The College Hill Independent V.25 N.9

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT Brown & RISD Weekly | V. 25 N. 9 | 11.16.2012

from the editors Providence-area castaway Gary Fitzpatrick was left with a useless deck of cards last Saturday when he realized he no longer new how to deal a hand of solitaire.

The single player card game of memory and concentration had been Fitzpatrick’s sole occupation after the merchant ship he was aboard went down in February. The 37-year-old merchant marine woke up beached on a desert island alongside a dry deck of playing cards and a packet of iodine tablets. Outside of fishing, gathering, and sending out smoke signals, the pastime was the one thing he had to while away the hours. Laying out column after column and filing them away was survivor’s only joy—and halfway through shuffling the deck for his umpteenth game in the past months, it dawned on him that he would no longer have even this creature comfort.

At press time, Fitzpatrick had taken to building card houses out of his now useless paper. — DD

ephemera

news

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

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

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

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WEEK IN REVIEW // emily gogolak & kate van brocklin

EAT ME // emily gogolak & kate van brocklin

science

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OH SHIT // jehane samaha

metro

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POP CULTURE PVD // dan stump

arts

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// kevin pires

TEETHING // doreen st. félix

// robert merritt

BACK IN THE HABIT // greg nissan

WWW.ART.COM // olivia jené

sports

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TREAD LIGHTLY // barry elkinton

literary

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features ARGENTINA

RED DOOR

NOVEL CONTACT // charlotte anderson

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GO FIGURE // adelaide mandeville

WEEK IN REVIEW

by Emily Gogolak & Kate Van Brocklin Illustration by Robert Sandler

San Fran Sans Clothes if you’re going to san francisco, be sure to wear...clothes.

San Francisco has long been a city that embraces nakedness as a form of self-expression. Its Gay Pride Parade apparently has more nude paraders than any other. It’s home to the annual World Naked Bike Ride (ouch). Many participants in the Folsom Street Fair, the world’s largest fetish fair, lay it bare. The website for The San Francsico Chronicle even has a “Nude Events” page.

But the City by the Bay may soon cease to be the nude-topia it once was. In the latest incident of an ongoing protest about the city’s assault on public nudity, Gypsy Taub, a pro-nudity activist, was kicked out of a San Francisco Board of Supervisors public hearing last week when she stripped down and started shouting at city officials, calling them “fascist.”

It all started last fall, when Scott Wiener, a city supervisor who represents San Francisco’s famously nude-

friendly Castro Discrict, backed a law that requires nudists to cover chairs and benches in public places before sitting on them in response to complaints by some businesses and residents. Residents got hairy about it then and staged nude-ins around the city last fall. It passed anyway.

But if covering chairs and benches weren’t enough, Wiener now wants to axe the naked thing all together. Last month he proposed a bill that would effectively ban nudity in most public places, including parks.

The park situation is what really has the nudists in a tizzy. As it stands, nudity is not allowed in the city’s public parks, with one big exception. A favorite and very crowded hangout for naked San Franciscans is a clothingoptional park/plaza in the Castro, the first and only urban non-beach clothing-optional park in America. (Imagine a clothing-optional Central Park or the High Line. Hello Hudson!)

Wiener’s rationale is that nudity has simply gotten out of hand. As he put it, there are more “naked guys” walking around now than ever. “Over the past two years, the situation on our streets and particularly in the Castro has changed,” he said in a public statement. “Public nudity is no longer random and sporadic, and it’s no longer an occasional quirky part of San Francisco.” He even called the Castro’s main park “a nudist colony.”

If the law passes, it would bring a $100 fine for a first offense and a $200 fine for a second offense in a 12 month period. A third offense would result in a $500 fine or a misdemeanor charge. Taub, the nudist activist, was neither fined nor cited, and agreed to get dressed outside of the courtroom. As she was being led away after dropping trou, her parting words were, “Down with Scott Wiener!” — EG

A New Kind of Cloak in 2006, researchers at duke university unveiled the world’s first “invisibility cloak,” which used metamaterials to hide a small object from microwaves (wavelengths much longer than we can see). Though the device didn’t conceal things from human view, this innovation kept it hidden from microwaves, an important first step in accelerating the technology of cloaking. But while it worked, it still left small reflections, which prevented it from completely hiding an object.

A new study published in Nature Materials describes how researchers are now able to render a centimeterscale cylinder invisible to microwaves. There are only a few caveats to the invisibility trick—it only works for centimeter-scale objects, it’s only made invisible from one angle, and it only applies to microwave radiation. “It’s like

NOVEMBER 16 2012

the card people in Alice in Wonderland,” said David Smith, a professor at Duke. “If they turn on their sides you can’t see them, but they’re obviously visible if you look from the other direction.”

In theory, invisibility cloaks work by bending electromagnetic waves around objects—instead of seeing the object, you see what’s behind the object. Smith and his Duke colleague Nathan Landy reworked previous efforts at achieving invisibility by tweaking how the edges of a microwave cloak line up, ensuring that the light passes around the cloak completely with no reflections. The team refashioned the metamaterial itself into a diamond, which is apparently the best shape for minimizing reflections.

“This, to our knowledge, is the first cloak that really addresses getting the transformation exactly right to get

you that perfect invisibility,” said Smith.

Practical applications of the new technique could have an impact in technologies like radar and telecommunications, as well as fiber optic networks, where invisibility cloaks could be used to bend light around corners without attenuating the signal. However, the design principles involved in cloaking microwaves would be difficult to replicate at optical wavelengths. The Duke team plans to use their latest findings to work toward an omnidirectional, fully three-dimensional illusion—maybe the next cloak invented will be one that humans can wear.

— KVB

NEWS // 02

I’M DEAD political poisonings through the ages

by Emily Gogolak & Kate Van Brocklin Illustrations by Robert Sandler

augustus, the founder of Rome and great-nephew of Julius Caesar, met his demise by figs on August 19, 14 AD while visiting the place of his father’s death in Nola, a town in southern Italy. Both Tacitus and Cassius Dio, two of his Roman consultants, wrote that Augustus’s wife Livia poisoned him with fresh figs, though this allegation remains unproven. Augustus’s famous last words were, “Have I played the part well? Then applaud as I exit.” king john of england reigned over his country from April 6, 1199 until his death by peaches on October 18, 1216. While suffering from a severe case of dysentery, King John overindulged in a “surfeit of peaches,” which, according to several accounts, were unripe, poisoned, and killed him. wolfgang amadeus mozart suffered many illnesses throughout his life—smallpox, tonsillitis, bronchitis, pneumonia, typhoid fever, rheumatism, gum disease and a few others. The official record states that Mozart died on December 5, 1791 of “hitziges Frieselfieber” (“severe miliary fever,” referring to a rash that looks like millet seeds), a description that does not meet the criteria of any modern medical diagnosis. One theory is that Mozart died as a result of his hypochondria and his predilection to taking patent medicines containing antimony, a toxic chemical element most commonly used in lead-acid batteries.

yasser arafat vomited during a meeting in Ramallah. His spokesman said he was coming down with the “flu,” but it soon proved to not be the 24-hour variety. In the following days, his condition kept deteriorating, and doctors were flown in from Tunisia, Jordan, and Egypt to find a diagnosis. But they couldn’t.

By the end of the month, things were really bad, and Arafat was admitted to a French military hospital outside of Paris. He fell into a coma and never got out of it. On November 11, the 75-year-old Arafat was pronounced dead. Cause of death: hemorrhagic cerebeovascular accident (AKA stroke). But Arafat’s medical records were withheld by senior Palestinian officials and Mrs. Arafat refused an autopsy. The legend had died but rumors about his death were only beginning.

For the past eight years, the main rumor has been that Israel poisoned Arafat. Israel said this was ridiculous. There was no evidence. Until now.

This past July, Al Jazeera reported on an investigation carried out by the Institute of Radiation Physics at the University of Lausanne that found abnormally high traces of polonium on Arafat’s personal belongings. According to the report, the tests suggest that Arafat was poisoned.

The news sparked major hype. French authorities opened a murder inquiry into his death, and Arafat’s widow requested that her husband’s body be exhumed to test for polonium. She wanted to be “100 percent sure.” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas approved her request, and this week authorities began the process.

A big tarp went up on Monday around Arafat’s tomb at PLO headquarters in Ramallah and workers started digging. The details of the exhumation are being kept top secret, but a source speaking on condition of anonymity told the AFP on Tuesday, “Today they started removing concrete and stones from Arafat’s mausoleum and the work will last for almost 15 days. There are several phases.” First comes the removal of stone and concrete and the tomb’s iron framework until they reach the soil that covers the body.

Arafat himself will not be removed until the arrival of the French prosecutors, Swiss experts, and Russian investigators on November 27.

napoleon bonaparte might have been tiny, but he was surely mighty. He might not have been mighty enough to withstand a dose of Arsenic, though after being defeated by the British in 1815, Bonaporte was sent to St. Helena, an island in the South Pacific. On his deathbed six years later, at the age of 52, he uttered his last words, “Head of Army!”

An autopsy at that time called the culprit stomach cancer.

Some French forensic scientists in 1961, however, begged to differ when they found traces of arsenic in the emperor’s hair. Given that if Napoleon had escaped St. Helena, he could have shaken up the balance of power in Europe, murder suspicions make sense-but how The Little Corporal, as he was known, would have been able to escape the island without being part merman doesn’t.

A lot of people hated joseph stalin, even some of his own friends. And they may have hated Uncle Joe enough to poison him. In 2003, 50 years after Stalin’s (supposed) death by a brain hemorrhage, an exhaustive investigation of a long off-limits report suggested otherwise. Relying on a secret account by Stalin’s doctors of his final days, an American and a Russian historian co-authored Stalin’s Last Crime, a 402-page book that claims joseph stalin may have been murdered during a dinner with four members of his Politburo. The poison was apparently warfarin, a tasteless and colorless blood thinner that, in high doses, is also used as a rat poison. The rationale? Politburo comrademurderers were convinced that Stalin was going to take the USSR to war with the US. “And it scared them to death,” one of the co-authors told The New York Times. So they cut to the chase and killed him first. pope john paul i spent the evening of Sept. 28, 1978 alone praying in his private chapel in the Apostolic Palace. After he finished, he went to his bedroom next door, and was found dead in his bed by a nun early the next morning.

The Vatican claimed that the pope—who was elected to the Papacy just 33 days earlier—died of a heart attack. But this was definitely fishy, and we’re not talking about Fridays here. In the 2009 book, Murder in the Vatican, historian Lucien Gregoire claims that John Paul I was murdered out of fear kthat he would make big-time changes in the Vatican, including the ousting of a number of powerful Masonic cardinals and an investigation into shady dealings at the Vatican bank. Though no official cause of death was ever declared by medical professionals, many feel that John Paul I died of poisoning by Aqua Toffana—a tasteless, colorless liquid composed of arsenic, lead, and the poisonous plant belladonna.

The former President of Ukraine, Kremlin critic, and Russian spy viktor yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin during the 2004 election campaign. One year later, it was confirmed that his blood contained an alarmingly high level of dioxin—1,000 times the acceptable level. To add insult to injury, to this day Yushchenko’s face remains badly pockmarked because of the chemical.

03 // NEWS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

OUT OF SIG HT, OUT OF MI ND The Invisible World of Sewage Treatment in Providence, RI Written & Illustrated by Jehane Samaha

much of our daily waste disappears down drains: tubs of soapy bath water, eggshells ground up in the garbage disposal, the fantastic dump you took this morning, globs of toothpaste, or that perfect tennis ball that rolled through the bars of a storm drain. Yet beyond the toilet bowl or the drain of the kitchen sink, our wastewater system is invisible.

In Providence, all of this waste—food particles, excrement, beauty products, storm water—ends up at the sewage treatment plant. To get there, the wastewater journeys through Providence’s network of historic sewers, with graceful curved arches of hand-laid brick, modeled after those of Paris. Pipes from each home connect to this maze, funneling all the wastewater through larger and larger pipes. The water eventually reaches a nine-foot diameter “trunk line”—the large pipe that flows under Ernest St. in South Providence and leads to the Field’s Point sewage treatment plant, one of 19 plants statewide.

There, waste is separated from water and treated to remove pathogens and pollutants. The treated water is released into Narragansett Bay, while solid wastes are sent to landfills.

Bill Patenaude, Principal Engineer at the Department of Environmental Management (DEM), has overseen the regulation of wastewater in Rhode Island for the past 24 years, inspecting polluting industries and training Wastewater Operators. He wishes everyone knew that “[Sewage treatment] exists, that it is the most expensive infrastructure that communities own and maintain, and that it is the underpinning of public health, civilization, and the economy.” To keep our environment clean requires millions of dollars, immense quantities of energy, and the tireless dedication of teams of men and women working around the clock. The process of sewage treatment is science at its most elegant—harnessing simple tools like gravity and microbes to speed up the natural process of breaking down waste.

CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT

Wastewater treatment removes some of the most dangerous contaminants from sewage: pathogens and other bacteriological agents that have the potential to cripple our civilization with disease. In the late 1800s, when Providence installed its Les Misérables-esque sewers, this was a real concern. The fecal matter of 100,000 people and 200,000 horses could not stay in the middle of Providence.

At the time, horses were a primary means of transportation; their feces lined the streets and gutters.

A single rainstorm could wash this excrement—full of bacteria—into the nearest body of water. To capture this runoff and ferry it to the treatment facility, Providence installed combined sewers which were state of the art at the time, but are now much too small to handle modern levels of wastewater flow, according to Jamie Samons, Public Affairs Manager for the Narragansett Bay Commission.

These old pipe systems combined wastewater flow from streets and homes into one pipe so it could all be treated at once.

Today, the wide sprawl of impervious surfaces like roads and parking lots has led to more water running into storm drains instead of seeping into the ground. In 1995, 75.6 percent of the land within three miles of downtown Providence was covered by buildings, asphalt, and concrete, according to Urban Environmental thesis research by Nick Rosenberg B’97. Beyond increased runoff, increased population in Providence County—from 328,683 in

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1900 to 626,667 in 2010 according to the U.S. Census— means that more homes are running showers and flushing toilets every day. Combined sewers became illegal in the US when Congress passed the 1972 Clean Water Act, in part because of Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO)—the pipes would overflow during storms and pour sewage into nearby tributaries. In recent decades, the Narragansett Bay Commission has drilled a three-mile long tunnel under Providence to prevent overflow by storing wastewater during rain events. The work of separating sewage lines from storm water lines continues to this day.

Even on a rainless day, the Field’s Point facility alone treats 50 million gallons of wastewater. Together, the treatment facilities in Rhode Island process a minimum of 100 million gallons of wastewater per day. Even though septic tank owners don’t use the same system of pipes and tunnels, they should still care about wastewater treatment.

When the day comes to empty the septic tank, the pumping company brings this waste to the treatment plant.

CORRUPTION

During the dark days of wastewater treatment in Providence, nearby waters were heavily polluted by sewage and industrial waste. In the years before 1982, Buddy Cianci’s administration allowed 65 million gallons of raw sewage to pour into Narragansett Bay every day, in direct violation of the 1972 Clean Water Act. Under Cianci, “the process of repairing the 1899 sewage plant was rife with corruption, from the kickbacks... to no-show workers to the theft of equipment—everything from work gloves to sixty-pound cast-iron-and-steel valves.” according to Mike Stanton’s The Prince of Providence, a biography of sorts of the illustrious former mayor.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) removed control of the sewage system from the city and mandated the creation of the Narragansett Bay Commission (NBC).

Before 1982, the Field’s Point treatment plant was the second worst facility in New England, as ranked by the EPA. By 1985, the newly established NBC transformed Field’s Point, earning it accolades from the EPA as the best facility in the country. Patenaude witnessed “the tail-end of the old school culture that said ‘this is just a sewage plant,’ versus the new mentality that ‘this is an important service to society.’”

The NBC now runs the Field’s Point and Bucklin Point treatment facilities, which together handle 70 percent of Rhode Island’s wastewater. Bill Patenaude notes that these plants aren’t “necessarily representative of typical small municipal facilities” in surrounding towns. The NBC employs teams of engineers and scientists and maintains cutting-edge technology. Rhode Island is small enough that all the municipal facilities can benefit from the research and innovation at NBC. GUESS HOW IT WORKS

A bustling control room flashing with red and green lights controls the flow through the treatment plant. First, the flow passes through bar screens which catch large trash— from styrofoam cups, to mattresses and shopping carts,

to the bodies of dogs and cats. All of this is removed and brought to a landfill.

The water that moves past this stage is murky and dense with grit and sludge, with a greasy film floating on top. In the next step, primary treatment, this heavy material settles to the bottom of a tank. A conveyor belt pulls the sludge from the bottom of a tank to be dewatered. This is the smelly stuff, and as such, it is is stored away behind the shield of silver-colored domes that look like they belong in a science fiction movie.

After removing the thick sludge, there are still fine particles suspended in the water. These are more difficult to remove, and that’s where the plant calls on microbes, or “bugs” as Samons refers to them. Secondary treatment pumps oxygen bubbles through the water, making the water less dense; if you fall off the gangplank into the tank, you will sink like a stone. With oxygen and particles of poo, the microbes thrive. They eat the particles, growing and sticking together in clumps. These heavy clumps then sink to the bottom, clearing the water. Secondary treatment is an active, dramatic process, where serious care is put into keeping the microbial community happy and working at all costs. “The ‘bugs’ actually come from the sewage. They occur in the intestines of mammals,” Samons said. “This is really a biological plant. Everything that happens here would happen in nature, but it would require a lot more time and space.”

The scale of the treatment plant is immense; tank after concrete tank pulses with millions of gallons of fluid, while even more tanks sit empty, awaiting the heavier flow caused by a rain storm. Beyond the physical scale, you also have to consider that the process runs continuously, night and day, every day of the week. The tanks are constantly being filled and re-filled.

After the clumps from secondary treatment settle out, the water is visibly clearer. It flows serenely through a maze while it is chlorinated to disinfect, killing all invisible disease-spreading pathogens. The water is then dechlorinated to make it safe to discharge into the Bay. US, THE BAY, US IN THE BAY

However, even though the water is clear at this point, it still contains high levels of nitrogen (a by-product of human waste) that can be harmful to ecosystems. Field’s Point is in the process of adding more treatment stages which will decrease the amount of nitrogen in the released water, thus decreasing nutrient pollution to the Bay. Excess levels of nutrients like nitrogen cause blooms of algae, resulting in depleted oxygen levels, fish die-offs, and decreased habitat quality for seagrasses and shellfish.

At Field’s Point, they know this: “People aren’t going to come to the Ocean State if there are grease balls floating in the Bay, when it’s polluted and smelly and you can’t swim in it,” said Field’s Point Operations Manager Carmine Goneconte, “We affect the lives of the whole state of Rhode Island.”

JEHANE SAMAHA B’13.5 lets

it mellow.

SCIENCE // 04

FLOWERS FOR ALDERAAN One fan’s free trip to Rhode Island Comic Con

by Daniel Stump // Illustration by Diane Zhou

NOVEMBER 4, 2012 2:00 PM

Forty or 50 kids shuffle around in the middle of a cementfloored exhibition hall with a three story ceiling. Some have brown robes draped over their shoulders, with Pokemon and Spiderman t-shirts poking through. One girl sporting the red leather jacket of Kat Everdeen from The Hunger Games waves around a cardboard arrow. Another teen wears a punk rock Boba Fett costume, with a great green Mohawk in place of the helmet. A black-haired, bespectacled boy of eight or ten points to his robe, now bunching up around his ankles: “My grandma made this.”

A round-headed man with a robust mustache moves to the front of the group. His full uniform and gray hair lend credibility to his commanding posture. The kids turn to face him—what was once a loose clump of people suddenly resembles a military formation, or maybe a backyard nerd militia meeting. The man is Joe “Kenpo Joe” Robello of New Bedford, MA, a black belt instructor certified in 18 martial arts. He begins pacing. Behind him, parents and spectators line a moveable wall. “Today we will be learning Jedi swordplay as taught by the great Sword

05 // METRO

Master Anderson, choreographer of such classic films as Robin Hood, Highlander, and Star Wars,” he announces. His voice pulses out across the empty space.

He tells the kids to spread their arms and maneuver around, so that they won’t hit each other. “Do not twirl your lightsaber,” Master Joe paces, “Do not twist your lightsaber.” A few students twirl; a few more twist. One tries all three at once and sends his wooden kendo sword clattering across the floor. Joe smiles. This is the out of character portion of the class, he says, and gives a little bow to a boy in front of him. “Now, let’s begin.”

Joe turns his back to his young padawans and pauses dramatically. He flips up his oversized brown hood and flicks out the ratcheting plastic segments of his lightsaber.

Bijouuuuuuuuuuuu. He turns back around to face his students, slowly lowering his hood again before resheathing. “The force is like water, it flows through you,” he says, his voice gravellier than before.

How did it come to this?—backroom drilling mystic combat, indoctrinating children into some sort of iconoclastic struggle—I’m a pacifist for Christ’s sake!

Most immediately, I guess, it began with the Rhode Island Comic Con staffers lurching about on a rapidly degenerating schedule, first delaying the Jedi Training Session for an hour before directing everyone to the bottom floor of the Dunkin’ Donuts Conference Center, then back to the fifth floor. They finally sent them to the bottom once again, prompting the outrage and impotent refusal of one mother, indignant at another trip up and down three flights of escalators.

“A Jedi does not feel rage,” cautioned Kenpo Joe. I had to agree with him. The kids in official t-shirts were just working the weekend so they could see the DeLorean for free—only so many little Dutch boys with their fingers in the dyke. It wasn’t their fault that Green Ranger and MMA Fighter Jason David Frank (aka JDF aka Fearless Frank) had to bump up his panel discussion by an hour, casting +5 disappointment on a line of Jedi hopefuls as he went highkicking past, “Hya! Hya! Hya!” Outside, an older professional staffer tried to soothe a pack of young volunteers, frantic and anxious to please the increasingly impatient fans. “Everybody just breathe.” He

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

held his hands in front of him in a gesture of calm. As soon as he could shuttle away his little helpers, a fan dressed like Rogue placed herself in his path to demand some sort of compensation for the ever-shifting schedule.

I sat against the movable wall listening to Kenpo Joe talk about the eight angles of attack and eight basic positions of lightsaber combat, counting out a striking cadence for the budding Jedis to swing to, and I watched my middle school nerd friends and I swordfighting behind the goal with our lacrosse sticks, while our coach yelled at us to “pull [our] heads out of each other’s asses” and to “go back to [our] mom’s basements if [we wanted] to play ‘Dungeon Wars.’” Coach had taken up Bush 43’s hobby of making up words (“The wings are strategorically intrictal to the success of the team”); there was no reason to tell him that no such game existed. We wouldn’t have traded a million varsity letters or senior proms for all the late nights spent reading The Sandman and Hellboy, so we just shook our heads and went back to our plans for weekend WoW raiding, and one day, just maybe, a trip to Comic Con. NOVEMBER 3, 2012 11:00 AM

And now here I was, riding an escalator with a battered Stormtrooper and the most cartoonishly over-muscled Batman I have ever seen, for free! All it took was signing an agreement in which I promised not to ask for any autographs or interviews (under penalty of perjury), and Dan Stump was covering Rhode Island’s first ever Comic Con. On the first day, the convention center hosted a beer fest opposite the Con, and the Dunkin’ Donuts people had set up a labyrinth of metal cattle chutes to keep the fanbases separate. This made matters infinitely worse, with disappointed beer-goers stuck next to the original Batmobile on one side, and the detritus of a thousand cartoon series stranded in a sea of hockey jerseys on the other. Frustrated convention center staffers tried to yell at the stray packs, to tell them which escalators they should go up and then down to loop around and find their peers, but they quickly gave up and just tore down the metalrailinged Berlin wall of nerddom.

I had never been party to a reunion so sweet. Clusters of fans shouted the name of each hero they passed: “Punisher! Black Widow! Yea!” Professional quality costumes traded tips with Salvation Army grab bags and steampunk cliques. It took one elaborate Predator five months to craft his costume from latex resin. A slick, modern Captain America spent all of October on his; he planned to auction it off and give the money to a ministry after the Con. Fans stuttered with excitement, nervously asking each other for pictures with their handiwork. Ten Jokers of various size and deportment stood in the press line, until one staffer called out that the costume contest was full. It wasn’t just franchised characters, however; most attendees were walking amalgams of their favorite things: a Pikachu hat with Link’s sword and a Batman t-shirt, or a Warrior’s leather vest and a ZZ Top beard.

I kept moving. “Get your picture with Marty or Doc! Get your picture with the 1967 Bat Cycle!” Pictures next to the Batmobile were free; getting in the driver’s seat cost ten bucks. Inside the main exhibition hall, vendors hawked comic books, action figures, posters, and autographed memorabilia. To the rear was the living museum: Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek casts, Lee Merriweather

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(Catwoman), Billy West (voice-actor for Futurama and Ren and Stimpy), Mike Edmunds (one of the Time Bandits, as well as the star of Men Without Hats’ breakout video hit, “Safety Dance”)—everyone sat at blue cloth tables to sign autographs and chat with the fans, while stands sold headshots for the signing. “You can do it, we’re behind you 100%. They’re just people,” said one Finn (of Adventure Time) to a friend, trying to pump him up to talk to Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca). A cast member of the Galactica recounted fond memories of one episode to Princess Zelda: “Probably my favorite, I liked the prison bars. I wish they had left me there longer.”

The local geek and freak industry was out in force: S&M Magazine, Morbid Films, the New England Horror Writers, Monster Haiku, even a reptile show. Makemeadragon.com offered to draw any dragon you could imagine for $12.95. The couple, a banker and an illustrator, eagerly showed me a Mario Dragon, a Garfield Dragon, a Penguin Dragon, and a Dragon hanging out with a cat, which I found to be a bit of a cop-out. Upstairs, the Green Ranger JDF was giving out high fives for free, but his handler announced that posters were $30, T-shirts were $30, signatures were $20, and a picture with the man himself was $10.

JDF called a pudgier, shorter clone of himself out from the crowd and posed like they were about to fight, while another member of his crew took a picture: “Good luck sucka!” He giggled and let a little kid pretend to knock him down. Another pressman told me that earlier in the day someone had fake-punched him in the face before laughing and walked away. “I thought it was just some dick but it turned out to be the Green Ranger.”

I went upstairs to meet an anarcho-geek friend at the costume contest. “Last night I was a drag-on,” my swarthy companion informed me, as a parade of DC, Marvel, and everything between gesticulated wildly by. “So I wore a dress and punched out some guy in a Nazi costume.”

Nearby, a fire marshal began arguing with another cat-lady as he tried to clear the walkways that the attendees had clogged. “Go see if you can get any coke from Jake the Snake,” my friend advised, but I told him I was legally prohibited from asking the talent anything.

Later, I found the room where a scaled down version of the costume contest was being judged. Contestants walked to the front and answered questions from a panel of judges about their characters and costumes. “I am Dr. Grimm of Dr. Grimm Laboratories. I travel through time doing... well there’s a lot of science involved so I’m not going into that,” said one man in a top hat with a telescoping monocle. Strong, silent types gave only their name and rank. The skinny MC made half-jokes, punctuated by shouts or booing from the crowd. Thor waddled up to the front and declared himself the righteous fist of Asgard. He thrust his hammer, Mjolnir, into the air, and everybody in the crowd oh’d when it lit up from inside.

The costume took him a year and a half of daily work.

Needless to say, he took first place and won a gold VIP pass to next year’s Con. The crowd favorite and best presentation winner, however, was the serial heckler Batpool—a relatively new character who fuses Batman and the wisecracking, fourthwall breaking mercenary Deadpool. James Jwanowski had debuted this costume at the NYC Comic Con last month, and had dressed up as Deadpool for the two previous years.

Recently, he had taken Batpool to a benefit for the victims of the Aurora shooting. “Batman was real upset,” he told me, indicating the hyper-muscled Dark Knight from earlier in the day, now standing in a corner with a COG from Gears of War. “He lost a lot of gigs. The Batman symbol, it’s more than just a thing. It’s about rising above, you know? We went [to the benefit] as three different Batmans.”

While we talked, an Ezio from Assassin’s Creed asked Batpool for his contact information. This one had started an anti-bullying and -violence organization of his own— he wanted to work with Batpool in the future. I excused myself from the group and for some reason apologized for not coming in costume. “No, you write for the Daily Bugle,” Batpool cheered, “It’s just your alter-ego!”

NOVEMBER 4, 2012 4:30 PM

Peter Mayhew uses a wheelchair now, but even sitting down, there is no mistaking his massive frame. His shaggy hair and the gentle, ent-like groan of his voice are enough to make anyone believe that he is every part the wookie he first played 35 years ago. At the last panel of Comic Con, he and Ryder Windham, author of over 60 Star Wars books, expressed hope for the future of the series, which was recently purchased from George Lucas by Disney for over $4 billion.

“Fans own a piece of Star Wars,” Ryder says. “Or at least they think they do. They take it very personally . . . It’s beyond nostalgia.”

I picture the poster of Luke Skywalker with his lightsaber over his head outside the Ephrata, PA, movie theater where my dad took me to see the re-release of A New Hope in 1997. In my head, I rifle through the shoebox full of old Magic: the Gathering cards and D&D character sheets gifted to my nerd friends and I by a cool older cousin and fellow WoW player. Then I think about the Chewbacca action figure I picked up in the showroom at the first day of the Con, whose arms wave when I press his legs together. Even as I write, I continually reposition him so he can hold the Magic card (Otarian Juggernaut—a 2/3 artifact creature which gets +3/+0 when it attacks) that I picked up the same day. It makes me happy.

Mayhew laughs when he talks about the pairing of himself and “little Kenny Baker,” the actor who played R2D2. “There’s always someone different from you. There’s always someone the same as you... Star Wars has been good to us. I’ve been fortunate.”

On the escalator outside, a few gentlemen from the beerfest in backwards fitted hats jeer at a Red Ranger: “Go Go Power Rangers!” They give each other high-fives before crawling up their own assholes. The sun dances across a thin layer of dust on the hood of the original Batmobile.

Another pair of bros with their sunglasses on indoors jab one another in the ribs and giggle at a well-crafted Princess Zelda. A man behind me holds a truly majestic Millenium Falcon replica against his chest. I tell him so. “Right? It’s even better with Peter Mayhew’s autograph,” he beams and then looks up and chews his lip. “Sometimes life can be sweet. May the force be with you!”

DANIEL STUMP B’14 is

brought to you by City Gyro.

METRO // 06

In Argentina an excerpt

by Kevin Pires Illustration by Diane Zhou

i write about cities because they are the only constant. I have existed in these places. This is a generous guarantee. I look back and realize that all I am certain of is having been there. What I thought then about myself, about life, about all those fallacious variables has now assuredly changed. In youth, it is impossible to anticipate what it will feel like to realize you were wrong. We learn early that hindsight is 20/20. We toss that phrase around bawdily, as if to assure each other and ourselves that we are aware of lunar phases, of eclipses, of waning stars we never even saw glow. We know that there will be a moment where what we thought we knew will change and we will be irrevocably altered. But there is no way to anticipate the quake. This is the record of the shifting.

we visited a detention center one sunny afternoon.

One of those last sunny afternoons in Argentina when I could feel the end approaching and couldn’t quite tell if I wanted it to come. The subway lines didn’t reach the part of the city where the detention center was, we took a bus instead. A bus full of people toeing the boundary between adolescence and adulthood, and so unsure of which part to play. We made easy jokes to distract ourselves of our own uncertainty.

Garage Olimpo was a bus garage and then it was a torture facility. Intention is permeable. Before we were given a tour of the structure we were sat down and talked to by the keeper of this makeshift crypt. The afternoon was hot and Spanish was easy to ignore if you tried hard enough.

The walls were white and unmarked except for the banner that covered the far right wall. It was a collage of black and

07 // FEATURES

white photos of the victims, of the disappeared. There is a chance, an astronomically large possibility in fact, that education has made me a lifelong cynic. Those photos of all those missing people, crooked smiles and teased hair, stared back blankly. What I felt in the pit of my stomach (is that below where the food goes?) was the sterile blanket pity that black and white photos of genocide victims call forth.

They say we once were people who sat for photographs.

But they all say it. And they all say it so loudly that I had to tune them out like I did the Spanish that afternoon. I listened to my stomach instead, the place where the food goes.

Above the entrance, a sign said, “Welcome to the Olympus of the Gods. The Centurions.” The center was open for six months, from August 1978 to January 1979.

Seven hundred prisoners walked under that sign once. Fifty walked under it twice. The building was a warehouse that was used as a bus terminal. In early 1978 cells were built to house the detainees. They were built by prisoners who were transferred from other detention centers. The sun held high overhead. It was a late spring Argentine and the fronds of the palm tree in the courtyard didn’t dare sway. I don’t remember the guide’s name today. He led us around pointing out where the cells used to be, where feet used to drag. When Garage Olimpo was abandoned as a detention center, the proof of its purpose was hidden. The cells that had been hastily constructed where the buses used to sit were taken down and everything was covered with a fresh layer of concrete. Underneath the concrete the foundations remained. In the kitchen, in the showers, the guide had us read poems written by detainees that had lived there. In heavily accented Spanish, tongues struggling to replicate the Argentine lilts, we held a literary séance.

in argentina, the terror the government inflicted upon its people was not simply a cataclysmic aberration of law and expectation but rather the all too foreseeable result of a series of discretely executed parts. This is the least reassuring of all the facts. We expect aberrations, are taught that nothing will ever be the way we expected. But forget that chance is never chance but the retroactive result of consciences maligned. In Argentina there was bad governance to blame and a military that grew in strength and the discrete wishes of flesh and bone. And as is often the case, that history is interesting only in what it begot. I tell you this because of the difficulty in untangling the series of events that led to all that silence. It was a war of acronyms that slip away before you can remember the difference between the FAR or ERP or PEN. Acronyms proliferate in Argentine society greedily and I never understood how anyone kept track of them all. I bet the truth is somewhere behind all those letters but acronyms hide the truth like foundations cemented over. What you need to know is this: that Isabel Perón was an unqualified leader, that the military grew much too strong for its own good and that there were people who opposed them and, in doing so, opposed the ticks and tocks of their prescribed chronology.

Three hundred and forty detention centers were built with corresponding mass graves. The military called one torture facility on the outskirts of Buenos Aires El Vesubio, Vesuvius, for the black plumes of smoke that rose from the flesh volcano and swirled into the sky. The inky fog was caused by the burning of tires and corpses and could be seen from a distance. Rubber burns with a stench more odorous than that of incinerated skin. At least the victims of the center’s namesake were fossilized, found in the fetal

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

position, an odd coincidence in birth and death. El Vesubio was also called “The Sheraton.” Vacations at Uruguay’s luxurious Punta del Este beach were ruined for many with the sudden appearance of ‘floaters,’ the bodies of victims that had been dumped into the River Plate and drifted like discarded bottles onto distant shores.

imagine auschwitz in your backyard or Dacchau down the block. Imagine torture so close that you could hear the clipped shrieks. The Dirty War made Buenos Aires complicit in the pain. This was a city made dangerous; where suspicion was bred with the finesse of pedigreed dogs.

Nunca Más was the name of the report issued by the perhaps grandiosely named “Truth Commission,” established to investigate the disappearances. They came to a number of conclusions. Nearly 9,000 disappearances were found to have occurred between 1976 and 1983. That is the official number. The real number is somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000. Families feared coming forward because the government was in charge of the disappearances.

They didn’t know whom to trust so they trusted no one. It was also found that all the disappeared were killed and the impossibility of tracing their whereabouts was intentional.

The government had all incriminating documentation destroyed. Memory is faulty in the hands of a government who has both the power to forget and to remember.

Description of El Olimpo from Nunca Más: Steel entrance gate, possibly red. A corrugated tin roof some 10 meters high covered most of the

NOVEMBER 16 2012

buildings. These were new, about three meters high, with flat concrete roofs, where there were two or three guards. The entrance was through the guards’ post. Prisoners were transferred through a double door. On the left there was a picture of the Virgin Mary. An isolation wing with large pointed windows, blocked with masonry, so that only their tops were left uncovered.

Small torture room, latrines. On the other side another torture room, a cell, a photographic and fingerprint laboratory, a special operations office. A kitchen and dining-room opposite. One infirmary for treatment and another for internment. Files and documentation office, another for X-rays. Three corridors of cells, each row of cells with a toilet with a curtain for a door, in the third row a wash-basin and showers. A guard room with a window on to the car park. A larger room was used for the repair of household, electrical and electronic goods stolen during the raids.

we had been told of the ranch and I awaited it restlessly. Late November was approaching and the heat promised arrived ungracefully. We left behind the concrete apartment blocks and mega shopping centers that encircle the city proper. Lines unmarked by man or machine, we saw the endless plains that they call pampas and soon entered a demarcated land of country estates. The dirt road that led to his home was well tread and a double row of trees flanked each side. There were those slat fences that don’t keep anything but large animals out and behind them

horses, 20 or 30 coffee-colored horses that clung to each other like children in a schoolyard, moving in jagged negotiation when disturbed by the rumble of our jeep.

The uniformed women set the dinner table for us outside amongst the trees and under the thunder whose claps I tried to measure for distance, hoping the rain would hold off at least until dessert. Livestock raised on the ranch was grilled and vegetables from the garden made into a salad and everyone tried to act as if a dinner lit by candles and flashes of approaching lightening were a thing done casually. The heat had to break. Why do we say that heat breaks? As if heat were a glass cup that could fall from a shaky hand. Heat collapses under the weight of its own being like a tent after a storm or a person after a beating.

Two bites in, it broke. We grabbed our plates and wine glasses and fled into the dining room. And it was as we finished our meals and the conversation turned to singer Sade—or maybe it was that night, after the bath I took in the tub with the faucets that said chaud and froid (I was in Argentina and that house was built only 17 years before I sat there and they choose the French words for hot and cold because they were rich and they were cultured and their own language didn’t translate money with the verisimilitude of French)—or it was on the patio reading the next morning, that I wondered whether this wealthy family had anything to do with the disappearances.

FEATURES // 08

at the age of six, in some cases earlier and in others later, the process of shedding teeth begins with the fall of the first tooth. Children around the world are struck by the new pulp vacancy in their gums, by the body part in their hands, struck by how unfinished their smiles now look.

Their adults tell them what to do: In the United States, you place the tooth underneath your pillow before going to sleep.

In the night, a flying figure called the Tooth Fairy drops magically into your room. She is in the business of collecting teeth. Quietly, she slips her hand beneath the bed pillows and collects her prize, which you call a “baby tooth.” She always leaves a reward in return—a quarter, a dollar, a small gift—so that you will gain something in the morning after you have lost something in the night. Besides her wings and the trail of sparkles from her wand, what she really looks like is unknown. But she is, most likely, a certain shade of blue.

In Spain, you place the tooth underneath the pillow before going to sleep. A 117-yearold rat named Ratoncito Pérez will enter your room with the moonlight by the cracks in the door. Pérez, who is from Madrid, is said to live in a box of sugar cookies with his precious wife, La Ratita Presumida, Vain Little Mouse, and his children, when he is not out collecting what is known in most European languages as “milk teeth.” His wife is the most beautiful mouse in all of Spain—the Donkey dreams of her, the Dog barks longingly for her, even the Cat thinks she is almost too beautiful to eat! Pérez is a handsome and sturdy rat. His bifocals perch on his perfectly sloped nose, he wears a freshly pressed corduroy jacket, and he tops off his dandy outfit with a calico wide-rimmed hat.

When he hears the sweet, glittering sound of your falling tooth, he kisses his beautiful wife goodbye and scurries through the marvelous maze of pipes underneath Madrid to your very bedroom. In exchange for your tooth, it is customary that he will also leave you a small gift, usually one of the cookies from his home.

In Peru, he is called El Raton de los Dientes.

In Argentina, he is El Raton Pérez.

In Venezuela, he is also the spokesman for Colgate.

In France, in the countryside, you leave your tooth to wait for La Petite Souris. Also a mouse, but French- rather than Spanish-speaking, the Good Little Mouse turns into a fairy during the day so that she can care for neglected children. She returns to her tiny size at night; simply, it is much easier to navigate your downy pillows this way. But if you live on the stirring, cosmopolitan streets of Paris, you will probably leave your tooth for the American Tooth Fairy because you’ve never heard of the Good Little Mouse, much to the resigned disappointment of your grandparents, whose teeth are also falling.

In Egypt, you wrap your bloodied tooth in the whitest cloth. You fling the small package as high as you possible can, so that the Sun God Ra might catch it. As it is ascending, you recite this wish: Shiny Sun, Shiny Sun. Take this buffalo’s tooth And give me a bride’s tooth.

In Norway, you drop your tooth in a glass of water on your nightstand. It is much easier for Tannfe, the Norwegian Tooth Fairy, to find your tooth in clear water than in opaque pillows—her eyes are so very old and tired. In the morning, sunk in the bottom of the glass, you will find a silver coin.

In Colombia, his name is not Spanish. Like his fellow indigenous folkloric characters, he does not dress in the European style. No bifocals, no jackets, no calico widebrimmed hat. In fact, this mouse does not dress at all. Long ago, the people who lived on the land before it was named after Christopher Colombus recognized that mice teeth, strong and sharp, never stop growing. And so the little mouse became the cultural tooth-gatherer. The tradition drifted to Europe many centuries after, but it has been forgotten amongst jars of molasses, bundles of sugarcane, pounds of tobacco­—the pounds of bodies.

09 // FEATURES

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

In Japan, and in most East Asian countries, you call the first erupted tooth and the dissenters that will follow “fall teeth.” When translated, the word in Japanese for “fall” more accurately fits the English word “deciduous”—the translation, however, is still ill-fitting. The sensation of the Japanese “fall” is to describe the natural and inevitable falling away of what is no longer purposeful. Instead, you close your eyes, curl your knees forward and throw the tooth into the air. If a baby tooth on the lower dental arcade falls, then you throw it upwards, so that the little fallen soldier will land on the top of the roof. But if, instead, a baby tooth on the upper ridge falls, then you toss it below, underneath your home. You do this in wise anticipation of the future; the adult lower tooth will grow upwards, while the upper tooth, nestled in the en-no-shita portion of your house, will sprout downwards. Perfectly, vertically.

In Haiti, if you have not yet been told about the American tooth fairy, you bury your tooth underneath the tree your father planted for you the day you were born.

That day, your father whispered his dreams for you into a carafe full of water. After wetting the earth, he nestled a seed and your umbilical cord into its dirt folds.

He did this so that the tree would be a good guardian, having grown up with the part that holds you close to your mother by its seed. Its shade comforts you, its fruits nourish you, and its roots ground you, especially if your parents have gone away. You bury your milk teeth because of two palpable fears. If a witch doctor or loa spirit gets to your tooth, he can use it to do terrible things to your family, or to make sure that no part of your body ever grows. And if an animal eats the tooth, your adult teeth will come in grotesquely, like the animal’s.

If it is a pig, your teeth will come in flat and dull.

In Mongolia, you don’t throw the tooth at all. You pack it in meat fat and feed it to a young dog, hoping that the lard will blind him as he eats your tooth. The dog will stay with you—even when the unforgiving, icy season called zud forces your family to gather everything, forces your family to move towards warmth. Your first fall tooth, in turn, stays with him. The dog is an earth-bound guardian for children and his consummation of the fall teeth ensures that your adult teeth will be as strong and destructive as his own, wherever the seasons move you.

If it is a goat, your teeth will come in grey and smell like mud.

In North Korea, you throw your tooth in the air. Perched, waiting, a black bird sees the dancing, white thing. It swoops through the sky, clutches it in its beak and flies away, invisible against the blackness of the night sky, the blackness of factory smoke.

In Costa Rica, you give your tooth to your mother, who has it plated in gold. If you are a girl, she has it made into an earring. If you are a boy, it is made into a charm necklace. The tooth and the cross you wear, both dipped in soft gold, should protect you from any harm or danger that might come your way. She cannot always stay with you but she knows your protectors always will.

In Sri Lanka, you must first coax a squirrel into staying with you a while. In his presence, you throw your tooth towards the upper branches of a tree. It is best to do this gently so he isn’t frightened and scurries away. When the tooth is nestled amongst the leaves, you tell the squirrel that the tooth is his if he agrees to bring you a new one. Of course, though you watch intently, you never can see him climb up the tree to retrieve it. When you finally begin to feel the new tooth scraping your tongue, you reason he must have fetched it during the few seconds you had to blink.

If it is a horse, your teeth will jut out of your mouth like mountains.

In Ukraine, in a corner of your home which light cannot find, you tuck your tooth in a tissue and leave it in the darkness. You whisper, “Take my old tooth and give me a new one,” but you are not sure to whom you are whispering.

In Nigeria, you hide your tooth in the attic so it does not get eaten, especially not by a mouse. The preservation of baby teeth is imperative to the health of your adult teeth, so while burying the tooth in the safe cobwebs of the uppermost floor in your home, you whisper this spell: Mr. Mouse, Mr. Mouse, don’t you dare eat this tooth! If you do, my new tooth will not come out. If you eat my tooth, I’m coming, I’m coming to get you and I’ll find, I’ll find your whole family and kill you.

If it is a mouse, your teeth will get lost in your mouth, tinier than ginger candies plugged into your gums.

In Jordan, you throw the tooth not towards the roof but a distance farther—to the sun. The hope is that Allah will accept your supplication, blazing a flying white dot onto the burnt color of the sun, and grant you with a better, stronger adult tooth.

In Jamaica, you throw the tooth to the moon. If you angle your wrist perfectly, the sugar-white tooth should disappear into the sugar-white moon, if only for a brief second, before it drops down, down, down, back to the ground.

NOVEMBER 16 2012

FEATURES // 10

Interviewing My Hero TIM PRESLEY

by Robert Merritt Illustration by Lizzie Davis i met tim presley in new york a few years ago while I was pretending to be a reporter. It was strange to meet someone that I had only known from listening to again and again while driving and walking and sitting in my room. Tim Presley is really cool and I really needed someone to look up to. He’s been making music for ages. White Fence is his solo project, and he’s been in bands as different as Darker My Love and The Nerve Agents. In April he released a collaborative LP with Ty Segall and last month he started his own record label, Birth Records, just so that he could release Jessica Pratt’s self-titled LP. Months later, after a show in Boston, my friend and I were talking to him and asked what it was like to perform at a show far from home when no one is dancing. He said to me something like, “It’s kind of like being on stage and someone pulls down your pants and you can’t stop to pull them up because you’re singing and playing guitar in the middle of the whole thing and everyone is staring at your dick.” But some of us were dancing that night even though this buzz dog and his girlfriend were half drunk and shouting at us. It is important to dance.

Tim Presley is the spiral. His music is an archival deepdive that picks up and leaves off from places that you think you remember in music history. But somewhere along the way, the referents are lost and swallowed up by the middle of it all. White Fence is a channeling of genre; listen as he cleans out the stables. Read the lyrics if you can’t make it out from the recording. Markets inside that keep me following you.

magic” to happen. All that can do is force you into bad decisions or make you lazy and say, “Oh, that take is good enough. ‘ However, working with Ty Segall and Eric Baur at the Baur Mansion studio was very easy. As far as studio recording, I would do it again with them any day.

INDY: White Fence seems to incorporate a lot of historical referents that lead to interesting and surprising melodic choices. Sometimes it seems as if you are very deliberately and effectively reappropriating a lot of different influences since the ’60s and creating a collage. You create melodies that seem collapsed from multiple time sources. I mean time sources both metrically and historically. Certain tracks even feel as if you slowed down a George Harrison song and mixed it with Syd Barrett. Who are your influences? What kind of stuff did you listen to as a kid?

INDY: You

have been in several other musical projects, including the Nerve Agents (as Timmy Stardust) and more recently Darker My Love and collaborations with Ty Segall, and I’m sure more. How does White Fence fit into this arrangement? Have you arrived at a point where you feel more confident or steady as a working and producing solo artist?

TP:

TIM PRESLEY:

Do you have a group of musicians that you consistently work with, or do you spend more time writing alone?

TP:

I write everything alone. Every day and night. No studio. Just my room. That way, I don’t have to compromise any decisions or worry if someone there is bored. I don’t like the pressure of someone sitting there waiting for “the

11 // ARTS

INDY: You are a graphic artist and attended an art school.

Does your music effectively translate your intentions—as a graphic artist, how do the different production modes complement one another? Do you spend time thinking about these relationships with different mediums or am I just being a foolish critic? How much self critique is performed in your work?

They are two different things. I can say something entirely different with music. I can say things in music that I can’t say on paper with a paint brush, and vice versa. I used to be very inspired by music and tangled it up with my art.

But looking back, it wasn’t proving anything real to me.

The best artwork I’ve done was not inspired by music, also the best music I’ve ever made was not art-inspired.

I know that my song-writing process tends to vary from song to song, sometimes a melody or larger song structure comes to me when I am walking or something and other times I sit down and improvise a melody over chords or a rhythm. Do you write your lyrics before or after the musical portion, or do your words help to shape the tune’s direction as it evolves? What’s it like?

INDY:

TP: He has influenced me in many ways. He always has.

Whether in showing me new music or being supportive of my music. When he was playing in Nodzzz, we would send each other demos or random recordings, and that had an effect on me as far as writing. That’s basically the way White Fence started. The first LP was songs I put on a CD for him to check out. I never thought much about it. Then it became a serious thing.

TP:

THE INDEPENDENT:

I do both. I used to cater more to the melody, and what words or phrases sounded best over the music.

But now I care more about the lyrics. Usually I’ll write a lot of thoughts very late at night for some reason. It all boils down to achieve a point, whether that’s a good lyric or a beautiful melody or harmony. Sometimes you get all of those. I think that’s what they call “a good song.”

sixties with The Beatles. I mean, what do kids have now?

Muse? Coldplay? That screamy emo shit? Fuck all that.

INDY: I know that your brother Sean is musical. What of the rest of your family? How has Sean influenced your playing over the years?

TP:

I have so many different influences, and it’s always changing. I think all those influences shape your musical decisions, like how your parents hopefully shape you to have manners and be a good person. I realize I lean more toward the ’60s but it’s not really a conscious thing. For example, when I was recording with Ty, we both just feel and know what something should sound like. We didn’t reference anything specific. We never said, “Oh, lets have this sound like the Pretty Things,” or, “Do this like the New York Dolls.” It was all just unsaid. People know what sounds appeal to them. As a kid I really loved Nirvana and that opened up the door to punk. I feel very lucky to have been at the young impressionable age I was during Nirvana.

It’s probably very similar to a teenager in the early to late

I’ve been in bands all my life, so working alone (or at times collaborating) is what I want to do at the moment. I love the band mentality, but I feel confident in what I’m doing right now.

INDY: How do you feel about your live performances versus the production on the albums? For example, it’s hard to double track vocals or guitar parts while playing live. Is there anything that you could do differently or change if you wanted to ?

TP:

Sure. I’d like to have the 1988 San Francisco ’49ers on stage while I play. I also really like simple rock and roll.

And if you can pull that off live then you have achieved something grand.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Throwback Live Nas, Lauryn Hill, and ‘90s Nostalgia

by Greg Nissan // Illustration by Robert Sandler it would’ve been hard for me to pass up Nas and Lauryn Hill’s double bill on Monday night at Lupo’s. They’re both legends, frequently appearing on ‘best of ’ lists, and though they’ve had drastically different careers (Nas has put out albums consistently since 1994; Lauryn Hill hasn’t come out with an album of new music since 2002), they retain a similar enigma, one tied to ideas of ‘classic rap.’ Nas was cursed by his precociousness—his debut album, 1994’s Illmatic, is regarded as one of the crowning achievements of rap music, and though all of his subsequent albums sold more copies, none has come close to reaching the heights of Illmatic, which epitomizes a jazz-fueled, lyrical East Coast style. After disbanding the Fugees, whose album The Score put Hill and Wyclef Jean on the map, Hill released her canonical album, 1998’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. It was the height of neo-soul and Hill’s brand of politically-minded spoken-word rap. She hasn’t come out with a studio album since. While Hill is undoubtedly the master of what she does—nobody else could be considered at the height of soul singing, rapping, and musical activism like she is—I wonder if her lack of production has attributed to her godlike status.

I wasn’t entirely sure why Nas and Lauryn Hill were touring together (they don’t play any songs together, and both can sell tickets on their own), but both their opening DJs made the connection clear. Nas’s DJ Greenland kept shouting, “1997, classic hip hop!” while playing songs like T.I.’s “What You Know,” which came out in 2006. While

NOVEMBER 16 2012

the crowd was mostly too young to have experienced the ’90s golden age of rap first hand, this entire show was sold as a ‘throwback.’ Lauryn Hill’s DJ gave a shout-out to “anybody over 25” while also deploying poorly thought out crowd pleasers like “�90s hip hop. This shit was real before MTV,” totally glossing over the fact that MTV was very popular in the �90s and that he was playing songs from Watch The Throne. These DJs marketed a lost golden age to a generation that never experienced it, ignoring the sustained popularity of Nas (especially his earlier work) and Lauryn Hill (I wish I could refer to her earlier work, since there’s no later work) through the years.

The headliners’ sets characterized their entire careers in many ways. Nas was on time, his band was unbelievably tight, and he charismatically rolled through classics and songs from his very enjoyable Life Is Good, which came out this July. Hill showed up 45 minutes late, and though her voice is still beyond heavenly and her raps jaw-dropping, she spent too much time controlling every detail of her band’s performance. To anyone who thinks she was just orchestrating the performance with her artistic insight, keep this in mind-anyone with the talent and esteem of Lauryn Hill can get a band that doesn’t need to be guided on every moment of every song, so much so that Hill would sing off the microphone while frantically gesturing to her back-up singers. It only highlighted the disparity between Nas and Lauryn Hill-they’re both immensely talented, but Nas treats music like a job and Lauryn Hill treats it like a god-

given gift. Nas has been through great, bad, and mediocre albums, finally making it to his most recent, which deftly addresses his middle age as a rap trope. He’s dealt with the overwhelming presence of his debut, and he’s still going.

Hill, on the other hand, has made one new song in recent years, “Black Rage,” and is notorious for demeaning her fans, showing up late, or not showing up at all. While she ran through a ton of crowd pleasers, including Fugees songs that nobody expected, I couldn’t help but be reminded of all the albums she hasn’t made. Even if Nas never matched Illmatic, he’s made some great music. Hill is too concerned with her stance as The Queen (it’s in many ways merited given her unique blend of top-rate talents) and her political stance ‘against the industry’ to make music. She’s apparently coming out with a new album at some point, but we’ll see if that happens. Hopefully it will.

While Nas and Lauryn Hill seem to hail from the same era, Nas has found a place for himself in the current rap scene, even if it is as an elder statesman. The shameless pandering to ‘old-school’ rap fans was entirely out of place at Lupo’s, though. It might’ve just been the two goofy DJs, like Hill’s, who dropped gems like this one: “Give it up for ‘peace and love.’ There’s a lot of shit in this world. Literally this is raw shit,” with no follow up. One can only hope that the next time Lauryn Hill comes around, it won’t be a throwback show.

GREG NISSAN B’15 epitomizes

a jazz-fueled, East Coast style.

ARTS // 12

LANDSCAPING FINE ARTS: The Promise of Art.sy’s Genome Project

by Olivia Jené // Illustration by Diane Zhou

In 2011, the launch of Google Art Project brought the public instant access to seven billion pixels worth of artistic masterpieces in high resolution, creating considerable anxiety over whether the site would permanently derail museum-going. It didn’t. Discussions concerning any attempt to wed digitized cultural material and online access have since moved past whether online art viewing can approximate the experience of seeing a work of art in person—it can’t.

But the drive to find a way to bring the art world online is not slowing down, and it may have found a new way in.

After almost two years of invite-only beta-testing, the online fine art image database Art.sy (‘sy’ indicates its Syrian domain name) went public this past month with 17,000 individual art works and 3,000 artists, and an algorithmbacked reference system called the Art Genome Project that sorts and connects all of its images. The site functions along the lines of Big Data—the sector of technology that synthesizes the data produced by our actions online to then predict what we’ll buy, what we’ll like, and where we’ll make our next online move, the algorithmic engine behind sites like Netflix and Amazon.

Art.sy founder Carter Cleveland, a 24-year-old computer science engineer with an artistic bent, heads Art. sy’s cross-curricular team, comprised of art historians who workshop and evaluate the various genes, an engineering and technology department, and a set of gallery liaisons who maintain and develop the company’s commercial and institutional working relationships. Art.sy’s minimalist design makes for a well-crafted, easy to use interface that showcases the high-resolution quality of their images. The “For Sale” labels on the majority of the art makes it clear that Art.sy isn’t necessarily an art-for-all-people initiative like Etsy or 20 x 200, which both make a point of eliminating any commercial gallery presence. Rather, Art.sy partners with 75 galleries and 50 museums and institutions, enabling it to house works by lesser known contemporary artists alongside formative figures ranging from Jackson Pollock and Warhol to old masters like Rembrandt and Francisco de Goya—all within the network of its genome system.

Created in the image of Pandora, The Art Genome Project isolates a work of art’s characteristics in order to define and relate it to other works. Rather then using tags, Art.sy isolates different genes. The site currently has 800+ genes which include techniques (i.e. multiple exposure), concepts (i.e. Globalization), art historical movements (i.e.

Impressionism), time periods (i.e. early 19th century), content (i.e. female subject), geographical regions (i.e. Chinese) as well as basic formal elements of work. The genes range from purely descriptive (color, subject-matter, medium) to more nuanced (“Contemporary Traces of Memory”). The Art Genome Project’s Tumblr described the site’s genes as “polyhierarchical,” indicating that works fall under several different genes and so have multiple and weighted relationships to one another.

13 // ARTS

The project uses computer software to identify basic visual aspects of works, but ultimately the genes are applied individually by team members. “We learned that the data matters much more than the math.” Daniel Doubrovkine, Art.sy’s lead engineer, told The New York Times. “How are you going to pick something that shows ‘warmth’ with a machine? We’re not.” Art.sy’s art historians refine the genome system by determining to what degree each work corresponds to a gene on a scale of one to 100. When you think about an Art.sy employee determining how high a piece of work should rate on the “Contemporary Traces of Memory” gene’s scale, it’s obvious that the site is expanding and refining the possibilities of algorithmic analytics. the fact that art.sy is trying to sell the work it features suggests that the algorithmic-function of its genome system isn’t simply about creating a road map for fine art but about finding the right work that the user would want to buy.

Such an algorithmic ‘personal shopper’ expands possibilities, but when the promise of algorithmic technology fails the results are jarring and unmistakable. Think about the laughable customer recommendations of Netflix (“Because you enjoyed Season 4 of The Chappelle Show, you may also enjoy “Transformers: The Movie”) or the transparency of Facebook sidebar advertisements. Yet Pandora is able to deliver song after song that I enjoy based on my initial song or artist choice, so why wouldn’t a similar process work for fine arts? According to Douglas Nickel, professor of art history at Brown University, “The problem may be in searching itself.” Art.sy is offering a personalized journey through contemporary art, but “there just isn’t a guide book yet to what good, collectable, contemporary art is.”

The Art Genome Project’s Tumblr states specifically that the reference system is meant to “provide the structure for related art search... that opens up seemingly infinite pathways,” indicating that Art.sy is not promising the “right answer” to a search in the way that traditional search engines like Google’s strive to. Rather, Art.sy gives options. “when you go into a museum you know that the educational information—the wall text, curatorial statements, docent tours—is coming from a place that’s impartial” explained Nickel, “but if you go into a commercial gallery and the gallerist approaches you and says ‘Look at John Doe’s work. He is going to be the next big thing, that’s educational too, but you know it’s motivated education.

It’s not disinterested.” Art.sy is a blend of the two, making artwork available to the general public on the one hand while maintaining a commercial interest. That the art on Art.sy either is from artists who have gallery representation or from established art institutions also presupposes the fact that some artists are left out. In this sense, while the random searches of Art.sy gesture toward a democratizing of artists’ exposure, the site is certainly not as potentially democratic as sites like Tumblr, or Pinterest, both of which

allow users to compile images without the network of museums, art-historians and the art market. Art.sy comes from and is part of this network.

It is from such authorities that come general consensus on the art historical canon of ‘great art.’ However, by placing lesser known artists in the same visual company as mainstream, recognized works, even works that are considered masterpieces, the site is offering its users a very consumer-targeted vetting process. I don’t get the sense that the site is assuming the average Art.sy user is operates on the logic that if they can’t have a Rembrandt, for example, they’ll take a work that is ‘visually similar’ but assembling these works together seems to be a way of giving more contemporary works a sense of ‘value-by-association.’ A contemporary work found by way of a Rembrandt seems to take on some of the value of the masterpiece with which it is associated. Yet looking at the images that fall under the broad black and white photography gene, the images of works by Man Ray or Moriyama stand out, but when grouped all together they undergo a certain leveling of distinction. “That’s what this does,” Nickel said, gesturing toward the expanse of black and white images. “When they’re put like this they all kind of look the same.”

Art.sy’s automated guidance gives its user an overview, a lay of the fine art’s land, and a sense of direction. Moving through the site you have an idea of where you’ve been, how to move forward, and how to go back, a positioning constituted by individual art works or artists. Art.sy gives a visualized and mappable six degrees of separation between the seemingly most unrelated artworks so a 17th century Rembrandt portrait could be connected formally and conceptually to a sculpture made in 2009 of discarded telephone cables by Daniel Conagar. That often times the connections between works are as basic as the ‘use of repetition’ to perhaps something more substantial like works that deal with ‘identity politics’ causes Nickel to wonder, “When do these genes stop being meaningful?” academic pushback to the genome project centers around the potentially reductive nature of the genes—a slightly ironic accusation considering so much of art history operates through categorization: established classifications and specific terminology. The interplay between the user’s open-ended searching and the various combinations of genes each artwork can fall under has the ability to connect art works that would never share the same space in a gallery, in a museum, or in an art history textbook.

The danger with any system of classification is that it can very quickly breed essentialism. Combined with ethnic or social bias, certain artists historically have become trapped by academic labels like ‘Feminist’ or ‘Primitive.’

When asked whether the site’s genome system has the potential to unsettle the classifications and categories of traditional art history, Nickel countered, “If you want to be disruptive to art history, then randomize it.” To some

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

extent, the seemingly accidental results that the site’s genefiltered searches delivers does exactly that, but is it disruptive in a productive way?

Reflecting on the advent of Feminist art in the late �50s, Nickel describes the value of differentiation in art history. “You may get the most insight into what feminist art was in the fifties by looking at a Pollock, considered the exact opposite of feminist art, but no one would ever ‘categorize’ his work as Feminist.” Because the genomes work by identifying similarities or influences, they can’t (at least not yet) point to perhaps a more complex discourse surrounding works in a way that, according to Nickel, would be meaningful. I did however note that Grace Hartigan, an abstract expressionist painter and disciple of Pollock who was labeled a pioneer of feminist art though resented that her work was considered in relation to her gender, was included under Pollock’s “related artists” list. on art.sy, I searched for El Anatsui, a renowned Ghanaian sculptor, who is most well known for his metal fabric hangings. His work has been included in an exhibition of African tapestries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a show of contemporary African art at the Haywood Gallery in London entitled “Africa REMIX” and he recently had a

NOVEMBER 16 2012

solo retrospective at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC. Art.sy doesn’t currently have any of his work but it offers a list of suggested artists and works, including American-born John Chamberlain’s scrap metal automobile-like sculptures, Louise Nevelson’s sculptural pieces created from dismembered furniture, and Bruce Conner’s collage sculptures. All four artists’ assemblage sculptural works are made from cast-off and found materials, playing on a certain raw materiality that the artists manipulate. El Anatsui is predominantly labeled an ‘African’ artist, and his work may not generally be considered or viewed in the company of these artists, while Art.sy genetics included him within the practice of assemblage.

But Anatsui’s work does relate to his Ghanaian heritage, and there must be a gene for that, too, though not yet.

As another example, Chinese artist Cai Guo Ziang’s Art. sy profile lists Ai Wei Wei and Maya Lin as related artists, though the content of all three artists’ works do not share a direct correlation outside of the artists’ shared nationality.

By finding ‘genetic’ links between artworks and artists that have been art historically relegated to distinct categories, the site can rethink these potentially limiting categories, showcasing works and artists without embedded value

judgments and cultural bias. Though it also runs the risk of falling into that same trap of reductive groupings.

Ultimately if you judge Art.sy solely as a commercial enterprise intended to find the next acquisition for a collector, then the site may not deliver. Their desire, according to their blog, to “map the serendipitous” suggests the site is not necessarily promising users that. Even in the tenuousness of some of the gene’s relations to works, it still offers a method of accidental but guided and searches and encounters with artists and works you haven’t seen. It is in these serendipitous moments that Art.sy’s Genome Project proves truly innovative.

OLIVIA JENÉ B’13 is

unsearchable.

ARTS // 14

ALL DOPED UP the cruel fascinations of modern track & field

by Barry Elkinton Comic by Drew Foster

christian hesch was having a good week. On August 17, Hesch, a semi-professional road racer from Los Angeles, ran 4:00.01 at the Pittsburgh Liberty Mile, good enough for fourth place and an $800 prize. Less than 36 hours later, Hesch was in Providence, lining up across from the Rhode Island State House at the start of the Providence Rock and Roll Half Marathon. Within a few miles, the pack had thinned out and Hesch found himself in a lead group of three, alongside Ethiopia’s Fikadu Lemma and Demesse Tefera. At mile 10 near India Point Park, Hesch laid down the hammer, dropping Lemma with a strong surge and taking full command of the lead. Three miles later, Hesch was charging towards the finish line in front of the Providence Place Mall. Just a few feet from the finish line, Hesch, glancing over his shoulder, dropped to the pavement. Behind him, Lemma started sprinting, thinking that Hesch had collapsed, giving him an opportunity to win the race. But Hesch was fine—he just wanted to bang out five victory push-ups before getting up and breaking the tape.

But the Providence race was likely the last race Hesch will run for a long while. Soon after returning to his home in California, Hesch’s teammates at Nike Run LA, a subelite training group, discovered a vial of EPO—a banned blood doping agent—in Hesch’s possession. After confronting Hesch, Nike Team LA contacted the US Anti Doping Authority, who began an investigation, and requested Hesch immediately stop competing. Rather than fight the charges, Hesch admitted to using the drug. In mid-October, Hesch went public, contacting The New York Times, and posting apologies on a variety of running websites, including LetsRun.com.

In the Times article that first broke the news, Hesch said he began using EPO two years ago, when some fellow runners directed him to a pharmacy in Tijuana where he could obtain the drug. Since then, Hesh said he injected himself with EPO on 54 occasions, during which he entered 74 road races, won over $40,000 in prize money, and was never once drug tested. For his actions, Hesch likely faces a two-year ban from the sport. as a confessedly avid fan of track and field, the Christian Hesch story provided a local reminder of an issue of I have been grappling with ever since I took a serious interest in running-the specter of doping that hangs over the sport.

Of course, this issue is longstanding, as performanceenhancing drugs have now wracked track and field for more than four decades. Although athletes have been experimenting with a variety of herbs and medicines since the nineteenth century, the steroid era began in earnest in the 1970s. During the ’70s and ’80s, things got so out of hand that some countries such as East Germany even introduced state-controlled doping programs, leaving many athletes with long-term health issues. By the ’90s, as drug testing became more stringent, many athletes started to shift towards more discrete drugs, such as synthetic Human

15 // SPORTS

Growth Hormone and designer drugs specifically formulated to elude drug-testing officials.

For endurance athletes, the drug revolution came a little later. Steroids were mostly counterproductive to milers and marathoners, who needed lean frames rather than big muscles. This all changed in the late ’80s with the distillation of synthetic erythropoietin (EPO), the hormone that promotes the body’s production of red blood cells. Until doping authorities finally invented a test for EPO in 2000, there was little threat of getting caught. Even today, many believe it is relatively easy for athletes to time their drug usage so as to avoid detection.

This legacy is well known to anyone who follows the sport, but not one that many contemporary sponsors of track and field like to talk about. Doping is a serious buzz kill; in their efforts to make nicely packaged, prime-time drama, NBC and the International Olympic Committee have little incentive to speak honestly about the sport’s dark past, where disgraced figures like Marion Jones and Ben Johnson cast long shadows.

But the online community of LetsRun tells a completely different story; many on the forum often suggest that doping is so widespread it’s become a prerequisite for even making the Olympics in the first place. “In the late ’80s/early ’90s, it was especially bad,” wrote forum commenter under the handle Nairobi Blows in 2011. “LA/ Seoul was anabolic steroids. Barcelona was old school blood doping. Atlanta was a freaking joke. The place was one big dose of growth hormone. Sydney was much the same, but recombinant erythropoietin [EPO] began to come in vogue.

Athens was a combination of designer drugs, with Beijing much the same, yet even more complicated as testing grew tighter.”

The rampant pessimism results sometimes results in severe conclusions. “Throw out all the World Records and start over,” urged one forum commenter in 2011. “All athletes must live in compounds six months before an Olympics. Their food and liquid intake monitored. Only way to have clean records anymore.” Whether to believe the paranoia of the online forums or to just put suspicions aside and enjoy the competition has become a central dilemma for even casual fans of track and field.

One athlete, American sprinter Carmelita Jeter, provides a telling example of how difficult this choice can be. In a world without drugs, Jeter would have been a household name during the 2012 London Olympics. On the track, Jeter’s credentials are impeccable. Currently, Jeter is the second fastest woman of all time, having run faster than Marion Jones and nearly as fast as the famous Florence Griffith-Joyner (popularly known as “Flo-Jo”). Coming into the Olympics, Jeter was considered the gold medal favorite for the 100-meter dash, the marquee women’s track event of the games (she got the silver).

But nobody on NBC really seemed to want to talk about Jeter—no emotional biopics, and no studio inter-

views with Bob Costas. The problem is, Jeter exhibits many of the classic signs of a drug cheat. At age 30—very late in a sprinter’s career—Jeter’s suddenly reached the elite level.

While most top-tier sprinters emerge in their early 20s, Jeter never even broke 11.48 for the hundred-meter dash until age 27. Three years later, she ran 10.64, an incredible improvement putting her in rarified territory. Most damning of all, Jeter has been repeatedly spotted in the company of Mark Block, a central figure in the BALCO doping scandal, who is currently serving a ten-year ban from the sport. But rather than investigate these suspicions, most in the media seem more inclined to just pretend Jeter doesn’t exist. Silence, it seems, is an easier choice than speculation or the threat of libel litigation.

This could not be further from the case on LetsRun, where Jeter is often referred to on the message boards as “Pharmalita Cheater,” and is the consistent target of jibes and derision. “Seriously, if [the United States Anti-Doping Authority] can't pop Carmelita Jeter, the system just failed,” posted Captain VG during the Olympics. “It's so obvious she's juiced that it hurts.” Of course, this is the same forum where people argue that any sprinter with braces is almost certainly using orthodontics to offset the jaw-expanding side effect of human growth hormone. Ridiculous opinions and speculation are the norm rather than the exception on the message boards. But in a sport with such a checkered past, it’s hard to dismiss these vigilante online doping tribunals as completely unfounded. the line between cheating and clean competition is even further blurred by a variety of technologies and medicines that—although legal—can have performanceenhancing effects. Traditionally, running has prided itself as the purest of sports, but these new gray areas have almost completely destroyed that fantasy, at least on the elite level.

Paradigmatic of this new reality is the Nike Oregon Project, an elite American distance running group founded by former marathon champion Alberto Salazar. In many ways, American running fans are enormously indebted to the Oregon Project for finally making American distance running relevant again on the international scene. For the first time in decades, American runners are consistent medal threats at the Olympics and World Championships. As the most prominent American professional running group, the Oregon Project has played a central role in fostering this level of talent.

While no major doping scandal has engulfed this group of elite American runners, the Oregon Project is infamous for pushing the rules in search of the slightest competitive edge. The core members of the Oregon Project live in an altitude-controlled house, which, according to experts, can mimic the effects of EPO on the body. The house is equipped with air filters that artificially set the internal altitude of the house to several thousand feet. This allows the athletes to achieve the magic-and usually logistically

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

impossible-combination of ‘train low, live high.’ Under this scheme, the runners can get the red blood cell boosting effects of altitude living, while maintaining a rigorous training schedule only possible at sea-level conditions.

The Oregon Project’s activities don’t end there. An unusual number of Salazar’s athletes have been diagnosed with hypthothyroidism, allowing them to take thyroid supplements that many believe to have performance-enhancing side effects. Other methods used by the group are, frankly, just absurd. The runners often train on Anti-Gravity Treadmills that manipulate air pressure in a chamber to artificially reduce a runner’s body weight, allowing runners to train harder with less wear-and-tear on the legs. Galen Ruppthe group’s top American runner, who recently won a silver medal at the Olympics-sometimes wears a mask across his mouth and nose during races to increase oxygen flow to his lungs and help him with his asthma. No surprise, Runner’s World has referred to Rupp as the “greatest-but-least-loved American distance track runner of all time.”

In 1999, Salazar famously wrote a paper for a conference at Duke where he posited that “it is currently difficult to be among the top five in the world in any of the distance events without using EPO or Human Growth Hormone.”

This summer in London, Salazar’s athletes took the top two spots in the Olympic 10,000-meter event. Despite my vexation towards Rupp’s high-tech training methods and ridiculous facemasks, I stilled yelled at my computer

in exaltation when he finally ended America’s decades-long medal drought in the 10,000-meter. But even as I cheered, I couldn’t help but recall Salazar’s famous statement thirteen years earlier. I can only hope Salazar has proved himself wrong. For better or worse, success brings scrutiny in today’s world of track and field like thousands of other lanky teenage runners across America, I grew up with a poster of 1970’s American running champion Steve Prefontaine on my wall. For many, “Pre” represents everything good about running. He had the perfect ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude, with his long thick hair, groovy mustache, and unwavering desire to lead every race start-to-finish, tactics be damned. In between setting American records in seven separate events, Pre liked to party, and could often be seen whipping around Eugene, Oregon in a vintage British convertible. Sadly, at age 24, Pre died when he drove his car off the road on the way home from a party.

Like many who died too young, Pre has become mythologized. But looking at the present state of distance running, it’s hard not to pine for the days of Prefontaine, when runners trained hard, lived hard, and raced hard. No EPO, no altitude-controlled houses, no anti-gravity treadmills, and no special facemasks – just plain running. In just a few decades, the simplest sport on earth seems to have become one of the most complicated.

But more recently, I’ve started to let go of my nostalgia

for a bygone era when competitive running was simply a test of training and tactics rather than chemistry. Instead I’ve come to realize that the mystery of doping that hangs over track and field is a main reason why I’ve stayed glued to this sport for so many years. While the sport I love is being dragged through the mud by the specter of doping, I follow it ever more closely all the same; that burning question-who’s cheating?-is central to my position as a fan.

And clearly I’m not alone. Nothing makes the LetsRun boards explode like a doping suspension or a suspicious performance. For many, contemporary track and field fandom is about more than appreciating athletic competition—it’s become a struggle for sporting justice. Doping scandals and speculation are probably the last thing track and field needs as it struggles to gain more attention. But, if anything, these speculations have galvanized the little community of fans that have stuck with the sport through all these troubled years. Sometimes, when something is slipping away, you cling on even harder.

BARRY ELKINTON, B ’13

trains low, lives high

man, myth, legend: the kip litton saga

two years ago, kip litton was just an ordinary 48-yearold Michigan dentist who liked to run marathons to raise money for research on Cystic Fibrosis. In 2009, Litton amped up his training and started a website, Worldrecordrun.com, where he chronicled his effort to run a sub-three hour marathon in each of the fifty states.

At first, all was going well for Litton, as he ticked a number of states off his list. But when Litton placed second in the Masters Division at the 2010 Missoula Marathon, some runners said they didn’t remember seeing Litton during the race. Race photos revealed that Litton was only visible in pictures taken at the start and finish, and Litton’s splits during the race were highly unusual. Litton was disqualified. Eventually, somebody decided to mention the situation in a post on LetsRun. What happened next was spectacular. For the next year and a half, the collective energy of the LetsRun community was applied to solving the mystery of Kip Litton. Every marathon Litton had entered was carefully scrutinized; graphs were made analyzing Litton’s improbable splits, and race photos were carefully dissected to show where Litton had cut the course. The official Kip Litton thread now spans across 255 pages, one of the longest threads in the site’s history. From all this collective labor, it soon became clear that Litton systematically cheated in practically every marathon he entered. Often Litton would start the race at the back of the pack with his head down and a hat worn tightly over his eyes. Then, somewhere near the finish line, Litton would emerge seemingly out of nowhere, usually in a completely different outfit. During just 2009 and 2010 alone, Litton is believed to have cheated in as many as 30 separate races.

Then things got really out of control. After some further sleuthing and backtracking of IP addresses, some LetsRunners discovered that some of the races Litton cited on his website were completely fabricated. In at least three cases, Litton simply constructed imaginary result lists from races that never actually happened. Litton would then post those results online, going so far as to provide fake names and email addresses for the race directors. In the case of the fictional West Wyoming Marathon, Litton’s most infamous fabrication, Litton created a fake website for the race, naming the race director “Richard Rodriguez.” After posting a link to the results on his website, Litton even he penned a fake review of the race on marathonguide.com “Small race, with only a couple dozen runners,” wrote Litton. “Sounds like a downer, but the view and the town are so worth it!”

NOVEMBER 16 2012

SPORTS // 16

Depraved Writing

by Charlotte Anderson Illustration by Adriana Gallo Joyce’s letters to Nora prove my foundational theory, which is this: writers are patently perverse creatures. Everything written is already a fetishization, a separation of content from its material source. James calls her “my sweet little whorish Nora” affectionately. And she responds with an equal (perhaps greater) measure of filth. They write miles and miles away from one another. There’s pleasure in privation.

Think about having sex with the people you read about, or the people you read. Mark Twain creeps into my bedroom, late at night. Takes me into his embrace, and I gasp, ‘Oh! Mark!’ His whiskers brushing up against my neck, he clutches at my back, his elderly hands veiny and brimming blue. It becomes hard not to think about. When I consider my favorite authors I often wonder what type of partners they would be. I whittle down their personalities to the point of obscene specificity. Kafka: back alley. Borges: excellent oral delivery. Nin: I’d call her late at night, feeling lonely.

This is why they can’t be trusted. Sexual feelings aside, I as reader have already developed a physical dependency.

It’s my own fault; I pine after authors at the same time I consume them. I slump backward sedated, or sated; I don’t know. I fail to notice the day passing. We’re involved! You don’t understand him like I do. And yet I as writer perpetually enact my own disembodiment. I’m working. I’m disassociated. I’m calculating and unemotional. I’m taking myself out of the matter. At best: an impersonal seduction.

At worst: a failed come-on.

“Never trust a writer,” I was once told—useful guidance, courtesy of my aunt, which becomes all the more convincing with the proper phonetic delivery: “ne-e-ever trust a writer.”

The ‘I’ that speaks in writing is always an invention, or more accurately an omission. A writer withholds, excluding undesirable elements—I hope I’m charming—rendering a bit of opacity—avoiding confession. Don’t feel the remove.

When I read, I am susceptive and involved, which sounds a bit like ‘in love,’ doesn’t it? ‘I’ reading (as opposed to ‘I’ writing) is visceral. It is consumptive and uninhibited, and (unlike Joyce’s letters and sex) lacks the quality of an exchange.

17 // LITERARY

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

the list week of november 16th

friday the 16th salon: proustfest part ii 5–7pm // athenaeum (benefit st) associate professor of french at columbia, caroline weber, presents “proust’s duchesse: the making & unmaking of a society style icon.” kelly shibari 6pm // csph (pawtucket) the center for sexual pleasure & health hosts a night of porn and q&a with self-described “intelligent hedonist” & adult industry kingpin, kelly shibari. 18+. saturday the 17th fall dance concert 8pm // ashamu studio (77 waterman st) // $ a series of short dances choreographed by student dance groups. tickets $5–15. also 2pm sunday. fielded, harsh boys, virusse 10:30pm // black box at 95 empire // $5 vocal-centric electro-soul pop, modular dance synth, dark poptronic bliss. xanadont djs between sets. sunday the 18th nautical almanac, peter glantz, russian tsarlag 7pm // machines with magnets (pawtucket) // $7 “natural mechanic” gallery opening. music after. have you ever wanted to hear an acapella take on the mash theme, snapped out by the most poetic, long-nailed hands you’ve ever seen? tsarlag’s last gig in a while. resistant culture, product of waste, power masters, worse off alive 9pm // as220 // $6 l.a. bros headline a night of downbeat / punk / rock. gerry of local darlings, power masters, is known to have said, “i was cute in the ‘70s.” we, here at the list, think he (& his brethren) are way cute in the ‘10s. monday the 19th blood drive at twin river during the day // twin river casino (lincoln, ri)

two public forces in ri, twin river casino & the ri blood center, team up for a good cause. where else can you donate blood & get a prize?! must be 18+. wednesday the 21st action speaks: 1972 powell memo 5:30–7pm // as220 this week, the live-panel radio show looks at the powell memo (a “call to arms to protect business from the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the 1960’s”). so you think you can dance tour 2012 7:30pm // ppac (220 weybosset st) // $ sytycd’s season 9 (11) top 10 finalists (audreay! chehon! clole! cyrus! eliana! george! lindsay! tiffany! will! witney! & me!) will be dancing for your sore eyes. use the code dance 2012 to order tickets ($40–65) online. tour the steel yard 12pm // steel yard (27 sims ave) free public tours every wednesday—find out more about programs & facilities. contact the office in advance for group tours. whiskey tour & tasting 12–4pm // sons of liberty (south kingston) // $10 the makers of uprising american whiskey & ri’s first vodka (loyal 9) invite you to tour the distillery & taste some spirits . tours every half hour. contact bryan@ solspirits.com for more info. thursday the 22nd it’s thanksgiving you turkeys! visit factoryfarmmap. com to learn more about where your bird may be coming from. don’t say i didn’t warn you, because i’m warning you. keep the dark vibes coming tomorrow: black friday film night 9pm // black box at 95 empire // $3 everyone’s favorite local creepster-curator, frank difficult, presents a night of spooky film. because a day of people strangling one another at walmart is always scarier than a night of halloween. feat. “the diddler.” know stuff? email listtheindy@gmail.com

this da y in lis tery 1532 francis co piza rro an his men d captur e incan empero r atah ualpa.