero minutes. The cowbell sounds. The contest is over, and all of the contestants have been done for minutes. In the absence of any momentous conclusion, Billy ropes the audience into a call and response of the sponsoring brand’s slogan: “Always Good, Always Hood!”® As we shuffle goodie bags and coupons to stand up and join in the cheer, the woman next to me remarks gleefully, “It’s like the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

seventh inning stretch!” Her companion wants to know the score of the football game.

The judges’ comments range from ecstatic—as in the Johnson and Wales instructor at Mary Jo’s ability to craft a quenelle, a delicate oval of cream—to noncommittal. In response to Kevin’s dish, which had some judges pulling cheese from their teeth: “There’s a lot going on.” The only negative comment, that Jean’s dish might need more salt, was quickly dispelled by another judge. The competition is a friendly one—everyone could have won, but for the sake of calling it a cook-off, let’s just pick one.

while the judges are deliberating, the contestants clean their stations, chat with family members, wait. Mary Jo throws back a shot of limoncello before passing around an extra tart to the supporters gathered around her station.

The event is celebrating the food of this local community, but another gloss is evaded, that of urban foodies. This is the other kind of local food, bought at Shaw’s and not Whole Foods. The recipe titles invented by the contestants are longwinded, not because they tout the names of area farms like tasting profiles, but because a little alliteration acknowledges aspirations toward elegance, here in this swanky location next to the Westin Hotel. The visitors might make a weekend of it, “go to that water thing,” as Billy knowingly suggests, but at the end of the event, they will take their VIP goodie bags with coupons and a box of pasta and head home.

Hood® has fifteen manufacturing locations around the country and produces nonsensical products like fat-free half and half, but it remains a neighborhood icon. As their public relations team has taken pains to express, the first Hood dairy farm was started in 1846 in Derry, NH, where today, a shopping center and a school still carry the Hood name. In Boston, the ice cream stand outside the Children’s Museum is in the form of a gigantic milk bottle. However vestigial or caricatured the traces might be, the white letters on red still speak to something close. This is the local that flies in blimp form over Fenway Park, emblazoned with the letters HOOD®, the chunky chowder kind, with x-tra American cheese and regular reminders of the score.

“are those really confetti cannons? I was making that up!” Billy is in disbelief, but they really are. The judges have made their decisions and the anticlimax of the event will burst in a cloud of colored paper and the declaration of a winning cook.

The contestants line up, facing the audience and the cameras. But before revealing the third, second, and first place winners, an announcement: The Patriots have won in overtime.

Billy clears his throat.

3rd place: Jean Dziedzinksi!

The audience bursts out in applause. I look about, and I’m not the only one grinning.

2nd place: Forrest White!

I can’t help but feel relieved. I know Mary Jo has got it in the bag. She made a quenelle, for heaven’s sake, and after four years!

1st place: Mary Jo Fletcher LaRocco!

The confetti canons erupt. Star-shaped spotlights circle above. Everyone claps along to Cool and the Gang’s “Celebrate Good Times,” bits of paper are landing on the runner-ups’ head, and the giant check wobbles between the Hood® brand manager and Mary Jo. BELLE CUSHING B’13 can be spotted in the live audience when the Cook-Off airs on TV Diner with host, Billy Costa, on November 10.

OCTOBER 26 2012

FOOD // 06

crime may be on the decline in America, but in these cities you should still watch your back. 2012 is coming to a close, which means just over a month until the rankings for this year’s most dangerous cities are revealed.² For now, why not brush up on your knowledge of the cities that topped the list last year? At least for the next two months, it’s probably best to avoid them.

Rankings are calculated using six crime categories: murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft.³ Rankings include all cities with a population of 75,000 or more⁴ that reported crime data to the FBI in the calendar year 2010. They are based on data from the FBI’s uniform crime report⁵ and are compiled in City Crime Rankings⁶, the reference book published annually by CQ Press.⁷

¹ Dr. Rachel Boba Santos, an Associate Professor of criminology at Florida Atlantic University, worked with CQ Press on the last three editions of City Crime Rankings.

She urged them to stop using the terminology “best” and “worst” and “safest” and “most dangerous,” and instead to adopt “highest” and “lowest” when describing crime rates.a While we recognize these differences in terminology, we have chosen to continue using “most dangerous” in our ranking. ² Last year, CQ Press rankings were repackaged or reproduced by US News, Business Insider, Money Magazine, and The Huffington Post, among other national news outlets. ³ For each of the six categories, reported number of crimes per 100,000 people is calculated and compared to the national average. Cities are then given a score and ranked accordingly. This methodology has been used for the past 13 editions of City Crime Rankings. ⁴ The Forbes Magazine rankings, also compiled using FBI data, look at metropolitan statistical areas with a population of over 200,000 rather than cities of more than 75,000. Their calculations only include rates for the four violent crime categories: murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. The results of their most recent list: 1) Detroit, Michigan 2) Memphis, Tennessee 3) Springfield, Illinois 4) Flint, Michigan 5) Anchorage, Alaska

⁵ The FBI published a disclaimer alongside its annual crime report: “Many entities use reported figures to compile rankings of cities and counties…These rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents.”

07 // FEATURES

«««««« 1. FLINT, MICHIGAN

2. CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY

Flint has been in the top five for the past five years. The homicide rate is five times the national average and the rate of aggravated assault is the highest in the country. The birthplace of General Motors, Flint was once a thriving industrial city. Experts say the extreme violence may be related to high i unemployment levels.

Camden is a repeat offender, having topped the list in 2009, 2005, and 2004. In recent years, one contributing factor might have been severe budget cuts to the police ii force.

⁶ The first City Crime Rankings was published in 1995 by Morgan Quitno Press, a private publishing house based in Lawrence, Kansas and owned by husband-and-wife team Scott Morgan and Kathleen O’Leary Morgan. After the success of City Crime Rankings, the Morgans branded a number of other annual ranking series, including ‘Most Livable State,’ ‘Healthiest State,’ ‘Smartest State,’ and ‘Most Improved State.’ ⁷ CQ Press, a division of Congressional Quarterly Inc. bought Morgan Quitno Press and its brand of state and city rankings in 2007. When the 13th edition of City Crime Rankings was published in November of 2007, it was widely criticized. The American Society of Criminology approved a resolution opposing the existence of rankings based on FBI data and the US Conference of Mayors issues a press release stating that the rankings “distorted and damaged cities’ reputations.” CQ Press publisher John Jenkins released a statement in defense of the rankings, explaining that CQ Press was “simply reporting the official government, FBI statistics…and doing what is a timehonored tradition of journalists, which is presenting data fairly and factually.” ∆ ∆ a Santos commenting on terminology in an email to the Independent: “Best and worst are a perception and vary based on who is perceiving it. Perceptions are typically acquired through surveys. The rankings are based on reported crime, not a perception of crime, so best and worst are not correct terms to use.”∆

FLINT i Councilwoman Jacqueline Foster Poplar has represented Flint’s 2nd WardA on the City Council since 2005. She grew up in Flint, lived in Chicago and Detroit, and then returned home to raise her children. When the park across the street from her home started filling up with prostitutes and drug dealers, she called the police “day and night.” One of her girlfriends told her to run for city council. She beat an eleven-year incumbent in the primary. Councilwoman Jacqueline Foster Poplar doesn’t like the crime rankings.B

a The second ward, in Flint’s northeast quadrant, is by

most counts the city’s most “dangerous.” Twenty Percent of the city’s homicides in 2010 happened in a square half-mile area in the second ward. b Councilwoman Poplar in an interview with the

Independent: “If I was an outsider and didn’t know the city of Flint, I would look at this city and think all we do here is rape, rob, and kill. You wouldn’t even want to drive on the highway through this city. The media is rude. They stomp on us. All they care about is gloom and doom…that’s what sells their newspapers and magazines. The nastier you get.

The smuttier you get. Nobody wants to hear about how a city is inching it’s way back. I won’t feel good until I see someone do an article on things that are going on in this city.a Flint is an inchworm.b We are inching our way back.” a In a 2009 article titled “Faded Glory: Polishing Flint’s Jewels,” The New York Times took a look at gentrification in Flint’s Carriage District, where an influx of young white residents began buying and restoring old Victorian homes.

Last year, there was one murder in the Carriage District. b Last fall, under Michigan’s emergency manager law, a forced financial manager replaced Flint’s mayor and city council.I This October the state of Michigan doubled the number of state troopers in Flint. i “It’s a dictatorship,” Councilman Bryant Noland told

the Independent, “They do what they want.” Councilman Noland represents the third ward and is a second grade teacher. He recently bought the house he grew up in from his parents.

CAMDEN ii This summer, after enormous budget cuts,A Camden disbanded its police force—firing 270 officersB—and replaced it with a non-union branch of the county police.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

AMERICA’S MOST DANGEROUS CITIES ¹

by Grace Dunham 3. DETROIT, MICHIGAN

4. ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI

5. OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA

The heart of the most dangerous metropolitan statistical area in the country, there were 310 homicides in the city of iii Detroit alone last year.

While fourth most dangerous may not look great to some, last year was a turnaround for St. Louis: in 2010 (and previously in 2006), it was ranked the most dangerous city in America. According to St. Louis iv authorities, things are looking up.

Violent crime ii Oakland is three times higher than the national average. Though Oakland has hovered in the top five in recent years, this California city has yet to come in number one.

a Camden is the poorest per-capita city in the country.

a In anticipation of the 2007 rankings, St. Louis launched

∆ Statistical description became popular in America in the

a PR campaign against CQ Press. In 2007, Dick Fleming— president of the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association—hired the international PR and branding firm Fleischmann-Hillard to orchestrate an organized backlash against the rankings. 2007 was the year that the US Conference of Mayors, the American Society of Criminology, and the FBI spoke out against the rankings.

mid-19th century, when volunteer organizations in search of reform started using statistics to illustrate the problems they hoped to solve. Similar statistical tactics were used during the Civil Rights Movement. In “Public Statistics and Democratic Politics” (1987), Kenneth Prewitt argues that statistical description is a central tenet of 20th century American democratic government.1 In other words, to be “measured” is to be made visible.

Real unemployment figures—including people who have been jobless for long enough to no longer be counted as unemployed—are between 30 and 40 percent. Camden was once home to the Campbell Soup factory. 36,000 people worked in the city’s shipyards during World War II. The city’s population has dropped 40 percent since 1950. b Jason Laughlin, public information officer for the

Camden County Prosecutor’s office, in an interview with the Independent: “In all honesty, we have enough on our mind. Things here are pretty horrible. We don’t have time to think about those rankings.”

DETROIT iii In November of 2007, Detroit Police Chief Ella BullyCummings appeared on CNN’s Newsroom to debate crime rankings with John Jenkins, the CQ Press publisher who adamantly defends the City Crime Rankings series. BullyCummings argued that the rankings are manipulationA of FBI data with deeply negative effects for the communities implicated in the rankings.B a Though Detroit reported 306 murders in 2008, Charlie

LeDuff alleged in a 2010 article for Mother Jones that there were actually 375 murders that year: the police department reclassified murders in an attempt to lower the murder rate, which is consistently the highest in the country. b Whereas 19 crimes occur per square mile in the state of

Michigan, 468 crimes occur per square mile city of Detroit.

ST. LOUIS

b O’Fallon, Missouri, a city in the St. Louis Statistical

Metropolitan area, is currently the second safest city in America.

∆ ∆ In “Rankings and Reactivity: How Social Measures

Recreate Public Worlds,” Michael Sauder and Wendy Espeland argue that the American obsession with rankings is essentially related to a movement towards a culture of accountability. By assessing the performance of institutions quantitatively—and against each other—we force those in positions of power to answer for themselves. Rankings are not neutral depictions of the world2 but rather “vehicles for inducing changes in performance.” ¹ Because simplified quantitative information is often perceived as factual, it holds portable authority and is thus well suited to the public. ² In comparing realities that are for the most part incomparable, rankings often breed widespread cognitive commensuration on the part of the public. Espeland and Sauder define commensuration as the “decontextualization of knowledge” which results from information being reduced and simplified for the purposes of statistical comparison. In short, in an attempt to compare different things we often erase those qualities that make them different.

GRACE DUNHAM B’14

exists at the periphery.

iv In 2006, St. Louis was ranked the most dangerous city inA America but failed to appear in the top 25 most dangerous metropolitan statistical areas.B This is because for a metropolitan area of its size, the city limits of St. Louis itself are relatively small. In addition, the majority of crimes in the St. Louis metropolitan area occur within the city limits.

OCTOBER 26 2012

FEATURES // 08

I ’ L L B E L I E V E I T WHE N I SE E IT a photographic ghost story

by Christina McCausland Illustration by Diane Zhou in 1869, the spirit photographer William H. Mumler was brought to court in New York City. Perhaps best known for his portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of her deceased husband, Abraham Lincoln, behind her, his hands on her shoulders, Mumler was charged with fraud for purporting to be a spiritual medium when, as the defense claimed, he was actually producing the spirit photographs via mechanical means. The images are consistentthe living person, in sepia tones, seated and often not looking at the camera; the ghosts, usually behind the sitter, a little above their head, faded and translucent, making unsettling eye contact with the camera.

By his own account, Mumler took his first spirit photograph accidentally, as an amateur photographer. He took a self-portrait, and as he developed it, noted that a ‘spirit-form’ was visible. He could not account for this second figure, but upon consulting a professional photographer concluded that it was simply an effect of using an old glass to take the negative—when the second portrait was taken, the old form was re-developed to a shadowy outline.

This accidental process was well-known among professional photographers and ‘spirit’ photographs were often sold for entertainment. Additionally, due to long exposure times, ‘ghostly’ figures were common in photographs—anything that left a camera’s frame before the exposure ended was only partly registered and thus appeared as translucent or ghostly. In fact, contemporary with Mumler’s practice, the London Stereoscopic Company (stereoscopes are binocularattuned instruments that create the illusion of a three-dimensional image) used these methods to create several sets of stereo cards—one set called New “Spirit” Photographs— depicting spirits intruding upon scenes of domestic life.

As suggested by the quotation marks around “spirit,” these cards were seen as entertainment, and not as evidence of spiritual truths.

Around this time, however, a religious movement known as Spiritualism had taken root in America. This mid-nineteenth century phenomenon upheld the possibility of communication between the dead and the living. The credo of the New England Spiritualists’ Association, published in 1854, summarizes the project: “Our creed is simple, Spirits do communicate with man—that is the creed.”

Spiritualists often cite March 31, 1848 as the beginning of the movement, when the young sisters Kate and Margaret Fox of Hydesville, New York, claimed to have made contact with the spirit of a murdered peddler, allegedly buried in the basement of their home. The spirit communicated with the girls through mysterious “rappings,” which they used to devise a sort of Morse Code to communicate with the dead. The girls were taken into the home of family friends later that same spring, who were immediately convinced of the authenticity of these communications and proceeded to convert their circle of radical Quaker friends. These Quakers had been growing increasingly dissatisfied with established churches, which in their view had done little to advance abolitionism or women’s rights. Spiritualism

OCTOBER 26 2012

became tied up in these interests, allowing women public roles as mediums and trance leaders. Through its insistence on the possibility of communication with the dead, the movement appealed to the large number of people who lost relatives in the American Civil War. Since Spiritualism emerged in a Christian environment, it shares some features with Christianity, particularly its moral system and the practice of Sunday worship. However, Spiritualism was also decried as blasphemy, mainly because of its belief that a spiritual existence is preferable to a bodily one is not compatible with the Christian doctrine of eventual physical resurrection. Spiritualism was essentially invested in the desire to deny the limits imposed on humanity by death. A popular method of consulting the spirits was table-turning—several people would sit around a table, resting their hands on it, and wait for the table to move. A successful table-turning meant that the table would rotate rapidly, and rise into the air. Séances were also popular—mourning the death of her son, Mary Todd Lincoln organized séances in the White House, which were also attended by her husband.

According to Mumler, his portraits became famous through an accidental association with Spiritualism. “One day a gentleman visited me who I knew was a Spiritualist,” writes Mumler in his autobiography, “and not at that time being inclined much to the spiritual belief myself, and being of a jovial disposition, always ready for a joke, I concluded to have a little fun … at his expense.” He showed the man his fake spirit photograph, pretending to not know how it happened. The man was fooled, and later in the week an account of the event was published in a Spiritualist newspaper, to Mumler’s embarrassment. When people began to appear at his door demanding their own spirit photographs, Mumler demonstrated the prank’s process.

But, to his surprise, extra figures continued to appear in his photographs, and his Spiritualist patrons continued to recognize them as their own deceased friends and family, accepting the photographs—a medium conventionally understood as having a privileged relationship to reality—as proof of their Spiritualist beliefs. Mumler, likewise, was forced to accept his position as a medium in this strange phenomenon, and therefore claimed no knowledge of the process in his trial. Though the prosecution presented nine different mechanical ways to make ghostly figures appear in photographs, no one could prove which, if any, Mumler was using, and thus he was acquitted.

of movement not otherwise discernable. Muybridge, for example, was able to prove that there is a point in a horse’s gallop where all four of its hooves are off the ground. Spirit photography’s allying of science and technology was part of this understanding that photographic technology could provide access to that which was normally beyond powers of perception.

In 1863, a man named Charles Seely predicted in the American Journal of Photography that “in short time spirit photographs will be generally looked upon as a low swindle.” However, the products of these photographic practices have become increasingly considered both documents from the history of photography, slowing wending their way into the realm of high art. In 2005 the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented an exhibition called “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult,” which included photographs

by Mumler, as well as other images depicting both visible manifestations of mediums’ work—levitation, séances, and the production of ectoplasm (a mucus-like substance believed to be the materialization of a spirit)—and invisible “vital substances and forces,” produced by mediums (like dreams or energy), all “without authoritative comment on their veracity.” This exhibition therefore deliberately plays up the expectation of visual truth through the photographic medium, while undermining it by fastening it to the dismissable mysticism of the spiritual medium. As of this month the museum has another exhibition, “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” meant to demonstrate the manipulability of photographs since their inception. This exhibition also includes photographs by Mumler, but with the explicit designation of the portraits as mere “amusement.”

As historian Tom Gunning suggests in his article “To Scan A Ghost,” our continued fascination with these images “may come less from what they indicate about a belief in ghosts than what they reveal about our beliefs in photographs.” The interest of these photographs lies in the unsettling experience of seeing something in a photograph—especially an old one, which perhaps codes authenticity for us—that we intellectually know (believe) was not really there.

CHRISTINA MCCAUSLAND B’12.5 is

the perfect medium.

The use of photography as proof of Spiritualism’s doctrine married new technology to ancient beliefs, combining belief in invisible realities with belief in the camera’s objective and mechanical eye. Indeed, photographic experimentation during the 19th century had a definite interest in capturing parts of reality invisible to the naked eye. Photographic pioneers Eadweard Muybridge and E.J. Marey are both known for their time-motion studies, using a quick succession of photographs in order to isolate tiny parts

ARTS // 10

SYNTHETIC SYNTH

supergroups in the age of new disco

by Greg Nissan Illustration by Lizzie Davis Dan Boeckner is out of place in 2012. The former Wolf Parade and Handsome Furs leader took the stage last Tuesday at the Met in bonafide warrior boots, a sleeveless t-shirt showcasing the Iggy Pop sinews of his arms, and a crimson heart tattooed on his left forearm. It’s unclear whether he walked out of the post-Strokes rock revival of the mid2000s (he’s a dead ringer for a Canadian Carl Barât) or an Aerosmith tour bus. He was there to perform with his new band Divine Fits, the so-called indie ‘supergroup’ born from a bond between him and Britt Daniel, the ghost-pale ringleader of Spoon, over Tom Petty and gravel-voiced, three-chord howlers (one can only assume). They added New Bomb Turk’s drummer Sam Brown to the line-up, but this is Britt and Dan’s baby.

While Spoon has remained a fixture of rock music for over a decade, the stakes are higher for Boeckner—Wolf Parade, the band Boeckner fronted along with jelly-voiced Spencer Krug (to whom the music press devoted significantly more attention), announced its “indefinite hiatus” to work on other projects. Handsome Furs, whose only other member was Boeckner’s wife Alexei Perry, called it quits for unknown reasons. This is Boeckner’s only band, and as the veterans launched into their 16th show as Divine Fits, playing songs from their debut A Thing Called Divine Fits, the sparse and idle crowd made it more than clear—Boeckner has started over. His old fans have certainly noticed his new band, but as music trends have shifted, Divine Fits has received less buzz than any of Boeckner’s previous projects.

He groans on the bare and gorgeous “Civilian Stripes,” an acoustic strummer about returning to the normal world, “Is it good? Is it really goooood? The quiet life.” His wobbling croon never gives an answer.

As The Wall Street Journal noted in “The Lure of the New Disco,” the blurry terrain between electronic and guitar-centric music is disappearing, and fans are clinging to opposite sides of the spectrum—the digital wizardry of Electronic Dance Music (however stupid the Grammys are, Skrillex won three of them this year) or the acoustic folk of bands like Mumford & Sons, whose second album was the fastest selling of 2012. Divine Fits is by no means radical in its combination of gritty Telecaster melodies and ’80s New Wave synthesizers, but this relatively standard combination felt startling at The Met, as the band sits in the middle of these two trends. Boeckner tossed around his greasy, jet-black hair without a trace of irony, even crawling on all fours while belting out the band’s first single, “My Love is Real,” his back arched in a signature Iggy Pop contortion.

Nobody seemed surprised or remotely inspired; rather, a foot-tapping amusement pervaded the venue. There was no nostalgia for the glory days of guitar, yet no visible irony about rock’s waning status. There were electronic elements, but they stand apart from the dubstep-addled pop songs on the radio. Maybe that’s why Divine Fits has gotten unexpectedly little attention-the band is stuck in the crack between innovation and revival, cutting-edge and looking backwards.

Rock music as a vessel for nostalgia is only gaining speed. While Mumford & Sons has four of the top 10 albums on the iTunes alternative chart right now, the rock chart’s top 10 reads like a Vh1 Classic special: Journey, Creedence, Guns N’ Roses, Led Zeppelin, Dave Matthews, etc. Wedding bands must be ecstatic. Once the beacon of youth and rebellion, guitar-driven rock has become mundane and predictable. Mammoth bands like Arcade Fire have straddled this recent musical divide with folky instrumentation coupled with inventive, ethereal production to move these instruments into the 21st century. Still, guitar rock is coping with its new identity: an inoffensive memorial to times past.

11 // ARTS

This state of music makes Divine Fits seem beautifully flippant or annoyingly stuck in the mud. Boeckner rose from the ashes of his old bands to find himself completely the same, still singing the word “heart” in almost every song (titles include “My Love is Real,” “For Your Heart,” and “Baby Gets Worse”) and playing scratchy but catchy lead lines. There’s no way around it—they’re a fun band, but they could be better. The Daniels-penned songs are easily forgettable, but the group’s chemistry is certain.

The three core members constantly grinned at each other, genuinely impressed and happy to do something new, while keyboardist Alex Fischel seemed amazed that he’d found a way to weasel into the band. They shared all of their own guitars, which sounds trivial, but usually a band like this would have a fleet of guitar technicians handing them new instruments after every few songs. They traded bass, guitar, and vocal duties, working in expressive economy.

Nobody came to see Divine Fits because of Divine Fits; the audience was full of Wolf Parade and Spoon fans.

Daniels and Boeckner, however, proved how seasoned they really are in the brooding opener, “For Your Heart.” For two musicians who’ve played to huge crowds, they didn’t change their dedication at all in front of a lackluster showing of Rhode Islanders. Brown’s deft drumming under the ominous synth pulse was the perfect backdrop for Boeckner’s howl and Daniels’s chiming upstrokes. You could see the collective “oh shit” moment take place, as everyone thought, this might be a real band.

The validity of a side-project or ‘supergroup’ is always in question. It’s the ultimate indulgent test of your fan base—how much can we screw around and still have people pay to hear it? In a recent interview with Spin, Boeckner was asked whether he likes the term “supergroup,” to which he responded, “No. No, I really don’t…Can you think of many bands that were called supergroups that were actually good? No, not really.” He’s right. The idea of an indie supergroup is even more disconcerting, as a supergroup seems like the apex of commercial desire. Laughable examples include Chickenfoot, with members from Van Halen, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Joe Satriani. With that roster and singles like “Soap on a Rope” and “Oh Yeah,” I’ll let you wonder how good they are. Reflecting the cultural ignorance typical of supergroups, this is all not in 1989,

but 2009. As Boeckner explains, “It sounds like a bunch of managers got together and said, ‘You know, if we got these people in a room...’” Monsters of Folk, an amalgamation of the biggest names from My Morning Jacket, M. Ward, and Bright Eyes, provided one model of the indie supergroup. They released an innocuous and inoffensive first album (with a band name like that, are you surprised?) and on tour played a “greatest hits” of their other bands’ catalogues. While Divine Fits does sound a lot like Spoon + Wolf Parade/Handsome Furs, that’s because there’s always been a musical connection between the two—the noisy mid-tempo, power chord, stomping grooves. As opposed to Daniels’ flaccid rockers, Boeckner’s songs are vibrant, filled with muddy hooks and buzzing energy. Daniel works best in a supporting role, lending his Texas-infused rhythm lines to Boeckner’s peculiarities.

It’s hard to say exactly where Dan Boeckner is going as a musician. While Wolf Parade could never match the quality of their stunning first album, Handsome Furs reached its zenith with their last, which sounded the least like Boeckner’s half-joking evaluation of the band: “Wolf Parade without the guy everybody likes and no real instruments.”

Development is a seemingly impossible project for musicians; they’re maligned by their fans for changing (unless it’s a Radiohead-esque total reinvention into new territory), or maligned by critics if they don’t. If they conform to the trends of the day, they’re “selling out,” and if they repeat themselves too much, fans lose interest. Boeckner seems to be searching for something he missed, avoiding the pitfalls of development but also neglecting his potential to be a relevant musician once again.

I can only hope that Divine Fits doesn’t follow the predicted path and retroactively confirm this as a side project.

Maybe Boeckner’s career depends on their continuation, or maybe his glory days as an indie rock guitar hero will afford him enough clout to start again one more time. The seductive chemistry is there, though, and maybe they’ll write the songs some day soon. They have before. Whether or not Boeckner will move forward is another story.

GREG NISSAN B’15 has

crimson heart tattooed on his left.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THE DAYS OF LABOR Memory and forgetting in the subways of Moscow

by Shira Atkins the roar of the machinery subsides, the speeding train begins to slow, and a familiar female voice erupts from the loudspeakers: “Stantsia Ploschad Revolutsii, sleduyushaya stantsia Kurskaya” (Station stop, The Square of the Revolution, next stop Kurskaya). I squeeze my way past the round old woman twiddling the long grey hairs growing out of her Kruschev-like face mole, the middle-aged man wearing a knit turtleneck and neon sneakers, the stick-figure woman with dyed blonde hair, severe makeup, and snake-print leggings. I clutch my bag to my chest and with a forceful heave exit the train through the mist of body odor and Russian beer, Baltika #6.

On the platform, there is a rush to get in and out of the wagons before the doors slam. I take a left, pass another archway, and then another. I feel small and out of place.

Kneeling sculptures of school children holding books, hair parted, serious faces. A bronze youth in a swimsuit stands opposite her friend holding a ball. I walk through an archway into the main artery of the Moscow Metro station.

The Armenian granite checkerboard floor reflects the high white ceiling and dangling light fixtures. In each archway of the famous station sit two figures, each expressing different iterations of the ideal Soviet citizen. I wander through the imposing maze of 76 bronze soldiers, staring up at the workers, farmers, soldiers, schoolchildren, aviators, sportsmen, officers, each facial expression and posture calculated to display courage and comradeship.

The Moscow Metro system is one of the most extensive fast transit systems in the world, and among the most beautiful. Constructed 80 years ago to serve as a “palace for the people,” the Moscow Metro is a living, breathing palimpsest of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet propaganda machine.

Underneath the swarming metropolis of over 12 million, the metro pulses from dawn until the last drunkard stammers aboard at half past 12. A Metro-rider transfers from one line to the next under marble archways, passing sculptures of Soviet heroes, mosaics of the archetypal Russian church or peasant. “t. tye. tya tyu tyo. tye. prepodavatyel. molotsi!” Olga Yastrebova, 65, purses her lips together, presses her tongue to the back of her teeth, and with kissy sounds and a smile on her face, attempts to fix our too-hard syllabic pronunciation and Americanized intonation. Olga, my Spoken Russian teacher at the Russian State University for the Humanities, is wearing her favorite blouse—a two-inone long sleeved shirt with a chocolate-colored base and cheetah-print fabric draped across her large breasts. She waves her perfectly manicured hands, which pick up the tint of her yellow gold rings, in order to demonstrate a second intonation.

After my classmates disperse, I approach Olga to compliment her beautiful reading. “By the way,” I said, “I’m writing an article on the Moscow metro, and I’d love to ask you a few questions.” Like toothpaste from a tube, the familiar sounds gleefully spurt from her wrinkled lips, “Da, konechno, Shirushka!” (Yes of course!).

Like a well-trained Russian student, I address her formally by first name and patronymic. “Olga Yastrebova,” I say, “it seems to me like most Muscovites walk quickly through the subways without paying any attention to the Soviet iconography, or the incessant references to Lenin.

How do you relate to the hammer and sickles and Soviet sculptures?” Olga answers sweetly, “The Moscow metro is a beautiful monument to our history. I love the metro, but I don’t think too much about the Soviet art. I grew up here.

I’ve traveled through these stations every day of my life.” I

OCTOBER 26 2012

continue, “But isn’t it weird to see Lenin all the time, even today? Do you think he should be removed?”

“Listen Shira, Lenin wasn’t perfect. None of it was.

But the metro is not only a monument to our history, it’s a monument to the thousands and thousands of workers who worked in the subway tunnels because they really believed in a brighter future. And they really did believe.” Sensing the doubt in my gaze, Olga reiterates “Really. Truly. They believed. We all did. At least for a time.” She pauses. “The metro is a monument to the Russian soul. I think that they should leave everything up in the metros: the red stars, the hammers and sickles, the statues of Soviet workers and soldiers. The only thing they need to erase is Stalin. His face, his words, his footprints!” in june 1935, one month after the grand opening of the Moscow Metro, an American journalist, Harold Denny, published the following review in The New York Times Magazine, going down a subway escalator one seems to leave behind the strange Moscow of collectivized experimentation, of the Kremlin and St. Basils and the old beheading platform, and to be again in the tidy bourgeois world of the West. It takes one home again to see a subway train roar into a station and to hear subway guards, even though in Russian, crying “Move further down the platform, please,” and “Comrades, watch the doors!”

As a foreigner, it’s hard to know when my sensitivity to an omnipresent strangeness is the effect of critical distance and not simply over-reading. Can a metro station with clear propagandistic intent ever make a full transition into a historical monument? Are we supposed to be disturbed by the lingering Soviet propaganda? Indifferent? Humored? Does the almost century-long outpouring of wealth into the metro haunt us or inspire us? If we do accept the metro as just a mass transit system with historical undertones, are we shutting our eyes to the inherent power of Soviet art? Is it the ultimate ‘Fuck you’ to Stalin that we can ride the metro ten times a day and not once think of him? Or is his ghost laughing at us as we walk through the marble arches?

In 1934, over 75,000 Soviet citizens worked to build the metro. The initial 11.6 km line, serving eight stations from the Southwest to the Northeast of Moscow, was built almost entirely by hand, due to a shortage of rock loaders and hammers. In the first wave of construction, starving workers-many thousands of whom were recruited as part of a Trotsky-inspired Komsomol (Youth Communist Organization) ‘days of voluntary labor’ project-used pickaxes, spades, and bars to hollow out a total of 9,013 meters of tunnel. Each day workers were carted to the northern suburbs of Moscow, living off ration cards that rewarded their physical labor with half loaves of bread and chopped potatoes. The walls of the Metro were plastered with Soviet propaganda newspapers praising the workers not only for re-creating the nation and building a majestic palace, but for re-creating themselves as laudable citizens of the state. Not only would the Metro come to represent the Soviet ideal of man’s triumph over nature—Moscow’s soil variety and myriad underground rivers proved to be among the most unfavorable conditions ever confronted in the construction of a metro—but it would serve to further break down the boundaries between science, technology, and art, transforming these forces into tools of the communist machine. As the chief builder of the Metro—and the “architect of socialism”—Stalin’s aesthetic refiguring was the best avenue through which to disseminate the socialist dream-reality.

the moscow metro was the perfect metaphor in action: a mansion for the people, built by the people, in which new, immaculately-ordered aesthetics replaced old rituals of the bourgeois Russian traditions. Many of the Moscow Metros even took precious stones and hallowed marble from Russia’s most holy church, The Church of Christ the Savior (the same church which was once again “defamed” by Pussy Riot this year). The Metro became a thing to be worshipped, a place in which one could aspire to the highest ideals. In the Mayakovskaya Metro station, Stalin’s personal favorite, the Metro-rider gazes upwards at the temple-like cupolas and sees not frescoes of the Virgin Mary, but the mosaics of “A Day in the Life of the Soviets”—hardworking farmers, clear blue skies, planes and tanks defending the empire—alternating with bronze hammer and sickles and Soviet stars encircling them.

Like a pre-pubescent student who’s just discovered figurative speech, Stalin seized the Mayakovskaya Metro, and played out each image to its death. Not only was the Metro a secular church, it was both a haven for the people—a bomb shelter during the War—and a meeting place for the elite—Stalin’s private party-pad. The station’s namesake, the twisted and talented Russian futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky, was Stalin’s favorite Soviet poet, despite the fact that Mayakovsky killed himself at 37 precisely because of his inability to live in a Stalinist universe.

Today, the Mayakovskaya Metro remains the exemplar of Soviet Art, except now the temple-station is filled with Prada and Armani high heels clacking at the spotless marble floor, sequined and shimmering coats, capes, furs, and designer bags picking up the pristine light of the chandeliers.

Most Muscovites cite the 155-meter-long Mayakovskaya station as their favorite, though there seldom seems to be veneration for the Soviet intent nor for the Mayakovsky bust, which sits proudly and solemnly at the top of the escalator.

Can we consider these stations monuments to history, if they are essentially utilitarian? And if they are monuments, where are the plaques to those who died of starvation, freezing, and labor accidents in the construction of the metro?

I fear that my Russian friends have become so accustomed to a life still colored by Lenin’s presence that there is a danger of forgetting. In Berlin, plaques, memorials, and even tombs line the streets-and with full consciousness of the terrible past, new life has been born. But in Moscow, with Lenin’s body still preserved in Red Square, and an ex-KGB official leading the country, how can we even begin to talk about commemorating and memorializing Moscow’s complex history? Challenged by the possibility of the familiar echoes of an oppressive regime in contemporary Moscow, the conversation around erasure is precarious and significant. We’re left with a similar ambiguity that Stalin and his advisors drew up from the beginning: the metro is both prescription and description, both museum and transit system, both sacred and common. atop the escalator in the Paveletskaya station, bronze victory banners and horns point upwards towards an empty frieze. There is a raised circular frame, in which you can just barely decipher the outline of a face, painted over many times by cream-colored lacquer. Once, Stalin was glorified in that center circle, his words painted in red above him: “Glory to our Red Army!” His words, his army, his face, and his glory are now gone.

SHIRA ATKINS B’14 is

your Soviet dream reality.

FEATURES // 12

PAYASOS AZULES

by Sam Adler-Bell Illustration by Robert Sandler the distance from the village to Colombo is “twenty minutes by pickup.”

Described that way, always. As if there weren’t any miles between the two places. No distance or space, only the passing of time and the passing of wispy too-green trees that shelter the road, and the passing of volcanic mountains that assault the horizon, and the careful passing of a rolled cigarette, the wind whipping the smoke into tiny tornadoes in our wake, between a man who looks sixty but is forty, who speaks the clearest, kindest Spanish to me, and an American in t-shirt, bandana, jeans. The bed of the truck is split into foot-by-foot rectangles by a sturdy metal grid, which makes standing not only possible but comfortable. Luis, that is his name, asks where I’m from, the lit cigarette, nearly dispensed by the wind, a tiny flame pinched between his thumb and forefinger, which he sucks between breaths, like he’s shushing a baby. Los Estados.

But he didn’t expect that, which is a relief. The American traveller’s perverse desire to be unrecognizable as such. Thought I was French.

Something about my accent, the syllables I swallow. And there’s something about the speed, our precarious perch above the whipping-by road, that makes the conversation easy. About the recent tremors, the looming rainy season, about grown kids in the capitol and errands in Colombo. I tell myself we’re sharing something. That our faces are lit by the same anxious joy, that his eyes widen at Santa Maria as she looms on our right, that his hands wrap white-knuckled around the rails, that he audibly hoots when we bump over a bump. But probably the ride is commonplace for him. A series of resting moments between one place and another. Between work and more work. A weakness indulged-in with an inarticulate stranger.

And we pass only other pickups. And it takes twenty minutes, exactly. // we’ve only found one bar in Xela where we can smoke inside. It’s called ‘Pool and Beer.’ Which, like ‘King and Queen,’ another bar we like, and ‘After Hours,’ the name on the package of my favorite brand of cigarettes, is difficult to pronounce in a way that most Guatemalans will understand. In English, with a Guatemalan accent. For the first few weeks, I emphatically roll the r’s in ‘After Hours,’ and the clerk looks at me blank, so I learn to point silently at the blue and orange package behind the counter, like a shy toddler at a candy store. A week before I return to the states, I hear someone else order them for the first time. [They have a maple-y taste, which I like but other people don’t seem to.] He says “payasos azules,” and the clerk grabs the box, places it on the counter. Blue clowns. That’s what they’re called. // Some Mayans in the Western Highlands pay tribute to a folk saint named San Simón. I have been told that San Simón was a beloved priest who was ex-communicated from the church for boozing, smoking, and womanizing.

I have been told that he represents a catholicized version of an indigenous god. I have been told that he is a deification of Pedro de Alvarado, the Spanish conquistador who conquered Guatemala in the 1520s. In Zunil, a small town outside Xela, there is an effigy to San Simón—a mannequin with light complexion, wearing cowboy boots, hat, and aviator sunglasses.

He has a colorful quilt over his legs and a string tie around his neck.

Believers and tourists bring him offerings of liquor and cigarettes. An attendant pours my bottle of Quetzalteca Especial down a hole in his face. There’s a lit cigarette attached to his hand. It smells maple-y. My friend Amaro tells me San Simón will bring me good luck in my sex life and business endeavors. Outside a pair of young men peddle cupfuls of the liquor, which passes through his plastic body and collects in a bucket under his chair. Drink some, Amaro tells me. It’s blessed.

13 // FEATURES

in the late 1920s George Washington Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company, hired Edward Bernays—a nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of modern public relations—to help market cigarettes to women. Following the advice of psychoanalyst A.A. Brill, Bernays popularized the notion of smoking cigarettes as an expression of women’s liberation. In 1929, he hired models to smoke and march in the Easter Sunday Parade in New York, thereby undermining a social taboo against women smoking in public. Photos of the march were published around the world: fashionable women escorted by fashionable men, lit-cigarettes trailing smoke in their wake.

He called them ‘Torches of Freedom.’ // the bar where we can smoke is called ‘Pool and Beer.’ And they have both of those things. They also have straight cues and flat tables and a good stereo. They have heavy-bottomed glass ashtrays, which Cristian, the bartender, places on our table when we walk in. Cristian usually sits and talks with us about hip-hop, animated, cutting lines in our smoke with his gesturing hands. But today, there’s a group of Danish tourists at the bar ordering tequila, speaking to each other in English. Cristian pours them shots into little plastic cups, which look like the ones that come with cough syrup. He makes vaguely conspiratorial faces at us from behind the bar. We don’t know what they mean. But we like him. He is youngish, probably twenty-something, but we’re not sure, handsome. Most young guys in Xela wear their hair in stiff faux-hawks, shellacked into place with Moco de Gorila hair gel. Amaro’s hair has spikes that feel like wooden shims. Cristian’s hair is wavy and long. Moco de gorila means ‘gorilla snot.’ // in the mid 1950s, the United Fruit Company hired Edward Bernays— nephew of Freud, father of PR—to engineer an anti-communist propaganda campaign against the government of Jacabo Árbenz Guzmán.

Arbenz was Guatemala’s second democratically elected leader in history.

He and his predecessor had presided over ten years of liberal reform. It was called the ‘Democratic Spring.’ Arbenz protected free speech and legalized political parties and trade unions. He was born in Xela. In 1952, Árbenz implemented an agrarian reform program, redistributing uncultivated portions of fertile land from corporations to peasant farmers. The move jeopardized United Fruit’s agricultural monopoly in the country. At the time, United Fruit owned 42 percent of the arable land in Guatemala.

Bernays’s propaganda painted Árbenz as a communist puppet of the USSR and Guatemala as a grave threat to American security. With the cooperation of the CIA, his distortions were reported by media outlets across the country, stoking American fears and manufacturing consent for an intervention. Meanwhile, the CIA armed and trained a mercenary army in Honduras to execute a coup. In 1954, CIA forces invaded Guatemala, deposed Árbenz, and installed an exiled right-wing military officer as president. The New York Times called the coup “the first successful antiCommunist revolt since the last war,” finding “no evidence that the United States provided material aid or guidance.” Newsweek reported that Árbenz had been overthrown “in the best possibly way: by the Guatemalans.” The spring gave way to four dark decades of winter.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

in the mornings, I sometimes buy coffee from McDonald’s. Because they’re always open and they have to-go cups and I want to be able to smoke a cigarette in the park while I drink my coffee. Amaro tells me I am an agent of neo-liberalismo. Which I’m sure is true. The nutrientrich volcanic soil in Guatemala’s highlands provides ideal conditions for the cultivation of gourmet coffee. The McDonald’s in Xela takes up the better part of a block. The supermarkets in Xela are owned by Walmart.

Guatemalans drink instant Nescafe in their homes, watery and sweet. // guatemala’s period of guerilla warfare and state violence, which lasted from the early ’60s to 1996, is now commonly referred to as the “armed conflict.” Some people call it the “Civil War.” But that doesn’t seem right. According to the Commission for Historical Clarification, 200,000 people were killed or disappeared during the conflict, and 93 percent of documented crimes were committed by the military. The state’s ‘scorched earth’ campaign in the early ’80s has been called a “genocide.” I am told, that during the worst of those years, people simply called it La Violencia.

the members of Guatemala’s elite counter-insurgency squad call themselves Kaibiles. During the course of Guatemala’s 36-year armed conflict, the Kaibiles were responsible for countless massacres against indigenous villagers suspected of supporting left-wing guerillas. In 1989, Sister Dianna Ortiz, an American nun doing missionary work in Guatemala, was abducted by a group of Kaibiles, tortured, and raped.

She was given one hundred cigarette burns on different areas of her body.

The Kaibiles’ motto—“If I advance, follow me. If I stop, urge me on. If I retreat, kill me”—is inspired by Henri de la Rochejaquelein, leader of the Vendéan Royalist rebellion against the French Republic in 1793. Their name is inspired by Kayb’il B’alam, an indigenous leader who rebelled against the Spanish during Pedro de Alvarado’s conquest.

In the 1960s, John F. Banzhaf III, the founder of Action on Smoking and Health, worked with Edward Bernays—that one—to help craft antismoking advertising campaigns and legislation. Banzhaf was among the first anti-smoking advocates to bring attention to the harmful effects of passive-smoking, better known as ‘second-hand smoke.’ In the 1970s, Banzhaf ’s efforts led to the first indoor smoking bans. In 2009, Guatemala adopted one. And that’s why we can only smoke at Pool and Beer.

//

//

at pool and beer, Cristian serves three types of a beer: an IPA, which tastes like soap, a stout, which tastes like an IPA, and an Irish Red which tastes like a fuller-bodied Budweiser. Microbreweries are not a thing in Guatemala. Most places only serve Cabro and Gallo, both watery but tolerable with lime and salt, and, if you’re lucky, Moza, which is darker but not dark-dark. All of these, it turns out, are manufactured by the same company, Cervecería Centro Americana, which is owned by the Castillo family, one of a handful of oligarchic dynasties that control most of the wealth and property in Guatemala. Some people in Xela express loyalty towards Cabro, which is bottled in the city and has a mountain goat on the label, but really it’s all the same. The oligarchy owns everything but the air, says Amaro. And the narcos own the rest. “Así es,” says Cristian. So we drink his IPA, which tastes like soap, and smoke my After Hours, which taste like maple, and play Nas and Calle Trece on the good stereo. When I ask Cristian how old he is, he says “cuando eras huevo, yo ya volaba.”

When I was an egg, he was already flying.

santiago atitlan—a small indigenous town on the banks of Lake Atitlan, situated in the cleavage of two enormous volcanoes, one of which I will climb, lungs screaming in my chest, coughing up blood that glints on the rocks, on a cool, clear day in early March—also has a San Simón effigy.

He is made of wood, unmistakably Mayan, dressed in traditional clothing.

He smokes a cigar, eyes his visitors warily. On December 2, 1990, the Guatemalan army opened fire on an unarmed crowd of a few thousand protesting villagers in Santiago. Thirteen were killed. Two-and-a-half weeks later, following an outpouring of public condemnation and international pressure, the army left Santiago Atitlan, ending a ten-year occupation of the town. Before they left, the soldiers erected a sign on the spot where the massacre took place. The sign reads: “Atiteco Friends, the Future of Your Village Is in Your Own Hands.” It remains unclear whether this was a warning or a benediction. // the air in xela smells like exhaust and sweet bread. My hands smell like cigarettes and something else and I don’t like the something else. My lungs are tight. Listen: the tinny insect whir of small-capacity motorbikes, laughing teenage lovers. Every kid over twelve has a girlfriend here. They meet each other on the elevated sidewalks, hold each other and flirt and show each other off because their parents are catholic or evangelical or ‘used to be your age’—and there’s no where else to go. Helmet under one arm, hand around her waist, she laughs, makes fun, pokes his rigid hair.

The sweet breads come in different shapes. Soft rolls with the band of hard sugar on top. Wafer-y biscuits, flat and stiff, that you wouldn’t know had flavor unless you dipped them in coffee. I wish I had a coffee. One of the boys sees me from across the street. I’m hunched on the steps, smoking, periodically punching my chest, and I can’t tell if I’m menacing or about to be menaced. The kid is fumbling with something in his hand, looks embarrassed. “Vos!” He calls me. “Tenés fuego, vos? Tenés fuego?” He needs a lighter. But the literal translation flashes lewdly across my mind: Do you have fire, bro? Do you have fire?

OCTOBER 26 2012

FEATURES // 14

ARE YOU SURE THIS IS WATER? D.T. Max on the Legacy of David Foster Wallace Interview by Drew Dickerson

on march 9, 2009, New Yorker staff writer D.T. Max published “The Unfinished,” a posthumous profile of David Foster Wallace. Wallace—who committed suicide in 2008—was the novelist behind Infinite Jest. Max’s article details the writer’s life, depression, and struggle to follow the 1,100 page masterwork. It amounts to a sort of “what do we do?” after the loss of such a huge figure in contemporary American literature. Wallace should have outlived John Updike. He should have outlived Salinger. He should have given the world another book. “The Unfinished” gives an explicit account as to this why did not and could not have happened. It isn’t an easy read. The essay prompted a book-length biography, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, which was put out by Viking in August of this year. Every Love Story takes the compassion and investigative acuity of “The Unfinished” and gives the David Foster Wallace narrative the time and attention it always warranted. Max and I spoke over the phone as he took a bus in from LaGuardia.

Bus sounds interrupted our conversation at odd intervals.

The Independent: I understand that your biographical work on Wallace began with that New Yorker article. What opportunities did the biography format afford?

even Bellow. It was somebody who had lived their life distinctively in this moment.

Indy: I was watching this Big Think interview with Jonathan Franzen the other day and he mentions Infinite Jest in a list of underrated novels. The idea of Jest as an underrated work was really surprising to me. This was maybe pre-suicide. It could have been 2006. How popular was the book at the time of its release?

DM: I mean there’s something to that. There’s something to the idea that David was not as remotely on everyone’s mind as he was after his death. I was actually living in Washington when he died and I saw his name on the crawl—you know that little thing that goes along the bottom of a news program, small stories or whatever. I thought maybe he had won an award or something. He almost never won an award in his lifetime. And only when I got home and got on the Internet did I find that he had actually committed suicide. So I feel like he was out of the public eye. But you would know better than me. I think people are always reading him on campuses.

15 // INTERVIEWS

Indy: How important do you think it is to read all of Wallace’s work to understand his mission or project? I know I’m sort of a snob on this point.

DM: Yeah. He had that groovy haircut. My understanding, or my guess, is that Wallace lived in a place that was sort of in between being famous and not famous. Do you know what I mean? He’s huge on college campuses where people read everything he wrote. But if you were to have asked me who the biggest writers in America were, I would not have guessed him. But all of his stuff is in print. And that’s very unusual. So if you think of all the books from 1996, they may not be read today. And Jest is in its 10th anniversary edition.

DM: I think it comes down a little bit to what you’re hoping to understand. You can get a certain sense of Wallace by reading just “This Is Water” if what you’re looking for is a sort of stance towards your own self, but you won’t get a deep sense of who David was. And you certainly wouldn’t get any sense of who he was as a writer. But you would get a sense of who he was as a person. I mean people go to writing and writers in some ways for a sort of remarkable immersion and there’s no shortcut. You can’t go to the biography to get that. You have to read Infinite Jest. But I think there’s a great many people who are getting more interested in Wallace and his stance in the world and haven’t read a certain amount of Wallace. He’s a writer. He’s not a rockstar. You can’t listen to records to get Wallace. You can’t read my biography and feel that you’ve fully read Wallace. You have to read Wallace. That’s what you have to do. I prefer to think of my book as fulfilling a different function. I try to tease out who Wallace was and relate his life to his work.

And why he’s worth reading. But I think every good biography in the end—even if the biographer knows the person who was being written about, which was not the case with me and David—every good biography has got to revisit the work. Otherwise it kind of contradicts itself, its DNA. Writers aren’t dictators. You only come to them because you want to come to them. Any writer in the United States is more easily ignored than anything else.

Indy: Do you think there’s a writer working today who’s filling that same niche?

Indy: What are your thoughts on the slew of posthumous Wallace publications? I would argue that your own book is

Indy: Oh yeah, he’s huge.

D.T. Max: Yeah. It’s different. I mean, for one thing, within the reality that all magazine work is done, it has to be a limited lane. And book-work is not done under that reality. Anything that you think should be in your book can get into your book. And that’s not true of magazine work. It’s far more constrained. As long as that New Yorker piece was—and it was 10,000 words long—I was always aware that it couldn’t go on forever. And that’s something with biography: you could go on forever. The biography is written in a somewhat different style from the New Yorker piece. I find the way that long-form feature writing tells a story is probably the best way we have right now. And somehow it seems to me that the picture of Wallace’s life…

I didn’t want to switch over into some grand, old biography stance as if he had been gone for decades. I mean my goal was, effectively, to create what a memoir might be like. You know, if David had written a memoir. That’s what the sense of immediacy is. If he was alive he’d only be 50 today. So it felt weird to make it into some long ago critical figure.

It wasn’t Thomas Hardy I was writing about. And it wasn’t

DM: You know, I don’t know. Every writer makes his own niche. If the niche we’re talking about is someone who’s both a writer and someone who has something larger to say and people respond to him or her off of who they are on the page. After Wallace, it’s not like the need is going to disappear. He’ll fill it for some people for a period of time.

At some point there’ll be others. I don’t know of anyone offhand, but you’re probably a better reader of young writers than I am.

DM: But was he huge in 2006? Did you say the Franzen video was in 2006?

Indy: He had his short haircut. I know that Franzen used to have longer hair.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

interesting and probably necessary. But do you think that the book of essays coming out in November from Little, Brown—Both Flesh and Not— will be at all worthwhile?

the most surprising piece in there is going to be “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young.”

Indy: What year is that?

DM: They’re sort of different questions. His death left a huge question-mark. The manuscript of The Pale King—it’s an incomplete work, but it’s a finished work. It’s weird.

It just never quite becomes a novel. But there’s things in there…I think that opening scene when Silverstein is on the airplane landing in Peoria…Have you read the book?

Indy: I have. And they’re in those Mr. Squishy ice-cream trucks from Oblivion.

DM: Yeah. Right. I mean I think that scene is just superb. I think that’s a different kind of writing than David had done before and it’s absolutely spectacular. Do we need Both Flesh and Not? Both Flesh and Not fulfills a totally different function. They’re previously published essays. An active undergraduate with a decent grasp of the Internet could probably put together that collection on his or her own.

But it’s convenient that it puts you in a position where it’s nicely bound into one book. Does it tell us anything we don’t know about David? It’s complicated because the essays in there span such a long period of time. I mean, “Fictional Futures” is just a whole other era. That’s David before he went to rehab. Yeah, it’ll be interesting actually. It’ll be an unusual moment where you can see all of David’s brain on display: early-David, mid-David, and late-David. There’s really no easy way to do that otherwise.

Indy: I hadn’t thought of that. Some of the other minutiae I’m less sure about. I mean the symbolic logic thesis was nice but it’s not like we’re seeing publication of that kind of work from somebody like William H. Gass who also does philosophy.

DM: You know, David’s name was put on the cover but the book was really about a particular issue in philosophy carried out in a handful of papers over time. I was always told that David wrote his philosophy pieces at school the way he wrote fiction, that it was full of voice... I thought the introduction was excellent. But I think the thing that’s kind of interesting about Both Flesh and Not is that probably

OCTOBER 26 2012

DM: He’s writing it right after graduate school, so maybe ’88. I think he actually starts it when he’s teaching at Amherst. But what’s cool about it is that it’s David showing off.

Really David’s only show-offy writing is his early work like “Broom of the System,” a book I happen to love. But it’s a show-off book. And this is a show-off essay. You’ll see it.

You can see the weird pheromones he’s throwing out. David developed later on, for all his paradoxical self-searching and meta-layers of personalization, a very strong sense of himself in regard to the reader.

Indy: I know there’s a preoccupation with Wittgenstein in the earlier works.

DM: You don’t find much mention of it in his work after a certain point. He treats Wittgenstein as kind of an early lark. A lot of what I don’t know about David, still, is really to what extent literary criticism and philosophy bring his pieces to life. There’s much academic inquiry still on whether David abandoned post-structuralism, deconstructivism, and similar things. I don’t personally know the answer, though it’s my job to know absolutely everything. Some more work will need to be done for sure. He writes a letter to Jonathan Franzen which I don’t quote in the book where he says—this is about 1990, still pretty early—something like: “You know, people always think I’m obsessed with these guys. And I’m not. I like them fine. I find them useful sometimes and less useful other times.” But the impression one gets after his rehab stay is of someone who is rejecting that as if they were an allergen. And I don’t know what the answer is. I think there’s a lot of information to be found in the earlier stories which we’ve not yet read with the right tools. Why is that one story named after the Richard Rorty book? “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.” I can’t pretend to understand why that’s the title of the story.

teller. He began at Amherst with their literary magazine, their version of the Harvard Lampoon. And before that he’s writing…He’s a parodist. He’s a precocious, dorky kid in Champaign-Urbana in the 1970s. And the thing you do when you’re precocious is you peek behind the scenes in whatever way you can. This is all long ago. But he had fairly small revelations about how TV was really made. He writes those fake jingles that are in my book. There’s a lot to focus on. He likes to make people laugh. I’ve always thought that if two percent of David’s DNA were different, he would have wound up writing for Saturday Night Live. But he got a bad gene which totally changed his entire outlook on the world and that’s huge. And until his anxiety and depression are established facts in his life, he certainly could have been a comedy writer. To me that’s enormously touching. One of the things I find so interesting about David, among many other things, is how quickly he became a writer from not being a writer. And—boom—after that he’s writing Infinite Jest; he’s writing “Broom of the System” in six or nine months when he’s 23. Look around at Brown and I don’t think you’re going to see that kind of development. You’ll see talented writers and talented readers, talented critics and so on. But that still just baffles me.

Indy: What was David’s relationship to comedy?

DM: David came up as a gag writer. David was a joke-

INTERVIEWS // 16

To His Coworker

by Doreen St. Félix // Illustration by Drew Foster Dear name from the Greek word margarites meaning “pearl,” Hey, second-person-pronoun. Yeah, second-personpronoun. I cannot control myself when I see you. It’s only been a month but coming in every day, working on this show with you, has been incredible. Tracing its origins to the 12th century Middle English, my nickname for the name Richard stands at attention when I watch you bend over to refill your bottle at the water cooler. Mhm, that’s right: last name Clark, first name this. Recent evidence suggests that despite what my ex-girlfriend Karen says, it’s definitely enough to satisfy a lady like you. Something to think about while you chew on your pen and read Sing You Home by this New York Times bestselling novelist.

Andrew, Had I but enough time before we went on air this evening, I would have reported both you and Pam in HR. Mark my words—this is the last time I’m dealing with your advances.

Carving my name into the side of your cubicle? Emailing me photos of you eating strawberry Yoplaits? Making my name the answer to every clue in the 2012 election category last night? That one didn’t even make sense, Andrew.

America was reeling.

So I’m going to say this in a way you can understand. If you ever bother me again, I will cut off your last name Clark, first name this.

-Margaret

I will blow your mind, girl. I can make you feel like the royal title of Mary Tudor after she married Louis XII of France. No, you’re not into that. You’re the opposite of clean. I see how you open Yoplait yogurts with your teeth.

Licking off the lid and then getting some on your nose and wiping it off with your sleeve when you think no one is looking. You minx. You’d want to me to treat you like a naughty this portmanteau for a female student at an elementary educational institution. I know you want it, too. I’ve heard things around the office. You like my “brash, kind of grating” British accent? Well, guess what: the British are gerund of the verb to come.

1972 hit single by Motown soul singer Marvin Gaye.

Are you busy tonight? Maybe we could do it by the light emitted from these cylinders of wax often found in French Baroque artist De La Tour’s religious paintings? I could stop by Crate and Barrel or this Swedish megastore that sells ready-to-assemble furniture on my way to your flat.

I just want to kiss you right now in your cubicle—but the office is a fine and private place and nobody embraces there. I think. Anyway, don’t worry about sending me directions to your place, got them off this virtual mapping and geographical information program created by Keyhole Inc. in 2004. Got your address from Pam in HR. When we finally get together ... let me tell you. Any position you want, type of religious evangelist who imposed Christianity on New World Native Americans, in the style of this first domesticated animal, the Rusty Bike Pump. Anything and everything, baby.

So let’s do it hardcore tonight. I don’t want to play any games with you. I’m talking 24th letter of the modern Latin alphabet, 24th letter of the modern Latin alphabet, 24th letter of the modern Latin alphabet shit.

Carpe diem, Andrew

17 // LITERARY

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

the list

week of october 26–november 1, 2012

friday the 26th collaborate to innovate (a salon) 5pm // athenaeum (251 benefit st) join former director of the ri economic development corporation, author, & founder of business innovation factory, saul kaplan, to learn about business innovations in health care, education and more. book signing to follow.

16mm halloween tripartite 6pm // 135 thayer st fiend without a face is the worst horror movie i’ve ever seen. it will not be playing tonight. 6pm means dr. jekyll and mr. hyde (mamoulian’s). island of lost souls at 7:40pm; the invisible man at 8:50pm. the people to come 6–10pm // studio 1 (granoff center) convergence of audience and choreographic material in real-time. five performers create a dance that relies in part on audience material. featuring the work of various providence talents including everyone’s favorite nerd 4-piece, bumpr. doors at 5:30; come & go as you will. magic lantern: terror and the inhuman 9pm // cable car cinema // $5 works curated by beth capper, which “point to both the promises and limitations of these concepts which constrain and define the legibility of bodies and things beyond or outside normative ideas of the ‘human.’” saturday the 27th spooky zoo!

10am–3pm // roger williams zoo // $ trick-or-treat and enjoy live music and seasonal entertainment including pumpkin carving demonstrations, games, animal encounters, costumed characters, pumpkin treats for the animals and more. costumed kids get a discount.

the fête of mistakes 8pm // black box at 95 empire // $5 a sublimated sideshow of everyday brutality and sweets. the very first piece by the newly formed performance team “rx” (feat. ric royer, xander marro & the sound of g lucas crane). agriculture, exhibitionism, zeppole pastries, vegas, terror. im-providence (v.2) 9pm // as220 // $6 crunchy music of the digital persuasion. featuring the hastings/knoth duo, in the loop, exaltron, and arvid tomayko-peters and elliot creager. sunday the 28th h.p. lovecraft walking tour 1pm // 52 power st // $18 he loved it here! yeah! me too! price includes admission to two lovecraft screenings following the walk. call 401.861.4445 for more information.

8th annual fortress of nightmares 6pm–9pm // fort adams state park (newport) the tunnels of terror haunted maze is a terrifying walk through the dark tunnels of the fort; the fortress ghost hunt takes you on a legitimate (!) paranormal (?) investigation ($). sturdy footwear is required; not recommended for kids under 12. a night of scary stories 9pm // as220 // $ the wonderful walker mettling hosts. all proceeds to benefit the providence comics consortium, an organization that teaches comics and cartooning at providence libraries and publishes strips from kids and comic artists of all stripes.

suicides, fires, and unfortunate gruesome accidents! visit the providence ghost tour website for tickets and more information. tuesday the 30th john yau reading 2:30pm // mccormack theater (70 brown street) john yau is a poet, fiction writer, critic, publisher of black square editions, and freelance curator. in 2002 he was named a chevalier in the order of arts and letters by the french government.

thursday the 1st anciet maya time & the meaning of 2012 5:30pm // salomon center 001 (brown campus) david stuart, director of the mesoamerican center at u.t. austin to speak about the end of the world. ela dia de los muertos salsa fundraiser 8–11pm // 92 printery st // $5 salsa lessons + dancing, costume contest, art, beer, cola, & more. come support english for action!

couscous@as220 9:30pm–11:30pm // as220 a movable feast of poetry, music & performance by and for participants from the colleges, community and out-of-town, hosted by mairéad byrne.

do you think i care 6–8pm // gelman gallery (20 n. main st) i care about a lot of things. like my cat. and halloween. and what people think about my parents. a curated exhibition by yuki kawae mia interior architecture & austin ballard mfa sculpture.

don’t change the subject 6–9pm // tap room (226 benefit) a screening a director’s talk with an included dinner beforehand. one man asks an important question. no one wants to answer.

in the know? what should i be for halloween? am i even allie? i don’t know if i’m even here. email listtheindy@gmail.com

wednesday the 31st booooooooooooo! action speaks!@as220 concert hall 5:30pm – 7pm // free in 1992 the body scanner was invented. surveillance, yo. let’s radio panel it out with marc levitt.

monday the 29th

libertalia weekly potluck/bbq 6–9pm // libertalia // bring food open to all. bring food, desserts, and/or nonalcoholic drinks. check out the space and find out how to get involved.

providence ghost tour 7pm // prospect terrace (congdon street) // $15+ a walking ghost & haunted history tour of the east side of providence, featuring ghosts, murders,

bsr halloween show 9pm // expose/2nd life (westminster st) // ? brown student radio lost it’s airwave to npr. fuck that shit. leslie gore grind core. that’s the shit.

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