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11

EPHEMERA

david adler, mimi dwyer & barry elkinton

The Joy Factor emma wohl

FEATURES 8

After the Beep

9

Sissaretta

FROM THE EDITORS

I like to imagine that in the basement of some building in Chicago, there is a man who paints his nails black, wears a fedora with a peacock feather, and designs American currency. Fuck the Illuminati—Mr. Bronson has been the Federal Reserve Fashion Consultant for over 15 years. It’s his seeing eye that gleams on the top of the one-dollar pyramid, peering out at all of us, memorizing the contents of our wallets and cash registers—in a word, our consumer habits.

Remember, our dollar bill has come a long way. In 1862, the Treasury minted its first dollar bills, waxing quite floral, with a mean mug of Salmon P. Chase placed in the top left. But no one knew who he was, and currency, it is often said, should be current. In 1886, floral was out, as was Mr. Chase, and Martha Washington took his place, her jowls leaking out from the bottom of her chin. This, too, proved unsustainable; without any caption to name her, she appeared to be little more than a hefty prune, and we balked at such a dowdy depiction of this great nation. Then, in 1896, there was the “Educational Series,” in which allegories appeared on American currencies to encourage “history instructing youth.” Here, a far more seductive young woman with a petite nose and soft curves, directing a loin-clothed lad to the Capitol. But then being smart got uncool, and they recruited Mr. Bronson off the streets of Peoria.

This is the mastermind behind the 50 State Quarters program—Indiana has a racecar; New Mexico has its Native American enchantment; Wisconsin has a cow—little collectibles, unique pieces of history for you and your loved ones. Money really is just an advertisement, after all. I wish I could talk to Mr. Bronson and tell them to start making cooler bills, with Art Deco and a more Miami vibe, but he’s worried about our brand, and change is slow in his business. — DA

Week in Review

METRO

raillan brooks ellora vilkin

LOVE

ED

NEWS

7 16

Massage Therapy robert merritt

Self Help

david adler, simon engler, erica schwiegershausen

ARTS 13

Release Dates

15

Sports!

tristan rodman

joe de jonge, greg nissan

SCIENCE 4

Red Tide

annie macdonald

INTERVIEWS 3

CAConrad will fesperman

FOOD 5

Hip Hopps belle cushing

LITERARY 17

KEEP CLOSE College Hill Independent PO Box 1930 Brown University Providence RI 02912

theindy@gmail.com twitter: @maudelajoie /// theindy.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

Poems

jack detar

X-PAGE 18

Blame Game annie macdonald

WEEK IN

AIRPLANES

by David Adler, Mimi Dwyer & Barry Elkinton Illustration by Lizzie Davis

ELIGIBLE DIRIGIBLE last friday, worldwide Aeros unveiled the Aeroscraft “Dragon Dream”—the company’s latest stab at a fully functional prototype. A gobsmacked crowd of industry insiders, air veterans, and (galactic) senators looked on as the first commercially-viable dirigible airship since the Hindenburg teetered, like a baby, a few feet off the ground.

But significant advances in the field distinguish the airship from that accursed craft. Unlike a blimp, the Aeroscraft’s ultralight hull of aluminum and carbon fiber is filled with pressurized helium that makes the vehicle lighter than air. To rise, it releases air from its chambers, and to sink, it sucks in air from outside. The helium level within remains constantin other words, unlike a giant balloon, this airship is a giant balloon with a shell. A reflective Mylar shell that bears some resemblance to Cloud Gate, the Chicago bean of distorted self-portrait fame.

The dirigible, which is 230 feet long and has already cost between $35 and $40 million to construct, could potentially revolutionize the airfreight industry. Worldwide Aeros’ commercial model should support up to 66 tons of material, more than any airplane on the market. This would allow it to deliver humanitarian aid to remote places at efficiencies previously only dreamed of, the company says. It would also make the ships particularly suited to, you know, deploying drones.

But the public has other uses in mind. Bornrich.com (“Home of Luxury”) has a slideshow of the Aeroscraft’s potential interiors. White leather recliners watch dolphins on an HD flatscreen. A fully-stocked bar beckons from the end of an inflatable hallway. The transparent nose of the dirigible provides a panoramic view of the cityscape below, and the blurred faces of soiree attendees take in the sights as one man looks up at the camera, seated in a chair, hands clasped together, whispering, join us.

Worldwide Aeros’s website bills it as the “world’s leading lighter-than-air, FAA-certified aircraft manufacturing company.” (At press time, the names of trailing lighter-thanair FAA-certified aircraft manufacturing companies remained undisclosed.) In any case, the company has poked a hole in the fabric of an industry long dominated by stalwarts like Boeing and Airbus-here’s hoping the industry won’t poke one right back. —MD

FEBRUARY 08 2012

RABBIT CONSPIRACY

FINDING SOUL PLANE

something’s always been a little off about the Denver International Airport. To start, there’s Mustang, the 32-foottall, anatomically correct blue horse with glowing red eyes that greets visitors at the airport’s entrance. Widely disliked by both the public and art critics, the sculpture’s history manages to outdo its terrifying image—during the 9,000 pound sculpture’s construction, the horse killed its creator, artist Luis Jiménez, when a piece of the sculpture collapsed on the artist in his studio.

The patricidal stallion is only one of the more conspicuously haunting features of DIA, which opened in 1995 and almost immediately became a fixture among Internet conspiracy theorists. If you believe what your read online, DIA is either a secret government end-times bunker, a haunted Indian burial ground, or a future government concentration camp hiding in plain sight. Admittedly, the airport’s runway layout vaguely resembles a swastika, and yes, the airport does feature a mysterious “New World Airport Commission” marker that contains a time capsule to be opened in 2094. For its part, however, airport management seems to find all this attention rather amusing. “Some people think there’s a conspiracy making our airport the center of a New World Order,” says the airport’s official website. “Rest assured the story is definitely a myth.”

Nonetheless, happenings at the airport continue to raise questions. This winter Denver residents have become fixated on yet another unusual DIA phenomenon—car-eating rabbits.

Apparently, rabbits en masse have begun eating automotive wiring out of cars parked in DIA’s sprawling long-term lots, causing tens of thousands of dollars in damage. Hundreds of rabbits are believed to be involved. One frequent traveler, Ken Blum, says he incurred 700 dollars in rabbit-related damage over the course of two separate incidents. “When I had the trouble with the oil light coming on, the dealer told me the wires that controlled the air conditioning were chewed,” Blum told Denver’s CBS4. “My insurance didn’t cover it, the manufacturer didn’t cover it.”

As the repairs bills rack up, passengers are complaining that the airport is not doing enough to stop the rabbits, or warn travelers about the risks of parking at DIA. “I saw no signs… nothing to tell me, ‘Hey, beware,’” said Blum. The airport, however, is preaching patience, noting that rabbits have been a recurring problem in the area for decades, and that the airport employs specially trained agents to patrol the lots and remove pesky animal intruders. Of course, if the conspiracy theorists are onto something, these rabbits are the least of our DIA-related problems. Perhaps we’ll learn more in 2094.—BE

this week, a woman got drunk on a plane and told it like it is. “She was screaming, ‘My dad’s CIA, you guys don’t know.

Arrest me if you want,’” a neighboring passenger recalled.

JetBlue Flight 185 New York to San Diego had to make an emergency landing in Denver, where it met the FBI on the tarmac.

Air travel is tricky, though. The “Home Technology” section is ripped out of SkyMall, and then the toilet is so loud when it flushes, and it’s like fuuuuck, just let me watch a Jennifer Aniston movie on this little screen. Worst of all, according to the police report, the flight attendants moved a passenger next to the woman on Flight 185 because his entertainment system was faulty, even though he didn’t pay for premium seating. She became unruly.

Everyone applauded as the 42-year-old woman (anonymous, legally) was escorted off of the plane. All 136 passengers were questioned about the incident, and the plane arrived over two hours late in San Diego. Waiting, spaghetti grew cold. “It was quite an adventure,” the local news reported.

Incidents of unruly passengers rose almost 30 percent between 2009 and 2010, according to the International Air Transport Association. Part of it is that tricky air travel is getting trickier—take off your shoes, now put your hands over your head like this, now tie your shoes again; at the same time, airline fees rose 11 percent last year. Fewer flights, longer delays: it’s no wonder that 2013 has found a new genre of in-flight entertainment. Last month on a New York–bound Iceland Air flight, a man drank a whole bottle of Duty Free and started hitting his neighbors, yodeling profanities, and whispering about a plane crash. The crew duct taped him to his seat and sealed his mouth shut, leaving the last button of his shirt undone so that his belly could spill forward.

Either way, airlines are clearly not adapting fast enough to the new era of the unruly passenger. Rather than an emergency landing—and more cold spaghetti—we should encourage intoxication and harness its power. Less duct tape; more mud wrestling in the cockpit. We, for one, took Soul Plane (2004) as advice, not parody. Nine years later, we seem to have learned nothing. —DA

NEWS

02

Present Time A Conversation with CAConrad

by Will Fesperman

Illustration by Lizzie Davis with painted fingernails and a large crystal hanging around his neck, he made a strong impression. A native of rural Pennsylvania, CA currently lives in Philadelphia. His new chapbook translucent salamander is available free online from Troll Thread Press. I first encountered CA Conrad and his poetry at a reading at Wesleyan University in 2012. Over the past few months, we corresponded over email while he travelled around America.

The Independent: On the back of The Book of Frank, you describe yourself as “the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift.” Why did you include these details?

CAConrad: These are windows into the book. The book also starts off with a quote from my grandmother saying, “Well of course they’re staring, we’re very interesting.” All of this is to dispel shame. I just did a reading for Megan Kaminski at University of Kansas where a woman in the audience asked, “How are you comfortable talking about the things you do?” I very much appreciated that she asked “how” instead of “why.”

I told her that I was a target of ridicule where I grew up, first because of my mother who was a known miscreant. Then later I was Outed as a faggot, only adding to my misery and to the endless entertainment of these very bored, very stupid, illiterate people. All this is to say when you become completely adjusted to being unacceptable in society few things will embarrass you. The gift of not caring what anyone thinks is possibly one of the only true gifts to own.

Indy: What do the initials CA stand for? And why do write your name without punctuation or spaces?

CAC: My mother knew that I was going to be born a Capricorn, the last Earth sign of the zodiac, the sign of the mountain/sea goat. Craig is Scottish for “brave climber” and she wanted to help me up the mountain. To be more precise it is to help my patience with climbing up the mountain. If I had been a girl my name would have been Tara, the Earth Goddess. Which is funny because most of my life I’ve felt Tara Incognita, haha!! But I feel bad for anyone born in the last couple of decades with the invention of ultrasound machines revealing the unborn child’s sex. No one has two names now, and parents don’t even need to THINK about names until the ultrasound procedure. I’m glad I got to have a female name waiting for me on the other end with my male name. Even though I rejected both names for the genderless CA, I feel very fortunate about having that.

I shut the cavity up with CAConrad, made it neither male nor female, which is who I am. I mean I’m not a fool, I know that I hold certain privileges being addressed at times as a biological man. Yet many people don’t know if I’m male or female so they don’t really know what to do with me. I’m gender-queer is the best way to talk about who I am I guess.

CAConrad is without the stopping points of periods.

I don’t like nor want the punctuation inside of me.

I want to be WITHOUT the stoppages. I admire the fluvial qualities of things, and I despise punctuation. So C is for Craig, and A is for Allen. My original last name was McNeil, my

03 INTERVIEWS

biological father was Dennis McNeil, a tortured, violent man last known to be fed thorazine and kept in a quiet apartment outside Chicago. Before the internet the local libraries would always have a collection of phone books from all over the United States. Every year I would check the newest book for him, just to see if he was still alive. It’s harder now to know about this man I have no real, living connection to.

Indy: I’ve heard you give tarot card readings. Do you think there is a connection between divination and poetry?

CAC: Poetry is a form of divination. Poetry is a way of seeing the world anew, which is what divination is supposed to be used for. To see the present in a flash, PRESENT TIME!!

The (Soma)tic poetry I create is an extreme present. I like an extreme present. I like making a structure I can climb inside to write poems where there is NOTHING ELSE on my mind but exactly what it is I’m doing AT THAT VERY MOMENT to make a poem. Recently I created a (Soma)tic where you are to return to where you grew up and immerse yourself in the surroundings, really GET BACK THERE. But you’re forbidden to write a single line of memoir. It’s about resistance, but resistance of the past. It’s about NOW, it’s about exactly NOW. Indy: If you were marooned on an island without human contact and the only way to write was to draw words in the sand that were washed away each night, would you still write poetry?

CAC: What about blood and shit and tears as ink? What about carving the poems into the body with a seashell? But all of the desert islands will disappear soon with the rising oceans, because these islands are tips of deep ocean mountain ranges. I think about the people who might very well be marooned right now. High tide just gets higher and higher these days!!

The desire we all have to give someone a BOOK so that they HAVE the poems we have been working on is a beautiful thing. That desire is beautiful. HERE I AM. Please take this, THIS IS ME. And I hope you are finding yourself in there and making them your home for a bit.

Indy: The next question pertains to your (Soma)tic poetics, which you explain in this course description for Naropa University: INTEGRAL CRYSTAL APPLICATION FOR DISPELLING INFORMATION FATIGUE: A New (Soma)tic Poetry Primer for the Ritual of the Everywhere Poem This mechanistic world, as it becomes more and more efficient, resulting in ever increasing brutality, has required us to

find our bodies to find our planet in order to find our poetry. (Soma)tic poetry rituals aim our attention at two basic principles: (1) Everything around us has a creative viability with the potential to spur new modes of thought and imaginative output. (2) The most vital ingredient to bringing sustainable, humane changes to our world is creativity.

What do you mean by “find[ing] our bodies,” and why must we do this before we “find” our poetry? And how does this bring “sustainable, humane changes to our world”?

CAC: In 2005 I went to a Conrad family reunion and I hated it. All my family talks about is working at their factory jobs.

Who works more overtime hours is the one who receives the most respect. It’s brutal, and it’s also one of the many reasons I left rural Pennsylvania. But I remember taking my train back to Philadelphia thinking about the dental floss factory, the cardboard box factory, the ketchup packet factory, and at some point IT HIT ME!! I was treating my poems the very same way, like an assembly line. My poetry had fallen into the assembly line model I grew up with and I was JUST figuring this out.

It made me insane for a couple of weeks. I remember thinking, “I’m going to quit writing poems, I can’t believe that I’m saying this, but I just can’t stand the idea of a factory job no matter how that factory job occurs.” Then the idea of (Soma)-tics came to me. It changed everything immediately, these bizarre structures that are really only bizarre because we all agree what is the acceptable way to live. What is the acceptable way to write poems. The acceptable was unacceptable to me and I wanted a very different experience with the creation of poems.

You ask what I mean when I say we must find our bodies in order to find our poetry, and the answer is in the opening words (This mechanistic world…).

The mechanistic world is the factory, and more, and worse. The factory, the military, the stock market, everything around us becoming more and more organized, efficient, and appropriate and acceptable and such a tremendous waste of potential. In the end, the brutality of the factory and the military comes from the extreme efficiency of an ever more efficient world. Step out of the collective breath. Step out, just step out. (Soma)tics are about divorcing from the drive to colonize the human mind with these beliefs of what we MUST DO in order to be rich, to be free, to be loved. It’s an exhausting time to be alive in many ways and (Soma)tics flow with something closer to a planetary time. This is from being PRESENT inside the structure of writing. You also ask how this can bring sustainable, humane changes to our world.

“The most vital ingredient to bringing sustainable, humane changes to our world is creativity.” Creativity is essential, I firmly believe this as a fact. The half dozen times I visited Occupy Wall Street 75 to 80 percent of everyone I met down there was an art student, writing student, creative student of some kind. People who went to art and writing school and THIS amazing leaderless community formed as a result. It was beautiful, it was so beautiful down there that I remain haunted by the times I visited.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The Bloom

photographs by Annie Macdonald

Red Tide is the common name for algal blooms, which occur when certain algae rapidly accumulate and form dense patches near the water’s surface. When dense enough, these algae color the water: red, most commonly, but sometimes green, purple, and pink, too.

Red Tides in the Gulf of Mexico are caused by the algae Karenia brevis, which—when high enough in concentration—releases a neurotoxin that paralyzes the central nervous systems of fish and renders them unable to breathe.

People experience respiratory difficulty when these neurotoxins are blown into the air and often report severe illness after eating shellfish contaminated by Red Tide toxins. A 1793 Red Tide in Canada caused over 100 human deaths and thousands of reported illnesses.

These photos were taken last October on Gasparilla Island, Florida, a month after a Red Tide in the Gulf of Mexico. This past week, the National Weather Service issued its first health alert about Red Tide.

FEBRUARY 08 2012

SCIENCE

04

HOMETOWN BREWERS A Toast to Pawtucket’s Newest Neighbors

by Belle Cushing Illustration by Stella Chung

it started with four soda syrup tanks. Reclaimed from a scrap heap, the tanks showed up and for them to get used, “the whole rest of this had to happen.”

“The whole rest of this,” as Nate Broomfield describes it, is Pawtucket’s newest—and only—nanobrewery. Bucket Brewery is a fully licensed brewery that sells beer to bars and restaurants around Rhode Island, but the operation is no bigger than a broom closet. In fact, just last year, the space was a broom closet. “A big broom closet,” Erik clarifies. Erik Aslaksen and Nate, his buddy and brew partner, are giving me a tour of the brewery, which, given the space, takes about a minute. Nate explains how the two were shown the utility closet as a joke while checking out the spacious studios of Lorraine Mills. But Nate saw something else: “If you can wire this up and patch the holes in the floor, we’ve got ourselves a brewery!”

With a little welding, the syrup tanks became fermenters.

Erik, Nate, and the other members of their team, TJ, Ron, and Drew, insulated the brew pots and installed heaters themselves. A pair of freezers were tinkered with for storing kegs, which are washed just a foot away by an original contraption that sounds like freight engine, but costs a fraction of what even a cheap one would have cost retail.

Erik and Nate live four streets apart in Pawtucket. They have known each other for years and used to brew beer together in their backyards. When they decided to expand beyond five-gallon experiments and open a brewery with their friends, the choice of location was obvious. The name followed naturally, after their beloved town: the Bucket.

The closet’s renovation was a welcome addition to the hundred or so tenants, mostly artists, in Lorraine Mills. The bathroom is stocked with artisanal soaps. A woodworker keeps shop around the corner. Dmitry, a screenprinter down the hall, is working on an etching for the brewery’s pint glasses.

Dmitry has just come into the brewhouse, as the former storage closet is now known, to ask about colors for the tshirts he is printing for them. Mason jar in hand, his timing is perfect: we are just about to taste some Park Loop Porter.

The porter is, in Erik’s words, “a big boy,” with seven percent alcohol content and “a little bit of a bite to it.” It is named for the loops of Warwick City Park made by runners in the Rhode Island 6-Hour Ultramarathon and Relay, a race the brewery sponsored. The race director requested a porter, and though they had never made a porter before, they did some research, tried some out, and the beer has since gained a spot on the permanent roster.

Although Nate and Erik spearhead recipe development and the brewing process, the door is open for any one of the five partners to come up with a beer. Erik takes particular pride in the Rhode Scholar, a subtle, kölsch-inspired beer designed to woo those stubborn drinkers of Bud Light. As Erik opens the keg to fill my glass, a harsh suction sound reverberates off the close walls. At any point in the tiny room, there might be one guy washing kegs, another making beer, someone scrubbing tanks, with everyone fighting over floor drain. Dmitry is prob-

05 FOOD

ably in having a beer. I understand what Nate means when he says it can get a bit claustrophobic.

“And filled with CO2!” Erik chimes in.

“We released a lot of CO2 yesterday when we were working,” recalls Nate, “and we both had to sort of run out of the room.”

Next, Erik fills a glass of Thirteenth Original Maple Stout directly from the fermenter. It is still warm, only halfway through the fermenting process. The recipes for the stout and their Pawtucket Pail Ale have been in the works for years, but sometimes, a good beer just happens. One day, TJ was following Erik’s recipe for the Thirteenth Original Stout. Erik had called for 2 lbs 8 oz barley, except TJ read it as 21 instead. But upon coming in and seeing that something just wasn’t right, Erik didn’t write off the expensive batch as a lost cause. He left, came back, and dumped in a heap of unsweetened chocolate, zested a bushel of oranges over the pot, and the chocolate orange stout was born. As I sip the rescued beer, which I never would have guessed was a fluke, Nate takes advantage of Erik’s brief absence to sing his buddy’s praises. “He’s a phenomenal brewer,” he professes. “He has an amazing palette. It’s pretty impressive what he can do.” Nate claims to be the more methodical one, though in the end, “We both end up with good products.”

When I asked the guys what they did before they became brewers, they exchanged glances and laughed: “We’re still doing it!”

Nate is in IT, Erik is an architect, and the other partners work in restaurant management, health care, and corporate accounting, the latter coming in especially handy. The brewing happens on when the day job stops, and brewnights are not just drinks with the bros. “My wife, that’s what she expects,” jokes Erik. “Every time I say, I’m going to the brewery, it’s ‘Oh, he’s drinking with his buddies.’ But it’s work! I actually gotta get stuff done!”

Dmitry suggests that Erik have his wife clean a couple of kegs, and she’ll understand. But chances are, she already understands what it means to run a completely self-financed business on the side. “The thing is,” Nate admits, “it is a lot of work. We don’t make any money out of this. We get the occasional t-shirt, we get to have beer when we’re here, but we don’t even get free kegs-we have to buy our own kegs if we want to take a keg home. We’re raising families, we’re doing our day jobs, and coming here for no pay. So it’s a bit exhausting. We’re very much looking forward to a day when it all pays off and becomes our job.”

just down the street, tucked between a transfer station and a lot filled with trucks, more beer is being brewed. Foolproof Brewing Co., Pawtucket’s other newly-opened brewery, boasts five towering fermenting tanks filling one of those cavernous vacants the city has to spare. Here, founder Nick Garrison makes, not just beer, but “experiences”—in sleek, attractively designed packages. Sitting at the gleaming wood bar in a

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

brand new tasting room, where carved tap handles promise stylish beer, I am impressed.

The IPA I am drinking is from their first ever batch, brewed December 7. Nick calls it “Backyahd,” and, according to official tasting notes, the experience contained in the pretty green can is “Guaranteed to deliver an unspoken zen with a spatula in your other hand...” Barstool golden ale, Foolproof ’s flagship ale, is for that “sacred drinking experience” of sitting with your buddies at the neighborhood bar.

“Looking at it objectively,” Nick says, pouring some Raincloud Porter (experience: “It’s pouring outside, so pour yourself something inside...”) into a glass emblazoned with the signature jester logo, “this is probably the best of the three.”

But judging by the response from Rhode Island drinkers after just a few weeks, the other beers are not far behind, and the near 100,000 gallons of beer that Foolproof can produce in a year will not go to waste.

The brewing process starts with a scenario. Nick thinks up a beer-drinking scene and works with his designer, friend and RISD graduate Liz Weinberg, to develop the pen and ink drawings and lyrical briefs that accompany each beer. He then works with his brewmaster, Damase Olssen, to translate the experience into alcohol and grain. “We met on the Internet,” Nick says with a laugh, on ProBrew, the “Facebook for brewers.” They clicked immediately. Together they tackle the full-scale operation-small by most brewery standards but a giant compared to the guys down the road-which leads from grinding grain, about 2,000 pounds per batch, up a flight of stairs to the platform where the barley gets boiled. After more tanks, a complicated rake system, and a water heater “like a fighter jet engine,” it’s back down to “tank row,” where in more tanks outfitted with big orange tubes, they finish the process. While Nick pours me some golden ale, Damase is shifting boxes somewhere overhead. The cans will arrive the next day, to be packed on an in-house canning line.

The local inflection in his IPA shows Nick’s affinity for his adopted town. It was after moving to Pawtucket that Nick first started brewing beer, when he still worked in communications in the aerospace industry. He got more and more ambitious and eventually brewed all the beer for his wedding.

But it was in Quebec City during his honeymoon, sitting at a brewpub when— “She actually said this, not me,” Nick admits—his bride mused about how cool it would be to own a place like this. “And it was that exact moment I knew,” he remembers, “that I was going to open a brewery.”

the breweries have filled a welcome niche in a community that, with its year round farmers market, high-end restaurants, farms and food trucks galore, seemingly only needed this influx of breweries to complete its edible obsession. Pawtucket’s New Urban Farmers recycle Foolproof ’s used barley on their farm and will soon begin growing some hops especially for the brewery.

For Bucket, also committed to the marriage of good food

and beer, the ultimate pairing would be with Chez Pascal, who not only offer beer on tap, but also source their pigs from some farms that recycle the brewery’s spent grain: a beer to drink with the pig that ate the grain that made the beer. “It’s either sick or brilliant,” laughs Nate. “We’ll really be able to gauge our audience.”

The brewers are taking advantage of the already burgeoning food culture, what Erik refers to vaguely as “the whole foodie thing,” but its the bars and backyards of Pawtucket that they hold dear. At least Erik and Nate seem genuinely surprised by the happy alignment of these stars. They opened the brewery, and “all of a sudden Rhode Island beer is a local news story.” despite the overwhelmingly positive response from restaurants, bars, and plain old drinkers, Rhode Island law does not make the process easy. Obtaining a license requires months of paperwork, inspections, questioning contradictions, and squeezing through loopholes—even the purchase of a Bucket Brewery truck (no, they can’t deliver their own beer, but they are nonetheless required to have a truck). For years, Newport Storm was the only craft brewery in the state, but with the sudden increase in entrepreneurs, it seems that the state had a learning curve of its own in terms of what these post-Prohibition era laws really mean.

Both would like to be able to sell beer out of their facilities, filling up growlers for visitors to the brewery to take home.

While this would be possible across the border in Fall River, in Rhode Island, all beer must go through a distributor first. A law enabling breweries to sell beer on the premises is currently up for review, and is supported by the recently reinvigorated Rhode Island Brewers Guild.

The Guild was founded in 2010 by Sean Larkin, brewer at Trinity, Narragansett and, recently, his own label, Revival, but at that point, there were hardly any brewers to be members.

Today, as Larkin and Newport Storm, brewing since 1999, are joined by the Pawtucket breweries, plus newly opened Ravenous in Woonsocket, Whalers in Wakefield, and Grey Sail in Westerly, the group meets regularly. They plan on acting as a single entity in support of laws that would make Rhode Island a friendlier state for small breweries, with the goal of carving out a little more space for this kind of beer. “You look at the fact that craft beer is about seven percent of the overall market,” says Nick, “there’s still that other 90 percent to possibly capture.”

And that 90 percent is not easily giving way to the little guys. On January 31, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit to block the takeover by Anheuser-Busch InBev, America’s largest beer company, of Grupo Modelo, maker of Corona and the country’s third largest. Together, they control 46 percent of annual beer sales. According to a DoJ press release, the $20.1 billion takeover would “substantially lessen competition in the market for beer in the United States as a whole and in

26 metropolitan areas across the United States, resulting in consumers paying more for beer and having fewer new products from which to choose.”

The suit is being cheered by craft breweries, an industry that has come a long way since Sam Adams was the only craft brewery around. “The first time I had it,” Nate marvels, “it blew me away! I didn’t know beer could be that good!” Since then, the craft beer industry has only gotten bigger and better.

The Ocean State, however, has been relatively slow to get on board. Rhode Islanders are notoriously proud of their local products, but defending coffee milk and stuffies is different from heralding artisanal beer, and the state has long held out against anything that borders on the refined. In the 1990s, as craft beer was sweeping the rest of the country, a brewery in Warwick opened serving cask-conditioned ales, a technique Bucket brewers have expressed interest in adding to their repertoire, and quickly closed due to lack of interest in the specialty beer.

What these new Pawtucket breweries are trying to do, however, is convince locals that a small brewery with carefully made beer doesn’t necessarily entail pretention. And judging by the beers’ positive reception, Rhode Islanders tend to agree.

“Rhode Island takes pride in its own,” as Erik says, and the Pawtucket breweries find a common cause in craft beer. “The prevailing attitude is we kind of work together and get people drinking better beer,” says Nick. While Erik acknowledges that they’re not all sharing trade secrets, he’s firm in his belief that competition among Rhode Island beers is not the main concern. “I think that’s a little different than other industries.

There is some sort of bonding about it.”

“Yeah,” Nate agrees, “‘cause we meet over drinks.” as they move forward, both breweries have hopes of expansion. Beyond the experiences he’s keeping on deck—a Saison for spring, a summer double IPA, a Belgian-style double for fall—Nick sees Foolproof becoming one of the larger craft breweries in the nation. His tight branding just might set him apart from all the other craft breweries popping up in one of the few industries experiencing consistent growth. As for the Bucket boys, they plan on using the initial success of their beer to attract some investors, increase their barrel capacity and eventually begin selling retail—hopefully from a space slightly bigger than a broom closet. No matter how much they expand, however, the brewery will always be a Pawtucket brewery, and their beer, as Erik and their clients see it, “hometown beer.”

For now, though, Nate is excited about the prospect of his beer on tap at his favorite bar. To have the tap handles—each one unique and made of a reclaimed chair leg topped with a tin bucket—displayed at his regular spots is a sign of homemade success. “It’s one of the neat things about doing this,” he says. “We’re technically professionals, but really we’re just enthusiasts and still get a little giddy about seeing our tap handles with the bucket on it.”

BELLE CUSHING B’13 is only halfway through the fermenting process.

FEBRUARY 08 2012

FOOD

06

i have this friend. We’ve known each other for a long time. So long that “Dude, that wallet chain is sooooo cool.” So long that I am hairless, sexless, colorless, odorless, resume-less, guileless, and taste-less to him. The feeling is for the most part mutual. And there’s a sort of archaeology to our relationship, too. He creates and I record. The relationship is typical of two mammals: loud shouting, general weirdness about sex, driven by categorical understandings of things. It makes for the unity of a thing I guess, but it’s inscrutable. The entirety of something is before me and I can’t coax a goddamn word onto a page about it. Every possible version is a send-up of another, so I’ve stopped trying.

What proceeds is an account of the relationship, a rendering of how one boy reaches the other. That other one, he thinks about it a lot. On the one hand, what does it say about him? On the other, what does it say about him? Regardless, he wonders if people would read the blog.

Full Disclosure//Unfolding Principles//I’m Scared: He’s now white.

I’m now “Black as hell.”

Imagine different voices.

Dispatches

by Raillan Brooks

May 9, 2011 boop boop booooonnggg/dum du-dum dum dum/boop boop booooonnggg/dum du-dum dum dum/boop boop booooonnggg/dum du-dum dum dum/boom boom boooooooom/dum du-dum dum dum.

May 11, 2011 What you know about Urdu? What you know about it?

May 18, 2011 Alright dude so I called because I just wanted to know where the white women is at?

Also, I’m drunk and alone at my parents’ ... at my mom’s house and I’ve been writing music, and I wrote an electrofunk song called “Baby is it Coo” spelled ‘coo’ parenthesis “If I touch yoo.” So that’s “Baby is it Coo (If I Touch Yoo).” Alright. I’ll talk to you later.

August 27, 2011 So I was just listening to 95.5 and they played “Super Bass” by Nicki Minaj, and afterwards the DJ said “Super Bass. Got about six million hits on YouTube. I guess that’s what comes with all that ass.” Hit me up today if you wanna hang out.

September 25, 2011 Just read a historical article on a Viking named Olaf [sic] the Thick. Thought you should know.

September 11, 2011 CATS. September 11, 2011 Yo girl why you such a ho? Your voicemail message box thingy sucks, and I hate it, and it’s annoying, and I had a dream about Victorian handcuffs. Later.

October 5, 2011 CLICK.

November 11, 2011 Hey Hey, Cripple Creek Ferry/running through the overhanging trees/make way for the Cripple Creek Ferry/the water’s goin’ down, it’s a mighty tight squeeze.

December 12, 2011 ANSWER THE PHONE MOTHERFUCKER.

May 14, 2011 Oh shorty, oh shorty what’s up? [laughter.] Never get drunk with only white girls because them niggas, they be straight lollin’, they be straight wilding out and I don’t even KNOW.

October 6, 2011 Yo wassup fool? I’ve been thinking the last couple of days about what I want in a wifey, and I decided that I just want a wifey with big ol’ breasticles. Just big breasts. I just wanted to talk to you about it, because I don’t know what that means, what does that say about me? Like, that I would be such a slave to genetic advertising. I just want a girl with big breasts. I dunno, like...

November 17, 2011 Why shouldn’t white people go swimming? Because crackers get soggy when wet.

What you do call 300 white men chasing a black man? The PGA tour. What do you call a bunch of white guys sitting on a bench? The NBA.

December 14, 2011 Duh, my life is like, pulling me in a lot of different directions right now. I’m like in love with this girl...

February 24, 2012 Dude I hear you’re at a lesbian party? (cough.) I said, I hear you’re at a lesbian party. That’s perfect. Brown sounds like the Promised Land. I’ll holler at you later.

May 4, 2012 What’s up nigga? I’m out here having a cigarette, doing my thing.

January 26, 2012 WOOOOOOOOOOO WOOOO WOOOO WOOOO. April 26, 2012 Hey what’s up dude. It’s me. Uh, things sounded a little rough on Gchat this afternoon. I just wanted to check in with you, make sure you’re doing alright. Um, I’ll holler at you later.

March 29, 2012 Call me back, youngin’.

June 28, 2012 Yo what’s up man. I was calling because I came to the realization that I dance because I have too much booty in the pants, and I wanted you to corroborate this. I’ll talk to you later.

July 13, 2012 Here’s something that just crossed my mind: That other night we were hanging out in my basement and you thought you had lice. Whatever happened with that? Were you hallucinating? Call me back?

July 23, 2012 Sorry to keep calling you, my sleep schedule is really messed up. I just cannot get to sleep. I smoked a bowl, I think that’ll help. I’ll talk to you soon.

July 21, 2012 I’m looking for an adjective that refers to the bounce-ability of an object. [pause.] Thank you.

July 30, 2012 [SCREAM THAT MIXES RELIEF WITH SURRENDER].

July 31, 2012 11:42 PM I CAN’T STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

August 3, 2012 Thank you for subscribing to the Kreayshawn Automated Update Service. Her new song “Breakfast” featuring 2-Chainz is on YouTube right now. It’s the worst song you’ve ever heard until listen to it like five or six times, and then it becomes your favorite song. Get money!

October 28, 2012 The federal government is closed tomorrow, so I put a beer up my butt and did a handstand.

December 18, 2012 Girl I don’t even know what time it is.

August 1, 2012 2:13 AM I CAN’T STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

August 4, 2012 Who is Charles, girl? Who is Charles? I seen him at the Boulevard Wood Grill, girl.

January 10, 2013 I just wanted to let you know that you had better rue the day, and the day is nigh, that I get the Twitter app on my iPhone, because the second that happens, girl, I am tweeting everything in your direction, girl. It’s gonna get nasty. I’ll talk to you soon.

January 24, 2013 Shorty I’ma get you on this phone one of these days, and it gonna be good.

RAILLAN BROOKS B’13 finally got the Internet to write for him.

FEBRUARY 08 2012

FEATURES

08

Sissieretta Jones

by Ellora Vilkin

Sissieretta said: “The flowers absorb the sunshine because it is their nature. I give out my melody because God filled my soul with it.” Her chin was lifted and her lips were dark red.

The pastor, who was also a carpenter, and his wife, a laundress who was also a singer, called her Sissy—Matilda Sissieretta Joyner, born January 5, 1868, Portsmouth, VA. She came three years after the close of the Civil War and seven months before the Fourteenth Amendment. She came to Jeremiah and his wife Henrietta, both former slaves who lived in a double house on Bart Street. In 1876, the family moved north to Providence, settling across from the Congdon Street Baptist Church. At school, the children called her Tilly.

In the dim orange churchlight, her voice sounded sweet and her eyes shone like sunlit honey.

In the gloaming, oh my darling When the lights are soft and low And the quiet shadows, falling, Softly come and softly go Within two years of moving to Providence, Jeremiah left his wife and daughter. In 1883, Sissieretta turned fifteen and began training formally at Providence Music Academy. On September 4 of the same year, she married David Richard Jones, a 21-year-old biracial bellman from Baltimore. When their daughter was born seven months later, 16-year-old Sissieretta called her Mabel Adelina, for the celebrated coloratura Adelina Patti. Her husband David became her manager. The couple lived with Henrietta; the two women likely sang the baby to sleep.

By age 18, Sissieretta had performed alongside established black vocalists like Flora Batson and Marie Selika. In February of 1886, a month after Sissieretta was invited to perform at New York City’s Steinway Hall, Mabel Adelina died of croup, an inflammation of the larynx and trachea. For a while, none of them could breathe.

Then, on April 5, 1988, Sissieretta finally sang in New York.

The playbill called her “the rising soprano of Providence.” The newspapers called her Mme. Jones.

When the trees are sobbing faintly With a gentle unknown woe Will you think of me and love me, As you did once, long ago Her audience was white and it was black. Sometimes there were more of one or the other, sometimes not. They all leaned forward to see her better and they all hung off the balconies to listen. Sissieretta liked to sing in starched satin and jewels and golden rings. Her cheeks were dark pink and her teeth were white.

The papers called her the “Black Patti,” for the celebrated coloratura Adelina Patti.

“There are newspaper reports of her performing at enormous state fairs, and when she finished singing the audience went silent,” her biographer Maureen Lee tells me. “You could hear a pin drop. And then they would just erupt in applause.”

Sissieretta said: “It rather annoys me to be called the ‘Black Pati. I am afraid people will think I consider myself the equal of Patti herself,” she told a reporter for the Detroit Evening News. “I assure you I do not think so, but I have a voice and I am striving to win the favor of the public by honest merit and hard work.”

Her voice reached the ears of Abbey, Schoeffel, and Grau, a management firm who had handled Adelina Patti’s South

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American tours and represented the whole Metropolitan Opera Company. Two tours through the West Indies and South America in 1888 and 1890 made Sissieretta an international star. She came back with seven medals, one large diamond, four pearls, one ruby, one emerald, five hundred dollars in gold from the Haitian President, and a diamondstudded tiara. She was 22.

high in the noble art of music.”

In 1894, Sissieretta appeared at Madison Square Garden again, this time under the direction of Antonin Dvořák. She sang the soprano solo in his original arrangement of “Swanee River.” Dvořák said: “The Negro melodies…are the product of the soil. They are American. These are the folk songs of

The Louisville Post said: “What people saw was a negress of light color, attired in a very becoming gown, en train, which revealed a superb figure, surmounted by a head and face bespeaking plainly intelligence and refinement. She carried herself with dignity, save once when she [curtsied], and with much grace.”

After a show in Cincinnati, a critic wrote about the sweetness of her voice, its “melancholy warmth.” People lined up outside the stage door. She sang arias and art songs in Italian, German, and French along with popular ballads.

The audience often requested her signature “Old Folks At Home” (“Swanee River”) as an encore. The song had been written in 1851 in “negro dialect” by Stephen Forster, a white man, to be performed by E.P. Christy, a white man who performed in blackface. A bowdlerized version remains Florida’s State Song.

In 1892, Sissieretta headlined the Negro Jubilee at Madison Square Garden in a pearl grey gown. “She is an artist,” said the New York Dramatic Mirror, “and the statement made by her manager that she is the greatest singer of her race should be altered to the statement that she is one of the best of any race.” Biographer Maureen Lee calls Madison Square the turning point of her career; there was even talk that the Metropolitan Opera would want her for “dark roles” in L’Africaine and Aida. Later that year, she became the first African American woman to sing at Carnegie Hall.

In the gloaming, oh my darling Think not bitterly of me In Louisville, on March 27, 1893, the diva played to a packed gallery and half-full orchestra. The orchestra seating was for whites, the upper gallery for blacks. “I have never met with anything like it before,” Sissieretta told the Louisville Commercial after the first night’s performance. Jim Crow was fully established in the South. “I think people of my race ought not to be shut out in this way. The gallery, you could see, was crowded and no more could go up there and still all the back part of the house was not taken. I didn’t know about it, or course. That’s a business affair.” She had had difficulty getting a suitable room in town.

What of her voice? Music scholar Eileen Southern dates the first documented recording of a black female singer to February 14, 1920, five years after Sissieretta retired from the stage.

The court said: “She feels now as if she could get along without her benefactor, and she has thrown down the ladder on which she ascended to the position she now enjoys.”

He called her ungrateful. One of Sissieretta’s managers claimed she and her husband violated the terms of their agreement by booking concerts independently of him. In his statement, Judge McAdam agreed, forbidding Sissieretta from singing under any other management: “Every sense of gratitude requires her to be loyal to the manager who furnished her the opportunity for greatness, and every principle of equity requires her to perform her engagements according to the spirit and intent of the contract.”

After a performance in Cincinnatti, a music critic said: “Every true Christian and every sincere philanthropist must rejoice to find a member of the African race arising this

America, and your composers must turn to them.”

By November, Sissieretta had a new business manager, a white man with an office in Carnegie Hall named Rudolph Voelckel, who led her on two tours of Europe in two years as the star of the Black Patti Concert Company. She sang at

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Covent Garden. She sang for the Kaiser.

A German newspaper said: “Her voice has power and fire, and the florid passages remind one of the rapid flow of a mountain brook.” Another wrote that while the comparison with Patti was fitting, “the adjective ‘black’ seems to us unnecessarily impolite. Miss Jones is evidently of Negro blood, but not alone

For my heart was tossed with longing What had been could never be Sissieretta dreamed of living in Paris. “In Europe there is no prejudice against my race. It matters not to them in what garb an artist come, so he be an artist. If a man or woman is a great actor, or a great musician, or a great singer, they will extend a warm welcome….It is the artist soul they look at there, not the color of his skin.”

Sissieretta returned from Europe in 1896, perhaps to be closer to her mother. But black classical singers were no longer a “curiosity” to white audiences in the states, says music historian Eileen Southern, and “by the mid-1890s the black prima donna had almost disappeared from the nation’s concert halls.” Divas like Flora Batson retired to open music studios or direct community choirs.

Her husband, David, was unemployed and often drunk.

Under Voelckel’s management, Sissieretta began twice-daily performances at New York’s newly opened Proctor’s Pleasure Palace, the city’s first all-vaudeville venue and her first non-concert appearances in the states. The Pleasure Palace gig paid well at $300 per week, and Sissieretta must have felt pressure to support her husband and mother.

She would never go back to Europe. Instead, Sissieretta became the star of the Black Patti Troubadours, a troupe of “forty colored specialty, vaudeville, and lyric stars” including “grotesque dancers,” acrobats, and a “protean artist,” according to biographer Lee. For 19 seasons, Sissieretta made nearly twenty thousand dollars a year headlining the Black Patti Troubadours, more than any other African American entertainer at the time. Sissieretta filed for divorce in 1898, citing David’s problems with alcohol and gambling.

Judge McAdam said: “Talent is of little value without opportunity, and history records on its brightest pages the names of many who would have died in obscurity but for opportunity.”

The Black Patti Troubadours show had three parts: first, a one-act musical farce; next, a string of vaudeville acts— dances, acrobatics and impressions layered with songs; last, the “Operatic Kaleidoscope,” where Sissieretta would sing arias wearing her signature gown and jewels. The Troubadours played up to ten shows a week, up to 44 weeks a year, travelling in a private railcar to every state save Vermont and South Dakota. They performed for white and black audiences, especially in the South. Sissieretta appeared only in the third act.

“Positively the Greatest Colored Show on Earth” “The Hit of the Season” “The Greatest Singer of Her Race” In the photograph she is seated, wearing a stiff embroidered gown, a pearl necklace, and arm-length gloves. Her chin rests on her hand. Her eyes are solemn. Lee captions: “Sissieretta looks confident and poised, almost regal.”

of Negro blood. She is a mulatto of bronzed complexion and pleasant expressive features with full lips and high forehead and the bearing of a lady, even to the choice of costume.”

Though I passed away in silence Left you lonely, set you free

FEBRUARY 08 2012

Musical Comedy Company and Sissieretta took on speaking roles. “Yes, I am to be a sure enough actress this season,” she told Lester Walton of the New York Age. “I certainly feel elated.” The Indianapolis Freeman reviewed a Washington, DC performance in March of 1911: “Madame’s ‘Suwanee River’ brings down the house as of yore, and her stunning gowns and $15,000 worth of diamonds, worn at each performance, are revelations to the fair sex.” Sissieretta still preferred to sing.

It was best to leave you thus, dear, Best for you, and best for me The Age’s Walton said in 1911: “While the song ‘Suwanee River’ was not especially written for Mme. Sissieretta Jones (Black Patti), yet no singer has become so closely identified with this well-known composition so suggestive of Southern environment as the race’s leading soprano…To-day her voice still possesses that sympathetic rich timbre which made her famous years ago.”

Sissieretta spent her summers in Providence at 7 Wheaton St., the nine-room house off of Benefit Street that she had purchased for her sick mother a decade before. In 1914, the Black Patti Musical Comedy Company broke up and Sissieretta returned to Providence. She was 47.

Her neighbors said she wasn’t too close to anyone, save her mother, who died in 1924. To support herself, Sissieretta sold off her silver and all but three of her medals, eventually borrowing money from a neighbor. She kept the blinds drawn.

On sunny afternoons, neighbors saw her humming in her rose garden. She wore beautiful feathered hats and furs.

On the morning of June 24, 1933, Sissieretta borrowed a dollar’s cab fare to go to the hospital. Baltimore’s Afro-American said two weeks later: “Black Patti, the elegant Madame Sissieretta Jones, is dead and the world that once sang her praises had to stop and scratch its head when that announcement was made last Saturday from Providence, R.I.” She died of stomach cancer. Her estate consisted of furniture, four paintings, a walnut piano, and two fur coats.

In the gloaming, oh my darling When the lights are soft and low Will you think of me, and love me As you did once long ago Sissieretta is buried next to her mother at Grace Church Cemetery in Providence. In May 2012, a plaque was dedicated in her name at the site of her old house on 7 Wheaton (now Pratt) Street on the East Side. Her grave is still unmarked.

Lyrics taken from “In the Gloaming” by Annie Fortescue Harrison and Meta Orred,1877 Historical data culled chiefly from Maureen Lee’s new biography Sissieretta Jones: The Greatest Singer of her Race, 2012, now available in paperback ELLORA VILKIN B’14 sang for the Kaiser.

The Matinee Girl, a columnist for New York’s Dramatic Mirror, said in 1904: “[Swanee River] seems to be hers. I’ve heard nearly everyone sing it—Clara Louise Kellogg, Lilian Nordica, and the light complexioned Patti herself—but the song will always seem to me to belong exclusively to the stout negro woman in white who, her face grayish under the limelight, sang it with tears and longing and heartbreak in her voice.”

After 13 seasons, the Troubadours became the Black Patti

FEATURES

10

OVER “this almost didn’t happen,” Ellie Wyatt, a retired public school teacher and member of the Rhode Island Coalition to Defend Public Education, tells me, shaking her head. She is talking about the battle her organization fought for years and lost last February. The decision to allow Achievement First, a national Charter Management Organization (CMO), to open two schools in Providence came down to a single vote. After months of protest on the part of charter school opponents, the state Board of Regents approved the schools on February 2, 2012. Just two months earlier the same board had rejected the organization’s proposal to build a similar school in Cranston.

On February 22, the lottery will close for the inaugural kindergarten and first-grade classes at the Achievement First Providence Mayoral Academy, which will open its doors next September. Achievement First runs 22 elementary, middle, and high schools in Connecticut and New York, and the organization now has approval to open two new mayoral academies in Providence. While Rhode Island has seen a growth in charter schools in the past few years, this will be the first school to open in the state run by a CMO—a non-profit school operator that manages various schools while also looking for ways to expand.

charter schools are the fastest-growing sector of American education, with the number of students in charter schools (including grassroots public charters, non-profit CMOs like Achievement First, and for-profit Education Management Organizations) increasing by 200,000 students in the 2011-2012 school year, according to the Huffington Post. This brings the total number of charter school students to over 2 million, about 5 percent of the total public school student body.

Achievement First has been growing steadily since its

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flagship school, Amistad Academy Middle School in New Haven, Connecticut, opened in 1999. It earned praise from state officials and charter education advocates for raising test scores and providing a structured program. Despite their focus on testing, Amistad Academy and other Achievement First schools also use a motivation-based rhetoric with rituals like this: “Every morning, the music teacher kicks off Morning Motivation with a chant called ‘Are you going to have fun today?’” The schools’ designers believe they can have a highly regimented structure, a focus on testing-based achievement, and instill a sense of joy in its students. “In fact, we evaluate teachers on their ability to ensure that the J-Factor (the JOY factor) is high in every class and dominates regular schoolwide celebrations,” reads the Achievement First website.

Not everyone is quite as taken with Achievement First.

The schools have been critized for their increased reliance on grant funding from private organizations; for their lack of accountability to state and local government; for removing from their halls students with special needs, those who did not speak English at home, or students who otherwise struggle. All these complaints have been aimed more generally at the charter movement as a whole, as well as at other CMOs specifically. When the founder of Amistad Academy, Stephan Pryor, became Connecticut Commissioner of Education, some critics saw this as an unsavory alliance and a sign of the way state education policy was shifting. As Achievement First schools moved into New York in 2005, former parents, teachers, and the teachers’ unions came forward with public criticisms.

“It was a vicious circle,” Mary Taliaferrow, a former parent at one of Achievement First’s New York City schools, says about her experience dealing with school administrators in the movie The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman. She was first alarmed by the school’s use of a “pull-out

room,” a form of solitary confinement where disruptive or disrespectful children—those who, say, drop a pencil, shout out in class or wear shoes that violate the dress code—sit in silence for the remainder of the day. In a 2012 article in the Hartford Courant, Amistad Academy Dean of School Culture Peter Uwalaka proudly explains the use of the pull-out room, or “Reorientation Room,” as the school calls it. He describes the room as a place where misbehaving students, such as those who roll their eyes at a teacher, go to “get the extra culture they need.”

Albert Shanker was the president of the American Federation of Teachers when he first proposed the idea of charter schools in 1988. To him, they looked a bit different; while Shanker believed that charter schools should be approved both by the district and the teachers’ union. More than 90 percent of today’s charters are not unionized. He was also staunchly against vouchers­— national corporations that would run the schools— and the privatization of funding; he turned against the charter movement when he saw it going in the direction of privatization in the 1990s.

By design, charter schools are meant to be “laboratories for practices” that can be replicated in the public schools, says Rick Richards, a former member of the Rhode Island Department of Education’s Offices of School Improvement and School Transformation. But with corporate charters, he says, administrators and structures of change are often inaccessible to parents and faculty, despite what administrators tout as a high degree of parental involvement.

Dr. Kenneth Wong, a professor of education and public policy at Brown University, sees the relationship between parents and charter schools as open and participatory, since parents have the choice of leaving a charter school if they

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ACHIEVEMENT Charter Academy Opens its Doors

by Emma Wohl

don’t feel it addresses their child’s needs. In general, “charter schools are driven by competition,” Wong says. They “have to keep thinking about bringing in outside resources.”

The Rhode Island League of Charter Schools lists 15 schools in the state. Two of those, The Learning Community and Segue Academy, are in Central Falls, a city that garnered national attention in 2010 when superintendent Francis Gallo fired all of the teachers at Central Falls High. The Learning Community has attracted national attention, almost all of it supportive. A 2011 New York Times column dubbed it “The Central Falls Success” for turning around students’ test scores.

The school has a unique relationship to the city that hosts it; through a “District-Charter Collaboration Compact,” The Learning Community works in tandem with the Central Falls School District to place Learning Community Lab reading specialists in all of the district’s schools. In turn, the district is working towards “equitable distribution of resources for public charter schools and district schools.” Additionally, as part of the contract, CFSD agreed to lift a “charter cap” limiting the number of charter schools that could open in its district to two. Business journalist Joe Nocera, who wrote the article, was encouraging about the goal of The Learning Community’s founders to “use their knowledge to improve public school districts in Rhode Island”—seemingly the perfect application of the “laboratory of best practices” model.

But Ellie Wyatt doesn’t consider that plausible. “You can’t duplicate the charter school movement in a public school,” she said, because charters are taking money out of the public school systems, while also having access to funds the public schools can’t access. She sees the new Achievement First school as the first step in a new wave of corporate charters, including online schools “like call centers” where students sit at computers the whole day through.

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as achievement first made a move to enter Rhode Island, Mayor Angel Taveras was one of its most enthusiastic supporters, joining with a coalition of mayors and lobbyists. Taveras may be the only city official with a say in the charter school’s governance; as a “mayoral academy,” it gives him a seat on its board. After visiting Amistad Academy, Governor Lincoln Chafee—who tried to reallocate Race to the Top funding intended for charter schools towards other parts of the public school system—was on board as well, saying he found the school “very impressive.”

An open letter to Chafee, Taveras, and other officials appeared on the site WeCanRI.org in November, 2011, intended to refute their claim that Providence “demonstrated broad support” for approval of the new schools. It was signed by more than 30 local organizations, six city councilmen, a former president of the Providence School Board, teachers, and students. The letter-writers highlighted several complaints about Achievement First, first taking issue with its “no excuses” model of learning.

In the weeks leading up to the vote last February, the two sides came no closer to agreeing. In January 2012, months after the Cranston School Committee rejected a proposed Achievement First mayoral academy in its city and a month before the vote, Achievement First and Rhode Island Mayoral Academies refused to speak at a Cranston School Committee hearing. Days before the vote, several state politicians asked the Board of Regents to delay their decision until legislation that could impact the academies went into effect. Achievement First spokesman Bill Fischer said that the city couldn’t afford to wait: “additional options are needed and needed now.”

On February 2, 2012, the state Board of Regents voted 5-4 to allow Achievement First to open two mayoral academies—the Providence Mayoral Academy, opening this fall,

and another to open in 2014. A week later, the school board of Cranston approved a budget increase including the $2.4 million it will likely be forced to spend on Achievement First in the next six years.

wyatt and richards were both in the audience at a January 30 rally against making the NECAP—the New England Common Assessment Program, the state’s standardized test— a graduation requirement for high school students throughout Rhode Island. At the rally, members of the Providence Student Union, a coalition of students in public high schools around the city, spoke about why their future shouldn’t depend on a test score. “It’s not the fault of the students,” one speaker said.

“Standardized testing is sort of what started this,” Wyatt says. The charter school movement grew throughout the 2000s, specifically marketed as a way to improve students’ scores in the era of No Child Left Behind. Achievement First, like many other charter schools, touts its extended school day and summer programs as additional support aimed at closing the achievement gap. Yet what all this extra attention is dedicated towards is still very “outcome-based,” as Wong describes it, and that outcome is judged by the same standardized tests the public school students were protesting.

“It felt like the student was a widget. It felt like a factory,” Taliaferrow says. At the school where her son was enrolled, there was a constant push not just to improve student test scores but to expand, to get more students and open more schools. “It became the McDonalds of charter schools.”

EMMA WOHL B’14 can’t be duplicated.

METRO

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Pitchfork Advance Spanning Streaming’s Single/Album Divide

by Tristan Rodman

Illustration by Lizzie Davis

“Physical is best. Touch it. Smell it right after opening the shrink-wrap.

Take it off the shelf to show to your friends, so they can touch it too. Neither downloaded, streamed, nor any other form of music will ever replace physical (except for live!)” – Chuck, user comment on “Pitchfork Launches Advance,” from HypeBot “Seriously - you’re going to love it. And if you don’t, it won’t have cost you anything.” masterofreality, user comment on “Spotify’s US launch,” from Ars Techinca. what do you do when you want to listen to recorded music in 2013?

You can opt for physical media: put on a CD, a cassette, a record. You can listen to an .mp3 file on software like iTunes. Or you can stream it from “the cloud.” A number of companies compete for your streaming music business, all with slightly different offerings and business models. Spotify and Rdio offer a seemingly infinite library, integrated with your Facebook account, and sync your collection across a bevy of devices. Pandora generates a stream of music based on any song or artist you give it. Turntable.fm puts you in a virtual room and lets you take turns choosing tracks with and for an audience of other users. The list goes on, but one constant unites all the cloud music services: they are free or have a free option. Sign in and log on.

Streaming music services emphasize the single listen and the individual track over repeated play and the full album. Don’t mistake this for sentimentality or for a lament that “streaming music killed the album.”

Fetishization of music-as-object can occur in any format. There’s validity in privileging individual tracks, and for that type of music consumer, streaming is a godsend. There is, however, a considerable hole in the streaming music industry for album fanatics.

Enter Pitchfork Advance. On January 7th, online music publication Pitchfork threw its hat into the ring with a fairly unique offering. For the uninitiated, Richard Beck’s n+1 essay puts it best: “In the last decade, no organ of music criticism has wielded as much influence as Pitchfork. It is the only publication, online or print, that can have a decisive effect on a musician or band’s career.” Pitchfork has attained its reputation through careful curation. Curation is the cultural capital attached to Pitchfork, and the key to its success and self-continuation as the premier source for music news and criticism.

The site invests deeply in bands as brands, and their coverage inherently favors some artists over others. For example, Pitchfork has reviewed every album by Rihanna, but declined to comment on the biggest pop record of 2012, Taylor Swift’s Red. They’ve launched the careers of Vampire Weekend

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and Bon Iver while simultaneously writing Kings of Leon and the Killers out of the annals of festival-tent indie rock. Pitchfork curates meticulously at the level of form and content, both on its site and with its new streaming platform.

Advance streams full albums, in their entirety, and only during the week before the album goes on sale. But rather than a simple media player, Advance attempts to bring the full album experience, including artwork and liner notes, to the web. If streaming services view the single as critical to a social music experience, Pitchfork Advance posits that the album is critical to an individual listening experience. Pitchfork CEO Ryan Schreiber argues that “Pitchfork Advance allows you to have an experience with the music that’s immersive in the way that engaging with a vinyl LP would be.” Certainly, this is romanticism through new media: an empty basement with nothing but a turntable and a pair of headphones, losing yourself for hours in the music, the artwork, the lyrics.

The first album on Advance, Yo La Tengo’s Fade, was accompanied by a set of video loops and animations, content unique and exclusive to this new format. The trees on the Fade’s cover glisten and shift color. Scroll horizontally to see a list of who played on the record, and where it was recorded. Scroll further for a tracklisting. Since Fade, other artists have expanded upon what the platform can do. Guards’ In Guards We Trust contains lyrics and video artwork of cars and lips, complementing the themes of the album. The Advance interface also includes links to social sharing sites and places to purchase the physical album. Advance emphasizes the close relation between music and its material form, making it impossible to extricate the experience of listening to music from the experience of an album. After the week an album spends on Advance, the music disappears, but the artwork and animations remain.

We live in a new era of media reception, one that has fundamentally changed the way we engage with and consume the music we love. In Strange Sounds, Timothy Taylor notes, “Today’s technology makes possible a greater degree of eclecticism in consumption than ever before because of purchases (or downloads) from the web of single tracks of recorded music.”

With .mp3 downloads and the ability to rip CDs, the focus of consumers has moved from the album to the single. Why buy an album when the one song you want to hear costs $.99 on iTunes? With this, the playlist has eclipsed the album collection as a source of personal meaning-making. Like listeners once did (and still do) with mixtapes, users invest themselves in playlists and hold them as sources of identity. The songs acquire personal connotations and flavors, and these can be shared to other users/consumers with similar desires. Spotify and other social music services invest heavily in this concept: if you put yourself and your identity into a playlist, an

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

algorithm can determine recommendations for artists, songs, even other users with similar tastes. The playlist is the primary piece of collected data.

But by emphasizing the individual song, streaming services highlight an age-old musical debate: what do you prefer, the single or the album? More precisely, which one do you use to create your identity?

For users of these services, this debate is intricately tied to debates on what, exactly, the ideal listening experience is. Commenting on a piece on Advance in tech-blog The Verge, user juliancamilo writes, “As long as theres [sic] a quick way to skip to the next song, it can’t recreate that experience.” Another user drolly suggests “picking up the needle,” but the point is taken: some music purists believe that the album is the paramount form for the art they love, and appreciate Pitchfork Advance for its effort to return people’s focus to the album. Another user, juanochoaiii, writes, “I think the key of enjoying music lies with giving it undivided attention.

A streaming service, iTunes, internet radio app, etc., is always used in the background of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, The Verge, etc.” And so, fittingly, Pitchfork Advance sets itself in opposition to the streaming mainstream.

If most digital music services are fragmented and distracted, Advance tells you that immersion makes you a superior music listener. Welcome to music snobbery 2.0.

Any popular music form has its detractors, from the top-ten-listing musical objectivists in High Fidelity’s Championship Vinyl to the LA Weekly critic who just this week rebelled against his counterculture by writing a feature called “The Dirty Projectors Are Not Good.” But the glance down the nose extends beyond musical taste. Decrying the new music delivery technology is as old as music delivery technology itself. Thomas Christensen writes about the outcry when four-hand piano reductions of orchestral scores allowed concert music to enter the home in the 19th century, quoting one man as saying, “It is horrifying and worthy of the strongest censure how masterpieces have been arranged—particularly for four hands—with such ineptitude, superficiality, and disrespect.” In Christensen’s article on four-hand transcriptions, those who stood in opposition to the format were those who were threatened by its democratic potential: music entering the home meant it could replace music in concert halls, destabilizing class structure. Similar outrage can be found anywhere economies of power are threatened. So how does streaming music threaten the economy of the album?

Streaming and singles work perfectly for music’s most ascendant (and lucrative) contemporary genre: EDM. An August 2012 Forbes article “places EDM’s rise on the genre’s coexistence with the Web [because] DJs were some of the first to truly give their music for free and adopt social media, making money off of gigs and appearances rather than album sales.”

FEBRUARY 08 2012

The money for EDM is in the single and the live mega-performance, and that money flows heavily. EDM’s fans view it as democracy-in-miniature, a sonic utopia, the music of a new youth.

This leaves indie rock, a historically album-based medium, with the short end of the stick. This summer, Nitsuh Abebe wrote a feature in New York Magazine on Grizzly Bear, a hugely popular act by indie rock standards, explaining that the band don’t make nearly as much as one would expect. The band members barely scrape the middle class. Meanwhile, the highest paid DJ in the world, Tiësto, made $22 million in 2012. Albums are expensive to record and clumsy to distribute, especially in the digital realm. Singles cost less to produce (especially if you’re making music on your laptop), and make distribution a breeze. As such, albums are quickly becoming a format that only record-label artists can afford, because the label provides the finances and infrastructure to make a record viable. In turn, many independent bands have relied upon crowdsourced funding via Kickstarter in order to make and distribute full records, using a recorded single as the promise of future returns.

By following the money trail and the current impulses of musicians, it’s possible to see why Advance represents a new way forward. Because Pitchfork curates so carefully, they ensure that they remain in the inner circle of commercially viable music. They cover the requisite amount of Top40, EDM, and R&B while keeping their core indie rock audience. With Advance, Pitchfork is using its clout in an attempt to save the full-album listen. And it’s an admirable effort. Advance is an ethical medium compared to other streaming services that offer a pittance in royalties to their artists. Writing for Mashable.com, Todd Olmstead claims, “Conventional wisdom suggests that in an age of rampant piracy, letting listeners sample music legitimately will curb illegal downloading, and in the case of rising acts, might even entice people to buy something that otherwise would have been off their radar.”

While trying out Pitchfork Advance, I didn’t find that I could give it my undivided attention. I did, however, find that I listened to multiple albums for their duration, albums I wouldn’t have listened to otherwise.

But I didn’t make the leap to go purchase them. At least not yet. Perhaps I will once the albums are off Advance and the music is still in my ear. I do feel a responsibility to pay for the music to which I listened and guilt about potentially stealing the albums. That, if nothing else, is a small victory.

TRISTAN RODMAN ‘15 is an interactive digital format.

ARTS

14

The Worst Kind of Punch Line

by Greg Nissan

“power fails and 49ers surge, but Ravens Win” - The New York Times. “Lights Out! Ravens Win the Super Bowl!” - The Huffington Post. “Beyoncé’s Super Bowl Dress Shocker” - The Daily Beast.

None of these puns, alluding to the blackout that occurred at the beginning of the second half of the Super Bowl last Sunday, are funny. Nor are they trying to be. If you disagree with me, I can venture a few guesses about you. You a) are above the age of 40 b) are wearing a thick-knit maroon sweater c) refer to coffee as “rocket fuel” and d) embarrass your children (Sarah, 9, and Joshua, 12) when you pick them up from Hebrew school. John Dryden called the pun the “lowest and most groveling kind of wit.” But it seems there’s some sort of pun paranoia in the world of journalism, where puns are a veritable plague: if I don’t make it, somebody else will. Does that mean I’m stupid? “Ravens win, stop Niners surge” -The Huffington Post.

According to Geraldine Pinch’s Magic in Ancient Egypt, puns held immense importance in the empire, where they were central to myth-making and dream interpretation. For example, dreaming of a harp (bnt) indicated evil (bint). Now, they’re the epitome of dad jokes—clunky eye-rollers—and a central stylistic element of HUGE PRINT HEADLINE SOURCES like The New York Post and The Huffington Post. The New York Post, the tabloid-as-newspaper

famous for its Page 6 gossip, features a 48-size font headline on both sides of the paper, one news and one sports. “Notre Shame” on Manti Te’o. “Booty Gaul” on Dominque StraussKahn. They pun about Knicks games. “May The Best Man Lin.” They pun about killings. “Trayvon Hoodwink.” The phonetic coincidence is their modus operandi. As a kid, I was amazed by the relentless frequency of awful puns in that paper. I envisioned a bearded man in a white suit who would spend all day at the Post headquarters sipping coffee with a splash of Jameson and reading O. Henry in a bulbous burgundy arm chair. The staff would bring him the next day’s paper, all finished but for the headline. He would stroke his beard delicately, his nails trimmed, and after a pensive moment the magic would surface: “Lance Arm…wrong.” Thunderous applause.

After doing some research, I came across the disappointing reality of the situation. Apparently, The Post’s Managing Editor Frank Zini fired 32 people after the New York Knicks didn’t re-sign Jeremy Lin, the international basketball and pun sensation who rose from nobody to “Linsanity” in less than a week. Why did he fire so many employees in one sitting? They were Jeremy Lin’s pun staff. His pun staff. 32 professionals came up with “May The Best Man Lin.” Did they all shake hands afterwards? Or sulk home to write in their journals: “I am pundering whether or not I should quit my job. Will keep

you Posted.”

How did this ubiquitously mocked form of word play worm its way into the journalism world? In the right hands, puns can be used to weave a web of literary double entendre. Nabokov and Joyce punned obsessively and complexly.

Shakespeare is revered for his dramatic and comic puns. In the wrong hands? Edgar Allen Poe: “Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.” The man died face down in a gutter and his biggest fans are 8th graders with leather bracelets and Angels & Airwaves posters in their bedrooms, but does he have a point? Maybe in past centuries puns indexed wit, but in the Ironic Age puns just seem too easy. As I watched the Google news feed after the Superbowl, pun after pun passed before me. Perhaps this collective need to pun in every headline is an attachment to the glory days of punning before the 20th century, when this wordplay actually said something about one’s intellect. Maybe it’s just a ploy to sell more papers. It looks doubtful that the pun will make a resurgence. Perhaps the pun will remain in the badlands of bespectacled dad humor for the rest of time. RIP. GREG NISSAN B’15 is ubiquitously mocked.

by Joe de Jonge

I haven’t seen Amour because I haven’t felt like ruining my day.

According to Box Office Mojo, Amour has grossed $15,541,260, so ~2 million people have seen it.

Amour is nominated for Best Picture, Best Foreign Film, and Haneke for Best Director. (Oscars)

Forbes.com reports that Beyoncé was not paid for her half-time performance.

Expenses, $600,000, were covered.

2 hr. 7 min.

go Ravens.

Jacoby Jones ran 108 yards in about 11 seconds to tie the postseason record for the longest run. His other touchdown was more impressive.

“Hey, Mama, it was the gumbo,” 80 quarts. He’s from NOLA.

Blackout- 34 min.

Nielson Co. estimates that 108.4 million people watched Super Bowl XLVII, putting it third in all time ratings behind both last year’s game and 2010’s.

Ray Lewis was underwhelming.

“Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.” – Psalm 91

The older brother won.

That safety was a brilliant ending.

“Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable.” - Haneke

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Optimize Your Valentine’s Day A Communication Guide

by David Adler, Simon Engler & Erica Schwiegershausen

YOU HAVE CHAMPAGNE, chocolate, candles, and a copy of Casablanca. All the pieces are there, but now it’s go-time and your mouth is full of tuna salad. So how do you get what you really want on Valentine’s Day? A ring, a trip to Las Vegas, a Whirlpool® bathtub, or simply a wet kiss? You’ve been there, and you know it’s true: pheromones can only get you so far. The real secret is verbal, person-to-person communication.

1) Respect Expert Advice

Which Gem is right for me?

You’re at Tiffany & Co. and you’re dazzled. But then you remember: T&C invented birthstones back in 1870. She’s a very practical Virgo, so Sardonyx is the one. Make it big.

The people who make intimacy work have certain skills. You can learn any skill by reading and practicing. Take weaving and smithcraft, for example. It’s well known that by reading and practicing, you will achieve Mastery. When it comes to intimacy, Mastery is a state of mind—one that will allow you to go from being the low critter (or “four-legger”) on the totem pole to having the constant sensation of being awesome-feeling. There are some questions you need to ask yourself first, though. First:

Maybe the best sort of gem to give your lover is one that’s embedded in a toe ring. But remember: buy foot moisturizer. That way, the gem won’t chafe their winky.

“Oops!” you might say. “My lover has Athlete’s foot! I’m not sure that a toe ring is the best idea.” In that case, buy an anklet. Anklets are exactly like bracelets, but you wear them on the wrist-like body part above your foot—the foot-wrist. See a beautiful gem dangling there, and tell me your heart’s not rising into your mouth.

2) What You Can Do Right Now

Charm bracelets are also really big right now.

Here’s a dolphin (he loves the water); there is a four-leaf clover (cause she’s your lucky girl/ Irish); and over here is a thimble—get experimental.

1) Explore your Emotional Footprint. It’s important to remember that unexpressed feelings can leak into the conversation. In love especially, you have to constantly, constantly be asking yourself: am I projecting?

2) Find your emotions where they hide.

Some feelings are harder to find than others. For example, gratitude, forgiveness.

Ask yourself: can I move on from last year?

Can I afford to Let It Go?

3) Be Proactive

3) Often emotions get lost behind simple labels. Buzzwords like “Anger” and “Frustration” simply can’t capture a full bundle of feelings. The keyword here is describe.

Take advantage of the pauses to ask your partner: can you say more about how you feel? Ask for more concrete information.

Remember: listening to them helps you listen to you.

1) Ask for what you want. You can’t be too explicit on Valentine’s Day. If you want someone to be your Valentine, you should just look them in the eye and tell them they remind you of the best thing you have ever smelled. Then, kiss them on the cheek and say, “I won’t take no for an answer.”

2) You can also communicate through objects. Keep asking yourself: can I say it with chocolate? Buy a teddy bear that says, “You’re looking awesome,” or bake a cake that does the same. Ask them to share some and give them a kiss on the cheek even if they say no.

4) Conquering the Inevitable: Delivering Bad News 1) Always Put Bad News First 2) Don’t Rely On Subtext 3) Think Like A Mediator

DAVID ADLER B’14, SIMON ENGLER B’14 & ERICA SCHWIEGERSHAUSEN B’13 are just not that into you.

FEBRUARY 08 2012

LOVE

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mosquito net boy-texture limbs his navel stone foot of the fire drags sheets over humped thigh. a dog body undertows heartbeat sweet meat at that age, eye fingers stamens in every mosquito net august insects slip from full wet field under a cracked door.

where a finger folds a lake of epithelial cells knuckle knuckles fast as light fast as hand hands.

northern michigan, black walnut grove mima, dove-woman slathered citrine honey over her own lips with her own tongue. alone, walked with the northern tribe yes great-grandmother of bees humming, raged in white-pine boxes, carried torches shadow to the lake-edge, lidless spear, ready for fish in the spring-fed scar.

squat to pull petoskeys her cracked closet, blue barrel of a rifle.

in summer ferns eye led hair on my father’s thigh cupped in fork of a black walnut sapling he planted when he was a boy.

pressed his thumbnail mulch, lake of ferns at tree-line four, dock-pylons of light. he rolls in the invincible seed.

grandmother’s herd brood of mima squats in field fertilized by nothing herding her animals herds them

shotgun cut jumped a hot milk carton in junk yard his eyes downed the stock. i put the barrel in mud.

spider drifted through (is it wind on my shin? goats made me. she leapt from a wrinkled cliff her lightning-body slashed, boiling the blue pool. something dark those old branches seeded in me sang a shaman song making her.

or hair hairs. a knuckle folds and a furrow of emptiness blossoms pouring dark concrete

by Jack De Tar

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LITERARY

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FEBRUARY 01 2012

NEWS

02

thi sw eek in l Jack ie K 1962 ister y e aT V t nnedy Wh our o give s ite f Ho the use

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 8

MONDAY FEBRUARY 11

compost conference // johnson & wales harborside recreation center, providence Can you compost Sweethearts™? How can I speed up the process? A day of workshops on residential and commercial composting techniques. $25. 9AM.

primitive accumulation // room 106, smith-buoanno, brown university Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation talks about restructuring the global economy, alternatives to capitalism, and new forms of social cooperation. 5:30PM.

talking about activism // mckinney conference room, the watson institute, brown university Four different activists talk about their experiences with activism on four different continents. Topics include: government-imposed land acquisition, mayoral control of public education, and safe abortion access. 5PM.

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 9 holiday bazaar // mt. pleasant library, 315 academy ave., providence In honor of St. Valentine’s Day. Items available for purchase include books, raffle tickets, food, and beautiful jewelry for Valentine’s gifts. 10AM – 2:30PM. a show // the funky jungle; email cgheezey@gmail.com for address Raven King, Huge Face, Hurricane Irene. Hard rock rock alternative rock grunge grunge rock alternative stoner rock Providence. Huge Face has two drummers. Donations suggested. 9PM. do plants flirt? // roger williams park botanical center, providence Botany and pheromones, dating and mating. The warmth and beauty of a greenhouse and a guided tour. 11:30AM. Adults $3; Children $1. cheese & wine // 186 carpenter st., providence A classy, cool art opening. Cocktails and snacks. Works starting at $420. 6-8PM.

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 10 piano concert // risd museum, providence Benjamin Nacar tears it up. Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and Chopin. Free!

3PM.

@list_easy

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 12 duck stamps // buttonwood park zoo, new bedford State winners of the 2012 Junior Duck Stamp program are now on display in the education center. 9AM-3PM.

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 13 unscripted empathy // room 305, pembroke hall, brown university Part of the Creative Medicine Series. Artist Jane Hesser talks about representing pain, illness, and transformation and the way that art can enrich our understanding of what people need to heal. 5:307PM. toastmasters // room 190, barus & holley, brown university Tell stories. Make friends. Hone your public speaking skills in a no-pressure environment. We’ve heard it only takes three or four meetings to stop saying “um” entirely. Seriously! 8-9PM.

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 14 a show on valentine’s day // psychic readings, 95 empire st., providence A date where you don’t have to talk at all, except, you know, between sets. Pak, Dungeon Broads, Nite Mode, Valise, Muffy Brandt. 9PM. kiss & tell // providence public library, 150 empire st., providence Raymond Chandler, a murder plot, a femme fatale—it’s all so romantic. A free V-Day screening of Double Indemnity with discussion to follow. 6-8PM. in the know? i.e. how to do a sock bun? email listtheindy@gmail.com