The College Hill Independent V.25 N.2

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT Brown & RISD Weekly | V. 25 N. 2 | 9.21.2012

from the editors Tonight I want to talk to you about love. I want to talk to you about a man I met at a dance many years ago. He was tall, laughed a lot, was nervous. In my memory, our first dance was to Mel Carter, “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me,” but it might have been Gary Lewis and the Playboys. It might have been Petula Clark. It might have been Johnny Rivers. We swayed. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.

My hand grazed his thigh when the song was over and he grimaced. He took me home. He was nice to my parents but he was glad when my parents weren’t around. That’s a good thing. He had a voice like the first rumbles of thunder, shot through with a thin hiss of rain. He talked about God and Country with a straight face while I stroked his back with my finger tips, whispered his name.

Tonight I want to talk to you from my heart about our hearts. Hearts full and bursting with color.

This good and decent man. Warm and loving and patient. He will take us to a better place, just as he took me home safely from that dance. I know it’s better because I’ve been there. He built it.

— SAB

ephemera news

2

WEEK IN REVIEW nickelback camera paradise // marcel bertsch-gout, doreen st. félix & kate van brocklin

the indy is MANAGING EDITORS Raillan Brooks, Robert Sandler, Erica Schwiegershausen NEWS Barry Elkinton, Emily Gogolak, Kate Van Brocklin METRO Joe de Jonge, Doreen St. Felix, Jonathan Storch FEATURES Sam Adler-Bell, Grace Dunham, Alex Ronan, Ellora Vilkin ARTS Ana Alvarez, Olivia-Jené Fagon, Christina McCausland, Claudia Norton SCIENCE Jehane Samaha FOOD Ashton Strait INTERVIEWS Drew Dickerson SPORTS Sam Rosen LITERARY Emma Janaskie, Michael Mount X Drew Foster LIST Allie Trionfetti BLOG Greg Nissan DESIGN EDITOR Allison Trionfetti DESIGN Cecilia Bodin DeMoraes, Carter Davis, Jared Stern, Joanna Zhang ILLUSTRATIONS Diane Zhou PHOTO Annie Macdonald SENIOR EDITORS Belle Cushing, Mimi Dwyer MVP Jonathan Storch COVER ART Affricanus Okonon

reachably yours 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

3 4

ON A BOAT

arts

11 13

seriously // kate van brocklin

UNREST day by day // emily gogolak

5 6

zzz // joe de jonge

IMMATERIALISM paradise lost in newport // jonathan storch

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7 9

expanding the narrative //

ARLENE

15

tunes, tools, teenagers // ana alvarez, christina mccausland,

GALLERY GIRLS what’s art? // ana alvarez

106TH & QUARK yo! lhc raps // eric axelman

interviews

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MARC MARON no johnny carson // drew dickerson

literary

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my brother’s wife // robert merritt

SUGGESTIONS

science

features WRITING RAPE

et tu dvd? // olivia-jené fagon

claudia norton

metro MATTRESS MATTERS

DIGITIZE ME

DON’T TOUCH THAT click click pull // noah prestwich

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x-page // drew foster

Week in Review

by Doreen St. Félix, Marcel Bertsch-Gout & Kate Van Brocklin Illustration by Diane Zhou

IN DEFENSE

By Wednesday morning, a quiet had finally settled outside the Chicago Public Schools headquarters on 125 South Clark St. The night before, a majority of the 800 delegates in the Chicago Teacher’s Union (CTU) had moved to suspend the teacher’s strike—the city’s first in over 25 years—that for eight days left classrooms empty, downtown streets engulfed with passionate protestors, and the parents of over 350,000 public school students frantically searching for child-care alternatives. Just that day, downtown was swarmed with thousands of vocal teachers and their supporters, protesting contract negotiations with Chicago public school officials.

If CTU President Karen Lewis, leading 26,000 teachers to protest, was the group’s bespectacled Moses, then Mayor Rahm Emanuel was the Brooks Brother’s-wearing Pharoah of Chicago. The chant “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Rahm Emanuel’s got to go” kept the marching protestors in rhythm. The signs branded Mr. Emanuel as a “bully,” a “liar,” and “Empermanuel.” Yet the sign 10th grade math teacher Mike Konkoleski toted on September 12 took smearing the controversial mayor to a new level.

“RAHM EMANUEL LIKES NICKELBACK,” read the sign, which instantly went viral across many Internet news sources and blogs. Mr. Konkoleski has declined any interviews about this or his other poster that read, “RAHM EMANUEL LIKES CREED.” So does Mr. Emanuel, former White House Chief of Staff and ballet dancer, like the Canadian rock band? “No,“ said his spokeswoman in a short, defensive email response to Redeyechicago.com on September 14. Apparently, Mr. Emanuel is not a fan of the aggressively mediocre and clichéd boy band. A retroactive look at the tongue-in-cheek sign, though, points to what was at the core of the teacher’s strike: the union’s Number One enemy wasn’t—and still isn’t—school board officials but Mr. Emanuel himself.

When Mr. Emanuel went to court on September 17 to file a temporary restraining order and court injunction against the union, his alpha male swaggering showed he isn’t a big fan of the union either.

Though a new contract has yet to be reached between the CTU and Chicago Public School officials, Lewis and Emanuel now speak about the bargaining phase in friendly tones. In a press statement, he called the outcome of talks between the two parties “an honest compromise.” She said she hoped the mayor “would carry out the [impending] contract in good faith.” According to The New York Times, a proposed three-year contract between the CTU and public school officials would include a double-digit pay raise, a limiting of standardized test scores to 30 percent of teacher evaluations and allowance for educators to create their own lesson plans. Mr. Emanuel’s desire to shut down certain and privatize other charter schools has been perceived by many members of the union as “corporate privatization of public education,” according to the Chicago Tribune. The CTU and its supporters view Mr. Emanuel as the unofficial figurehead of Chicago’s moneyed elite, and a threat to the traditional model of neighborhood public schools. Michael Rusin, a teacher at Lincoln Park High School, said it clearly in a September 18 Huffington Post blog post: “I encourage Chicagoans to share my vision of the future, and to speak out against those that seek to destroy our public education system.” — DSF

SEPTEMBER 21 2012

ATLANTIS TREMBLES

BIGGER BROTHER In a ferocious bid to cement their place in the annals of useless technology, Maryland’s Prince George’s County Police Department revealed that it plans to install cameras to watch over already existing speed cameras, which take license plate photos of speeders. Henceforth, there will be cameras that watch the speed cameras that watch the drivers who are watching the road.

To be fair, these speed cameras have seen their share of abuse. Reportedly, one was used for target practice by a pistol-toting man. Yet another camera was incinerated in an act of arson. A third bruised and battered camera is believed to have been the target of a roving gang of delinquents. These transgressions have gone unpunished and had to be pieced together based on the cameras’ later-found, pitifully savaged bodies—for privacy reasons, speed cameras are not legally allowed to record anything but license plates. This may be partially remedied by the new cameras, but it seems more likely that they will provide a generous concession to the barbarous incinerators. In justification of the extra measures, Major Robert V. Liberati, the police department’s Commander of the Automated Enforcement Section, declared, “I think the traffic itself is the cause of frustration [towards speed cameras]. We have a duty to make the roads safe, even if it takes a couple extra minutes to get to your destination. “If Liberati is right, the new cameras hardly get to the root of the problem. Meanwhile, these little symbols of government strictures clearly get people revved up, and every time a camera perishes, another $30,000 to 100,000 is drained from government coffers.

The proposed remedy seems only to be worsening the situation. Online commenters responding to reportage of the new camera initiative almost unanimously express added hatred to an additional prying eye and display imaginations that clearly outstrip those of the Prince George County police department. One reader suggests using “hornet and wasp spray whose aerosol-propelled streams can reach 20 feet,” to knock a new camera out of commission. Another reader recommends “flying a remote control airplane into the lenses.” These seem like risky proposals; after all, there may be a third camera they’re not telling us about. — MBG

Some 3,600 years ago, the last major eruption flooded the caldera of island of Nea Kameni on the Greek archipelago of Santorini. This blast, the second largest of its kind in human history after the eruption of Tambora in Indonesia, may have destroyed the Minoan civilization based on nearby Crete, which inspired the myth of Atlantis. According to Plato, in 9300 B.C. the legendary island and utopian civilization of Atlantis was a naval power that failed to conquer Athens and sank into the ocean “in a single day and night of misfortune.” Now a swelling magma chamber—a pool of liquid rock beneath the volcano—is awakening beneath Santorini once again.

Satellite radar technology has detected the source of some recent rumblings. The Santorini-magma study, published in the latest issue of Nature Geoscience, reported that between January 2011 and April 2012, a rush of molten rock swelled the magma chamber, by some 13 to 26 million cubic yards—about 15 times the volume of London’s Olympic Stadium. The pressure from this ballooning mass has already forced parts of the island’s surface to rise by 3 to 5.5 inches. A recent article in Science Daily reports that this seismic activity is drastically deforming the Santorini caldera, a cauldron-like collapse that is triggered by the magma chamber emptying, at levels never seen before.

According to University of Oxford vulcanologist David Pyle, massive eruptions on Santorini occur about 20,000 years apart. The last small earthquake struck the archipelago in 1950. Pyle predicts that imminent earthquakes will have minor effects on the island. “They might produce some ash, which could disrupt air traffic or interfere with drinking-water supplies. But most likely we’re not even talking about evacuations,” Pyle told National Geographic.

More than 50,000 tourists a day flock to Santorini from May to October. One can often see as many as five cruise ships floating around the volcano.

Pyle chocks up the latest quakes caused by the inflated magma chambers on Santorini to the little restless patches that rattle volcanoes that spend hundreds or thousands of years in a state of dormancy. The molten rock moving around the depths of these volcanoes is the core of the change in these volcanoes’ behavior.

The volcano has been quiet for 60 years, but these tiny tremors don’t indicate an imminent eruption, geologist Nomikou Paraskevi of the University of Athens told National Geographic. “We simply don’t know enough about the lifecycle of large volcanoes in between eruptions to be certain,” said Paraskevi.

But studies at the volcano take the rumblings more seriously, suggesting that the current state of volcanic inflation is the only significant one since the eruption of 1939-1941. “It would be unwise to assume that the present state of unrest will not end in an eruption,” the researchers wrote. With luck the gods will spare Santorini rather than sending another “terrible night of fire and earthquakes” that caused Atlantis to sink into the sea. — KVB

NEWS // 02

Lifeboat Healthcare, by Land or by Sea

by Kate Van Brocklin Illustration by Alex Dale

The longest lake in the world holds 18 percent of the world’s fresh water, borders four countries, and, surrounded by steep mountains and underdeveloped coastal plains, is nearly impossible to access. Healthcare infrastructure is either nonexistent or nonfunctional along the coasts of Lake Tanganyika, which borders Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, and Zambia. The 12 milllion people who live along the lake face many infectious diseases that have been eradicated in other places. The most common diseases are malaria, cholera, and measles. In Congo, malaria is the leading cause of death and illness. Nearly 95 percent of the population lives in malaria-endemic areas.

Combined, Congo and Nigeria account for about 40 percent of malaria cases and deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa each year—children being most at risk—according to the World Health Organization.

In one of the most challenging landscapes in rural Africa, two innovative models are expanding the distribution of health care to ensure consistent aid—a boat and a truck.

The Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Clinic is a proposal for a ship, envisioned by American physician Amy Lehman, which would travel for one to two weeks at a time through to isolated communities. A team of US, European, Congolese, and Tanzanian medical professionals would offer checkups and surgeries, including emergency response and trauma care, specialty care, and medical transport. The clinic would also help distribute medicine and medical equipment to areas that border the lake, which have weak overland supply chains.

The ship would offer two onboard operating rooms, intensive care facilities, a small inpatient ward, ship-toshore loading equipment for the establishment of temporary land-based patient registration and treatment areas, and an outboard motor boat to serve as a water-based ambulance, according to the organization’s website. A large component of the clinic’s mission is to implement training for local medical providers and visiting personnel.

03 // NEWS

The founder of the organization, Dr. Lehman claims that this regional hospital could provide resources to one of the most geographically inaccessible regions on earth. So far she’s raised about $795,000, the majority of which has been used for direct services, like supplying mosquito nets, medicine, and bandages.

As daunting as the task is, Lehman told The Daily Beast that she “loves going and doing the hardest thing.”

She first witnessed the region’s abject poverty while on vacation there five years ago. At the time, Lehman was a cardiothoracic surgery resident at the University of Chicago. The desperate situation in the region troubled her. She decided to quit her residency and commit to building a floating hospital on Lake Tanganyika.

Lehman needs to raise roughly $6 million just to build the boat, about half the cost of building a more traditional hospital in the West, which usually have 165 beds and 20 operating rooms compared to the Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Clinic’s proposed two operating rooms.

AID ON WHEELS

In Namibia, the Mister Sister Mobile Health Service employs a similar solution for providing care to remote communities—a hospital on wheels. Two mobile clinics cover the Otjozondjupa, Omaheke, and Khomas regions in eastern and southern Namibia; each equipped with two nurses and a driver who is also trained to provide administrative support. In 2008, the PharmAccess Foundation and Namibia’s Ministry of Health, two investors in the new delivery service, commissioned the first clinic. PharmAccess is a Dutch non-profit dedicated to strengthening basic health systems in sub-Saharan Africa by using public-private partnerships to alleviate the healthcare burden of African governments. The clinic was established in response to a national study conducted by PharmAccess that showed how rural employees and their dependents have limited access to health services. In 2011, a second clinic was mobilized

due to increased need for healthcare. At the end of January 2012, there were 53 participating employers on the Mister Sister outreach route, with approximately 4900 individuals registered on the electronic database as potential patients.

As of February 2012, there were 4630 patient visits from 1824 patients.

In addition to providing care, the organization also offers health insurance for services in the communities it serves. Those who benefit from the clinic include rural employees and their dependents, whose employers contribute to the healthcare program through annual subscription and premium contributions. The clinic is also available to other community members on a fee-for-service basis. Services for poor communities, pensioners, and orphans receive scome primarily contributions of medication from the Ministry of Health, donors and other corporate sponsors.

Working with the Namibia Global Fund Programme through the Namibia Business Coalition on AIDS (NABCOA), PharmAccess conducts wellness screenings for blood pressure, BMI, rapid blood testing for glucose, cholesterol, HIV, hemoglobin, Hepatitis B, and syphilis.

Both the Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Clinic and the Mister Sister Mobile Health Service are attempts to serve those who need assistance for severe diseases and illnesses. Patients who cannot be treated by these traveling hospitals are referred to the nearest public health facility, though that may be a great distance away. Though the organizations work to connect gaps in rural Africa between medicine, vaccines, technologies, diagnostics, and patients, they provide only a piece of the ongoing conversation needed to guarantee a network of health benefits and treatment for all. These models provide emergency care for the inhabitants of remote African regions, but interventions are still needed for long-term preventative solutions.

KATE VAN BROCKLIN B’13 floats

for the cure.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

INNOCENCE &INSURRECTION How a fringe anti-Islam film out of Los Angeles is stoking violence and burning bridges from Khartoum to Jakarta

JUNE 23 Innocence of Muslims is shown at Vine Theatre in Hollywood. It was the only full screening of the film to date. According to a Los Angeles Times source, almost no one attended the screening.

JULY 2 YouTube user Sam Bacile uploaded a 14-minute clip of the film, entitling it “Muhammad Movie Trailer.”

SEPT. 2 Bacile uploaded an Arabic-language version of the clip to YouTube. He quickly deleted it.

SEPT. 4 A second Arabic version was uploaded by

an unknown user.

by Emily Gogolak graphic by Robert Sandler

SEPT. 5 An anti-Islam activist, Moris Sendak, began circulating the trailer to news outlets through social media. He timed it with Florida pastor Terry Jones’s “Judge Muhammad Day” on Sept. 11.

SEPT. 8 Sheik Khaled Abdalla, an Egyptian TV host,

found the clip and aired part of it on a Cairo-based channel. The YouTube clips went viral.

SEPT. 10 Pastor Jones (the same one who caused an uproar across the Muslim world last September for threatening to burn the Koran) announced that he would show part of the clip on his “Judge Muhammad Day.”

SEPT. 11 Protests began when thousands stormed the US Embassy in Cairo. Rioters scaled the wall and replaced the American flag with a black flag used by Islamic militant groups.

In Benghazi, Libya, heavily armed militants joined protesters (possibly using the protest to cover up a planned attack), entered the US diplomatic compound, and killed US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American diplomatic personnel.

SEPT. 12 President Obama gave a late-night phone call to Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi, warning him that their relationship would be in serious danger if authorities did not stand more firmly against anti-American attacks.

Protests erupted in Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad, Pakistan.

hilary clinton on ambassador stevens “Chris Stevens fell in love with the Middle East as a young Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in Morocco. He joined the Foreign Service, learned languages, won friends for America in distant places, and made other people’s hopes his own. In the early days of the Libyan revolution, I asked Chris to be our envoy to the rebel opposition. He arrived on a cargo ship in the port of Benghazi and began building our relationships with Libya’s revolutionaries. He risked his life to stop a tyrant, then gave his life trying to help build a better Libya. The world needs more Chris Stevenses.”

the muslim brotherhood After President Obama’s late-night phone call, Gehad el-Haddad, spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, told The New York Times: “Speaking to the angry Muslims of Egypt, we told them we understand your anger, you are right to be angry and we share it—but let’s all express our anger in the right way and control it. And on the other side we tell the international world that we condemn these attacks and we urge restraint.”

mitt romney After news of Tuesday’s unrest, Mitt Romney released a statement criticizing Obama’s response to the embassy raid in Egypt, saying it was “disgraceful” and appeared to “sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” The comments—described by Obama as “shoot first and aim later”—didn’t pay off.

SEPT. 13 Protesters stormed US Embassy grounds in Sana, Yemen.

SEPT. 14 Protests erupted in Tunis. An American

school in the capital was ransacked and burned, and the US Embassy was breached.

Thousands in Khartoum, Sudan stormed and set aflame the German Embassy, the first time a non-US compound was breached. Protests continued at the US and British Embassies.

In Tripoli, Lebabnon protesters torched fast-food restaurants. One person was killed and at least two dozen were injured. The protests coincided with the start of Pope Benedict XVI’s official visit to Lebanon.

At a bazaar near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, protesters burned an effigy of President Obama.

SEPT. 15 The story behind Bacile, the YouTube up-

loader, began to come together. AP reporters found that he is an anti-Islam activist named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, living in Los Angeles. Nakoula was brought in for questioning. The riots seemed to calm down.

Google denied a White House request to remove the clip from YouTube.

SEPT. 16 An Iranian religious foundation headed

A national survey by Pew Research Center found that over 4 out of 10 Americans followed the rioting news, and that they, by a large margin, favored President Obama’s response over Romney’s. Forty five percent approved of Obama’s handling of the crisis, while under 25 percent approved Romney’s statement.

google “We’ve restricted access to it in countries where it is illegal such as India and Indonesia, as well as in Libya and Egypt, given the very sensitive situations in these two countries,” a Google statement said. “This approach is entirely consistent with principles we first laid out in 2007.”

salman rushdie “This was essentially one priest in Iran looking for a headline,” Rushdie said during a New York reading of his new memoir, Joseph Anton, in New York.

hassan nasrallah After six years in hiding since Lebanon’s 2006 war with Israel, Hassan Nasrallah emerged to speak to Hezbollah followers Beirut: “All our people and governments must put pressure on the international community to issue international and national laws to criminalize insults of the three world religions,” Nasrallah said, referring to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

“The world does not understand the breadth of the humiliation. The world must understand the depth of our bond with our prophet.”

SEPTEMBER 21 2012

by Ayatollah Hassan Sanei’i upped the fatwa bounty against Salman Rushdie by $500,000.

SEPT. 17 Indonesians fought with the police outside the US Embassy in Jakarta, hurling rocks and Molotov cocktails and burning tires. According to Reuters, at least one police officer was seen bleeding from the head and being evacuated from the protest.

After days of mostly peaceful protests, violent riots broke out in Afghanistan. Hundreds of Afghans burned cars and threw rocks at Camp Phoenix, a military base near Kabul.

In southern Beirut, a large crowd of peaceful protesters gathered to hear an address by Hezbollah leader, Hasan Nasrallah.

SEPT. 18 Fourteen total were killed by a suicide

bomber in Kabul, bringing the number of deaths attributed to the past week’s unrest to 28.

SEPT. 19 In Paris, a French satirical magazine pub-

lished a series of cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad, setting off a new wave of outrage. France announced it would temporarily close its embassies and schools in 20 countries on Friday.

Cindy Lee Garcia, an actress in Innocence of Muslims, sued Nakoula (aka Bacile), YouTube, and its owner Google, citing fraud, slander, and emotional distress.

She reportedly responded to a casting call in July 2011 and was selected for a movie titled Desert Warrior, which was represented to be a “historical Arabian Desert adventure film.” According to Entertainment Weekly, Garcia said that Nakoula “intentionally concealed the purpose and content of the film.”

NEWS // 04

Beautyrest® in Pieces THE AFTERLIFE OF PROVIDENCE MAT TRESSES

by Joe de Jonge Illustration by Diane Zhou

mattresses do not sleep well in landfills. They are an inefficient use of space, both big and hard to compress.

The air pockets they contain cause them to float up, rising through the layers of trash, bringing with them any debris in their path. Aware of this, landfills often refuse to accept mattresses.

Thousands of mattresses are left on Providence sidewalks each year. Nineteen thousand mattresses were collected and disposed of in 2010, costing the city $513,000—“a surprisingly high price tag that the city simply can no longer afford,” states a press release on the City of Providence Department of Public Works (DPW) website. The DPW is tasked with maintaining much of the city’s infrastructure, and also cleaning it up: maintaining Providence’s sidewalks, curbs, street lighting, traffic signs and lights, highways and bridges, and picking-up and disposing of our collective refuse. They take out Providence’s trash—performing the maintenance work that keeps Providence running smoothly.

As of August 2011, the DPW stopped picking up old mattresses and box springs for free. Providence residents have since had to pay $20 per mattress or box spring to have them trucked away, lug their beds to the Department of Public Works’ Convenience Center themselves or face fines of $50 to $500 for leaving mattresses on the curb without scheduling a pickup. the headquarters of the DPW is located on 700 Allens Avenue in Washington Park, and is open Monday through Friday from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM. The Department of Public Works’ Convenience Center, at the same address, is only open on Thursday afternoons and Saturday mornings.

None of the building’s signage mentions ‘convenience.’

Three hand-drawn signs use “You are Here” and arrows as guides to a lot behind the building. At the gate of the lot, a large vinyl sign welcomes you in two languages: “Mattress|Box Spring Convenience Center,” “Centro Para Botar Colchon|Box Spring,” “Two (2) Pieces Per Load Per Day,” “Limite De Dos (2) Piezas Por Dia,” “Proof of Providence Residency Required,” “Se Require Demostrar Prueba

05 // METRO

De Residencia,” “Warning! Video Surveillance. No Unlawful Dumping,” “Adviso! Vigilancia De Video. Ilegal Botar Basura.”

A minimal rendering of a clock in lime and yellow sits above the hours of the convenience center, without numbers but with a second hand—the time always approximately 11:05:13. A matching couch and loveseat, a purple nursery mattress, and the bench seat from a minivan seem to have been thrown over the chain-link fence that the sign is hanging from. A bookcase, four broken dining room chairs, and upholstery still protected by clear plastic, didn’t make it over the fence.

Halfway down the driveway, Steve is sitting in his white DPW Chevy with the driver side door open, waiting to help load your discarded mattress into one of Waste Management Inc.’s large green dumpsters. Pointing towards the loveseat Steve tells me, “People dump couches and stuff at night, but it’s not a dump. That’s still free to get picked up.” He’s got a pad of paper on the dashboard where he notes the names of residents who have dropped off mattresses and the number of mattresses or box springs dropped off. In the first two hours of the day four people had dropped off mattresses. The representative for Waste Management Inc. (WM) explained that mattresses brought to the DPW Convenience Center or picked up at resident’s homes are incinerated in Millbury, Massachusetts. WM is a Houston based corporation contracted by the DPW to dispose of mattresses and other bulk trash. The DPW was not willing to discuss the details of this contract without getting clearance from Providence’s communications department. Presumably recycling, like landfilling, is not cost effective for WM. According to a 2012 paper published by Clean Water Action, a non-profit citizens group that monitors water pollution, mattresses disposed of elsewhere in Rhode Island are initially trucked to the Central Landfill in Johnston, RI, the only landfill in Rhode Island. The Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation (RIRRC) owns and operates the landfill. The RI General Assembly created the RIRRC

in 1974 as a ‘quasi-public’ company. It is not a department of the state government; it is self-sufficient, earning revenue from sales of recycled products and methane gas produced by the landfill, but it must report its finances as if it were a branch of the state government. It also returns a portion of its profits from the sale of recyclables to the municipalities where the recyclables originated.

According to Clean Water Action, mattresses brought to the Central Landfill are shipped to Conigliaro Industries in Framingham, MA to be recycled. In the 2010 fiscal year rirrc sent 35,000 mattresses to Conigliaro Industries, which cost the RIRRC $350,000. According to a 2007 report in American Recycler, an industry news publication, Conigliaro Industries is one of three large-scale mattress recyclers in the country, the only one that is run as a forprofit operation. Company President Gregory Conigliaro explained in a 2003 interview with Rubber News that lowquality mattresses and high-end mattresses are separated at the facility. Cheap mattresses are shredded whole, with 60% of the shreds recycled. These low-quality mattresses are primarily from schools, prisons, and hospitals. Brandname mattresses are ‘filleted’ so the springs can be removed before shredding to separate the polyurethane foam and cotton from the other filler that cannot be sold on the secondary market. Filleting the mattresses allows for up to 90% of the material to be recycled, often ending up as insulation or carpet backing. All of this is done at rate of one mattress per minute.

It takes only a minute to fillet and shred a mattress, but Providence residents are taking longer to adjust. The City of Providence has not been picking up mattresses free of charge for over a year, but Steve thinks people are still confused about the policy. Steve implored, “Make sure you tell the people that it’s not a dump, that couches and furniture are still picked up for free.” To schedule a pick-up of bulky trash or a mattress call 1-800-972-4545.

JOE DE JONGE B’14 sleeps

well in landfills.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEW WORLD ORDER

George Berkeley in Rhode Island

by Jonathan Storch Illustration by Robert Sandler not many rhode islanders know it, but three centuries ago, an Irish philosopher-minister came to Newport, determined to found a new civilization. born in 1685 in kilkenny, ireland, George Berkeley hatched his plan to come to the New World relatively late in life. As a young man, he’d studied at Trinity College in Dublin, where he stayed after graduation and published his most philosophically significant work, the Principles of Human Knowledge. The book, which attempted to support belief in the existence of God by demonstrating the nonexistence of matter, was received poorly at first.

Berkeley’s friend John Percival conveyed responses from London: “A physician of my acquaintance undertook to describe your person, and argued that you must needs be mad,” he wrote. “A bishop pitied you.” But Berkeley was in earnest, and in 1714 he moved to London to publish a popularization of his theory, the Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. Within a few months, Berkeley was a literary light, contributing religious articles to the Guardian and socializing with the likes of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Per custom for educated young men, in 1716 he embarked as a tutor on a tour of the European continent. in the history of philosophy, Berkeley is best remembered as the connecting link between the commonsense empiricism of Locke and the radical skepticism of Hume. Locke had maintained that the human mind possesses no ideas a priori, but rather that it acquires all the material of thought through the experience of sensation and reflection. But if all we can know comes through our experience, Berkeley argued, then we’re really not justified in positing the actual existence of anything outside of our experience. Calling his position “immaterialism,” Berkeley maintained frankly that the only reality is the reality of ideas—that if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, not only is there no sound, there’s also no tree. In order to save his universe from collapse into solipsism, Berkeley made recourse to a particularly eccentric incarnation of the proverbial God of the philosophers: the omniscient mind of God that simultaneously perceives all of reality, thus maintaining the consistency of everyone else’s perceptions. Keeping Berkeley’s epistemology, Hume just dropped the God—and was left with the provocative skepticism that Kant credited as the spur toward his own critical turn. berkeley kept up with politics during his time abroad— even publishing an anonymous counterrevolutionary tract—and by his 1720 return to London, he had become convinced that European civilization was in a state of terminal decline. Especially dispiriting was the cultural environment following the collapse of the South Sea Company, into which England had invested much of its national resources. “People were losing money like crazy, people were making money like crazy,” says Nancy Kendrick, a philosophy professor and Berkeley scholar at Wheaton College. “Berkeley thought there was this misplaced hope that commerce alone would improve the state of human life.”

Not only did commerce appear to be getting the upper hand over virtue, but intellectual justifications for the pursuit of self-interest were simultaneously gaining currency among the educated class. Bernard Mandeville’s 1714 essay “The Fable of the Bees,” for example, had argued that vices play an important role in the health of a society.

In his own writing, Berkeley’s response to the changing cultural climate reached an apocalyptic pitch. “We have long been preparing for some great catastrophe,” he warned in 1721, “vice and villainy have by degrees grown reputable among us; our infidels have passed for fine gentlemen . . . other nations have been wicked, but we are the first who have been wicked upon principle.”

SEPTEMBER 21 2012

The New World seemed to offer the possibility of a new beginning. Returning to Dublin in 1721, Berkeley decided to establish a school in Bermuda that would educate the sons of English settlers alongside American ‘savages.’ In contrast to the mainland colonies, which he believed were already corrupted by irreligion and European malaise, Berkeley imagined Bermuda as a blank slate whose inhabitants could readily be inducted into civilization and the life of public virtue. He expressed his exalted hopes in a 1726 poem: There shall be sung another golden Age, The rise of Empire and of Arts, The Good and Great inspiring epic Rage, The wisest Heads and noblest Hearts.

Not such as Europe breeds in her decay; Such as she bred when fresh and young, When heav’nly Flame did animate her Clay, By future Poets shall be sung.

Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way: The four first Acts already past, A fifth shall close the Drama with the Day; Time’s noblest Offspring is the last. (“Verse on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America,” stanzas 4-6)

On September 6, 1728, with a charter, initial funding from a few donors, and the promise of £20,000 to come from the crown, Berkeley set sail for the colonies. displaced from the benefits of ecclesial establishment, Rhode Island’s Anglicans at the beginning of the 18th century were a small and indignant group. A letter from the Reverend James Honeyman, for example, contains dire reports regarding the “infection” of Quakerism and the philistinism of the Baptists. Still, due to the colony’s climate of religious liberty, Newport had become the de facto center of Anglicanism in New England and was a natural landing place for Berkeley.

With more than fifty boxes of books shipped ahead, Berkeley and his pregnant wife Anne arrived in Newport in January 1729. Soon after, they purchased 96 acres of land and a farmhouse in nearby Middleton, naming the plantation after the former British palace of Whitehall.

Joan B., a preservationist who agreed to show me the house, points to the classical facade that Berkeley added—Ionic columns and a pediment carved out of wood. “This is the

feeling the Berkeleys wanted to create, the little island of civilization in the wilderness.”

While in Rhode Island, Berkeley took an active part in the intellectual and religious life of the area. He had been appointed a dean of the Church of Ireland in 1724, and when he disembarked in Newport, he was the highest ranking Anglican official yet to set foot in New England. He preached regularly at Trinity Church in Newport, hosted frequent visitors at Whitehall, and may have even been involved in an intellectual secret society.

Ministers in Connecticut and Massachusetts tried to enlist him in clerical squabbles with the Congregationalists, but he demurred from confrontation; he did, however, donate around a thousand books to the library of Congregationalist-run Yale University. As for philosophy, while in Newport he penned the dialogue Alciphron, an attack on Mandeville and defense of Christianity that ranks among his more important works. Intending Whitehall to provide support for the Bermuda school, he employed a manager for the farm and bought three slaves, whom he baptized at Trinity, but never set free. berkeley never made it to Bermuda. Before his trip to Rhode Island, the missionary Thomas Bray had published a pamphlet attacking his plan—according to historian Edwin Gaustad, “a sustained and devastating critique” whose central point was that Berkeley had no idea what he was getting into. Once in Newport, Berkeley himself toyed with the idea of abandoning the Bermuda project and founding an Anglican seminary in Rhode Island instead.

And he had a new competitor for the promised £20,000: the prison reformer James Oglethorpe, who wanted to found a colony for English debtors. Eventually, Parliament decided that Oglethorpe’s scheme—which would free up space in British prisons and provide a southern buffer for the colonies—was a better investment than Berkeley’s plan to provide a liberal education to Indians. Oglethorpe founded Georgia, but Berkeley’s money never came through, and he left the New World for good in 1731.

Though disappointed at the abortion of the Bermuda project, Berkeley was “not a beaten man, much less an embittered man,” writes historian A.A. Luce. Returning to London, he published Alciphron, and several years later he received an appointment as the Bishop of Cloyne, Ireland.

Through the end of his life he continued to write on his numerous diverse interests—mathematics, speculative metaphysics, and, curiously, the medicinal properties of tar-water.

Nancy Kendrick, the Berkeley scholar at Wheaton, cautions against making too direct a connection between Berkeley’s theoretical philosophy and his unusual practical life. But she does believe the connection works in the background. “[For Berkeley], the universe has certain properties, and moral ones are among them,” she says. berkeley’s dream, of a world in which the moral properties of the universe cohere with the lives of its inhabitants, was thwarted by the forces of the same world that he had tried to escape. But if the Old World government had sent through the money, would there have been any chance his plan would have succeeded?

Maybe. Probably not in the way he had imagined.

Nothing, not even a New World, can give you a blank slate.

All men, in the climatic instant of coitus, are the same man.

All men who repeat one line of JONATHAN STORCH B’14 are JONATHAN STORCH B’14.

METRO // 06

AND THERE IS NO WORD FOR THAT there was this girl, whose face I can no longer see and whose name might have been Maggie but just as easily could have been any number of things. I was probably only nine. No one else was there. We climbed up to the bunk bed and she either said, “My brother showed me this,” or simply, “this is my brother’s.” Play. It started with a woman being raped, though I didn’t know that word then, nor what it meant. I watched as the woman left the suburban house, barefoot, in a ripped white dress, carrying high heels and crying. Walking and crying and her wavy hair was lit by sunlight. I wondered why she wasn’t wearing shoes, but also how that could happen during the daytime. The other girl, the maybe Maggie, was watching me watching.

The condo pulsed with a strange and sickly silence. The air hung heavy with some intractable misdemeanor, like wallto-wall carpeting, or at least the idea of it. “I have to go home,” I said and I never went over to hers again.

Here is what I wrote six months after I was raped.

I would like to forget, but I think the best chance I have is careful forgetfulness, when you lay something down warily because you’re afraid of getting it on your hands, when you are afraid the smell will cling to your hair, that the memory of it will be readable on your face. Despite everything, there is yolk on my hands and I can’t get the smell of egg pan off my clothes. I mean that it lingers and nothing is enough.

I stripped the bed when I came home from work.

My sheets, my hair. Washed. I turned the water scalding, dizzyingly hot till my skin was pink, till my mind was raw. Then nothing and other things and regular things.

Would you believe me if I told you that I apologized to the boy who raped me? It was the next morning and I said sorry for kicking him out so early, which I did because I had to go to the dentist. It was confused because it was confusing, because it wasn’t clear-cut and well-defined like the rape on TV, but mostly because it happened to me and I didn’t think it would.

07 // FEATURES

It was hard to call it rape because he didn’t pin me down, because I invited him in, because I said yes to some things. It was hard to call it rape because I am mostly okay and that is not what is expected. Dear Mom, dear Dad, dear Everybody, he raped me, but I’m okay. It was very hard and now it is less hard. For many days I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I was overwhelmed with shame and embarrassment, and when he would randomly contact me in the weeks and months that followed I felt it anew. “I was so stupid,” I said, and that word stood for a hundred other things. to him what happened wasn’t rape and that’s one reason why I am writing this. Later, when I said the word he grew angry. I told him that he raped me and if he continued to contact me I would call the police. That’s when he called me a dumb bitch. That’s when he called me a fucking slut.

That’s when he called me a dirty whore. Dumb bitch. Fucking slut. Dirty whore. That was the story he told himself.

Here is the truth, not the story. These are the answers to the question he didn’t ask. He asked if I had a condom and I said, “I don’t want to have sex,” or “we’re not having sex,” or something. He asked three separate times and each time I said no. I think I may have even said, “I’m not having sex.” And it ended up being true, I didn’t have sex, he raped me.

Of her own rape, Charlotte Shane explains that it didn’t seem serious enough to count. “To call it rape seems too self-pitying, too histrionic.” She adds, “It automatically implies a level of emotional damage that did not take place.” I couldn’t call it rape either. I didn’t know the word as mine in the present tense. When I was being raped, which I don’t really remember too well, I was not thinking ‘this is rape.’

The next morning when I woke, I didn’t think that was rape. I didn’t say to myself ‘you were raped.’ I could imply something like it, but it wasn’t for a long while until I could say it. Say the word ‘raped’ as mine. Even months later I wasn’t sure. I wrote, There are words for what happened and some are too big and others too small and none fit just right.

I don’t know what to call it and that is even worse.

If someone could give me a name for that I would feel much better. But no word is the right word and there is no word for that.

I also wrote this, but now when I reread it I realize I am talking to myself, not to him.

I said yes to things but not that. I said no. I know I said that. That is what I said. And you, you, you— you didn’t listen. I said I didn’t want to. I said I wasn’t going to. I said no to you. The next day you said we, as if I was involved, but don’t be mistaken, it was you, because me, I said no.

It makes me cringe to read it now because the writing is bad, but also because I needed to say it so many different ways. No I said. I said no. I know I said no. Rereading this is like watching myself realize I was raped, and still I didn’t take the word as mine.

Now I would tell myself, he raped you, and I would tell him, you raped me. You raped me, you raped me. I would say it again and again and again until it was the only thing that he could hear, because for days he was the only thing that I could feel.

I knew him, barely, before he raped me, and it didn’t occur at gunpoint in a bad neighborhood. I was raped in my room, in my bed, late one summer night, and I wasn’t the only one home. But it doesn’t make it any less rape.

It took me a while to realize that. When there is only one type of story about rape that we’re told over and over again, it comes to seem possible that any deviation from that plotline isn’t really rape. We are conditioned to fear empty parking lots and late nights, but not the boys we call friends, the room that is our own. i am scared to write this because it feels like as soon as I say anything about when I was raped, the words become scrubbed of their origin and suddenly I am talking about Rape, period. Who gets to talk about that, I’m not sure.

This is a serious piece and the editors treat me with careful respect, they defer to me. None of the editors say “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you were raped,” and I am glad they don’t.

I am glad that they will look at me as writer and not as raped. I am glad that they will see me and not just what happened.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

What do I want to be true? That this word isn’t mine.

But it’s true that it is and I need it. Words are not enough and yet they’re everything we have. Rape is a word I am scared to use, but I think that’s a problem. If I can’t have the word, how can I talk about it? On a reluctance to use the word, Elissa Bassist wrote, “When I explained to a friend what happened with my first boyfriend, I added the caveat: ‘I mean, it wasn’t like back-alley rape.’ Her response: ‘Yeah, I was not-back-alley raped too.’” It’s easy to get caught up on what it isn’t, rather than what it is. Without the word we are stuck in a purgatory of quiet confusion. I called it When I Got Too Drunk. I called it When I Was Really Stupid.

The indirect violence of it all is hard to name. Jenny Diski writes of her own rape, “He wasn’t violent. I mean that he didn’t hit me.” I know exactly what she means. To that I could add: He wasn’t violent. I mean that he was nice to me. He wasn’t violent. I mean that he invited me to the movies. He wasn’t violent. I mean that he paid for the cab.

Do you see what I mean? The way this act of violence can be caged in something that looks like kindness. And still it is rape.

By taking the word rape it seems that I must also take everything that comes with being a girl who has been raped. It means that I am a scarred survivor, deserving of your pity. It means that you should be careful with how you touch me. It means that I am porcelain and on the tippy edge of a shelf called flashback or breakdown or crying jag. According to Shane, women who’ve been raped find themselves bound by a strict code of appropriate action, in which “you can only ‘learn’ to live with it, as though it is akin to abrupt blindness or a paralyzed limb. If it does not ruin you, it will at the very least change you forever for the worse. This is the only allowable truth about rape. There are no alternatives.”

For centuries, rape destroyed a woman’s value, and now it just destroys her. Today this destruction is cast as a mental undoing, rather than a monetary one. It’s what Vanessa Veselka calls the “absolute ruination of rape,” a narrative perpetuating the notion that rape causes inescapable, permanent trauma, and those who don’t experience it are simply “in denial” or “not yet ready to deal with it.” This is why I’m uncomfortable with the words ‘rape victim’ and ‘rape survivor.’ Mostly I write, woman who has been raped.

I like to leave a bit more space between the words because you can still be yourself and have been raped. The way the word ‘survivor’ is used, so laden with sympathy, makes it seem unexpected, this surviving. For years and months I found nothing that would suggest that those who are raped can go on living rather than merely surviving.

SEPTEMBER 21 2012

the song is no one’s, it is just sung.

Stop Don’t touch me there This is my private square R-A-P-E Get your hands away from me.

It is a chant. It is a game. We pushed each other, in the ease of girlhood, before our bodies became different and weighted and full. We shrieked the word at each other, playing and laughing. “Rape! Rape! Get off of me.” We were young and we didn’t know, and the word meant only something, but also nothing.

Now rape is a word that travels, that echoes, that pushes people from you, in flight, or in fear that touching you will do things wrong. It has been hard to tell anyone about it, to introduce the word into the space between us.

I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. Whenever I bring it up I cage it by saying, “I’m okay, everything is okay, but...” and now I want to say “I was raped” and leave it plain like that, bare. Saying “I am okay” the way I did became an apology, a way to say, I am sorry that you have to have this around you, I am sorry to make you think of this, I am sorry that you have to see this in front of you.

Now I want to say I was raped, period. I am okay, period.

I was raped and it hurt, not physically, but yes, physically.

And other places too. And I am mostly okay and that is good but linking them together so close doesn’t seem right anymore. They are connected, but being okay is not an apology I need to make to the people around me who might feel uncomfortable.

It has been a year, more. But there is no way to undo it, time passes and it is still done. I was a girl, but newly twenty-one, when it happened. Woman is a word I don’t yet own. Rape is one I do. Now there are bells ringing outside my window and yesterday I forgot his name. It surprised me that I couldn’t call it to mind instantly. This is the slow forgetting I guess. The bells aren’t ringing anymore. Salvation isn’t your saccharine sympathy. Salvation is the nights I told myself it’ll be okay, the days that becomes more and more true. — A

FEATURES // 08

Game Camera Observing Art Through Nature

by Robert Merritt

About a week ago I opened the freezer door to take out a pizza and found my copy of Keith Richard’s autobiography staring up at me. I took it out and replaced it on the shelf next to my bed. I didn’t really think much of it until I opened the freezer and saw my book again the next day. Had I forgotten to take it out?

This happened for the next three days until I got smart. I used my game camera rig with its motion sensor to catch myself in the act that night as I slept. I placed the camera on the wall opposite the freezer and tried to stay up but dozed off inevitably. The next morning I noticed that the camera’s light was blinking, an indication that the camera had been tripped. I printed out the photograph, but it wasn’t me at all. It was my roommate Aaron. I was being pranked. I approached Aaron and he denied it even though you can clearly see Aaron’s laughing face on the left side of the photograph. I can’t wait to get even.

09 // FEATURES

This is a photograph taken with the Planet Optics gx22 motion detection game camera. Unlike the camera I set to watch the freezer, the gh 11, this camera does not have an infrared capability, instead compensating for this inefficiency with an inoffensive low light flash. I set one up in the bear cages I work with because the bears had become increasingly irritable. One large Kodiak Bear had mangled the locking mechanism on the cage so badly that my team and I had to go in and replace the entire door.

This photo is from that day. It seems as if the bear may have damaged the game camera itself, rather than it just malfunctioning. For example, a piece of the housing was dislodged and strangely colored (and these cameras never malfunction). Also, the timer on the camera was not working, causing it to continuously take photograph after photograph. You can see how bright it is here, even though it was pitch black when we went in to fix the door, this is a result of several photographs layered on top of one another. As mentioned above, we have to go in at night so as not to over stimulate the bears.

I took the camera home to see the printouts and they were unusable. The following evening, my brother and his wife, Arlene, a prominent artist, came over for dinner. They saw the printouts sitting on the computer desk and asked about them, so I explained what had happened. Arlene, my sister-in-law, suggested that I submit them to the Rancellier Gallery where she had a commission as an artist.

Arlene explained to me that there was a popular art movement in the 1970s around animals making art: cats made paintings, monkeys took photographs with special cameras and even dogs learned to sew with a harness bell system. Arlene said that recently there was an increased interest in animal-made art and that my photos would be well received. I couldn’t believe it.

The last part about the dogs is a joke that my son asked me to include, but the rest is true.

I don’t know anything about art and was just going to trash them. I’m glad I didn’t!

Thanks to my sister-in-law Arlene Briggs, I got them published in a magazine and even got some money for the thing.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

This is the only photograph not taken remotely. I took this photograph, not a bear. This is my sister-in-law Arlene. She came with me to check out the facility where I work and to see the bears. If you look carefully you can see my arm in the bottom left hand corner of the photograph. Here, the bears can be seen by means of a one-way mirror.

This photograph is strange to me because I don’t remember taking it. I am afflicted by bouts of temporary blindness usually brought on by stress. They can last for a few seconds or a few hours. This photograph was taken during a short blind spell, when talking to Arlene the camera misfired without a sound. I include it because Arlene said that it “completes the set.”

ROBERT MERRITT B’13

SEPTEMBER 21 2012

is married with children.

FEATURES // 10

over the course of two centuries, the Library of Congress was able to acquire, catalogue, and preserve 29 million books and 105 million items including maps, photographs, manuscripts, and films. In 2012 it would take the world 15 minutes to produce an equal amount of information digitally. Today most intellectual production is born digital; created with computers, published online, accessed on mobile devices.

Art-making and art-viewing have risen to meet the new digital standard. Like John Raffman’s online photo essay of selected Google Street Views, Kyle Mcdonald’s performative online hacks, and Cory Arcangel’s interactive video games, artists are using digital technology to make and show their work.

And larger art institutions have begun to embrace it.

The 2008 exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” and the 2011 exhibition “Talk to Me,” both at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, featured many digital artists whose work depicted digital technology’s effects on design and function. Video artist Hillary Lloyd, who uses digital software to render and edit her work, was nominated for the Turner Prize last year.

Now that it has proven its cultural worth, art museums have begun to cautiously acquire digital works for their collections, following in the footsteps of organizations like Rhizome and Rhizome Art Base, an online user-populated digital art archive, and Franklin’s Furnace, a non-profit organization in New York with an extensive digitized video art collection. And while the breakneck speed of digital production and technological obsolescence is opening up more and more possibilities for artists, it is making the institutional task of collecting and archiving these artworks that much more difficult.

“With digital art, there’s no room for things to fall between the cracks,” explained Richard Rinehart, the director of digital media for the Berkeley Art Museum explained.

“If you don’t do something to preserve it within a span of five years, it’s not going to survive.” Digital art is usually comprised of data, housed within a carrier like a DVD,

11 // ARTS

which is made visible on display devices (monitors, projectors, etc.) Because operating systems and computer hardware are continually being upgraded, and even seemingly reliable digital repositories like CDs only have a lifespan of twenty years, the material of these works and the way they are displayed is inherently unstable. museums and their collections have traditionally dealt with the singular art object, like a painting or a print. Once a museum decides to acquire any work of art, an archival package is created and stored including exhibition copies of the work, video documentation, press material, statements by the artist, and licensing information. In the same way that the advent of performance art or installation works forced museums to evolve their collection and preservation strategies by demanding more holistic materials, such as interviews with participants, or the purchasing of very specific equipment, digital art’s rise in contemporary art practice immediately raises the issue of how to safely hold on to it, Go to http://www.teleportacia.org/anna/. This is the web address of a seminal work of digital art. Olia Lialina’s net.comedy Anna Karenina Goes to Paradise reinvents the Tolstoy narrative by combining the results of set search engine queries for “paradise,” “love,” and “train” into a new three part story that produced an absurdist dialogue between Anna, the train she has fallen in love with, and links that the search engines returned. Of the three search engines used, Magella, Altavista, and Yahoo, only Yahoo is still running. In 2012, the artwork is still technically live but most of its links are dead and half of its web-software is now defunct.

In 2002, the Guggenheim Museum commissioned and acquired net artist Mark Napier’s Net.Flag, an online digital palimpsest, created by various online users manipulating and layering available flag motifs on an interface designed by Napier. In a 2002 interview, Napier explained of his software-based work that, “The computer language, operating system, and hardware form an infrastructure that

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WITHERING BYTES Preserving Digital Art

by Olivia-Jené Fagon Illustration by Diane Zhou

supports the artwork, but they are not the artwork. The artwork is an algorithm, a design built on this infrastructure, which is constantly changing and rapidly aging. To hold onto that technology is to tie us to a sinking ship.”

For many museums, the name of the preservation game seems to be collaboration, with almost all large museums forming interdisciplinary and inter-departmental initiatives that pool the specific expertise of curators, media technicians, and conservators. Current Smithsonian Exhibition Technician Alex Cooper described this as a response to a knowledge gap: “Those that do have the technical expertise are only able to express themselves in techno jargon. Then you have a curatorial or more aesthetic role who are really trying to understand the technical aspects of these works but there is a total language barrier.” The impetus is to bridge the gap between technical proficiency and art historical backgrounds, so that museum’s aren’t left responsible for works they’re not fully capable of taking care of.

The Guggenheim has been a forerunner of technologybased art conservation. Their work began in 1999 with the Variable Media Initiative, a project that brought together in-the-field experts to try and establish best practices for digital and time-based works. In 2005 The Tate Modern, San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York formed the Matters in Media Art Coalition. The various D.C. based Smithsonian Institute’s art museums established the Collaborations in Preserving Time Based Art Consortia in 2010.

Many of these efforts espouse mottos like “permanence through change” “accommodating the unpredictable,” and “managing inherent variability,” romantic flourishes that indicating the ways in which museums are attempting to concede their institutional desire for standards, regulations, checks and balances in favor of preservation methods that are just as varied and flexible as the art they are intended for.

One approach to preservation museum’s have taken on been dealing with the digital data and the hardware used to

SEPTEMBER 21 2012

present or hold it separately- to use Napier’s metaphor, to divorce the artwork from the sinking ship. “I see the digital essence of a work as an intellectual notion divorced from any physical thing,” Cooper explained. “The USB or DVD are simply carriers. There could be multiple copies of a work on different hardware, but it’s really just another location.” This strategy appears practical; digital data can easily be moved to another current medium and the hardware or software used, if not available, can be emulated as well.

But consider artists like Philip Stern, who creates “glitch art,” a type of art that purposefully exploits and visualizes flaws in digital technology. To emulate and to alter the hardware that make up the process, medium, and subject matter of his work would be to undermine the intent and integrity of it even while potentially preserving it for future audiences. Similarly, Lialina could have preserved Anna Karenina Goes to Paradise by recoding it with current search engines. However, the conceptual thrust of the piece was a comment on the embeddedness of content within an information network, a key theme of 1990s Net.art. To “update” this piece with new software would make it available today but it would remove it from its art historical and intellectual context.

“I think it’s important to understand that things we do age, and they carry a history with them,” noted former Rhizome Director of Technology, Francis Hwang at the Echoes of Art Conference in 2004. “It’s really useful for people to be able to look at media works that are five years old, ten years old, thirty years old, and kind of see what those works may have implied about the tools that were available at the time, and how they affected culture.” Perhaps the struggle for museums is that their efforts at preserving digital art could so easily undermine their material integrity while also preventing digital art from writing it’s own history.

One recently noted approach to preserving digital art is the Variable Media Questionnaire (VMQ) developed by net artist and curator, Jon Ippolito, and employed by the Guggenheim, whose current Media-Art Conservation Lab

is considered to be the best digital and time-based art preservation facility in the country. The questionnaire captures both the functional components of a piece of work as well as the opinions and intentions of the artist, then proposes four potential preservation strategies: storage (collecting the equipment and software of a specific piece), migration (upgrading its hardware when necessary), emulation (simulating old software or hardware with newer versions) and finally, the most precarious, reinterpretation, in which works are reconceived each time they are exhibited or restaged.

So, in the ten years since the Guggenheim acquired Napier’s Net.Flag, how have they been preserving (storing, migrating, emulating, and reinterpreting) it? Besides archived physical copies of the algorithmic code and operating system, as well as visual documentation of the work’s evolution as users contributed to it, the museum has kept the work alive online. The museum’s preservation strategy has been to never allow the work to complete itself.

“My concern is that completing a work kills it,” Ippolito remarked at a 2004 digital preservation conference. If looking at the current state of Anna Karenina goes to Paradise, this approach is conceptually attractive but unsatisfactory, since the work will remain complete and accessible only so long as it is technically practical.

Museums may not be fully prepared for what is to come and in some ways are unclear what their duties are to what has passed. In the time it takes for such pieces to be deemed historically or culturally important, the technology needed to operate them may have already become defunct. And in evolving their technology, museums may be erasing what made these works historically or culturally significant.

What exactly is the museum trying to protect and to what end? As Napier pointed out, “At what point is the work alive? At what point are we replicating something that should have passed?”

OLIVIA-JENE FAGON B’13 expresses

herself in techno poetry.

ARTS // 12

INVENTORY

by Ana Alvarez, Christina McCausland & Claudia Norton Illustration by Diane Zhou

ROOKIE YEARBOOK ONE Rookie Yearbook One proves there’s a teenage girl in all of us waiting to wear a paper crown and cover our notebook covers with ice cream stickers. The book marks the one-year anniversary of fashion-kid-blogger turned teenage editor Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie Mag, an online magazine tailored to young girls. Along with covering fashion, music, and television, Rookie offers refreshingly nuanced advice on tackling life as an independently minded and self-aware teenager. The book includes posts from the blog’s first year, designed with analog photos of melancholy nymphets and nostalgic patterns of roses and lace. Although it looks like someone barfed glitter hearts all over the book, the exemplary writing helps excuse the design’s precocious and overlaid cuteness. Unlike peer publications like Seventeen, which tells girls how to trim their waists and pick the best lip-gloss for their hair color, Rookie assumes that young women’s interests lie beyond appearing attractive. No other teen-girl publication gives young girls a taxonomy of late night snacks, opens up a conversation on masturbation, advises them on how to not care what other people think, teaches them how to produce their own zine, or geeks out with them over The Golden Girls, Joni Mitchell, and deep sea creatures. And even those of us not in the throes of teenagedom can identify with Rookie. In one of the articles featured in the book, several writers, most of whom are in their twenties and thirties, write sincerely about their experiences with sexual harassment. Especially relatable is Gevinson’s guide on how to properly bitchface (read: how to control your demeanor when interacting with insufferable people), a skill that comes in handy well beyond the teenage years. Rookie reminds all of us that it’s okay to feel uncomfortable, and to have your own thoughts, and to not know what those thoughts mean. Rookie is there not to give you the answers, but to encourage you to wear your own crown, march to your own beat, and go figure it out for yourself. — AA

13 // ARTS

BEND BEYOND I have no idea what music people are listening to now.

Are you guys still into chillwave? Witch house? Is Seapunk really a thing or did the New York Times Style section make that up (a trend born, they reported, “like Aphrodite from the foam”)? I don’t know if it’s still okay to like Woods, but their newest album, Bend Beyond, came out this week, and if you’re looking to listen to something a little less “synthpop” and more “sturdy,” I’d recommend it. Brooklyn-based Woods have released an album every year since 2006, and this momentum is evident in their music, which has always been attractively sloppy—probably a consequence of their spontaneous recording process (in interviews the band says they tend to record a song immediately after writing it and often mix while recording). This album seems to have been given a little more thought, and though it’s not quite the creepy ‘90s lo-fi they’re known for (at least I know that lo-fi is still in), they haven’t scrubbed their unsettling tension between dark lyrics and sunny music. The cleaner recording on Bend Beyond just makes frontman Jeremy Earl’s unhinged falsetto more intelligible, which in turn forefronts those incongruously gloomy lyrics. It’s like going to a party stoned with kids you haven’t seen in years and not being able to tell if it’s just you or if small talk is always veiling a bit of aggression.

This album definitely leans more toward the band’s live sound—the extended solos on the eponymous opener “Bend Beyond” are thicker, more jam-band-y than the intimate ambling of earlier albums. But songs like “Cali in a Cup” and “Lily” still have those summery California guitars and folk-pop hooks. Maybe it’s time to kill these sunshinethemed descriptors—I’ll just call this a late-September album: you still have a tan but you’re working your way up to double layers, readying yourself for the slow onset of seasonal affective disorder. Really, though, the best thing about Woods is their blend of pop, folk, and psychedelia, which gives them their weird back-porch America vibe, and that’s still there. I think we’re not supposed to care what Pitchfork says anymore, but if you do, they like “Bend Beyond” and “Is it Honest?”; personally, I like “Find Them Empty.” — CM

RUN YOUR MOUTH With a collection of headgear pieces, London-based artist Guo Cheng can mold, extrude, drill, vacuum, and lathe with his mouth.

In a video of his work “Mouth Factory (2011-2012),” named after the series of the five apparatuses, Cheng demonstrates the use of each tool. After putting in a mouthguard, Cheng inserts two prongs into his mouth and chews, allowing his contraption to transfer vertical pressure into the spiraling motion of a drill bit that punctures a wall.

With another device, Cheng uses a mold fit to the inside of his mouth to push soft material out of the mold with his tongue. To carve a door handle, Cheng wedges a piece of wood between two cylinders that rotate with the pull of a wire; he uses his mouth to hold the carving blade in place.

With a waterwheel strapped to his head, Cheng can use his blowing power to mold resin. With another contraption, he inhales air from one end of a cylinder whose other end, made of hot plastic, then forms a concavity. After Cheng finishes the vacuum molding, he eats cereal from this makeshift bowl, proving the device useful. If you’re intimidated by the prospect of working with your mouth, don’t worry—Cheng has also posted a ‘how-to’ video for a comprehensive mouth workout in which he gobbles up a string with a weight attached to its end.

In this series, Guo Cheng examines the mouth, a part of the body generally used for verbal and gestured communication (and kissing), as a tool of production. The project’s re-contextualization of the mouth allows the user’s mouth to communicate with objects instead of subjects and work toward an end goal typically incongruous with the traditional purpose of the body part. Standing alone, it’s unclear if Cheng’s study of human enhancement and industrialization of the body is affirmational or critical, but the meaning of the project begins to settle when set in the context of his previous work. With “Flipped World (2011),” Cheng created another piece of headgear that uses mirrors and pipes to reverse the visual and auditory input to the user. She stumbles around, trying to make sense of her surroundings.

Cheng’s absurd, disorienting work creates pastiche using basic systems of operation, confounding us and traditional modes of making at the same time. — CN

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

A GALLERY GIRL ON GALLERY GIRLS girls don’t rule the art world

by Ana Alvarez Illustration by Adriana Gallo girls, Bravo’s latest reality television venture, follows the trials of seven young women as they navigate the ‘New York Art World.’ They are gallery assistants, aspiring photographers, and art advisors. Some live off trust funds, others have part time jobs. Some are die hard Brooklynites, others never venture beyond the Upper East Side. Despite their differences, all of them aspire to create successful careers in the art world. Several critics have already argued that, as far as quality of content goes, Gallery Girls runs in the same league as Bravo’s reality television trademark The Real Housewives, except they’ve traded unfulfilled millionaires’ wives for unfulfilled 20-somethings and switched botox and charity events with ‘art’ and gallery openings. Audiences witness the banal and contrived interactions of the show’s protagonists—waiting to see who will shoot a dramatic look at who, and hoping that all of their white girl problems will be solved by the end of the episode.

Yet Gallery Girls is particularly well-situated to make insightful cultural commentary, for the ‘New York Art World’—an insulated network of artists, curators, gallery owners, collectors, art dealers, writers, and critics—is very much real. I was once a gallery girl, a title I am embarrassed to own up to after it’s become a reality television moniker and mockery. Yet I had a productive and fulfilling run as an unpaid gallery intern. Sure, there was sweeping and spackling, and one of my main duties was “updating the gallery’s social media output,” but for the most part, my job allowed me to meet and write about emerging artists, and I ended with an opportunity to curate my first New York show.

These are experiences that are totally lost in the show, mainly because there is little, if any, mention of actual art. To the girls of Gallery Girls, art is nothing but a justification to lead self-indulgent lifestyles and only becomes relevant when attached to a hefty price tag. The show conflates pursuing a career in the art world with leading a privileged party-girl lifestyle, taking for granted the very artworks that make working as a gallery assistant fulfilling and exciting. The girls of Gallery Girls are alienated from the art-making process and aloof to the very community that they claim they want to promote. Two of the girls, Chantal and Claudia, open a gallery

SEPTEMBER 21 2012

‘hybrid art space’ on the Lower East Side, which turns out to be less of an experimental creative hub and more of a high end fashion boutique with two or three paintings on the wall, none of which they ever sell. There’s never any interaction or conversation about which artists they work with or what type of art they want to feature in their space.

And when the girls of Gallery Girls do talk about art, the conversation is overlaid with tedium and ridicule. In one scene, Liz has dinner with gallery director Eli Klein, and complains when he talks excessively about Chinese artists. Note that Klein is her boss, and they work at a gallery dedicated to contemporary Chinese art. Perhaps the worst offender is Amy, who interns with an art advisor. While visiting an art fair, she is asked to pick a piece that reflects her personal taste. Instead of taking the time to learn about and appreciate lesser-known artists, Amy chooses a work

by Damien Hirst because he is “one of the most famous contemporary artists out there.” The only time the girls truly perk up at the sight of artwork is when they visit Philips de Pury for an auction. Of course the art that’s being sold isn’t shown or even talked about; they just get excited because it’s selling for so much money.

But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Gallery Girls is not where it clearly goes wrong, but where the show gets it right, especially in the gender norms that are reproduced in the show. Gallery Girls suggests that unless you are an attractive, thin, upper-class white female there’s no place for you in the entry echelon of the art world.

Although there’s little data on the gender ratio of unpaid gallery interns, the show reinforces the stereotype that working as a gallery assistant is a pink-collar job assigned only to attractive young females with little pay and minimal opportunity for advancement. This stereotype speaks true to the gender makeup of leading art world professions. Women are consistently only 15 percent of the names on Artforum’s, Art + Auction’s, and ArtReview’s annual “power lists,” and according to analysis of the current membership of the Association of Art Museum Directors, less than 30 percent of mid-size and large institutions are led by women.

The situation is even direr for female artists. The Guerilla Girls, a radical feminist group of artists founded

in 1985 devoted to drawing attention to continuing gender and racial inequity in creative professions, gathered some telling statistics: “Less than 3 percent of the artists in the Modern Art sections [of the Museum of Modern Art] are women, but 83% of the nudes are female.” An article in The Economist titled “The Price of Being Female” retold an all too common incident in New York auction houses: “The proceeds on all the works by women artists in the Christie’s sale tallied up to a mere $17m—less than 5% of the total and not even half the price achieved that night by a single picture of two naked women by Yves Klein.” That said, if men overwhelmingly hold power in the art world, both as artists and as art professionals, watching Gallery Girls raises the question—where are the gallery guys?

Yet, compared to other art world careers, the gallery scene is a particularly viable space for successful women. In 2006, art critic Jerry Saltz found that of the 125 well-known New York galleries, 42 percent were owned or co-owned by women, a surprisingly even ratio. Female gallerists have proven that they are able to foster art world success despite facing continuously unequal standards. As an aspiring female gallerist and curator, the most disappointing result of Gallery Girls is that although there are scores of successful women in the art world, it is over-privileged and talentless girls who get on TV. ANA ALVAREZ B’13 is

more of a guerrilla girl than a gallery

girl.

ARTS // 14

PEER REVIEWED RAP Friction in Fur Coats

by Eric Axelman Illustration by Charis Loke

“people have an idea of what scientists are like, and how scientists are supposed to act, and how scientists are supposed to convey information,” said Dr. Jeremy Long, assistant professor of Biology at San Diego State University.

“Hip-hop is about as far removed from that image as you can get.” He should know. A rapper himself, he has two tracks on YouTube—one, titled “What Invert,” is set to the beat of TI’s “Whatever You Like.” The other is a recording of an academic talk at an annual meeting for Marine Ecologists delivered as a rap, despite serious discouragement from his peers. The night before he was going to rap his talk, “several colleagues I respect immensely were trying to talk me out of it. So I was totally freaked out, because I was like, ‘there are potential implications of this,’” such as risks to his chances for tenure in an increasingly competitive academic environment. He ended up going through with the rap, and the same people that discouraged him congratulated him after they saw him perform. Long said that scientists interested in creative forms of outreach are “uncertain about the consequences of doing this [kind of stuff]. If we see more of us are doing this, that we’re ok, and we’re getting tenure and all this stuff, maybe it’ll fuel the beast.” Long has been rapping about science since 2008, and his persona as a rapper is widely known in field of marine ecology. He also requires undergraduates in his classes to make music videos of their own, and he sees this as having a larger influence on the dissemination of science than his own videos. “It’s more about me guiding students on the style now. In the past few years, I’ve made one video, and my students have made ten or fifteen,” said Long.

Long believes much of the humor in science rap comes from peoples’ reaction to the juxtaposition of science and rap. “Science has such a specific language,” said Zach Bornstein B ‘12, “a specific way you’re allowed to write, and a very specific template in which you’re allowed to convey information.” Bornstein, a neuroscience concentrator and former leader of Brown’s Out of Bounds comedy group, now works for Late Night with David Letterman and does stand up comedy in New York. Bornstein is interested in what triggers the human brain to find a joke, song, or act funny, and how that affects retention and memory. “I think that what’s cool about scientists rapping about science is that if they’re doing it earnestly, you’re making science accessible to people in a format that they’re used to. It’s way easier to listen to a 4-minute song than to read a paper in Neuron [the neuroscience journal] or something, because you have to learn that language, whereas more people are familiar with rap language,” said Bornstein.

When scientists rap, they oftentimes become increasingly visible while their content does not. For Long, this

15 // SCIENCE

isn’t good enough: “I get responses, and often times they are ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’” he said.

“Showing that we’re human is important…but I do think that we need to take it to the next level and really try to get a message across.” To Professor Long, this is where there is room for improvement in the field of science rap. “I want to teach. I want to teach the public about science, not just that scientists can be funny.” It’s unclear which scientific field has the most rappers, or how science raps are received by the public. However, if you do a YouTube search of “rap + [any scientific field],” you’re guaranteed to find pages upon pages of uploaded videos. Some only have a few hundred views, but may have 10’s of thousands, and some are in the millions. One, the “Large Hadron Rap,” is going on 7.5 million.

Scientists are not the only ones rapping about science.

Underground and alternative hip-hop artists have often embraced science related themes and language to evoke a certain aura and feeling in their music. In “Chemical Calisthenics,” Blackalicious raps that, “I’m calcium plus potassium, magnesium…style aroma is scientific, the lyrical fuse would be connected/ to teach you chemical calisthenics.”

In these lines, and in using the phrase “chemical calisthenics,” the rap group compares and associates themselves with the power and lightning-like energy of chemistry. In Mos Def ’s “Mathematics,” the rapper writes, “you wanna learn how to rhyme? you better learn how to add / it’s mathematics.” In the song he views the world as a series of statistics, such as “69 billion in the last twenty years / spent on national defense but folks still live in fear,” and “the system break man child and women into figures/two columns for who is, and who ain’t niggas.” Mos Def believes that if you don’t look at the world quantitatively to see larger patterns of injustice, you’ll miss their existence.

GZA of Wu-Tang Clan fame is coming out with an album about physics, and it will be a physics album through and through. GZA’s explanation for why he has decided to change his subject matter dramatically: he thinks the universe is beautiful. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, GZA commented, “[People are] drawn to [science,] but they don’t know why they’re drawn to it.” Zach Bornstein believes that GZA, and others like him, are trying to help people drawn to science connect to it in a meaningful way. “What they’re doing that’s cool is making science accessible to people who know the language of rap, but who would like to know the content of science,” Bornstein argues. Marco Vitali, a violinist who is helping to score the album, states in the Wall Street Journal that, “overpowering ideas [like] the grandeur of the fact that the universe was born in a millionth of a second, in this explosion that

created billions of stars. How do we make a record feel like that?”

Talking about the rap community’s response to his album, GZA told the Wall Street Journal, “They don’t get the idea. Because rappers are so one-dimensional, so narrowminded, it comes off as corny.” The one-dimensionality of mainstream rap that GZA talks about is one of the main reasons science rap music can be so funny, Bornstein says: “where you’re using the rap format to talk about things that are high brow, you’re bringing to light the fact that rap usually talks about really stupid things. There are of course people who rap about significant things,” but Bornstein argues these people are the minority in mainstream hip-hop.

Whether or not most science rappers are making fun of the genre is unclear. When I spoke to Jeremy Long, he was sincere in saying, “I hope I’m not making fun of hip-hop.” On the other hand, Bornstein also believes that using science in rap can be extremely positive for the genre, as it can “help expand the umbrella of what rap’s allowed to deal with.”

Although GZA’s decision to make a science album is a major step toward making the ‘genre’ of science rap larger, for now, the emphasis seems to be on professionalizing the field. Scientists like Tyron Hayes are writing clever, funny raps, that truly tell the story of their research, and the GZA is undertaking a good deal of research himself, doing serious fact checking with Neil deGrasse Tyson (the famed astrophysicist) and a number of famed marine biologists.

Both artists are passionate about what they do, and think that science rap can expand their profession’s horizon. I’ll be happy just to hear GZA rap about whales—he has an album about the ocean planned.

ERIC AXELMAN B’12.5 doesn’t

know whether he wants a PhD

or a record deal.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

What The Fuck?

Marc Maron on Finding One’s Audience Interview by Drew Dickerson Illustration by Diane Zhou

in 2009, standup comedian Marc Maron was fired from the radio and media network Air America after it cancelled his political webcast “Breakroom Live with Maron & Seder.” The company forgot to take away his keys to the building. With the help of an ex-co-worker and without permission, Maron began work on a new project, a project over which he would have total creative control. So began “WTF with Marc Maron”—widely regarded as one of the best, if not the best, comedy podcasts out there. In the years since, listeners have followed Maron in his move from New York to California, heard him kvetch from hotel rooms across the country, and seen him grow from a deep-cuts road comic to one of the industry’s leading figures. From his Los Angeles home (dubbed “The Cat Ranch” for its many rescues and strays), Maron has interviewed Conan O’Brien, Ben Stiller, Louis C.K., and many other stars in the field. He was also recently featured in Mike Birbiglia’s film Sleepwalk with Me, Sundance Film Festival darling and pet project of Ira Glass (B`82). Mr. Maron spoke to the Independent via phone.

The Independent: I know you have a show coming out with IFC relatively soon in which you highlight your podcast and play a “Marc Maron” character—correct?

Marc Maron: Yeah, we’re writing it. It’s coming out next year. But we’re in the process of finishing up ten scripts for ten episodes. We’re going to start shooting October 1st.

Indy: I was curious what the format was for that. Is it like a Dr. Katz-style show where you guys are highlighting lightly fictionalized versions of people in the comedy community or— MM: No. No. It’s more of a single-camera half hour scripted comedy based on my life. I do do a podcast in my garage and I think we’re going to be using guests playing themselves in more of the way Larry Sanders used guests, as part of the texture of my life. Some of them will be engaged in narrative elements on a couple of episodes. But mostly it’s about me being a guy who’s brought back from failure and despair and a couple of marriages trying to manage the life that he’s put together for himself.

Indy: Yeah. Absolutely. I have to ask because I’m sort of weirdly fascinated by Brown in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, especially with people connected with the Semiotics department: how was working with Ira Glass?

MM: His interview with me was surprising and exciting for me. And I didn’t work with him too much on Sleepwalk With Me. He’s a sweet guy. You know, he’s championed my show, which I appreciate enormously. Because I never saw myself really integrating into the precious and delicate world of the NPR mindset. But I think that because of his support I was accepted in a way I never thought I would be. There are a couple radio channels that run “WTF” and we produce a series from the original show that’s re-edited a little bit for NPR. He’s an interesting guy, man. I’m just glad I got him to say “fuck” on my show. I think that my relationship with him has helped both of us in some weird way. There’s still some things I’m curious about—like what’s going on in there. Radio’s a very intimate medium so you really feel like you get to know somebody. With Ira, and

SEPTEMBER 21 2012

I’m sure like with all of us, his public personality is very raw and real because of the medium. That makes him very interesting. Also he’s an incredibly hard worker and he’s very meticulous about the way he produces what he does, whereas I’m sort of the opposite in terms of preparation and delivery and how I handle interviews. Thank God I have the guy I work with who edits it and makes the show sound like a radio show.

Indy: It feels like—and correct me if I’m wrong—in the past two or three years there’s been an uptick in semi-autobiographical material with things like Louie and Sleepwalk With Me. Is this due to a different conception or perception of what the comedic performer is these days?

MM: I don’t know if you could really make that argument.

I think that because of the explosion in different avenues to go with film and with television, I think that people who at one time would have had a much more difficult time surfacing in mainstream culture are able to do it and find people that enjoy what they do. I think that if you look back at television, since the beginning of television there’s been comedian-driven sitcoms. It was a big thing. Like in the ‘70s where a comedian—the television networks found it compelling when they brought their own area and their own point of view and their own ability to do comedy. So I don’t know if that’s unique today. I think that the difference now is that people can do it almost exclusively on their own terms if they partner up with the right people or get the right support. And I think that is what’s different. Artists can now generate and find their audience. If they have what it takes or if they have what people want or they find the people that want them, they really have a certain type of creative control that I think is unprecedented.

Indy: Semi-related: I was looking at your keynote speech from the Montreal Just For Laughs Festival in 2011. It seems that—looking at both your speech and Patton Oswalt’s this past year—there’s a lot of volatility in the industry and that non-content-creators are in trouble. I was wondering: do you have an idea of what things are going to look like in even two years, when people my own age are probably going to start entering the field?

MM: I can’t tell the future. I certainly didn’t plan—in any way—what happened to me and what is happening to me, the results of my podcast, or anything else. It certainly had a certain amount of desperation and the timing was right and people enjoy what I do. Ultimately two things will rise to the top: talent that’s handled properly and things that people want. Now, obviously, they’re not always the same. I would expect that what people want, in all its ugly manifestations, will often dwarf talent in its ability to find its way. I guess what I’m saying is: sure. People that don’t generate content are probably doing themselves a disservice.

But there’s still no guarantee that will yield a career or even the attention that that person wants. It’s just the way it is.

Indy: You spoke just now about who winds up being successful or what ends up rising to the top. Do you ever feel that you’re curating or vetting comics that the layman or non-comedy-nerd wouldn’t know otherwise? Do you feel that responsibility?

MM: No, I mean, I don’t think that my speech was really hung up on content. I think that Patton sort of celebrated the idea that everybody’s capable of expressing themselves because technology is so accessible. I think that really what I was talking about was the life choice of a comic and also the job of a comic. A comedian is very fleeting…there’s a fleeting success to it because relevance is sort of hard to hold on to. But I find that I’m interested in people that are interesting to me. And I’m glad that I’ve been able to interview a lot of younger comics despite the fact that I may reject them or feel threatened by them given my status as a veteran. But these are guys I think are funny generally, 99 percent of the time. I don’t feel like it’s part of my job helping them break out. I’m not Johnny Carson. Somebody that I talk to really has to be able to talk to me for an hour or so. And I’m thrilled that it sort of functions as a sort of way for newer comics to be heard and seen. But also it’s sort of a community bonding-device. A lot of comics listen to my show. And they get to listen to people that they may have never have heard talk before or they’re just able to get caught up with old friends. I like that element of it. Does that answer that question?

INTERVIEWS // 16

The Dead Thing in the Backyard

by Noah Prestwich Illustration by Jehane Samaha

Nobody speaks to the dead thing in the backyard.

The dog chews on it. Slobbers on it. Tries to lick it back to life. No use. That thing is dead. It wants to be dead maybe.

The dead thing in the backyard touches everything it can.

The ground. The grass. A million flies. Their fly babies.

Dog fur. Dog skin.

Every thing it touches becomes part of it. Becomes part of the dead thing in the backyard. It almost got to be part of me too. But I’m not touching that thing. No way.

I spoke to the dead thing in the backyard and my words fell into it and got stuck in its rotting bloodness. The words meant less against the bloodness that seemed to make the dead thing dead. I saw them fall into the maggot mouths attached to the maggots that call the dead thing their home, home and food all in one. Living in their dinner.

I try not to play with my food. I try not to live in it.

I told my mother about the dead thing in the backyard and the dog and their relationship that I find somewhat unholy and twisted in a deep, dark, and very real sense. She pushed down my tongue with her thumb. Mother made me drool.

That’s what you get for talking to the dead.

I said why does the dog know the dead thing but I can’t?

That dog has fleas in its hair that tell it nightly what it wants and truly really needs to know and I can’t say the same for you.

Sometimes my mother speaks in a heavily accented Morse code between vowels. She spells her intentions in clicks that flick on my brain reminding me nightly of fleas on the dead thing. I wonder if they made speed bumps for hearing. I know I would. Spitting while speaking is not uncommon in the home area.

When punctuation speaks, it’s hard to stop the word.

That’s how I found out I never had any fleas. Something people should know about me. Something I should know about me but until this point had not been privy to. I’m glad I learned this truth from my mother sooner than later.

I never had any fleas. Not yet.

The dead thing in the backyard must get lonely with its only friend being the dog and they’re not really even friends, just assistants. Acquaintances, working together for something. I guess it’s got all those maggots. They must be not so fun to talk to. I wonder if they conjugate their weakest verbs. I would but that’s me and what do I know?

I never had any fleas. I wasn’t one though I was once in a dream I had.

My dog is special though.

I’ve imagined his voice against the back of my eye.

Fluttering. Crawling. Always slipping. I. I. Stillness does not belong to my dog. He’s a full-bred dog from south of the border and we call him Burley. My grandfather named him right before he died. Before my grandfather died. His last words to me were “I” and “this” and “under my skin.”

Sometimes I see a secret in the dog that hints at other voices present in our lives in the backyard. I think the dead thing sees it too. At least if it can. It probably can’t see seeing as it is dead. Then again, I could see how death could have moments of sight. I’ve certainly seen moments of death in my life and I’m not dead. Not yet. Not yet I’m not. Not today.

Not now.

(And I do. I really do. But I’m not the only one. Something else here is listening and it’s listening loud.)

Translation comes easier this time. Night. This Night helps translation. Family recipe.

She speaks slowly so I understand. I’m writing this down.

I’m writing down my mother’s words and I’m listening. So is the dead thing in the backyard. So is the dog. Where are the maggots? They’re in the dead thing. Okay, we’re ready.

The story she goes on to tell is old and sad. Full of cats and old women and sailors and dirty wood and disease. There are good parts and we laugh at the funny parts, me and my father who does not speak but only laughs now. Cannot speak, can only laugh. My laughing father and I, we can laugh now. My mother, she goes on clicking— There was a different place. Time. I would feel—I could touch—my taste— My father is smiling and holding her knee. He is from my country. He married this foreigner and he is proud of this.

A picture of it. A realistic photograph of this event; you can find it on our wall in this home area. He wears a hat.

She, a beautiful gown.

There’s a secret in my dog and it has to do with the dead thing but I can’t work it out. There’s a reason for the rubbing. There’s a soundness to the paw against the blood and it makes my mouth dry. We’re all dry-mouthed around here. Except when we’re spitting. How do you keep the water inside? We’re losing it with all this droughting.

(He does not speak ever to anybody. Only laughs now. A quiet, squealing laugh. He’s been known to snort at maximum hilarity. My old man, when will you go? Where did grandfather go? “I” and “this” and “under my skin.”)

Neighbor and madman Douglass Freckle teases my dog with firecracky boobie traps designed to make crazed the canine mind. I told my mother but she feels bad for Douglass Freckle and his tendencies. She says-

Dead things in the backyard, they didn’t try to touch back then there. Instead we touched them. We wanted to. Then the dead things in the backyard. More than just one dead thing.

And they all wanted to get touched. We couldn’t help ourselves and we couldn’t help them. We knew very little then there. So small. So. Talkless.

One day he’ll be the death of us.

I said why don’t we go kill him then? She packed her thumb down on my tongue until the spit came up to my teeth. Made me gush. What a funny picture. I can remember that picture for when I need a laugh.

Mother speaks to me presently accented as she sometimes does and I translate with my Morse code dictionary but it comes out slow and strange like—

Click.

I feel the backyard pull me from my bed. I feel the deadness that was in it. I feel the thingness that was dead there. I feel these things now against my mother’s transcription. Dots. Polka-dotted words. Dash—A code from her country. A story of her past. Father laughs. The one he uses for memories and listening. No snorts. Just guffaw.

Never touch that thing. Never touch that dead thing.

This Mother speaks to me and to my father but not to the dead thing in the backyard. No one speaks to the dead thing in the backyard. Only me and I learned my lesson. I’m not getting stuck in the bloodness with my words all rotten and empty. Fooled me once. Where did my mother’s language go?

There’s a talkless rule about this old house. No one told me but I don’t have to be told to know.

I say no I would never do that.

Get I Good. That’s good.

Want When I Came I think my mother is trying to tell me about her country, which I have only heard her speak of in sleep so I say: Yes, tell me. Tell me the story of your country. I want to know.

17 // LITERARY

But these words. They’ve fallen. Drooled. Smooshed.

Deep down into the dead thing in the backyard. On dog hair. On grass. Against the bloodness, all this is rotten.

Too squished for code. Too dark for ink. Hollow breath.

Maggot mouth.

Click.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THE LIST September 21–27

hierarchy

//monday the 24th// depictions of conflict: documenting violence in colombia 3pm // watson institute (111 thayer st) a reading, conversation & book signing with sibylla brodzinsky and max schoening, co-editors of throwing stones at the moon: narratives from colombians displaced by violence. sun foot, black pus, dungeon broads 9pm // machines with magnets // $ did you like lightning bolt saturday? did you miss them and feel demoralized? black pus is brian gibson’s recent project. bring earplugs. or confident abandon. or both. //friday the 21st//

//tuesday the 25th//

ladyfest 4pm–12am // machines with magnets (pawtucket) // $12 “check out astronomically phenomenal bands, get in on fabulous workshops, and soak up the ripping vibes.” a weekend celebrating & encouraging creativity/community among women & non-gender-conforming persons. proceeds go to girls rock! rhode island. runs through sunday. tickets at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/272598

open life drawing 6–8:30pm // as220 drop in with materials. leave with art.

libertarias!

7pm // libertalia (280 broadway st) // donate libertalia’s weekly movie night to support providence industrial workers of the world (a grassroots, democratic labor union). yermedea raw 8pm // leeds theatre // $7–15 erik ehn’s hybrid pupper and theatre performance that links medea & yerma in a single narrative. runs through sunday & 9.27–9.30. tickets at https://www.vendini.com/ticketsoftware.html?e=379316a3a64f5e075c82448 fb59b6a56&t=tix. //saturday the 22nd// uproar in pawtucket 12&2pm // pawtucket public library premiere of the documentary about fanny the elephant, beloved inhabitant of pawtucket slater park zoo from 1958–1993. the second documentary in the series elephants in rhode island (!?). a thirty-minute q&a with cast & crew will follow each screening.

35th annual ri heritage day festival 12–6pm // 282 north main st “travel around the world in a day”— cultural displays, traditional foods, craft demonstrations & exhibits from more than 11 different countries. puffers fest ii 2pm–12am // oak st // $5 before 5pm; $10 after a slew of sonic weirdos, outside, for you. lightning bolt closes...lightning bolt!!! //sunday the 23rd// slam shop 5:15–7pm // as220 fourth sundays at as220 mean spoken word poetry. come workshop and be workshopped.

beatriz da costa 7pm // risd auditorium a digital+media lecture. da costa is an interdisciplinary artist, working at the intersection of art, science, engineering & politics. her work takes the form of public participatory interventions, locative media, conceptual tool building and critical writing. the quebec students strike back!

7pm // salomon 001 (brown) a talk by guillaume legault, a leader of the student union behind last spring’s historic student strike. 3/4 of all students in quebec protested tuition hikes & the law that outlawed their fight. rad dad. //wednesday the 26th// film screening: 300 7pm // salomon 001 (brown) the screening will be followed by commentaries by brown professors, examining the themes and historical basis of the movie. oh boy. keith rowe, shawn greenlee, stephan moore 8pm // risd auditorium an evening of electroacoustic improvisation. rowe, a free improvisation tabletop guitarist and painter, headlines. greenlee is a sound and electronic media artist interested in generating digital audio from visual patterns. moore is a composer, improvisor, audio artist, sound designer, teacher, and curator affliated with brown’s meme program. //thursday the 27th// lynn tillman: a reading 2:30pm // mccormack theater (70 brown st) the novelist lynn tillman will read from her work as part of the writers on writing reading series. design the night: you are here 5–10pm // risd museum of art fourth thursdays are free thursdays. for students. lively discussions with artists & designers, hands-on art-making, a magic lantern show, live music & more. in the know? email listtheindy@gmail.com

this da y in list ery 1937 j.r.r. to lkien’s the hob bit is publi shed.