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NEWS in Review 2 Week barry elkinton, emily gould, rick salamé

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simon engler

METRO the Box 3 Ban megan hauptman

FEATURES 5 Tulips lili rosenkranz Piet 12 Zwarte sophia seawell

FROM THE EDITORS A wise man once told me what a wise man once told him. They were talking about change. I can’t remember the words exactly but this was the feel of it: It is night and it is raining. A guy’s driving, his car breaks down. He pulls it to the side of the road—he’s alone and he’s huffing and puffing a little cause he’s mad right? You see, he’s upset because his car broke down and cars aren’t supposed to break down.

He opens the door, he walks toward the front of the car. The tire on the driver’s side looks fine, swollen in the right way. So he walks around to the other side of the car. He squats down to the concrete, real slow, pinching up his pressed pants so they don’t get wet. He checks out the tire on the passenger side and damn it, it’s done. The tire on the passenger side is flat. You know what I’m gonna say now, right? You’re anticipating me. You’re anticipating that I will say he changed the tire on the passenger side. And you know what? He did just that! Took out the lug nuts and everything, used his wrench. After that, he did the same thing to the tire on the driver’s side. And then he switched the two tires. So the car still couldn’t move.

So that’s change. What we need is progress.— DSF

Fascist Fashion

ARTS of a Lady 6 Portrait grier stockman What?

7 Art. claudia norton

SCIENCE Are From Mars 11 Men ardra hren

EPHEMERA

FOOD That 17 Tap anna rotman

INTERVIEWS Tapes 10 Awesome houston davidson

LITERARY White Stuff 16 The alex ronan and Yellow 17 Black greg nissan

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

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annie macdonald

WEEK IN

THE WOODS

by Emily Gould, Rick Salamé & Barry Elkinton Illustration by Lizzie Davis

A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, ETC. trees these days just seem to be everywhere. Casuarina and Nyssa; Robina and Salix—no matter how hard we try to chop ‘em down, they just keep growing, making our cities into forests, backyards into marshes. On February 5, nonprofit group American Forests honored these overgrowths by announcing the top ten US cities with urban forests—New York and Washington, DC, Sacramento, Seattle, and Portland, and a few notables in between, like Austin, Charlotte, Denver, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis—a motley crew, to be sure.

An urban forest, as American Forrest defines it, is an ecosystem “‘composed of trees and other vegetation that provide[s] cities and municipalities with environmental, economic, and social benefits,” like improved air quality, water system management, and energy use reduction. National Urban forests have been estimated to contain 3.8 billion trees and store 770 million tons of carbon per year. It’s a little bitty ecosystem; that potted plant on your street corner may have purified the water you drank this morning.

Winning cities were chosen not only for the acreage of their green spaces, but also for their community engagement programs and for their plans to maintain forests in the future.

Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to plant one million trees in New York City by 2017, for example, is already halfway to completion. Volunteer work and private donations have played a large part in the success of that plan. Another winner, Portland, Oregon—formerly nicknamed “Stumptown” because of miles of land left barren by destructive logging—now has 1.4 million trees. Portland officials aim to eventually cover 33 percent of their city’s surface area with vegetation. Providence, meanwhile, hasn’t quite caught up with the trend. Maybe it’s time for the city to tap back into its roots.—EG

FEBRUARY 15 2013

SQUIRREL SLAM SLAMMED On saturday, february 16, around 4,000 people will gather in the Village of Holley, NY to shoot the town’s squirrels, and perhaps win an assault rifle in the process. At least that’s the plan according to the town’s volunteer fire department, which is hosting its 7th annual “Hazzard Country Squirrel Slam” contest. For a mere ten dollars, you can team up with a buddy and compete for cash prizes against other competitors running around town in a quest to see who can shoot the heaviest squirrels in the land.

Now, there are a few rules to keep in mind. Don’t shoot any black squirrels: “REDS AND GREYS ONLY,” reads the fire department’s webpage. And remember, “no internal packing or soaking of squirrels for added weight!!!!” Other than that, have at it. Whichever team shoots the five combined heaviest squirrels takes home 200 dollars. Plus, when the smoke clears, the fire department’s going to raffle off an AR/22 semiautomatic assault rifle and a .50 caliber muzzleloader-a true frontier classic-which should be able to take out any land mammal in North America, beached whales notwithstanding. And don’t forget, kids under 14 have their own divisional prizes.

Apparently the last six contests were a real blast, and went off without a hitch. This year, though, animal rights groups and gun control advocates have seized upon the event as paradigmatic of all that is wrong with gun and hunting culture in America. As of February 12, over 20,000 people have signed online petitions calling for the hunt to be canceled, and almost 3,700 dollars have been donated to a fund that will be given to the fire department in lieu of holding the contest.

While some people just really like squirrels, most protesters are decrying the optics of rewarding preteens with money and assault weapons for shooting squirrels, especially in the wake of the shooting in Newtown, CT. “It’s bad on so many levels,» said state representative Tony Avella, a Democrat from Queens who joined Friends of Animals at a press conference in Albany to protest the event. “A poor little squirrel getting a nut and probably coming up to the individual to try and be friendly — and then the kid pulls out a gun and shoots it.”

But the folks of Holley remain unphased by the downstate naysayers, and the fire department is adamant about the event continuing. The contest is totally legal-children as young as 12 can hunt in New York-and the department will be checking hunting licenses. Plus, all downed squirrels will be used for pelts and meat. “There’s a lot of people locally that spend time with their families and come do this hunt,” Fire Chief Pete Hendrickson told the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.

“It’s like a fishing derby, and the only difference is it’s with squirrels.”—BE

BAD NEIGHBORS hiking in summertime New England, when the foliage is thick, one can usually maintain the illusion of being “awayfrom-it-all.” It’s in the winter, when the deciduous trees are denuded, that houses appear and the imagined continuity of the forest is broken. Of course, if your patch of heaven is bisected by I-95, like Rhode Island’s Big River Management Area is, then it’s hard to pretend you’re anywhere other than the country’s second most densely populated state, unless you wear earplugs.

Disrupting continuous stretches of forest, a process called fragmentation, is problematic, to say the least. According to the state Department of Environmental Management (DEM), fragmentation “has the potential to change local water cycles, reduce critical wildlife habitat, increase disturbances, and foster the invasion of exotic plant species.” And there’s no doubt that Rhode Island is highly fragmented. A 1998 joint study by the DEM and the US Department of Agriculture found that there is only one place in the state where a person can stand and be over a mile away from the nearest road.

Well, technically, a person can’t stand there. That place is the middle of the Scituate Reservoir. This fragmentation speaks to a pervasive blurring of the boundaries between human settlement and forest. That may explain how such a densely populated state can still be among the most heavily forested in the nation, with forests covering approximately 60 percent of its land area, according to the same study.

The loss of ecological diversity that comes with fragmentation is bad enough, but there might be a more immediate cause for concern following the recent blizzard.

According to ecoRI, the Rhode Island Department of Transportation deposits between 80 and 300 pounds of salt and sand on each mile of roadway that it de-ices. Splashing, runoff, wind, and snow plows transfer this salt to the soil nearby, threatening trees as far as 60 feet away, according to a study on the effects of road de-icing on trees by Wayne Clatterbuck of the University of Tennessee. Salt absorbed by trees is moved to the extremities, where it inhibits bud and leaf growth, or kills the affected limbs altogether. Younger trees often cannot survive the loss of a limb. So take the good news about our percentage of forested land with a grain of salt. After all, most of Rhode Island’s trees are probably within 60 feet of some road or another.—RS

NEWS

02

Boxed Out

Revisiting Employment after Felony Convictions

by Megan Hauptman Illustration by Lizzie Davis

on many job applications, below availability and above the signature line, stands a question that may appear innocuous at first glance: have you ever been convicted of a felony? If so, give details and date.

If you haven’t been convicted of a felony, this question is rote: tick the no box, move on to sign and date the application. If you have a criminal record, “that box is a scarlet letter,” says Elton Simpson, who spoke in favor of striking the question from job applications at an event hosted by Providence’s Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE) on January 31. DARE’s event, a speak-out in support of legislation to prevent employers inquiring into applicant’s conviction record before an interview, sought to raise awareness of the difficulties many people face in procuring employment after being released from prison.

At DARE’s event, and at a press conference held at the Rhode Island Statehouse this past Wednesday, several formerly incarcerated people testified about the difficulties they have had in finding employment, often not even receiving a followup phone call after submitting an application that identified them as having a criminal record. John Prince, who works with DARE advocating for legislation to strike the question, told an audience at the Statehouse his story. In 2009, he submitted a resumé for a job online and was asked to come into the company’s office for an interview. After being told he was perfect for the job and filling out a pile of forms, the employer noticed that Prince had checked the box that said he had a felony conviction. “He froze. He said, I can’t use you. You checked the box, I can’t use you,” Prince remembers.

“Now I’m leaving there with an amputated spirit. There’s no anesthetic for an amputated spirit. Riding that bus coming back, I was frustrated. It had been 12 years, and that box was still haunting me.”

The legislation in question, referred to as “Ban the Box,” has been introduced into the Rhode Island legislature twice before, in 2011 and 2012, but has never passed. The current bill has three main points: employers cannot ask about felony convictions on applications and must give applicants a chance to explain any convictions at the interview stage; employers are not allowed to deny jobs to people based solely on their criminal records (unless the crime is directly related to the job); and employers are cleared of liability for hiring people with a felony record.

In April 2009, the city of Providence eliminated criminal history questions on job applications for publicly-funded city jobs. This decision was a response to investigations by Mayor Cicilline’s office on the difficulty people with criminal convictions face in transitioning back into the workplace. Now, applicants for city jobs can be asked to sign a waiver for a background check only once it

03 METRO

has been determined that they meet the minimum criteria for the position. Although this doesn’t prohibit employers from investigating applicants’ criminal histories, it does make the process more transparent and helps prevent employers from passing people over for jobs before giving them a chance to explain their specific circumstance or prove their qualifications. Ban the Box’s sponsors, state senator Harold Metts (D-Providence) and state representative Scott Slater (D-Providence), want to extend these rules to private employers as well.

Both Metts and Slater have supported “Ban the Box” in all its iterations, and were joined at Wednesday’s press conference by several other legislators who see this bill as important for their constituents. State representative Michael Chippendale, a Republican from Foster, spoke to the bipartisan appeal of the bill, touching on its economic benefits. “As an employer, as a business owner, I’ve hired a lot of people. And I’ve hired a lot of people who’ve had records. And those people had something to prove to me...and they were going to work hard to overcome those things that people wanted to stereotype them with, so from a business perspective it makes sense.” Chippendale also pointed out that the high costs of incarceration, combined with a 60 percent recidivism rate, cost tax payers huge amounts of money, “but we’re going to save that money when we put good, hardworking people who made a mistake back to work.” in april of this year, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced that it would begin to crack down on employers that discriminated against job applicants with criminal histories. Deciding not to hire applicants based purely on their criminal record is considered illegal discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but many employers are unaware of this stipulation, or don’t know how it applies to them. It is illegal for employers not to hire someone based purely on the fact that they have a criminal record, but if they determine that the offense is “job-related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity,” the criminal record can play a factor in their decision.

Confused? So are employers. Along with its announcement that it would more aggressively prosecute employers who were in contempt of Title VII, the EEOC issued a hefty set of enforcement guidelines, with these recommendations for best practices: don’t ask about felony convictions on job applications, take into consideration the nature of the crime and the time elapsed since the conviction, and conduct individualized assessments. This last clause is both the most burdensome and arguably the most important.

To protect against discrimination lawsuits, the EEOC suggests that employers “(a) inform the individual of his/

her exclusion based on a criminal record, (b) provide the individual an opportunity to demonstrate that he/she should not be excluded, and (c) consider whether the individual assessment shows that the exclusion policy should not be applied.” The EEOC also suggests that employers keep detailed records of why they decided to hire one applicant over another, especially in cases where criminal records were considered.

Deeming a conviction relevant to the specific job is a confusing matter, and the EEOC’s guidelines spell out a variety of ways to take someone’s criminal history into account. They even provide specific examples of how to use this information to make decisions, walking employers through scenarios in which the criminal conviction could be considered relevant, and in what situations employers would or would not be protected from discrimination lawsuits.

However, as the EEOC language acknowledges, these are guidelines, not law, and they leave a lot of room for situational interpretations and variable court applications.

Assessing an employer’s intent to discriminate is difficult, and employers’ views of which crimes constitute a risk to their business vary greatly. Many employers not only worry about discrimination lawsuits, but also lawsuits from co-workers or clients as well. “Companies can be sued by their employees if they hire someone who harms his coworkers,” pointed out David R. Carlin III, speaking on behalf of the Northern Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce, in a hearing on Ban the Box in 2011. some employers in providence openly disregard EEOC guidelines for acceptable use of criminal records in making hiring decisions. Spectator Management Group (SMG), a private company that runs the Dunkin’ Donuts Center, as well as other convention centers and arenas in New England, is one of the largest facility management groups in the world.

They employ hundreds of stagehands and technicians for the events and conferences hosted at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center, and they have a blanket restriction on hiring anyone with a criminal record.

This restriction is relatively recent, according to Mike Araujo, the business agent for the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Engineers (IATSE), the union that represents workers for all of the major Rhode Island venues, as well as those who work on local TV sets and at events like Waterfire. This type of seasonal, contractual employment has often attracted people with criminal convictions, many of whom have trouble finding long term employment.

“Historically, someone getting out of jail could go either to the docks or to us, and be put to work almost immediately,” Araujo says. “We never had a problem [with criminal records]...We don’t deal with kids, we don’t deal with money.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

It’s just fielding shows.”

This changed six years ago, when SMG took over management of the Dunkin’ Donuts Center and started asking for background checks on all new stagehands, blacklisting all of the union members with criminal records. “I went to management and asked them for letters for each one of these people [that were rejected for work], explaining why they aren’t qualified,” said Araujo. “They told me that their criminal records removed their qualification for the job. Some of these men and women had been working as stagehands for 30 or 40 years.”

IATSE decided to challenge the blanket restriction; Araujo continued to send people with criminal records to work at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center, knowing that they couldn’t collect their checks. He found many volunteers who were willing to go without pay on a few jobs to protest SMG’s policy. The union has recorded over $400,000 in a pool of unpaid wages with this tactic, almost equivalent to the union’s yearly payroll. They hope to win these unpaid wages from SMG through union negotiations, using legislation such as Ban the Box and the EEOC guidelines to make the case that SMG’s policy is blatant and illegal discrimination. Araujo and other IATSE union leaders aren’t looking to instigate a major lawsuit against SMG, because it would drain the union’s resources. Araujo’s tactic intended “to make the process so burdensome for them that they just gave up on it.” smg is contracted by the City of Providence to manage the Dunkin’ Donuts Center, and “part of their corporate charter is that they have to be working for meaningful employment in the community,” says Araujo. “If they’re denying up to 25 percent of the minority population work, they are actively working to destroy the community they are hired to serve.”

The criminal justice system disproportionately punishes black and Latino workers, and restrictions on ex-felons’ ability to work also disproportionately affect these same populations. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act seeks to prevent two types of employment discrimination: disparate treatment (treating someone differently on the basis of race, gender, nationality, etc.) and disparate impact (practices that disproportionately harm racial or ethnic groups even without obvious intent to discriminate). Even though civil rights laws do not explicitly restrict the use of criminal records in making hiring decisions, the EEOC recognizes the disparate impact that excluding individuals with records has on minority communities.

FEBRUARY 15 2013

In January 2012, Pepsi paid the Minnesota branch of the EEOC $3.13 million in a settlement around their blanket discrimination against hiring people with felony records. In a press release, the EEOC states that they sued Pepsi because they found “reasonable cause to believe that the criminal background check policy formerly used by Pepsi discriminated against African Americans in violation of Title VII.” six years after smg instituted their policy, discrimination on the basis of criminal history is receiving local and national criticism, and Araujo believes that negotiations with SMG for the years of back pay will be successful. “They’re afraid of the potential lawsuit,” he says.

In Worcester, Massachusetts, where SMG runs the DCU Center, the same restrictions on workers with criminal records don’t apply. “I could turn one guy down for work in the morning [in Providence] and send him to Worcester in the evening and he’d be allowed to work for the same company,” Araujo says.

In 2010, Massachusetts passed a law prohibiting public and private employers from inquiring into criminal histories not directly relevant to the job position. State employers and private companies contracted by the state (like SMG) cannot inquire into a job applicant’s criminal record until after making a conditional offer, and must allow applicants a chance to explain all convictions during an interview. In Boston, “ex-offender status” is now a classification protected under the civil rights laws of the city. Araujo and other activists in Providence consider Massachusetts’ various legal protections to be a model.

Massachusetts’ legislation is particularly progressive, but seven other states have banned the box for public, statefunded jobs, and have defined more clearly how criminal records may be considered in hiring decisions. In Providence, some private employers choose not to ask questions about criminal convictions; Araujo cites the Providence Performing

Arts Center as one example of a local business that doesn’t inquire into workers’ conviction records. on top of being stigmatized in looking for employment, formerly incarcerated individuals face barriers and discrimination in finding public housing, qualifying for welfare, and receiving educational loans. The effect of a prison sentence extends far beyond the time served. State representative Anastasia Williams (D- Providence) spoke to the limitations individuals face after leaving prison: “From one box to another box. That’s not what it’s supposed to be.

If you remove that box, it removes one of the many barriers individuals have to face after doing their time.”

Sentences should end when individuals have fulfilled them, agrees Representative Slater, saying “I’ve never seen a judge sentence anyone to a lifetime of unemployment.”

MEGAN HAUPTMAN B’14.5 may appear innocuous at first glance.

METRO

04

The Land Named Lisse

by Lili Rosenkranz Illustration by Diane Zhou i

was 11, they looked like onions, and so I started to cry. I cried because he had even given me a choice between the replica of a Kinderdijk windmill, canary yellow clogs, a delftware panel with my name etched in cobalt blue, and tulip bulbs.

“What do you think, Papi? Which gift should you bring me?”

I asked him over the phone. “Well presciosa, big things come in small packages.”

Soon after, a woman came on the line and told me my father had to go. I thought he was just tired from the time difference, that the woman was a hotel concierge, not a nurse, and that the tulip seeds would be small like buttons, perhaps with some cherry-stem extension, not bulbous and brown with a stratum of foul-smelling skin.

The other souvenirs would have been simpler—more durable mementos of those times he spent in Holland. The windmill was a music box, which could have played a bouncy excerpt from a Dutch folk song. I could have danced in the kitchen, loudly, with the wooden soled shoes. These were things that could be put on a shelf or in a closet, precious and enduring possessions made of ceramic and wood. They were objects so explicitly representative of their homeland; they needed no toil or preparation or explanation. They would have been a safer and more stable kind of inheritance. Flowers are fickle, always subject to rain and wind.

But my father wanted me to choose the flowers—he always had. Had named me after the patch of blossoms visible from a hospital window. Had bought me vases of Goldband lilies for each birthday. Had taught me the etymology for each species. I learned that like primrose and honeysuckle, trumpet lilies are especially fragrant after dusk, attracting moths and moonlight. I learned that Lily of the Valley is often used in bridal bouquets, is the breed birthed by the tears of both the Virgin Mary and Eve, is the national flower of Finland, is also called “ladder-to-heaven,” and is said to determine the migration of nightingales in Victorian-era floriography. What I loved most was that the lilies’ prettiness conceals its advantage as a highly poisonous woodland plant. The tears, the toxicity, and the biblical tales all suggested that flowers were not just for vases.

Tulips would also be part of the patrimony.

What I didn’t know then about my father’s trip to Holland was that it was his first trial of radiation therapy, that the procedure is prohibited in the States, and so they sent him to the Low Lands. He had been accepted because of an unlikely connection. The oncologist, a friend of the brewing manager at Heineken, was a friend of my father’s lawyer. It would be the first of 12 rounds; it is not curative for his kind of cancer and only occasionally works with chemotherapy. But despite these limitations, there was faith that a foreign country could help restore, that the inaccessibility of the treatment promised revival and results, and that the humor of his being there because of beer made the matter less tragic.

I waited by the window, watching for cars. My father had been away for two weeks, and I was anticipating presents and affection. Flowers and kisses. Stories about the land named Lisse where the earth bore polychromatic pastures—32 hectares of flowering furrows. There people travel by riverboat along the fields to track the changes in color, to see thousands of tulips. “It is the most photographed site in the world.” “It is the most spectacular antipode of the underworld.” Charon is not a monster, but some sweet Dutch skipper; the river Styx does not drag along the dead, but is for smiling sightseers, and Persephone is always inspiring vegetation in this maritime climate, never absent or arcane.

Then, I didn’t understand my father’s descriptions of the Dutch town as a mythological incarnation of death, streams, and flora. Although I had never been to the region, I was able to admire the country from his stories and because of its archetypal associations with windmills, clogs, and cheese.

But the tulip has always been the most precious of Dutch products. The tulip was worn as a periapt, was traded for Golden Age genre paintings, and was once sold for ten times the annual income of the man who harvested it. There was a

05

FEATURES

time when natives erected grand estates and the flower, not the fortress, was the symbol of pride. But above all, the tulip meant that a man could make his fortune overnight, he put faith in a fleeting thing, he had conviction despite the uncontrollable, the cyclical, the precariousness of a season’s yield.

This is optimism, and so the tulip is a measure of persistence.

But he never came home. Then, that’s what I had believed—that his flight had been delayed, that he had gotten lost among the canals because he could barely speak the language and said he didn’t need maps. I waited longer, until dinner, but never saw him pull into the driveway, and Holland became more haunting: a place with a history of pestilence and famine and floods. It was then that I remembered a man could also lose his fortune overnight because of flowers, because of unseasonable winds or grub worms. The petals were either plucked by the storms or plagued by the bugs. Nothing is durable; there is only distress.

He should have never travelled to a country below sea level, full of marshes and bogs. He should have never stayed in a city by the harbor. I catch my breath. I remember Holland has Rembrandts.

I didn’t know that he had returned, wheelchair-bound and weak, after I had fallen asleep. My mother didn’t want me to see him come home with fading hair, fatigue, discolored skin, and dizziness. He might have forgotten my name. He was vomiting blood and bile. There were cables and cannula in each nostril and forearm—plastic contraptions connecting the body to a canister of oxygen and a freestanding IV. Now I know that the trip was a kind of medical mission and that the diagnosis was serious. But if I had seen my father come home that day, I would have discovered that he didn’t buy a Baedeker while abroad because he was confined to an oncology annex; that he never saw the pastures, the bicyclists, or the village streets, and that he had to ask a surgeon’s wife to purchase his daughter a Netherlandish keepsake, because he couldn’t return empty-handed.

Most of all, I can now comprehend the ensuing distance and precaution. But then, his confinement was inexplicable.

We were not a family with closed doors or quiet kitchens, but I didn’t see my father for days. “40 feet, Lili. In a few days you will be able to get closer to him again.” My mother cooed and handed me the bag of bulbs on his behalf, but that is when I cried—because of the smell, because 40 feet were too calculable and specific, because I was in the adjacent room, but the void felt much greater and related to some fault of my own.

Now I know that he was just trying to keep me safe from

the brachytherapy. He was stronger than a microwave; he could set off alarms at airports. The radiation could have damaged a young girl’s developing bones.

During one of those days of recovery and respite and separation he opened the windows to the balcony while I waited in the backyard. The night before, we had spoken on the phone, approving the arrangements for this strange union.

We had crafted a careful list: a watering can, a trowel, a roll of pennies. “Mañana, mi amor.” “Besitos, Papi.”

He could have looked yellow from the sunshine or from the jaundice. Regardless, I was beaming because it was the first day he could stand, because it was a mild May morning and he was wearing dark aviators and my mother’s magenta bathrobe. We conversed about the topsoil, decided the depth of the groove, and laughed at our optimistic projections. “I promise. The zinc in the pennies will feed the flowers with extra iron,” he said.

I tried to plant the tulips for seven subsequent spring seasons—a perennial undertaking that concurred with the cycles of my father’s cancer treatments. It became my method for marking time, a way to record the eight years he travelled to Holland to try to heal, the 12 rounds of radiation, and the 24 weeks of “40 feet.” My family did not engage in this obsession with the ground and floral growth. But they found other ways to manage fear. My sister started to sing, my brother compulsively read cartoons, particularly Calvin and Hobbes, while my mother supervised our hobbies and made friends in hospitals.

But each year the buds proved too stubborn. Sometimes I could see the stems starting to surface. For months, I would try to nurture the barren plot, remaining steadfast. One year, I visited a local nursery. The horticulturist inspected the browning bits of herbage, which I had collected and carried in a plastic bag. But the leaves looked more like the remnants of smoked drugs than a flower. “Your stalks have been stunted by some kind of microbial disease. You probably need to re-plant them or the land you are using doesn’t have enough nutrients.”

The cleft in the earth was forever closed. There wasn’t enough luck, was never enough rain.

Every spring tulips emerged around my Connecticut town—by church parking lots, under street signs, scattered amid the gravestones. Their unintended ubiquity brought me to tears, sometimes so much so that I found myself taking detours and highways, anything to avoid the quaintness of suburban streets and the possibility of encountering these pervasive florets. Every Easter and every birthday in April, his and mine, I was swallowed by the rainwater, startled by the windshield wipers moving too impulsively, and scared by the childish rhyme that showers would make more of them manifest by May. Their randomness, their frequency, and familiarity. The tulips were too excitable, spreading pollen and panic. I could never get them to grow—for me, for my father, as a way to fight the ailment.

As he was standing overhead on the balcony overseeing my labors, I was unable to spot the signs of his sickness. There was just intimacy—with the earth, with my father—and the quiet attention to the shifting of sod. Our concentration and caution were only occasionally interrupted by spurts of giggles or swarms of birds alighting on the roof near the place my father was perched. I never knew that one day this scene of a daughter planting with her protector on a trellis throne would be replaced with a much darker one. That the seeds would be swapped for stones, tsror. That the garden, 10 years later, would be a grave. But I still brought pennies and store-bought tulips. Scattering them across the cemetery in the heart of spring, I hoped they would serve as a reminder of the decadelong endeavor to grow a garden. That the coins would soak through the burial ground and bring him good fortune.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The Problem With Portraits last month, the British National Gallery opened an hour early so that Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge (Kate Middleton) could enjoy a ten-minute private viewing of the Duchess’s first official portrait. According to The Telegraph, Prince William was distracted by photographs of himself hanging in an adjacent room and delayed viewing. United before the Duchess’s portrait, the royal couple thoroughly praised its trembling creator, Paul Emsley, for his “beautiful” work. The Duchess described it as “just amazing” and “brilliant,” later celebrating her portrait’s unveiling with her family over a private breakfast reception at the museum.

Minutes later, when the portrait was officially unveiled to the public, the response was so poor and the criticism so withering that artist Paul Emsley said he felt like the target of a witch-hunt. “Dour,” “rotten,” and “savage” were some of the more acidic proverbial tomatoes flung at Emsley. “It really wasn’t pleasant and I stopped reading what had been written,” he said in an interview with British tabloid magazine Hello! “I have coped with the criticism by going back to the studio and getting on with it.”

Kate Middleton hoped the portrait would reflect her “natural self, as opposed to her official self ” according to Emsley.

But critics claim she looks old and sallow. Emsley is known for several impressive artistic feats, though none more foretelling than his photo-realistic rendering of an Indian rhinoceros, complete with cracks, bags, and wrinkles of gray flesh, which he created for an exhibition at the Red Fern Gallery in London. His portrait of Middleton is similarly intimate. Indeed, the immense 45x37 inch canvas is so embarrassingly detailed, one can almost picture the chemical formation of triglycerides beneath her ladyship’s fine cheeks. The Guardian’s chief arts writer, Charlotte Higgins, wrote “the first thing that strikes you about Middleton’s visage as it looms from the sepulchral gloom of her first official portrait is the dead eyes: a vampiric, malevolent glare beneath heavy lids…then there’s the mouth…(she is, presumably, sucking in her fangs).”

The Duchess’s delight, the public’s outrage, and the artist’s despair is a familiar trinity in the history of British royal por-

FEBRUARY 15 2013

by Grier Stockman Illustration by Mariam Quaraishi

traiture. Artist, subject, and public seldom move in tandem.

And the artist is almost blamed for the miscommunication.

Portraiture as an artistic form has a long and varied history, but has always had the same daunting task: to be the sole, everlasting representation of a figure. The stakes are even higher with the royal portrait as it must somehow fuse the way the subject views herself, the way the public views the subject, and, ultimately, who the subject is in the eyes of the artist.

Emsley isn’t the first one to get it wrong. Charles Saumarez Smith, former director of the National Portrait Gallery, wrote “In the latter half of the 20th century almost every royal portrait has been excoriated by art critics and the popular press.”

Queen Elizabeth II has a long history of portraits gone awry.

She’s sat for129 of them and is said to be the most portrayed person on earth (including her image on stamps and currency). John Napper’s 1953 portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, commissioned by the Liverpool City Council, was outright banished for bearing almost no resemblance to Her Royal Highness and “portraying the monarch with an exaggeratedly long neck,” according to Today News. The painting was hidden from view until last month when it was hung St. George’s hall to commemorate the event’s 60th anniversary (and perhaps to console the Duchess). Napper was devastated by the public’s reaction, according to his wife.

Lucian Freud, widely considered one of Britain’s greatest painters, painted a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II that created a divide between press and critics. The Sun called it a “travesty,” and said, “Freud should be locked in the tower for [it].” According to the BBC, the painting has been described as “thought provoking and psychologically penetrating” while others likened it to a carpet. Stuart Peterson Wright’s portrait of a shirtless Prince Phillip was turned down by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce in 2004. After taking a peek at the portrait at the end of his first sitting, Prince Phillip “spluttered ‘Godzooks!’” according to The Guardian. The artist responded, “He was a bit startled, but I think quite flattered.”

Perhaps as Kate Middleton sat before Paul Emsley last

summer, once in his studio in Avon-Upon-Bradford and again in Kensington Palace, he felt a deep urge to produce the beauty and precision expected for a royal portrait instead of something avant-garde. Yet Emsley’s decidedly unflattering representation of the Duchess seems to ignore all that.

The youthful, bright-eyed Duchess is supplanted by a tired, haggard, soon-to-be mother who can’t escape the spotlight.

Nowadays, royal portrait viewers “want evidence of a real person. It’s very challenging­—they want an ordinary person and someone special simultaneously,” explained Paul Morehouse, curator at the National Portrait Gallery, in an interview with Vanity Fair. This dichotomy reflects a growing divide in Great Britain, especially among young people, as to what they see as the role of the royal couple and family. Prince William and Kate Middleton fulfill a historic duty, but they are also major celebrities. In fact, there is so little evidence of the royal couple’s normalcy that some artists have profited from simply designing false images of what their real lives. British artist Alison Jackson, for example, recently released photographs of royal couple look-alikes celebrating Christmas at home.

Jackson has developed an entire career around creating such scenes, including the queen in her nightgown having breakfast in bed. According to her website, Jackson “creates scenarios we have all imagined but never seen—the hot images the media can’t get.”

Whether or not Kate Middleton has been represented accurately in Emsley’s portrait matters much more to the royal family than to the public. With the help of two-foot-long telephoto lenses and greedy tabloid tycoons, images of Kate Middleton’s private life­—her fluctuating weight, tumultuous prenatal health, and topless vacation—are accessible to the general public. With so many images like these, the official portrait becomes somewhat obsolete. Queen Elizabeth II never reveals her feelings about her official representations.

Maybe she’s learned there’s no such thing as everlasting.

GRIER STOCKMAN B’14 is, presumably, sucking in her fangs.

ARTS 06

Talking About Utility Enumerating Art in the Western World

by Claudia Norton Illustration by Lizzie Davis

1.

Episteme, from Ancient Greek: knowledge or science. An understanding of principles, know-how.

Techne, from Ancient Greek: craftsmanship. Applied know-how, often servile in nature: Understanding bound to obligation.

There was no word for Art and no word for Artist.

2.

It went more like this: 1. raw material 2. procedure 3. final form 1. paint 2. application 3. portrait 1. ailing body 2. treatment 3. less-ailing body 3. A TAXONOMY OF ART (Ancient Greek system, according to Shiner) Liberal arts: Practice in which one engages for the sake of diversion, often a practice of the educated.

1. Grammar 2. Logic 3. Rhetoric (Poetry) 4. Arithmetic 5. Geometry 6. Music, the science of 7. Astronomy

Mixed Arts: Practice that includes both liberal and vulgar components.

1. Navigation 2. Architecture 3. Painting 4. Agriculture 5. Medicine 6. Mechanics 7. Gymnastics 4.

To put it simply, a man of high birth wouldn’t be caught dead with a compass in his hand.

7.

Two days ago I saw this on someone’s OkCupid profile: “I tend to spend more time looking at the pretty buildings and the details on the pretty houses all over the city, then I do looking at the road or the car in front of me that I am about to hit.”

To put it simply, art was more like applied science.

Talk about utility, right?

Vulgar arts: Practice for which one is paid.

5.

1. Tailoring 2. Weaving 3. Cooking 4. Music, performed

To put it simply, as a practice’s function increased, social status of the practitioner decreased. That’s called an “inverse correlation.”

07 ARTS

6.

I messaged him and told him I like to look at moldings too.

I asked him if he wanted to go on a walk with me to look at homes and their details. He hasn’t responded yet, although he’s been online and has looked at my profile. He spelled “than” wrong.

Function (weaving) > Function (poetry); Status (weaver) < Status (poet)

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

8. TAXONOMY OF ART II & III In the Medieval period, the vulgar arts were re-branded, if you will, and named the “mechanical arts” in an attempt to confer dignity to practitioners.

The ninth-century philosopher-poet Johannes Scotus Eriugena created seven categories of mechanical arts to balance the seven liberal arts.

give to his work the best disposition; not absolutely the best, but the best as regards to the proposed end; and even if this entails some defect, the artist cares not: thus, for instance, when man makes himself a saw for the purpose of cutting, he makes it of iron, which is suitable for the object in view; and he does not prefer to make it of glass, though this be a more beautiful material, because this very beauty would be an obstacle to the end he has in view. -Summa Theologica 1274 Thomas Aquinas wouldn’t last a minute now.

Mechanical Arts:

13.

1. Tailoring and weaving 2. Agriculture 3. Architecture and masonry 4. Hunting animals and people 5. Commerce 6. Cooking 7. Blacksmithing

ar·tif·i·cer, A skilled worker; a craftsperson

Around the same time, German mystical theologian Hugh of St. Victor made his own list. I like this list better because look at #7.

1. Weaving 2. Armament

(Forging, Architecture) 3. Commerce 4. Navigation 5. Hunting 6. Medicine 7. Theatrics (Puppetry, Wrestling, Dancing, Epic recitals) 9.

Imagine-hundreds of years from now-citizens of the future ascending the stage to re-enact one of your high school pep rallies. “Did you enjoy the theatre tonight?” they will ask one another after the show.

They will have no idea that your pep rally wasn’t only a show, but also a communion. They won’t remember that the pep rally was a functional, participatory social rite. Don’t laugh at them. How could they know? They weren’t there.

10.

Most of the classic Greek plays were performed as a part of religious and political rituals. The whole thing had a different “feel” than theater produced recently. Like, a rodeo has a different “feel” to it than an inauguration, but they’re also similar in certain ways.

11.

Me: It’s hard to draw something I don’t like because I don’t want to focus on it.

Other: If you pay close enough attention to anything you will find that you can’t help but love it.

12.

Leonardo da Vinci was an artificer and Michelangelo was one too.

14.

During the Renaissance, people like Leonardo Da Vinci weren’t given creative license. Artificers were given specific requirements to fulfill: a list of objects and where to place them in a painting, dimensions, the color palette. They signed contracts. They worked in teams.

15.

There aren’t always words for things. Some practices go unarticulated. Once I and another invented the term “jealous-pity” for something we feel toward others who we superficially want to be like, although we know their internal life must be more painful than our own.

Art must have had a silent life, latent like “jealous-pity.”

16.

Art was hiding in the bushes, unnamed in the Western world.

“Art had finally revealed its true nature: something that makes a statement and self-consciously embodies it. After the revelation that the essence of art is “embodied meaning,” the true form of the art-versus-craft polarity was also apparent: embodied meaning versus mere utility and genius versus mere skill.” Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art 17.

Have you ever noticed how often the phrase “indigenous crafts” is used?

18.

Once I was walking around an art museum with some adults and a baby. There were a bunch of Meissen porcelain figurines on display. I was confused why they were in an art museum, these domestic, decorative figurines. They didn’t seem pure enough. The mother of the baby said, “You could put anything in a museum and I would love just walking around and looking at it. It’s about the quality of attention.” The baby agreed.

CLAUDIA NORTON B’14 wants to walk around with someone and look at details on the pretty houses.

All natural things were produced by the Divine art, and so may be called God’s works of art. Now every artist intends to

FEBRUARY 15 2013

ARTS

08

mussolini’s thugs wore black. Early German fascists chose brown. Neo-Nazis of the 1980s and ’90s dressed in leather jackets and combat boots, picked up at army surplus stores.

But things are different now in Germany, where members of the far-right can buy stylized clothing on professionally designed websites. Right-wing apparel has become commercialized.

Thor Steinar, a Berlin-based firm, sells sweatshirts emblazoned with the word “NORDIC” in gothic script. Erik and Sons, a prominent competitor, offers t-shirts printed with images of the Luger, the needle-nosed handgun made infamous by the Nazis, and the slogan “Mi Casa is Not Your Fucking Casa.” Other brands get the message across more directly: stitched across a track jacket sold by Ansgar Aryan is the word “SVASTIKA” in large red print. A product description assures shoppers that the jacket is “absolutely and perfectly legal.”

But just barely. Section 86a of the German Strafgesetzbuch, or criminal code, prohibits the vending of objects that display the symbols of organizations “declared to be unconstitutional.” That provision was ratified just after the Second World War, when the Allied powers attempted to eliminate Nazi ideology from German public life. It is for this reason that the Strafgesetzbuch categorically prohibits the “flags, insignia, uniforms, [and] slogans “ of National Socialism with punishments of up to three years’ imprisonment for convicted offenders.

Ansgar Aryan avoids illegality through a deliberate misspelling: replacing the “w” in “swastika” with a “v” on their poly-cotton full-zip changes an outlawed slogan into a word that is not even pronounceable. In German, the “sv” phoneme does not exist.

Two other words printed on Ansgar Aryan’s track jacket are more easily articulated. They are not misspelled. They read “European Brotherhood.” The model displaying them is bulky. His head is shaved. from afar, the branded clothing favored by the contem-

09 NEWS

porary German far right is nondescript. After all, t-shirts, pullovers, and track jackets are popular among Germans of all political tendencies. And the gothic lettering and floral patterns preferred by Thor Steinar and Ansgar Aryan are as common in Germany as they are in the United States. They look a little like Ed Hardy. At first glance, these are the styles of the mainstream.

Typical designs recall a mythological white past—think Viking ships cresting the waves, or Thor Steinar’s “NORDIC.” Other products, like the Luger t-shirt sold by Erik and Sons, take their inspiration from the Nazi era.

Some symbols are subtler. For neo-Nazis, the “N” logo on New Balance shoes can stand in as an abbreviation for “National Socialist.” The number 88, on the other hand, can refer to the repetition of the alphabet’s eighth letter in the banned phrase Heil Hitler. And the four middle letters of the British sporting brand Lonsdale, “NSDA,” can recall the acronym used to refer to Hitler’s outlawed party, the NSDAP. As sociologist Cynthia Miller-Idriss has observed, it only takes a half-zipped jacket to display the altered logo.

These symbols are radically political. Yet they remain legal, for none of them are explicitly outlawed by the provisions of the Strafgeseztbuch. The problem is made murkier still by the appropriation of normally apolitical brands like New Balance.

Coded symbolism can be indiscernible.

This commercialized extremism is more insidious than camo pants and combat boots. This is the blending of the far right into the crowd at the stadium. at a december match of Cologne’s Bundesliga soccer squad, a group of extreme fans chanted an anti-Semitic slogan at an opposing team. The offenders were members of a hardcore fan club known as the “Boyz.” Soccer fan clubs are common in Germany, and though most focus only on the game, some also have political leanings. According to the Westdeutsche Rundfunk, the “Boyz” were dressed in Thor Steinar.

Gerd Dembowksi, who researches German fan culture at

the University of Hanover’s Institute for Sport Science, told the Independent that displays of far-right symbolism, including the clothing of Thor Steinar, can be found around German stadiums and amateur soccer grounds “every weekend.”

And though Dembowski estimates that the average number of organized neo-Nazis per match is relatively small—no more than a few dozen out of an entire stadium of fans—he says that the impact of right-wing activity during soccer matches can be substantial.

A fan culture of provocation and anonymity is partially to blame. Soccer is Germany’s most popular sport, and competition between clubs is heated. Spectators “who might not call themselves neo-Nazis” often “temporarily” flash racist and far-right symbols to escalate their jeers. Add in the anonymity of a massive crowd—an anonymity heightened by the chameleon styling of brands like Thor Steinar—and spectators feel that their offensive displays will go unpunished. The result is repeated displays of racism and intolerance that are disproportionately greater than the small number of organized neo-Nazis actually present in the stadium.

Tolerant soccer fans have taken a blow. The Aachen Ultras, one of several soccer fan clubs to openly denounce racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, disbanded this January after continual intimidation by a far-right fan group known as the Karlsbande, or “Gang of Charlemagne.” Dembowski told the Independent that stadiums throughout Germany have witnessed similar processes of intimidation at smaller magnitudes.

The Deutscher Fußball Bund, or German Soccer Association, recently established an anti-discrimination work group that will attempt to curb these displays of intolerance.

Dembowski says a provision is in the works that will require referees to note instances of bigotry on their match reports.

And some of the Bundesliga’s most prominent teams have taken measures of their own. Clubs like Dortmund, Werder Bremen, and Hertha SC, for example, have already banned Thor Steinar from their stadiums. But perhaps bans on cloth-

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

HIDDEN THREADS

The German Far Right in Public

by Simon Engler Illustration by Carter Davis

ing can’t limit hateful actions in the first place: at an away match of Dortmund on September 1, fans waved right-wing banners and an imperial war flag forbidden by the Strafgesetzbuch. Clothes may make the man, but they certainly don’t make—or break—a neo-Nazi.

like the design of a Thor Steinar t-shirt, much of the deeper activity of the German far right—violent crimes, for example—is initially illegible. Felix Hansen, who works with the Berlin-based Anti-Fascist Press Archive and Education Center (APABIZ), told the Independent that municipal governments often “fail to admit that there is a problem with neo-Nazis.”

To leave the issue unacknowledged avoids both shame and administrative difficulties. What’s more, it can be difficult in Germany to register a violent crime as hatefully motivated: Hansen said that official statistics count 60 deaths from rightwing violence since 1990, while independent groups calculate a figure that is sometimes three times greater. The net result is that the German public considers the problem of far-right extremism less statistically significant than it actually is—and, as Gerd Dembowski explained, that many Germans falsely perceive a “re-articulated German nationalism as non-aggressive and non-exclusive.”

APABIZ’s current project will attempt to dispel this myth.

Rechtes Land, or “Just Nation,” is a database of present and historical far-right activity that will be displayed geographically in a searchable map online. Every beating, every murder, every bombing—Rechtes Land aims to cover it all, in a consolidated and accessible interface. But the data mapped won’t be limited to events of official illegality. Felix Hansen explained that the project will also map marches and rallies—events which are technically legal, but which play an important role in the far-right scene. “Whether or not [right-wing] groups have broken the law plays no role for us,” explained Hansen.

It’s with this understanding that Rechtes Land will pay close attention to the commercialized far right. Brands like Thor Steinar and Erik and Sons will be mapped, their networks of

FEBRUARY 15 2013

distribution exposed. “We will attempt to show,” Hansen said, “how easily these products can obtained, and how even stores can affect the culture of a place.”

The Retches Land project is small and running on a low budget, but its impact could be huge. The maps will be available to anyone with a computer. That’s a new level of exposure for the German far right—an exposure that will be meticulously catalogued and documented. The cartographical database will launch in March.

Rechtes Land follows a simple logic: exposure is necessary for awareness, for research, and, ultimately, for policy. This strategy of exposure is particularly well-suited to Germany, where the most successful far-right groups tend to be dispersed and obscure. As the Karlsbande has shown, largely unknown grassroots organizations can remain locally successful, even as the country’s best-known rightist group, the National Democratic Party of Germany, performs poorly in general elections. there’s a new shop in the Bavarian town of Au. It’s called the “Revolution Store,” and it sells clothing by Thor Steinar, among other brands. Its interior is decorated with images of revolvers and Viking ships. The store opened in October 2012 with little notice.

It wasn’t until a January 22 report by Bavaria’s Bayern Eins that the “Revolution Store” gained much attention. For the first time, an expert on right-wing extremism presented the shop in Au as a commercial hotspot for neo-Nazis.

According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Au’s town hall has not had a quiet moment since. Mayor Karl Ecker did not respond to the Independent’s request for comment, and recently removed his email address and contact information from Au’s municipal website. Ecker has gone so far as to contact Germany’s Interior Ministry for guidance.

The “Revolution Store” has been open and running for months. Yet Ecker, writes the Zeitung, did not suspect any more than the other townspeople that the shop was connected

to the far-right scene—nor that its founder has apparent ties to “Blood and Honor,” a neo-Nazi group that has been banned in Germany since 2000. The products sold at the “Revolution Store,” after all, initially seemed innocuous. “Not much can start with clothing brands,” one member of Au’s town council remarked. rechtes land won’t list the exact address of the “Revolution Store,” nor, for that matter, the precise location of any other shop selling clothing favored by the far right. Thor Steinar, after all, has nearly 90,000 fans on Facebook, and Rechtes Land wants to be sure that it doesn’t inadvertently provide directions to would-be shoppers. There are enough of those as it is.

Here is a strange confluence of obscurity and exposure, of normalization and of outrage. This is the German far right remaining on the fringe, even as its symbolism, and its goods, melt into the mainstream. Even as it shouts from the middle of the crowd.

Comments from Felix Hansen and text from the Süddeutsche Zeitung were translated from German by the writer.

SIMON ENGLER B’14 is a cartographical database.

-

NEWS

10

Neurosexism

The Biological Argument for Gender Inequality

by Ardra Hren Illustratration by Michelle Lin

Scientific findings have had a powerful effect on the evolution of social norms and gender rights. In the 1800’s scientists cited women’s smaller craniums and “delicate brain fibers” as evidence of intellectual inferiority, so it made sense that they were not allowed to vote. Beliefs about women’s roles have certainly changed in the last century, but biological justification of traditional gender roles has endured.

In fact, the science of gender differences has experienced a resurgence in recent years due to technological advances that allow researchers to measure differences in hormones and neural activity. It has become trendy in popular science to explain these differences to the public.

Books like Boys and Girls Learn Differently! by Michael Gurian or Why Gender Matters by Leonard Sax claim to offer revolutionary scientific progress, but these authors often dumb down complex biological processes to make them digestible for a popular audience. In the process they abandon nuance, oversimplify complicated science, and backslide on progress made for gender equality by endorsing stereotypes.

This trend is mirrored in parts of the scientific community by researchers who study gender differences in hormones and cognitive ability. Prominent Cambridge University professor Simon Baron-Cohen is one such scientist whose work is often the basis of these pop science claims. He joined the bandwagon with a book of his own, The Essential Difference, in which he theorizes that gender differences start with a burst of fetal testosterone at eight months of gestation and escalate throughout development as small tendencies created by biology are amplified by behavioral reinforcement.

The keystone of his book is his study on infant attention, which was performed in 2000 and published in the journal Infant Behavior and Development. In this study, researchers presented newborns with a human face and then a mobile and measured how long they looked at each.

Baron-Cohen found that boys generally stared longer at the mobile while more girls preferred the face. From this, he inferred fetal testosterone created gender differences by causing boys to tend toward a “systemizing” mindset while more girls have “empathizing” brains. these claims, touted by writers who pin gender differences on innate biological processes, are strongly disputed by an opposing contingent of feminist scientists that includes Lise Eliot, author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain, and Anne Fausto-Sterling, author of Myths of Gender, Sexing the Body, and others. Cordelia Fine is another of these scientists who wrote Delusions of Gender, in which she mercilessly pokes holes in Baron-Cohen’s theories, questioning the methodology of his infant vision study and the conclusions he draws from it. She points out that the researchers were not blind to the sex of the babies they tested, which could have caused an accidental bias in presentation, especially since they did not standardize the angle from which the babies were shown the face and mobile-a crucial factor when testing the barely developed vision of day-old infants. Additionally, no other researchers have been able to replicate his results, a major blow for the study.

11

SCIENCE

Even if other researchers were able to replicate his study, it is a big jump to say that a slight visual preference in infants translates into significant differences in the way men and women’s minds work. He and other researchers also fail to differentiate between sex and gender, which limits their ability to examine the interaction between societal gender roles and biological sex on development of adult differences.

It is a short step from here to conclude that men are innately better at science while women are better at communicating, and Simon Baron-Cohen does just that, stating “The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.”

In promoting the notion of innate physical difference, these studies ignore the social factors that cause fewer women to go into math and science, for example In 2006, then-president of Harvard University Lawrence Summers championed this perspective in a speech during a conference on diversity in science and engineering, suggesting that the lack of women in high level science positions was mostly due to “intrinsic aptitude” instead of structural factors. By this reasoning, gender inequality is scientifically inevitable, not societally constructed.

This kind of explanation is often proposed as a separate-but-equal model in which women’s skills are equally valuable to men’s, just different. Such reliance on biological explanations has dangerous implications for gender equality as social norms often take their cues from scientific consensus, and right now the voices for innate biological differences outweigh their naysayers in number and in bestsellers. Along with Gurian’s twenty-five books there are also Why Men Don’t Iron: The Fascinating and Unalterable Differences Between Men and Women, Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps, and The Female Brain, with much fewer on the opposing side questioning their assumptions.

Gender scientists have a responsibility to be balanced and fair in the conclusions they reach because they have a powerful influence on societal perceptions. Reducing complex biological processes to levels of testosterone and estrogen creates a false sense of simplicity about a complex topic, and capitalizing on a trend by using studies that have been discredited is unethical. Yet books sensationalizing gender differences continue to sell, and The National Association for Single Sex Public Education (founded and directed by Sax) has gotten almost 500 schools to implement single-sex schooling in order to cater teaching styles to each gender despite the shaky foundation of his claims.

Evidence on gender differences and their causes is inconclusive, and acting as if there is a clear divide between men and women is dangerous. As Simon Baron-Cohen put it: “the field of sex differences in the mind needs to proceed in a fashion that is sensitive...by cautiously looking at evidence and not overstating what can be concluded.”

ARDRA HREN B’15 has experienced a resurgence in recent years.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

“Benje een Buikenlander?”

Zwarte Piet and Blackface in the Netherlands

by Sophia Seawell

Illustration by Katy Windemuth from mid-november until December 6, his grinning face was omnipresent. I saw him in the festively decorated windows of shops’ and on the napkins in cafés. There was a life-size statue of him in the grocery store behind my dorm.

Despite seeing him everywhere, I was unprepared for the day I would meet Zwarte Piet in the flesh: Sunday, November 18, 2012.

It was beautiful and sunny in Amsterdam—perfect for the day’s festivities, the Sinterklaas parade. A friend had been visiting for the weekend, and we decided to walk to the city center to see for ourselves. We came across a main road blocked off for the parade, which takes place three weeks before the holiday itself on December 6 to celebrate the arrival of Sinterklaas. As we waited for him to make an appearance, we were entertained by dozens of young Dutch volunteers dressed as his helper, Zwarte Piet. Their skin was painted thickly with dark brown makeup and their lips were colored red. They wore curly black wigs, gold hoop earrings and minstrel-like costumes. They were in blackface.

The question “Why did you choose Amsterdam?” had surfaced repeatedly during my program’s orientation, and many responses mentioned the city’s reputed progressiveness.

The Netherlands became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage in 2001; sex work, treated with a policy of regulated tolerance in the second half of the 20th century, was legalized in 2008; and, most importantly for many tourists, so-called “soft drugs” such as marijuana fall under a policy of regulated tolerance. But several orientation speakers made a point of debunking this liberal reputation, pointing out that the city is trying to shut down red-light windows and reduce the amount of coffee shops. It took until November 18 for me to realize that, at least when it comes to race relations, the Dutch reputation for open-mindedness was a bit overstated. established to honor st. nicholas, Sinterklaas is a traditional winter holiday celebrated in Luxembourg, Belgium, parts of France and Germany, and the Netherlands. The legend of Sinterklaas is based on the story of a bishop living in what is now Turkey during the Middle Ages, canonized after death and laid to rest in the city of Myra. The patron saint of children, sailors, and the city of Amsterdam, Sinterklaas is said to deliver presents on the evening of December 5, riding his white horse from rooftop to rooftop. He has several helpers. Zwarte Piet listens at chimneys to find out whether children are behaving well or poorly. If you’re good, you get a present from Sinterklaas. If you’re not, Zwarte Piet will hit you with his stick, put you in his bag, and kidnap you to Spain.

Originally, Zwarte Piet represented the devil, enslaved

by St. Nicholas. This changed in 1850, when Jan Schenkman published his book Sint Nicolaas en Zijn Knecht (Saint Nicholas and his Servant), which portrayed Zwarte Piet as a Moorish servant from Morocco. Though there are various suggestions about when and why, Zwarte Piet eventually transitioned from a servant to an “assistant,” also transitioning from an illiterate, stupid character to a “respected” though “scattered” one. The aesthetics have remained relatively unal-

FEBRUARY 15 2013

tered.

Watching dozens of young Dutch volunteers as they danced, handed out candy, and generally acted a fool in their Zwarte Piet costumes was a bizarre experience; something wasn’t sitting right. Though every year there is a debate about the propriety of Zwarte Piet, for many of the Dutch, it’s harmless fun without malicious intent; he is simply a character they can play without second thought, a holiday tradition to celebrate their culture and history. According to a poll by taken by VOK!, a Dutch news-sharing website and virtual community, 90 percent of voters did not think Zwarte Piet was racist. Another, on 1VJogerenPanel.nl (1V Youth Panel), asked if the Netherlands should get rid of Zwarte Piet. 92 percent responded no. but it is precisely the country’s history that complicates the situation. For years, the Netherlands profited through colonization and enslavement of non-white populations in poorer countries. Following decolonization, immigrants from these countries began arriving in the Netherlands in the 1950s.

Immigrants from Southern European countries came next, then immigrants from Turkey and Morocco in the 1960s, and immigrants from Iran and Iraq in the late 1970s.

Although the Netherlands adopted a policy of multiculturalism in the 1980s, the nationalistic, extreme-right Center Party was established around the same time with an antiimmigration platform. In 2011, Lord Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the (British) Commonwealth, made an important distinction when he described the Netherlands to the British newspaper The Times as “a tolerant, rather than multicultural, society.” That is, different cultures are tolerated but not necessarily encouraged or expected to assimilate. Another significant destinction is reflected in the usage of the words allochtoon (originating from another country) and autochoon (originating from this country) to distinguish between native Dutch and immigrant-descended Dutch.

Immigrant-descended Dutch have been voicing their opposition to Zwarte Piet for years. Last year, Curaçao-born Quinsy Gario was assaulted by the police during a protest of Zwarte Piet. Gario, who was raised in the former Dutch colony of St. Maarten, attended the Sinterklaas parade in the Dutch town of Dordrecht with three others, wearing t-shirts that said “Zwarte Piet is Racisme.” A YouTube video shows the police pinning Gario to the ground, kneeing him in the back and dragging him away from the growing crowd as he yelled “Ik heb niks gedaan” (“I didn’t do anything”).

Gario was jailed for six hours. According to the police, the

group did not have a permit to protest and ignored an order to leave.

The behavior of the policemen is an extreme result of tension between autochoon Dutch and allochtoon Dutch on the issue of Zwarte Piet, and Jessica Silversmith, director of the Anti-Discrimination Bureau for Amsterdam, told the Associated Press that opposition to the holiday figure is growing.

Her office, which used to receive only a handful of complaints per year, received more than 100 in 2011—still not a huge amount, but a significant increase. Criticism is not limited to descendants of people from Dutch plantation-colonies, such as Antilleans and Surinamers. “It’s all kinds of Dutch people,” Silversmith said. Even an author at GeenStijl, the notoriously conservative Dutch news website, wrote a series condemning Zwarte Piet as “nothing more than a repulsive parody of a slave, fine-tuned to indoctrinate school children into the finer points of racism … The sooner we get rid of Zwarte Piet, the sooner we won’t look like idiots to the rest of the world.” (An article mocking Gario appeared on the same website the year before). Large store chains like household goods store Blokker changed images of Zwarte Piet in their promotional material to have streaks of soot on their faces instead of full blackface.

And for the first time, a Dutch politician has spoken out against Zwarte Piet. Andrée Christine van Es, executive of the city of Amsterdam for GreenLeft told Het Parool in a December 2012 interview that it was time for the Netherlands to leave Zwarte Piet out of Sinterklaas festivities. zwarte piet is generally referred to as a tradition, a tradition so pervasive that even Fisher Price made a toy as part of their “Little People” series that includes Saint Nicholas and Zwarte Piet figurines. Zwarte Piet is also a character on an informative television series for children. But “traditions” can also be changed. In 2006, the Dutch Programme Foundation represented Zwarte Piet as rainbow-colored—the next year it was back to black. This anomaly is revealing because it shows an awareness of the racist nature of Zwarte Piet, demonstrating that traditions do not have to be preserved in their original form. They can be adapted to accommodate changing public perceptions; they are not free zones exempt from criticism. writing about the tradition in the context of the country’s problem with race, journalist Siji Jabaar cited Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory in a December 2012 article for This is Africa. In a 1957 article, Festinger refers to the phenomenon as “a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors,” which “produces a feeling of discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.” Still, Jabaar finds a space for progress: “Perhaps the defenders of the ‘tradition’ believe so long as they don’t listen to anything the black Dutch people say, the debate will never get beyond talk… But I was reassured that the numbers (black and white) of those against this ‘tradition’ are indeed growing.”

SOPHIA SEAWELL B’14’s aesthetics have remained relatively unaltered.

FEATURES

12

Collect and Disseminate An Interview with Brian Shimkovitz of Awesome Tapes From Africa

by Houston Davidson Illustration by Benson Tucker

i met brian shimkovitz, the charming founder of Awesome Tapes from Africa (ATFA), a couple of summers ago. He was an agent at the PR firm where I was the summer intern. After his departure, we got coffee at a Ukrainian diner and he told me of his impending move to Germany and his plan to tour as a DJ and spin Awesome Tapes into a proper label. Nearly two years later, Brian is still touring the world playing cassettes through large speakers, with new releases pending. We sat down over Skype to chat about the collector impulse, charges of exoticism, and why academics forget just how good music can feel.

The Independent: You were in Africa on a Fulbright when the Awesome Tapes from Africa project began. What’s the story here?

Brian Shimkovitz: I started ATFA in 2006, shortly after moving to NYC after a year doing ethnomusicology fieldwork in Ghana. I moved to NYC to get a job in PR because I realized after doing fieldwork that academia wasn’t going to help me communicate about what I’d learned in a very useful or efficient way.

I grew up playing music, being obsessed with music, and wondered how I could make a career out of my interests. So when I found out Indiana University had one of the best ethnomusicology programs in the country I had a total epiphany. I spent my final year taking all grad courses in ethnomusicology so I was able to get a sense of what the field would entail if went for a PhD. Indy: That’s cool. Turning to the moment when you first started collecting tapes­— what was that about?

BS: I was always a tape guy, even before I visited West Africa. But when I went to Ghana the first time I saw that the widest selection of music was available on tape.

So I started going to the shops and areas of the big outdoor markets where tapes are sold. I searched for parts of town where foreigners lived, so I could find music from other regions. I was sending packages home to Chicago so I could collect as much as possible while I was there.

Indy: Who were these tapes originally meant for? What is their original market?

BS: They are generally commercially available sounds, everything from local radio pop highlife to rap of all kinds to traditional music. Many of the things I bought I heard first on the radio.

Once I learned to speak Twi, one of the local languages, I was able to impress people and show them how serious I am.

It’s the language of the Ashanti people. It’s not the indigenous language of the capital where I was based, but it’s the lingua franca.

Indy: Cool. Glad to learn that. Awesome Tapes became a thing in your life largely because it met blog success. What’s the story here?

BS: After bringing home so many tapes I thought it would be cool to do something with them. When I started Googling some of the more obscure or exciting recordings, I realized there wasn’t much info, and this sparked excitement in me. It felt like a nice way to relieve the stress of my PR job during the weekends.

So as I started posting this stuff and sharing it with my friends it somehow got popular, largely from other blogs including it in their blogrolls. Not quite sure how it happened but I suddenly felt encouraged by other peoples’ interest and feedback.

I realized I was doing what I wanted to learn about toward the end of school, “public ethnomusicology”, although in a much less dense, much more fun and accessible way.

13 INTERVIEWS

Indy: On the topic of “public ethnomusicology,” could you speak more about the relationship between Awesome Tapes and academia?

BS: Scholarly pursuits related to cultural practices in general tend to be narrow in their impact beyond journals and libraries and conferences. ATFA was a reaction to the boredom I felt existing in this theoretical realm where music is over-analyzed to the point where it loses the power it holds among the people who make it.

Broadening the definition of ethnomusicology is something that sort of makes me cringe though I don’t wish to denigrate the deep and important work social and cultural scientists are doing worldwide. Nonetheless, the artists whose music I’ve made available to more diverse ears than otherwise imaginable would probably find the blog more useful and vital than scholarly journal articles few people will read or remember.

Indy: It seems to me that there is a strange and populous community of blogs all engaged in some kind of unprecedentedly specific collector effort. I’m thinking of the blogs that feature vinyl rips of Kollywood electronica, old cassettes of Nigerian funk, or South American Psych Rock. What do you think? Do you feel like Awesome Tapes fulfills some sort of collector impulse writ large? Or is this an overintellectualization?

BS: Personally, I have always been a collector. And I think the Internet and blogging is ripe for showing off one’s collection. Further, the Internet and blogs have helped give a voice to esoteric things of all kinds.

Many of these tapes may no longer be in print and almost all are nearly impossible to find in shops outside Africa, in NYC, Paris, Brussels, etc. Many African expats I meet who know about the site are excited to find old recordings that they can’t find any more ring featured on ATFA. That said, this is no exclusivity claim. Quite the contrary. I am fascinated by the mass produced nature of this as opposed to the vinyl nerd mentality we see among many DJs and music tastemakers.

Indy: Recently, upon seeing me wearing my Awesome Tapes shirt, a peer of mine said that the blog sounds exoticizing. Thoughts?

BS: Well, listen. This blog is for people who haven’t experienced this music and won’t be able to go to Africa. If people interpret the blog and use it as their own way to…what does it even mean to exoticize something? I’m treating the music in a respectful way.

There are probably a lot of people who have gotten that reaction. But people who check it out realize it’s not there. When you look at early ethnomusicology and anthropology, there is a view of inhabitants of non-western cultures as savages. I am not doing this.

There are definitely people who think African music is involved in some sort of hipster trend. They think we’re trying to co-opt something to garner some semblance of authenticity in our lives because we are ostensibly upper-middle class white kids from the suburbs. I am friends with a lot of people who think this.

Ultimately, if you look at the blog, it becomes pretty clear what my intentions are. This blog is meant to pull away all of the attachments and baggage surrounding this stuff that we talk about in relating to Africa and instead focus on how great the music is. I’m specifically trying not to be the douchey guy who exoticizes something and puts it on his mantle. I remember what it means to be in university and look at the world with a lot of skepticism. I might have said the same thing. People are haters.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Indy: So who do you think is the blog’s audience?

BS: I am writing for my friends and other people who like the music. When I look at the traffic statistics of my blog I see people coming from Pitchfork, Polish hardcore metal message boards, Greek art magazines, and Jazz message boards. A wide variety of people, or whatever.

The message can be garbled by whatever generalizations. What is Africa? It means a lot of different things!

But at the end of the day it’s pretty rewarding for me and the people who have had doors opened up for their music. When I was doing my research, everybody asked me how to get their music to North America. I’ve been able to apply what I know to putting the music out there.

Indy: On the Awesome Tapes from Africa blog, the music has always been available for free download. How do you think about and manage ownership of the music, especially now that Awesome Tapes from Africa has become a record label?

BS: I am not posting ads on the site so there is no direct profit coming from these downloads. I launched the label to find a way to generate an extra revenue stream for some of my favorite artists. As all profits are split 50/50 and I take on significant risk in terms of investing money and time in the manufacturing and promotion of these commercial releases, I feel the label is quite fair. Following the research I did on the music industry in West Africa, it is apparent to me that this deal is better than what the majority of musicians received when they first made these records. My hope is that further profits will go to the artists by way of touring and licensing opportunities.

Ultimately my goal is get people to hear and enjoy this music.

The fact that I am white and the music is made by mostly black African musicians should not make a difference. The criticisms I have received for my perceived profiting through this project have come from a mixture of ignorance about the music distribution process across Africa and misplaced white guilt. Yes, this digitized way of distributing the music isn’t as accessible to the musicians themselves but assuming that Africans don’t hear music via globalized, mediated formats is condescending. Most people I know in Africa aren’t listening to or downloading music they can hear locally when they go online. They are accessing music from outside their countries. Are they exoticizing Jay-Z or does this process only move in one direction?

Indy: Do you see a difference between what you do with Awesome Tapes and with labels like Soundway? Correct me if I’m wrong here but it seems to me that Soundway has guys who pretty much go in to abandoned major label studio catalogues in places like Lagos or Accra and mine the archives for new songs for their compilations.

What do you think about their work? How does it relate to Awesome Tapes?

BS: They are going out and finding music that sounds like certain things: Funk, Garage Rock, etc., whereas I’m more interested in the music people there are into: specific micro-musics, subcultural delicacies. Compilations necessarily disembody the track from the context it came from. Many of these funk tracks are really good but they miscommunicate what an artist was going for. From day one I didn’t want to post a track here or a track there. I wanted to post the whole recordings. I wanted people to hear it the way you’d hear it in Africa.

I see this preference as furthering the mission the blog has had from its beginning which is to make people realize how much cool talent and diversity and creativity there is in every corner of Africa.

FEBRUARY 15 2013

INTERVIEWS

14

O N YO G U RT

by Alex Ronan

Illustration by Lizzie Davis I. In the fifties yogurt was hip. Yogurt was so hip it was even spelled yoghurt. Today, yogurt is mainstream, yogurt is banal, yogurt is bourgeoisie.

Then: “Slightly eccentric? Does she read Henry Miller? Adore yoghurt?”

Now: “Cheerful blond woman eating yogurt for a healthy eating concept.”

And plain yogurt, with its simple flavor, is fed to babies, eaten by children, messy and wholesome. These professional women, so sure, so western business casual, with nice pens and jobs, still eat like children, can’t even cook, use the stove for storage. As if that means something more.

VII.

Then: “partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt.”

Now: “Lovely lady eats nice yogurt.”

“made with real cream it’s so good that yogurt haters can’t believe it’s yogurt” (advertisement, 1980s)

II. Sample Case: Swallowing Rose and Sarkis Colombosian, Armenian immigrants, fled Turkish persecutors in 1917 and settled on a small dairy farm in North Andover, Massachusetts. They produced more milk than they could use or sell. With Rose’s traditional Armenian recipe, they made extra yogurt to distribute on their milk route.

Colombosian became Colombo since “no one could pronounce our name.”

1. The yogurt “tasted funny” so she did not finish the sample.

2. The yogurt she ate was “gross.”

3. The yogurt “did not taste good and [she] wanted to spit it out but could not find a trash can to do so.”

4. She was told she “had to try the yogurt on the spoon because that’s where the nutrients are.” The substance on the spoon was clear or white and the yogurt was pink so she declined to taste it.

“What the hell is that yucky stuff you sell?” neighbors asked.

Colombo was sweetened.

Fruit preserves were added.

“Americans like a lot of sugar.”

“completely outrageous” “sickening and disgusting” “he wanted to witness the victim consume his bodily fluid” Anthony Garcia, of Sunflower Market, is serving two years for serving semen-tainted yogurt samples to female customers.

Sales soared “like a rocket.” Shoppers would no longer “spit it out.”

VII. In 1951 Dannon announced that yogurt had become “completely Americanized” with a new version containing vanilla flavoring.

And yet,

“it’s cultured to eat culture.”

III. Yogurt eaters in Los Angeles like fruit-added yogurt. New Yorkers prefer to do without.

Yogurt is like yoga: whitewashed, commercialized, corporate. Yogurt has a following.

IV. “Portrait of young female enjoying yogurt.”

“Businesswomen eating yogurt.”

“Lovely lady eats nice yogurt.”

“Cheerful blond woman eating yogurt for a healthy eating concept.”

“The Last Little Bit...Of Yogurt.”

Description: Shallow depth of field with focus on face.

Curtail.

Contain.

Commodify.

A culture where women and their preteen daughters wear a blush called orgasm.

Where sex is dirty, but inevitable, and girlhood is short. Sometimes I forget that I cannot step into dresses the way I did before hips came and I miss that. When food was simply something to eat and nothing more.

What we want in yogurt is what we want in women: that they be wholesome and American but also maintain something incongruous with that, something foreign, exotic.

IX. One summer afternoon when I was little, I took one pink yogurt and one white yogurt and mixed them in a bowl. No one else was around and the day stretched long ahead, so I worked with precision—using my spoon to carve lines first one way and then perpendicularly, till the bowl was filled with a beautiful marbleized pink and white concoction.

V. Helen Gurley Brown founded Cosmopolitan Magazine and ate yogurt. She worked 70 to 80 hour weeks. “It was my magazine,” she said.

Associate editors wouldn’t stay so late or work so long. “We would leave at six, have dinner, walk by Cosmo, look up, and see the light on in Helen’s office. You could imagine her up there, eating her yogurt at her desk, typing and writing notes.”

I took to the task of consumption methodically and confidently, without considering that this would mean double the yogurt. Upon realizing that I couldn’t finish it, I was inexplicably despondent. I felt like I could never finish and also that I absolutely had to. Today, couldn’t and must come to me again and always. As for the yogurt, eventually, belly full, I gave up, spooning the rest down the sink.

VI. When I worked at a magazine there was always yogurt in the fridge. Mine and someone else’s. And someone else still who said “yogurt is disgusting,” and “yogurt is for control freaks,” and also “women who eat yogurt are control freaks,” which seemed not only redundant but just plain annoying.

I eat yogurt because it tastes good and because it doesn’t require cooking, but I also feel good when I eat yogurt, and simultaneously like I have to defend myself. There is a whisper of something there—the way a woman’s restrictive diet can stand in for some sort of sexual closetedness that I know certain types find attractive.

15

LITERARY

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THE BEEKEEPER GOD

by Greg Nissan Illustration by Lizzie Davis the beekeeper god has been visiting me in my dreams. Well, no, he visits me during dream hours, wakes me up with his static, and takes a seat in my burgundy desk chair. He’s always dressed the same—an olive jumpsuit and that medieval mask, out of which his gray mustache bristles. That thorny stick of ash. He looks like Teddy Roosevelt, or my sixth grade girlfriend Helena’s dad, who everyone said looked like Teddy Roosevelt. The Great Compromiser. But, well, was that his nickname? No, no, he was Old Hickory. The Sage of Monticello. The Human Iceberg. Come to think of it, the only Roosevelt I could identify is Franklin, since I did a powerpoint presentation on Polio and Foreign Policy in 8th grade, and I could only recognize him then because of the caption under the picture. But the Beekeeper God, who looks like Helena’s father, he asks me to be his intern. I know his line of work is sticky and burdensome, the hours long and the coworkers mostly of a different species. I tell him no, I want the camaraderie of a real internship, slouching around the coffee shop in untucked beige shirts with massive collars, three and three attractive young men and women, in a big city full of shops with puns for names and rampant crime and poverty. Or is that Friends? They were always getting coffee on Friends. Were they interns? I remember watching the 10,000th episode with Helena, my sixth grade girlfriend, at her dad’s beach house. I turn down the offer to the man with his barbed wire mustache, mesh wire mask. But he says I’ll print your resume on solid gold and send it to all the top dogs at all the biggest firms. Sign me up! As long as I’m not fetching you coffee every minute, as if this weren’t some sort of supernatural albeit low-level position for a very minor deity. I could see him frown through the wires. Apparently, coffee was one of my main duties. Not that the Beekeeper God even drank coffee; it was just to shame me into the stereotypical intern role, an errand that would index my lack of pay. I’m willing to do anything else instead! I swear! He lays his cloth-skin hand on the zipper at his waist, buzzes the zipper down, and hefts out his staggering cock, colored with alternating bands of black and yellow along the pulsing shaft. Like an engorged, rotten candy cane. So I went to Starbucks, no big deal, and returned with a grande beverage. Or was it tall? But, of course, it was tall. Slender and warm, like Helena’s dad, Teddy Roosevelt. I had to ask Old Bull Moose to fetch me a glass from the second-to-top shelf whenever I wanted orange juice, which was, at the time, my favorite juice. Now I partake of more sophisticated juices, ones that leave my face in a sour collapse.

Grapefruit juice. Kumquat juice. Something classy. I ask him about the colored bands on his penis and he explains it all, gesturing to the dangling wonder with a salesman’s enthusiasm that puts me at ease. “It’s a tattoo. I’m a Steelers fan. And I don’t mind Wiz Khalifa.” His low laugh buzzes through the partition.

I think the reference near dated, but he snaps back through the brillo pad mask. “You’re the one writing about me, Aristaues, God of Beekeepers, an irrelevant God in this modern world of mechanized bee keeping and general agnosticism. As well as my hideous genitals. Don’t pawn off your cultural pedantry on me, you pervert.”

FEBRUARY 15 2013

LITERARY

16

Brain Freeze!

by Anna Rotman Illustration by Michelle Lin

1. Like all good recipes, this one starts with a quest: find clean snow. Suggestions: backyards, rooftops, the inner layers of snow banks. Let it be known that no snow is truly clean and the notion itself of untouched snow is anthropomorphic projection. Nevertheless, attempt the impossible.

2. Collect a small bucket’s worth of snow. The Roman emperor Nero used to send slaves to the mountains to gather snow for him. Feel the weight of history in your gloved hands.

Scoop the snow into a baking pan or any large container. Pat it down, so that you have a compact two-inch layer of snow covering the area of the pan. Do this quickly so that the snow does not melt and then store the pan in the freezer or outside.

3. Pour one cup of maple syrup and one teaspoon of butter (optional) into a saucepan. Bring it to a boil over medium heat. If you have a candy thermometer, heat the syrup until it reaches 255˚F. If you do not have one, heat the syrup, stirring occasionally, for fifteen minutes. To test if it is ready, drop a small spoonful of syrup on the snow. It should stick to the surface and harden.

4. Pour the syrup into lines on the snow. Keep an eye on it; last December, $18 million of maple syrup was stolen. That’s six million pounds. And it wasn’t the first large-scale maple syrup theft. $1.3 million worth was reported stolen in a single incident in 2006. This won’t be the last we hearn of sweettoothed thieves, so beware.

5. Wait a few seconds for the syrup to harden slightly and then take a Popsicle stick or the non-business end of any utensil and wrap the resultant syrup taffy around the stick.

Repeat for each line of syrup. Consider that maple syrup has buttressed the American diet in times of hardship: it was the sweetener used by the abolitionists during the Civil War, protesting the slave-based cane sugar industry. The Roosevelt administration encouraged wartime households to supplement their rationed cane sugar intake with maple products.

6. The taffy should be chewy and sticky. If you were in it for the candy, you can stop here. If you want the total experience, prepare one of the three following drinks and dip the taffysticks in them. What do you taste? The government agency Agriculture Canada is developing a maple syrup flavor wheel of 91 different terms. Mostly, it is sweet.

Maple Dark & Stormy

The Maple Leaf

2 oz. spiced rum 8 oz. ginger beer ¼ oz. maple syrup 2 slices raw ginger muddled with lime juice

2 oz. rye or bourbon whiskey ½ oz. lemon juice ¼ oz. maple syrup

Sweet & Spicy Apple Cider 2 oz. whiskey 8 oz. apple cider dashes of cinnamon, all-spice, nutmeg

Pour some sugar on ANNA ROTMAN B’15.

17 FOOD

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 15

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 17

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 20

murder mystery // bravo brasserie, 123 empire st., providence The perfect day-after-Valentine’s Day date: Horsehead Asylum, Criminally Insane, The Godfather. A four course meal in the heart of the theater district. $42.95 (whoa weird). 8PM.

salaam dunk

// chace center michael p. metcalf auditorium, risd A documentary about a college women’s basketball team in Iraq that won a lot of film festival awards last year. $7.50. 2PM.

one thousand and one readings // mc cormack family theater, brown university Approximately a dozen MFA candidates in electronic writing, fiction, playwriting, and poetry will read some short selections. 7PM.

MONDAY FEBRUARY 18

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 21

lego club // knight memorial library, 275 elmwood avenue, providence Build with Legos. Your creations will be displayed! Steal a (one) red block. Anything can happen. Free. 3-4PM.

work, progress // risd museum, 20 north main st., providence RISD students talk about their processes and techniques in relation to historical examples, or whatever. 7:30-8:30PM.

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 19

is college worth it? // room 117, macmillan hall, brown university The education bubble. Blub, blub. A lecture followed by a reception. 4PM.

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 16 sugaring // coggeshall farm museum, poppasquash road, bristol Missing the pope? Make some mope! Oh, we mean maple. Tap trees, sugar-off over an open fire. Eighteenth century techniques. Register by phone: 401.253.9062. Adults $10; kids $6.

10AM-4PM. 2 shows back2back // machines with magnets, 400 main st., pawtucket First: X-TRA ZEUS, with cocktails. Free.

7PM. Second: Hector 3, Forma, Over.

MySpace it yourself. $7. 9PM. “rave” // the underground, stephen robert campus center, brown university A Blacklight Dance called International Love.

There will be a raffle. Do you think there will be ecstasy? Bring $$ but it’s free. Brown ID required; rave gloves provided. 10PM.

public observing // ladd observatory, 210 doyle ave., providence Look at the stars, up close, way up there, for free. 7-9PM. chocolate fest // east smithfield public library, smithfield Watch the magical chocolate fountain churn waves and waves of liquid chocolate. Also: chocolate bingo, chocolate drinks, items dipped in chocolate. A big welcome to everyone in 5th grade and above. Space is limited, so call Mr. Mike 401.231.5150 x3. 6:308PM.

voulez-vous coucher avec moi?

// cable car cinema, 204 south main st., providence The French Film Festival begins. Eleven days of screenings. General admission $9 per screening, $55 for eight screenings; students $7 per screening, $20 for four screenings. The first is: Les adieux à la reine. 6:30PM.

THE LIST EEK IS W Y TH ISTER IN L 961 es in ire 1 t rash 48 c the en . g m ht 5 Flig killin ing tea t m iu ska lg e e r B figu S U

WEEK OF FEBRUARY 15-21

IN THE KNOW?

e.g. how to be safe when alone at home?

EMAIL LISTTHEINDY@GMAIL.COM @LIST_EASY