The College Hill Independent V.29 N.01

the college hill a brown/risd weekly september 12, 2014 | V29 N1

independent

managing editors Greg Nissan, Lili Rosenkranz, Alex Sammon news Elias Bresnick, Sebastian Clark, Kyle Giddon metro Sophie Kasakove, Cherise Morris, Rick Salamé arts Lisa Borst, Eli Pitegoff, Erin Schwartz features Jackie Gu, Matt Marsico, Sara Winnick TECHNOLOGY Patrick McMenamin SPORTS Zeve Sanderson FOOD Sam Bresnick literary Kim Sarnoff, Leah Steinberg EPHEMERA mark Benz X Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan, Pierie Korostoff list Polina Godz, Megan Hauptman design + illustration Casey Friedman, Ming Zhen Cover Editor Jade Donaldson Senior editor Tristan Rodman Staff WriterS Pranay Bose, Will Fesperman, Stephanie Hayes, Mika Kligler, Jamie Packs STAFF ILLUSTRATORs Andres Chang, Amy Chen web Edward Friedman COPY Mary Frances Gallagher, Paige Morris BUSINESS Haley Adams Cover Art Jade Donaldson Mvp Ming Zhen

VOLUME 29 | ISSUE 1

news 2 Week in Isolation

kyle giddon & sebastian clark

3 Risen Shine elias bresnick

METRO

5 Early Returns rick salamé

7 Chain Gang mika kligler

ARTS 12 Gallery Pals erin schwartz

13 Boyz 2 Men lisa borst

LIT 16 To the Ocean

SPORTS

fROM THE EDITOR S

11 Get that Bacon zeve sanderson

FEATURES 9 Red Light j.g.

FoOD 15 Among the Stars

If it’s floating, poke it first. Chances are it’s dead, but the pond scum may have globbed on so thick that the small signs of life you’d usually notice–rising chest, twitching paw–don’t surface. You’re probably thinking, “My Airbnb rating is fucked. I’ll never get that loft in Copenhagen.” But here’s the catch: beavers die all the time. Would your hubris rise so high that you might think you had any part in this cosmic game of give and take? Gather some twigs and build a pyre. Send this chomping champion to sea and watch the flames rise into the Many Heavens, a slice of red tucked between briny blue and celestial periwinkle. Someone say a prayer.

sam bresnick & alex sammon

The Anglicans: “From asses to asses, bust to bust...”

EPHEMERA

Rick Springfield: “I loved her like a sister...”

14 Chiseled mark benz

X 18 Lunar Luau

The Seven Seas: “We didn’t much care for the beaver.”

And what are we to make of this cosmic chorus? We, who eulogize even what is living, who count death in number, who grill cheeses? Is there meaning in a beaver’s death, when we ourselves are so covered in pond scum we can’t see the air in front of us?

-GN, LR, AS

layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

leah steinberg

P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 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.

THEINDY.ORG II @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN ISOLATION

by Sebastian Clark and Kyle Giddon

For some, the summer was long and lonely. While most of you rollicked in sunlit fields to the sweet sound of harmoniums, others languished in bleak seclusion. For a taste of the abject, we offer you a week in isolation.

SPACE ODDITY

HERE WE GO AGAIN

Curious little kids have been putting lizards in glass jars for years. It was a simple numbers game that some percentage of these kids grew up to become rocket scientists, and it should surprise no one that they thought to themselves: let’s do the same thing, but in space.

On July 19, Russia’s federal space agency, Roscosmos, launched a satellite containing a number of biological experiments, including tests of mushroom growth in low-gravity conditions and a study of solar radiation on moth eggs.

It also contained five live geckos, whose stated mission was to fuck.

The gecko cohabitants—one male, four female—entered Earth’s orbit as part of an attempt to study the effects of weightlessness on copulation.

Delicately placed cameras charted every salacious shimmy aboard their satellite love-nest. But with no live video feed, questions about what exactly happened in the zero-gravity lizard orgy had to wait until the spacecraft’s return. Was the experimentation a smashing success? Was the male gecko a real slimeball?

Alas, coitus interruptus. After only a few sensual spins around Earth, the geckos’ satellite lost contact with mission control back in Moscow. Yet the geckos had no choice but to voyage on, hurtling through space, abandoned, utterly alone, their only comfort found in each other’s small slippery bodies.

Roscosmos tracked down the rogue satellite a few days later, with the promise of recovering the spacecraft’s footage. This week, after 44 days in space, the satellite was returned to Earth and its capsule opened.

All five geckos, according to Moscow officials, were found dead.

“We can say with confidence that they died at least a week before the landing because their bodies were partly mummified,” a project scientist told Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency. It is unclear if the mummification was caused by the geckos’ demise or was some kind of fetish thing.

So when we’re all up in space, having spacesex in our Wall-E-inspired floating recliners, let’s not forget the sacrifice of these star-crossed lovers. In the meantime, with anxieties over Russian actions at a local maximum, it wouldn’t be entirely shocking for NASA to come up with some kind of response to their Russian rivals.

Once upon a time, Stewart Brand, the iconic founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, was in attendance at the world’s first Hackers Conference in 1984.

Sitting next to Steve Wozniack, whose infamy needs no explanation, Brand turned and let out a rambling spiel that bore no relation to the conversation.

Speaking as if the word of God were flowing through him, one sequence of syllables stood clear amongst the rest: “information wants to be free.” With a transcriber at hand, this dubious phrase was recorded, published, and then later, republished. Before we knew it, utterance became ideology, and we now stand at the foot of a never-so-muddled debate on censorship, with a doctrine that has bred a libertarian spirit in which all information is mindlessly understood as the same, something quantifiable in kilabytes, not regarded in terms of its content.

Facilitated by Silicon Valley’s crafty invention of the e-book, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf came to top Amazon’s Propaganda & Political Psychology chart earlier this year. Costing $3.56 a copy, Hitler’s incoherent drivel now circulates amongst the masses alongside Tori Spelling’s Spelling It Like It Is. It’s actually a shame Tori wasn’t around in the Weimar days to offer Hitler a lesson or two in grammar. It would make the thing at least readable, even if still not emotionally comprehensible.

That should never happen. As Martin Amis recently wrote in the Finiancial Times on the nature of Hitler’s evil: “the facts, set down in a historiography of tens of thousands of volumes, are not in the slightest doubt; but they remain in some sense unbelievable, or beyond belief, and cannot quite be assimilated.” It follows Primo Levi’s belief that to understand what Hitler did is to justify it. Understanding is an act of empathizing, identifying.

This is the fear that preys on the mind of the German government as 2015 nears. Mein Kampf’s copyright is now held by the Bavarian state, who banned it in Germany and Austria following Hitler’s demise in 1945. But, theoretically, now, 70 years after the author’s death, the copyright will expire and literally anyone will be able to publish it.

Whether Germans like it or not, the voice of Hitler will be emerging from state-imposed isolation, opening itself up to mass comprehension.

Its impact will hinge on how we decide to manage, if at all, the flow of its content. How can neo-Nazis be prevented from exploiting its redistribution? One proposition is to publish it only alongside a critical, analytical text, making clear its evils. But, when today’s digital libertarians feel that worthy ideals are being so readily upbraided in cases like that of James Risen, will they break from their ideology to allow the censoring of Mein Kampf? As Bavaria’s Interior Minister Winfried Bausback said earlier this month: “the entire demo-

Like, say, lizards fucking on the moon. –KG

cratic world is watching Germany on this one.” -SC

SEPTEMBER 12 2014

NEWS □ 02

PRESSING THE LIMITS OF FREE PRESS In June of 1972, two little-known journalists working for The Washington Post were assigned to report on a burglary at Watergate, an office building in downtown Washington, DC that happened to house Democratic Party headquarters. Though it appeared they had no more evidence than reporters at any other news outlet, over the next two years, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein revealed a series of “dirty tricks” the Nixon administration had employed during its reelection campaign—most notably bugging the offices of political opponents. As the reporting duo continued to unearth a wealth of incriminating evidence that would later lead to Nixon’s resignation, the public marveled at their ability to almost miraculously discover scandals well before the FBI. The thing was: Woodward had an in.

As would later be revealed in the duo’s 1974 book, All the President’s Men, FBI Associate Director Mark Felt – codenamed “Deep Throat” – had been leaking classified information to the pair from the beginning of the fiasco. Bernstein and Woodward refused to name, or even admit the existence of a confidential source within the government until after the scandal had ended. Without Felt’s contribution, it’s unclear just how many of the crimes committed at Watergate would have been brought to light.

Whistleblowing has come to be broadly recognized as an act of courage in recent years. President Barack Obama, who ran on a platform of increased government transparency, tacitly endorsed whistleblowers in his 2007 Obama-Biden Plan, stating that, “Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled.”

With the vaunted goal of transparency in mind, it may come as a surprise to find that, the Obama administration has prosecuted more leakers in its two terms than all other presidential administrations combined. The recent Edward Snowden case marks the eighth time since 2009 that charges have been filed against government agents under the Espionage Act, compared with just three total during all other presidencies since the act was established in 1917. While it may be true that the president wants more information out in the open, as for the secrets he wants hidden, he seems to reserve a particularly vicious protective urge. Speaking about the Obama administration in a report dated October 10, 2013, former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie wrote, “The war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration.”

Other players in government, such as attorney general Eric Holder, have come to the defense of the Obama administration, noting that the digital age has made it easier than ever before to release vast amounts of information all at once. With the ability to download hundreds of thousands of classified documents onto a disk drive, as in the 2010 case of Bradley Manning, leaking information has never been easier. +++ All this has led up to the case of James Risen B’77, a New York Times reporter who is currently being subpoenaed by federal prosecutors for information in a case against Jeffrey Sterling. Sterling, a former CIA official, has been indicted by the government for leaking details of a failed operation against Iran’s nuclear program. Sterling’s leaks appeared in Risen’s 2007 book, State of War, prompting the government to request Risen’s testimony against Sterling in court. Though the facts of the case seem relatively mundane, this case is a monumental moment in the fight for the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press.

For seven years, Mr. Risen has doggedly refused to identify his source for the controversial chapter in his book. Citing Reporter’s Privilege, a set of loosely defined laws that protect a reporter’s right to keep his sources confidential, Risen simply refuses to budge.

At this point, with all his legal options exhausted, Risen says he’s willing to face jail time if need be, even claiming to have picked out the books he’ll take along with him. As he said in a recent interview for the Times, the choice is simple: “Give up everything I believe in—or go to jail.”

For the journalistic community, the stakes are enormous: if journalists can’t guarantee protection to confidential sources, information available to the public about government misconduct will undoubtedly decrease. If “confidential” sources are unconvinced that their names will remain anonymous, it follows that far fewer people will be willing to risk their careers and even their freedom in order to point out flaws in the system.

To this effect, Daniel Ellsberg, the legendary leaker of the Pentagon Papers, wrote in a petition defending Risen, “The pursuit of Risen is a warning to potential sources that journalists cannot promise them confidentiality for disclosing Executive Branch criminality, recklessness, deception, unconstitutional policies or lying us into war.”

It has been repeatedly documented that the government classifies too much information. Take, for example, a recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice called “Reducing Overclassification Through Accountability.” The report shows that a vast number of secrets protected by the classification system pose no threat to national safety. As can be seen in many of the leaks released by Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, often the information that remains classified is simply the type which, if revealed, would merely embarrass the United States.

In a statement supporting Risen’s refusal to cooperate with the governmet, Delphine

03

□

NEWS

Hagland, the director of Reporters Without Borders’ Washington office, said elegantly, “Freedom of the press is the most important freedom, it is the freedom that allows us to verify the existence of all other freedoms.”

While Risen’s case and the call for assured confidentiality of sources have picked up widespread support across the nation—a notable collection of more than 20 Pulitzer Prize winners have come to his defense—the issue at hand is more ambiguous than it would appear at first glance.

In a 2013 news conference, Obama explained that “leaks related to national security…can put men and women in uniform that I’ve sent into the battlefield at risk. I don’t think the American people would expect me, as Commander-in-Chief, not to be concerned about information that might compromise their missions or might get them killed.”

The Post agreed in an editorial, stating that “there is a core of true national security information that does need to be confidential… [I]f reporters were completely immune from testifying, those laws and rules would be toothless. Without the key witness, many leaks—no matter how damaging—would be impossible to prove, and even information that all agree is properly classified would be impossible to protect.”

The problem, then, is that if the government can’t compel journalists to hand over the identity of leakers, both whistleblowers and traitors alike will have equal opportunity to release classified information without fear of punishment, as the seal of Reporter’s Privilege would prove absolute. +++ The current state of affairs sets up an interesting, if intractable, question: will the nation set a precedent for confidential sources to be revealed, diminishing the number of these sources and trusting the government not to abuse its own power; or will we allow insiders to publish national secrets with impunity and threaten to compromise the covert nature of agencies like the CIA and FBI? The roadblock to answering the problem is this: the essential difference between whistleblowing and treason relies on a qualitative assessment. Take the extremely polarizing case of Edward Snowden, for example. While the Obama administration and many Americans view Snowden’s recent revelations as treasonous criminality, a good portion of US citizens on the other side view him as a heroic figure bent on revealing the NSA’s wastefulness and abuse of power. One side sees Snowden as a criminal for breaking the law; the other side believes his breaking of the law exposes the very illegitimacy of law itself. Peeling back the histrionic rhetoric used by both sides—“traitor” versus “hero,” and nothing in between—exposes the most essential problem: how can a coherent and fair justice system be put in place for whistleblowers who commit crimes in the interest of justice?

A law does exist for this purpose. Known as the Whistleblowers Protection Act, the law offers protection for government employees who report misconduct. Under the law, whistleblowers are encouraged to report offenses to the investigative Office of Special Counsel. But with a track record of only three out of 56 cases brought before the committee resulting in a positive verdict for the plaintifs, the act does not appear to offer genuine sanctuary for whistelblowers.

Where can we draw the line between whistleblowers and traitors? Should we judge each new perpetrator by his intentions or by the effect of his actions? Is it possible to come up with a governing body that can adjudicate issues of whistleblowing without an inherent bias? +++ In a statement given to the news outlet Pro Publica, the Justice Department claimed it doesn’t target whistleblowers who follow the rules, but admitted that it “cannot sanction or condone federal employees who knowingly and willingly disclose classified information to the media or others not entitled to receive such information.” In a sly showing of equivocation, the DOJ’s statement would seem to imply that the government condones whistleblowers even as it condemns whistleblowing.

With all that said, the pressing question remains: does the case of Jeffrey Sterling and James Risen amount to whistleblowing? Decide for yourself. In his 2006 book, State of War, Risen details a botched CIA plan to delay the progress of Iran’s nuclear program. In a story more far-fetched and mystifying than the plot of Showtime’s hit TV show “Homeland,” CIA operatives gave a Russian defector phony nuclear blueprints to pass along to Iranian officials. The hope was that the Iranians would assume the blueprints for a “TBA 480 high-voltage block” were legitimate and would waste crucial resources constructing a bomb that, when detonated, would offer nothing more than a tantalizing fizzle. “Operation Merlin,” as it was called, quickly ran amok, as the Russian chosen to pass along the blueprints proved unreliable. Hoping to hedge his bets by carrying out orders and not angering Iran, he tipped off Iranian officials in a handwritten letter stating that the plans were, in fact, fake. The pay off? With detailed knowledge of what exactly in the blueprints was phony and what was authentic, it’s possible that Iranian scientists were able to use what was genuine in the prints to their advantage. Like giving someone a car without an engine, the US had still offered up valuable information on some of the bomb’s essential

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

by Elias Bresnick illustration by Sara Kahn parts. Ultimately, the operation was categorically reckless: an ill-conceived and colossal failure.

Risen concludes the chapter noting that this “espionage disaster, of course, was not reported. It left the CIA virtually blind in Iran, unable to provide any significant intelligence on one of the most critical issues facing the US—whether Tehran was about to go nuclear.”

So, was this fiasco something the American people ought to have known about? Was Sterling’s intervention genuine whistleblowing or simply the release of classified information for personal gain? Is the government justified in going after Sterling, and by extension Risen, for a story about a bunch of bumbling CIA officials?

In a particularly damning piece of criticism, journalist Dana Priest wrote, “If the US government were so concerned about the information revealed in Risen’s stunning chapter on a now 14-year-old CIA operation against Iran gone wrong, it would have moved quickly to resolve this matter eight years ago when it was first published. Instead, it seems obvious now that what officials really want is to hold a hammer over the head of a deeply sourced reporter, and others like him who try to hold the government accountable for what it does, even in secret.”

New York Times writer Maureen Dowd added pointedly in a recent op-ed that “the tale made the CIA look silly, which may have been more of a sore point than a threat to national security.” +++ Many observers view the Risen case as an act of pure retaliation, one that has nothing whatsoever to do with national safety. Risen’s book challenged the Bush administration on a number of levels, and some believe the government’s reaction might just be payback. Gregg Leslie, a legal defense director at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, stated, “The government likes to keep its house in order and likes to go after every possible leaker it can find. They really just don’t believe in whistleblowers.”

As it stands, Risen is waiting for the subpoena to be either renewed or retracted.

With widespread support—a petition in support of him recently garnered its 100,000th signature—Risen has become the poster child for First Amendment freedom of the press to print the truth.

“As Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama classified more and more of the government’s actions over the last 14 years,” wrote Dana Priest, “it has fallen to reporters like Risen to keep Americans informed and to question whether a gigantic government in the shadows is really even a good idea. We will all be worse off if this case proceeds.”

Both sides have elements that merit, at the very least, dialogue. On the one hand, the government has a necessity to keep classified information a secret if it wants results from its covert agencies like the CIA and FBI; on the other, the press has an obligation to reveal government abuse of power. Without a doubt, though, government officials should be more afraid of breaking the rules than should be the journalists who report on them.

Democracy fails without an aggressive and undaunted press.

A few weeks ago, Risen sat on a panel of journalists discussing the future of press freedom. Gruff and impersonal, the steely look plastered on his face throughout the hourlong discussion suggested a man unwilling to compromise. For him, the case lacks any ambiguity. In a recent conversation with Maureen Dowd, Risen refused to mince words: “A lot of people still think this is some kind of game or signal or spin. They don’t want to believe that Obama wants to crack down on the press and whistleblowers. But he does.

He’s the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.”

ELIAS BRESNICK B’17 is completely immune from testifying.

september 12 2014

NEWS

□ 04

Primary Analysis +16

+6

+24

+13

+15

+20

+7

+15

+46

+38

by Rick Salamé

Governor (D) Statewide Gina Raimondo Angel Taveras Clay Pell Todd Giroux

+3

Lt. Governor (D) Daniel McKee Ralph Mollis Frank Ferri

42.2% 29.2% 26.9% 1.8%

43.5% 35.9% 20.6%

Within Providence Gina Raimondo Angel Taveras Clay Pell Todd Giroux

44.0% 39.8% 17.9% 1.3%

Rep. In General Assembly Distict 7 Daniel McKeirnan Maria Cimini

53.3% 46.7%

Mayor of City of Providence Jorge Elorza Michael Solomon Christopher Young Brett Smiley

49.3% 42.9% 4.7% 3.1%

Council Providence Ward 14

Council Providence Ward 10 Luis Aponte Jenny Rosario

61.0% 39.0%

David Salvatore Anthony Sionni

82.8% 17.2%

Council Providence Ward 9 Carmen Castillo Hector Jose Gerard Catala

52.3% 34.4% 13.4%

Council Providence Ward 11 Mary Kay Harris Darian Sanchez Francisco Franco

44.1% 39.5% 16.4%

Data from State of Rhode Island Board of Elections

5

□

METRO

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

September 12 2014

EPHEMERA

□ 06

TEN MORE YEARS Gang Sentence Enhancement Legislation in Rhode Island Picture Atwells Avenue. A few minutes shy of 5 AM. The surveillance camera shows a young man sporting a baseball cap and cutoff jeans, a skateboard tucked under one arm, casually tagging a wall. As he turns to leave, the camera catches this would-be hooligan’s mug in perfect detail. If he’s caught by the Providence Police Department, and this is the third time he’s been nabbed for graffiti, he’ll be charged with a felony offense, brought to court. If, however, the prosecutors link his tag to a Rhode Island street gang—Members of Pine, maybe, or the Hanover Boyz—this kid suddenly faces 12 years in state prison.

This past July, Governor Lincoln Chafee signed into law what is known as “Criminal Street Gang Enhancement” legislation, which allows prosecutors to add up to 10 years to the prison sentence of “any person who is convicted of any felony that is knowingly committed for the benefit, at the direction of, or in association with any ‘criminal street gang,’” according to the bill. “If you think being in a gang makes you special,” said Senator Paul Jabour in a press release last March, “it will when it comes time for sentencing.”

The law is the next move in a series of ongoing crackdowns on gangs and gang-related activities by Rhode Island’s state authorities. Last October, Providence was one of 16 districts in the nation to receive $150,000 in federal funding from Project Safe Neighborhoods to reduce gang violence. By that December, city, state, and federal authorities completed Operation Gas, a two-year campaign in which they arrested 36 alleged Providencebased members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 and confiscated 50 pounds of heroin.

Reliable genealogies of Providence gangs are hard to come by; gangs do not publicize their own origins, so most of the information available comes from police intelligence or sketchy and biased Internet guesswork. According to the Providence Journal, though, street gangs first started cropping up in the ’90s, as the Mafia’s influence ebbed. At the same time, a generation of children whose Cambodian and Laotian parents had settled in Providence as refugees from Pol Pot’s reign and the Laotian Civil War were coming of age.

Early gangs, such as the Bad Junior Boys, were made up largely of these second-generation teens. Stefano Bloch, a criminologist and professor of Urban Studies at Brown University, explains this phenomenon: “One of the reasons immigrants [might] engage in criminal activity is that they are locked out of the mainstream networks that provide jobs and opportunities because of racism, ethnocentrism, nationalism,” he says. “So people engage in these underground, black market, subversive networks as a means of survival.” Soon, the Bad Junior Boys splintered, and the Providence Street Boys, the Oriental Rascals, and Laos Pride joined the scene. National gangs were laying roots too; the Chicago-based gang the Latin Kings moved in to Providence about two decades ago.

These days, the Providence Police Department estimates that there are 36 gangs and 1,800 gang members or associates of gangs in Providence. Of these gangs, about 10 to 12 are currently active, including Young Bloods, Lockwood, C-Block, M.O.P., Hanover Boyz, Laos Pride, Trinitarios, Young Gunnas, and Throw Back For Days. The situation is volatile; as of July, Providence had seen 10 homicides in 2014, three of which police consider “gang-related.” +++ It’s unclear how often “Gang Sentence Enhancements” will be used in court. Amy Aempe, a Public Information Officer in Attorney General Peter Kilmartin’s office, stated that the legislation is intended only for individuals whose “loyalty to a criminal street gang and whose disregard for public safety has resulted in death or serious injury.” Aempe believes that established precedent will keep the law from being misused. “This language has been widely and consistently utilized,” she told the Independent. According to the Attorney General’s office, laws are only dangerous if they’re the first of their kind—if there is too much space to manipulate phrasings and twist intention. If things have worked out elsewhere, in other states, why should Rhode Island be any different?

But Teny Gross, the director of Rhode Island’s Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence (ISPN), points to Rhode Island’s system of family court waivers as a damning precedent. “When the law to waive young people from the juvenile system into the adult system was enacted, it was intended initially for crimes like homicide. And now you get waived into adult courts for maybe shooting at a house or something.” Gross says he has an acquaintance who has already been charged under the new law, though the man has not been involved with gangs for eight years. “It’s a slippery slope once the floodgates are open.”

And Aempe’s insistence that gang sentence enhancements will be applied only to violent felonies is not explicitly stated in the language of the law. “If it’s about violent felonies, it should simply be specified,” says Bloch. “The reason they don’t say it is because they still want to put the fear of this legislation into the minds of those committing felonies that are non-violent. They know what they’re doing.” Civil rights groups have also argued that even if the legislation is rarely invoked in court, it could be used to coerce defendants into pleading guilty to lesser charges. Bloch points to himself: “I was actually charged with felony vandalism in the ’90s. And I pleaded down to a misdemeanor. If I thought I was facing 10 years, that…changes the whole outlook of a court case. If I had been facing 10 years, I would’ve pled to anything.”

The criticisms don’t end with courtroom coercion. In June, Gross and the ISPN, along with the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island, and 20 other organizations, sent a letter to Governor Chafee, urging him to veto the bill. “We believe the bill will be unfairly used to target the minority community in particular for increased

07

□

METRO

imprisonment,” the letter reads. The legal definition of a “criminal street gang” in Rhode Island is far too broad, the groups argue, and “makes no differentiation between a ‘gang’ that engages in occasional random acts of vandalism and one that has been involved in murders and other serious felonies.” Gross and his allies also believe that the law might even encourage higher-up gang members to push vulnerable youth into committing felonies on their behalf. Fred Ordonez, the director of Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), says that under the state’s legal definition, prosecutors could call Brown University fraternities “gangs;” they are groups of three or more people, they have identifiable names and common identifiable symbols, and they engage in illicit and illegal activities.

“But no way in hell will the police come raiding those frat houses,” says Ordonez. +++ The Rhode Island legislature is not breaking new ground with this legislation; the whole country is on high alert. The list of states with similar laws is extensive—at least 24 besides Rhode Island—and there is also a federal statute with comparable aims, albeit with a more stringent definition of “street gangs” (according to federal law, a gang must have more than five members instead of just three, be involved in interstate or international commerce, and commit drug-related or violent felonies). Though the costs of such legislation may prove steep, the supporters of these anti-gang laws say they are willing to pay the price. Aempe rebuts Gross’s claim of inordinate costs to taxpayers bluntly: “and what’s the cost of a human life?” Gross’s images of “vulnerable, at-risk youth” don’t ring true to her either—she points to Luis ‘Fatboy’ Gonzalez, a member of the Harriet Street gang, who was controversially acquitted in June from charges of shooting of an 12-year-old girl at a graduation party last year. “These are not innocent people,” she says. “We have an obligation to prosecute people who commit crimes.”

But dissenters with a more radical bent aim to dismantle this notion entirely, arguing that more severe prosecution is not the way to deter crime. Most people are not thinking rationally about consequences when they commit crimes, argues Bloch. And if they are thinking rationally, he adds, then they are most likely committing a crime in the name of their own survival, in which case legislation will do nothing stop them. Ordonez makes the same point. “The whole idea of legislation as a deterrent is upside down,” he says. “It’s a farce. Policing and criminalization happen after the fact of crime, and will do nothing to stop crime.”

“All you’re going to accomplish with draconian legislation and criminalization,” Bloch says, “is taking more members of urban communities and placing them into prison communities.”

This population shift is expensive—for every year an individual is imprisoned, Gross points out, it costs the state around $50,000 on average. “Every additional year in sentence given for a ‘gang member,’” Gross told the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island, “could pay for five returning inmates’ employment engagements for a full year after they pay their debt to society and the ranks of the rest of us taxpayers.” California’s implementation of its street gang sentence enhancement act (STEP) supports Gross’ estimations. Over the past two decades, the City of Los Angeles has spent over one billion dollars on costs associated with increased sentences for gang members. Rhode Island is currently about 12 billion dollars in debt. “Everything is under cuts at the moment,” says Gross. “This just added potentially millions of dollars worth of taxes.” +++ Ten years will stretch out in front of many accused felons in the months and years to come. 10 years can distort the world, skew reality, slide things out of focus. It’s a long time to lock someone up for the circles they move in and the company they keep. In a press release in July, Attorney General Kilmartin put it simply: “Gang violence will not be tolerated.”

For others, it’s not so simple. “My office is on Lockwood, by Hayward,” says Ordonez of DARE’s South Providence location. “I look out the window, and I see a sea of people with nothing. ‘Gang member’—we don’t label people like that. That’s a police term. These are kids, and they grow up in these neighborhoods, and they say OK, those guys shot our friend, and they’re mad, and they go do something.” To Ordonez and Gross and Bloch, it’s clear that we’re letting too much fall on the shoulders of these kids.

Not everyone is on the same page, though. At a peaceful rally following the Chad Brown drive-by shooting this summer, Dewayne Hackney, of the organization Urban Men Against Murder (UMAM) framed the situation differently: “We really can’t complain about city officials, national officials, the mayor,” he said. “We’re really not carrying our weight. It’s on us.” Ordonez agrees that neighborhoods should take some responsibility for violence that occurs there, but argues violence will not be abetted without government resources. “Mediation—you can mediate one conflict, but then a thousand other beefs are going to rise up…I think [Gross and the ISPN’s] nonviolence training is a

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

good idea, but ineffective.” The root causes run deep and require systematic changes. On the phone, his voice even and controlled, Ordonez sounds discouraged but undeterred by the recent legislation. For him, there’s only one way to move forward: “we’re going to get louder and louder with our demands.”

by Mika Kligler illustration by Ming Zhen

MIKA KLIGLER B’17 would plead to anything.

SEPTEMBER 12 2014

METRO

□ 08

CLOSED DOORS, SEALED MOUTHS The building that stands at 385 South Main Street is a three-story brick structure: nondescript, its windows papered over from the inside. A weathered sign hangs over its awning: “OFFICE SPACE FOR LEASE / UP TO 10,800 SQ. FT. AVAILABLE.” Located five minutes away from Brown University by foot, the building is situated on an upscale avenue in Fox Point, littered with law offices and beauty salons, small shops and restaurants. The street is nice, albeit a bit bland—the type of place upper-middle-class families might go shopping on a Sunday morning.

But beyond the paved sidewalks lined with new European cars and coffee shops lies an Asian slave camp—an entryway into shaded hallways and coded language, surveillance cameras and boarded-up windows. On the second floor of 385 South Main resides a business that Providence police thought they had eradicated eight years ago. But the world’s oldest industry is back—and business is better than ever.

The seemingly abandoned building has been occupied since 2006, with what the Providence White Pages lists as a massage parlor called Downtown Spa, but its clientele doesn’t appear to be going for spinal adjustments. In fact, the only role of the massages here is as foreplay for the male clients that frequent it.

Downtown Spa calls itself as an Asian massage parlor (or AMP), which is a front commonly shared by brothels across Providence and the rest of the country. Its entry on Backpage—a classified advertising website notorious for its listings for sex—offers “skilled young Asian staff,” “gorgeous Asian staff,” and “sweet soothing Asians” alongside images of young East Asian women posing suggestively in various stages of undress. There are dozens of other listings on Backpage’s Providence sector just like this one.

But apart from these ads and the spa’s business listing in the Providence White Pages, the only real clue that Downtown Spa exists is the neon “OPEN” sign that flashes on the second floor every night until 2 AM. Owners of nearby businesses either deny knowledge of Downtown Spa or are unaware of its existence. The owner of Tir Na Nog Spa, just one building away, could list every other spa or massage parlor on South Main Street. The receptionist at Tax Credit Finance, which shares a building with the spa, vehemently denied knowledge of the business on the second floor. (She had been working there for over two years.) Tanya Sar, the owner of Radiance Laser Skincare located in the basement of the building even responded with hostility. “I don’t know. I don’t want to know,” she said, upon being asked if she knew anything about the business on the second floor. “I have my own business and they have theirs.”

So, given this fog of secrecy, how do Downtown Spa and other brothels in Providence stay in business? With a cultural cone of silence, clients, or johns, have turned to the darker recesses of the internet to share tips, contributing to forums dedicated to the search for Asian prostitution services across major cities in the United States. Through websites like RubMaps, USASexGuide, and countless others, these johns compare experiences—prices, services offered, favorite girls, ages, attractiveness. Breast sizes. “Tightness.”

The forums read like Yelp reviews. The forum for massage parlor reports in Providence on USASexGuide.com alone has over 10,000 posts, dating back to early February 2006, not including the thousands that have been deleted by site administrators for violating forum guidelines—which prevent site-goers from posting anyone’s true identity or personal phone number or posts that are too sexually explicit. Some posts, of course, slip through the cracks.

These euphemistically-named massage parlors are often fronts for human trafficking, housing girls brought to the United States from Korea, China, or Thailand. There are dozens scattered across Providence, hundreds in New England, and thousands mapped across the entire United States in a twisted web of sex trafficking. Some have survived local police raids or federal investigations. Often both. Many are connected to international organized crime rings, as discovered by the U.S. Department of Justice in a 2006 federal investigation. These are manifestations of the oldest form of slavery, sexual slavery, operating on intricate circuits nearly impossible to break, with horrors that extend far beyond a boarded-up second floor in Fox Point. +++ Rhode Island’s story For over a decade, Rhode Island has been quietly infamous for its booming sex industry. An article published in the Providence Journal in April 2002 calls Providence “the most densely concentrated red-light district in New England” that “attracts thousands of out-of-town spenders.”

One reviewer, calling himself “Ri Designer,” posted in May 2006, “I went to DT [Downtown Spa] to remember the days I spent with my Brothers in Arms, on leave in various countries.” “Lao Ma” reported in February 2009 that he stopped in an AMP for sex during a layover at T.F. Green Airport, coming all the way from China. Dozens more have posted that Providence brothels are superior to their local AMPs, the ones they typically frequent.

“Aldrich317” wrote in March 2014 that “I have come to truly appreciate how lucky those of us are in reasonable commuting distance to Providence. There is nothing like the sensuousness of the [experience] the AMPs provide.” He added, “The girls also tend to be more intimate, dress more provocatively and give their best effort for the full hour, and less expensively.”

Rapid growth in the massage parlor brothel industry from the 1990s to today seems to have been caused partly by this recognition, but mostly by the decriminalization of indoor prostitution in 1980. Lawmakers adopted a law targeting those who sold sex in public but ignored paid sex in private—and so Rhode Island’s outdoor sex industry at that point, which was concentrated in a handful of prominent strip clubs and some street prostitution, dissipated, while the indoor sex industry quietly flourished. But the decriminalization of prostitution didn’t mean that it was legalized, either: legalized prostitution

09 □ FEATURES

The racial politics of Rhode Island’s sex trade

by J.G. illustration by Andres Chang

would have necessitated regulation, whereas decriminalization only peeled back laws meant to regulate or suppress it. In other words, it wasn’t technically legal, but nothing could be done about it.

In 1998, after almost 20 years of neglectful law enforcement, local media called attention to the existence of Asian spa-brothels after a police raid on Club Osaka, where undercover officers were soliciting sex acts. The Providence Journal discovered that the prostitutes had been “lured from Southeast Asia and paid only the tips given by their patrons.” Detectives arrested the club owner and six alleged prostitutes, seizing almost $15,000 in cash and plastic bags stuffed full of pink condoms.

Sgt. Nicholas Cardarelli, commander of the Special Services Division at the time, used dire and evocative language to describe the scene, saying that it “was like slavery.”

The women, who worked 16- to 18-hour days, had been told that their work paid for the cost of bringing them to the United States, in some cases as high as $10,000. Essentially, they were forced into prostitution to pay off travel expenses.

One woman’s arms featured cigarette burns.

And yet the discovery of Club Osaka brought about no legislative change. The law remained stagnant, allowing the Asian massage parlor/brothel industry to expand rapidly.

In 1998, local media indicated only two or three AMPs in Providence. By 2009, however, there were at least 32 that advertised publicly, a number that seems more or less consistent with that of today—despite the fact that prostitution, both indoor and outdoor, was finally recriminalized in 2009.

Although the spa-brothels leave an easily traceable paper and digital trail, law enforcement has found that regulating the industry or eradicating it permanently is nearly impossible. Almost every time one parlor gets shut down, it reopens a few months later— under a different name, at a different location, with a different phone number.

Even Downtown Spa has undergone changes to make it harder to retrace. According to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice published on August 16, 2006, the spa-brothel had been involved in an Asian sex trafficking ring spanning across the Northeast, from Rhode Island to Washington, D.C. Its manager, Kyong Polachek, was arrested, along with 30 other pimps, middlemen, and madams—female managers of brothels. They discovered that not only were the conditions Cardarelli found in Club Osaka nearly universal among the fake spas, the women were often traded back and forth among brothels within the ring. Supposedly, over 70 enslaved sex workers were freed in that investigation.

But mere months later Downtown Spa reopened, moving from 1 Custom House St. to its location now—385 South Main Street, second floor.

Polachek was released from federal prison in 2007, barely a year after she was arrested. Today, at 62, she resides in Ohio, but could not be reached for an interview.

Why are these brothels so difficult to bust, even now, after prostitution has been criminalized? Attorney Melanie Shapiro, whose research was critical in re-criminalizing prostitution in 2009, doesn’t have an answer. Shapiro claims that before the loophole was closed, “police weren’t able to do the arrests in the raids, [only] see what was going on in the places.” And often the madams, who legally constitute traffickers, would be present with the prostitutes, so “the girls would be too intimidated to speak.” She added, “It’s necessary to get them away from the brothel, to get them away from the people there so they can feel safe in explaining what happened to them.” Otherwise, police would have no legal right to arrest anyone.

Law enforcement officials could not be reached for comment. +++ Inside the mind of a john At the heart of the brothels’ popularity and persistent ability to regenerate is the racial dimension of the business, the sexual commodification of East Asian women. “Yellow fever,” as it is commonly known, refers to the fetishization of Asian women by those of non-Asian descent, particularly white men. Its existence relies heavily on the European colonizers of the 19th- and 20th-centuries, who attempted to erase the existing culture of East Asia and inscribe upon the indigenous people a forceful new authority, relishing their power when they found success. When American soldiers occupied combat zones throughout the Pacific Rim for much of the 20th century, dozens of “comfort stations” sprung up around each military camp, with women brought from their homes to work as prostitutes, often against their will. Soldiers often joked about conquering the women alongside the land. Thus emerged the stereotype of Asian women as shy, submissive, docile—a type of china-doll, lotus-blossom beauty whose roots trace back to the soil of white colonialism.

A brief perusal of any online review forums shows that many of the men who frequent the Asian massage parlor-brothels harbor such a racial fixation. Not even counting all the posts that feature some kind of fetish for Asian women—and there are a lot—their usernames provide clear displays of it. On USASexGuide, dozens of men signed up under usernames derived from “yellow fever”: “YellowFever,” “YellowFever #69,” “Yellaman,” “Yellafever,” “Yellerfever.” The list goes on.

One of the most active users on the Massage Parlor Reports forum for Providence, “Yellowfever023,” said in a private message that he prefers Asian prostitutes because “even if they are 35-plus they look much younger.” He added that “their teasing drives me crazy—they look so innocent but they are wild.” He also noted, they are “usually easier to find, especially in Providence.”

Another user, “SteveBerg,” posted in January 2014 about brothels with older Asian women, expressing anger that they fail to meet his expectations. “It seems that everytime I check these places out I either can’t get a lineup or I’m forced into having a session with an older and often broken English speaking batshit crazy chick,” he said. “Not that I mind broken English, but it’s cuter coming from a dollfaced petite girl.”

To buy these women as prostitutes is one way of dehumanizing them, but to distill

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

them down to a racial stereotype—an inanimate object—is to completely erase their humanity.

So how did the fetish for Asian women evolve into what it is now? Vickie Chang speculates in a 2006 article for OC Weekly that the means of entry into the United States for many Asian women has perpetuated the problem.

“It’s arguable that Asiaphilia, ironically, stems from legal attempts to exclude Asian Americans from the United States,” Chang wrote. “The criteria by which many Asian women were permitted to enter the US were not exactly morally sound: prostitutes, picture brides, war brides, mail-order brides.” In short, sexual commodification was a prerequisite for many Asian women to enter the United States. It was, historically, the price they had to pay.

The same August 16, 2006 press release that indicted Downtown Spa in its earlier form states that the trafficking process “typically begins when recruiters identify women in Korea who want to come to the United States, often to make money to support their families.” The recruiters then arrange their transportation to North America, sometimes securing illegal immigration documents in the process. By the time the women arrive, they have typically incurred large financial debts to recruiters in Korea and other members of the organized network, and they are forced into prostitution to pay off these debts.

A few of the johns online appear to have caught onto the women’s backgrounds. One post in July 2006, by “A Regular Guy,” reported of a girl at a spa-brothel in Providence: “She did mention she works everyday and has no time off…sounds like she’s working [off] a debt or simply, not free to set her own schedule.”

Shapiro once spoke to a prostitute at One Spa on Atwells Avenue in Providence— a brothel still in operation—whom she described as a confused-looking woman in her mid-twenties. “She was wearing hardly any clothing, and she was very, very skinny,” she said. “I asked her a few questions and she just kept saying ‘my boss, my boss, where is my boss?’”

That’s what these brothels are ultimately about: dominance. The power play is prominent in the dynamic between both prostitute and pimp and prostitute and customer, not only in terms of sexual domination but also in terms of administering control over the business. “Many of these girls will take kindness for weakness if we don’t remind them who’s in charge and holding the cash,” wrote “Bigben99” online. Boycotts and violence have even been threatened: “Can you imagine the message we can send out to AMP’s if we all got together and avoided their service completely or only supported specific ones?” said “SpermSac” in response to “Bigben99.” “Or have mongers [customers] patrolling locations with bad providers. Breaking legs will send a definite message.”

Some have written reports that display an obvious unwillingness on the prostitute’s end during sexual intercourse, regardless of whether or not these women have freely chosen to work at the spas. Someone calling himself “Raven1950” wrote in a review of One Spa, a spa-brothel off Atwells Avenue in Providence: “She got upset and dismounted. I got pissed because she asked for all the money upfront and I was getting my bang for my bucks, so I force[d] her to lay down, hike her legs over my shoulder, and finished.” Another user, “Little Tony II,” posted about a girl in Downtown Spa, “Several times I tried to reposition her, but she kept backing away. ‘No touch,’ ‘no,’ is all I heard. As I started to get up to leave, she finally grabbed little Tony and sat on him for a quick ride. The only good thing was she was verrrry tight.”

Some johns, too, take pleasure in their sexual dominance over the prostitutes, expressing a sadistic thirst in their display of power and control. In one instance, “Little Tony II” tried to convince another prostitute at Downtown Spa to let him use an object he brought. She could barely speak English, making a gesture that she did not want the object used on her, but he forced it on her anyway during intercourse: “After a while I was ready, and she was making broken English remarks about too big…I flipped her on her back and went at it. NO SHIT!!! She was really small, and I think it actually hurt her. She was tight as hell.”

Downtown Spa in particular is known among the forum-goers for having younger women. Many of the girls there are described as “very tight” and uncomfortable with touch—one man said that his provider “[sounded] like I was ripping her apart.”

So, is prostitution rape? Melissa Farley, a clinical psychologist whose research focuses on prostitution and trafficking, says that women in prostitution generally describe it as “paid rape.” Perhaps this is an unfair accusation—perhaps, in the Asian-run brothels guilty of sex trafficking, the women taken from their home countries, working in such conditions, forced to sell their bodies, forced into plastic surgery, threatened with violence or murder—could be doing this willingly. Or perhaps not.

Donna M. Hughes, a professor of women’s studies at URI, wrote a report titled “Race and Prostitution in the United States” that included a survivor’s testimony from a Korean-American woman referred to as “Dal.” Trafficked in Las Vegas, she described her years in the sex industry as harrowing: “The women and I were in constant fear that our lives would soon end…I remember seeing hundreds of dollars being exchanged from one hand to another. Money seduced the people that kept us in silence and our existence empty.” Most of the women were actually young girls ranging in age from 12 to 16, she said, and many were foreign, trafficked from other countries.

“Even though I couldn’t speak the same language [as] these women, we definitely had one thing in common: fear and hope. I remember holding each one of them in my arms,” she said. “I let them cry all over me and I’d feel the same pain.”

tation of a person. I don’t support legalizing because I don’t support the rape of women.”

She acknowledged there are perhaps people who willingly become prostitutes and find it liberating, but “the vast majority of people have a pimp or have a drug addiction or were abused as a child.”

The average age of entry into prostitution is 13. In a 2002 study based in Chicago by the Center for Impact Research, researchers found that one-third of women had entered prostitution by the age of 15, and of these women, 72 percent ran away from home, onefourth had completed a high school education, and as a whole, they were more likely to have used drugs or alcohol growing up. “This is not something we want to make legitimate and legal,” Shapiro said.

Legalization proponents, however, contend that enforcing rules and regulations would be able to prevent such statistics. As Erin Fuch writes for Business Insider, “We legalize and regulate a ton of commerce that’s morally controversial—like gambling, alcohol, lap-dancing, and pornography. We’re not helping [anyone] by making consenting sex work a crime.” Furthermore, proponents ask, how would arresting the prostitutes benefit them? And perhaps they have a point—after all, it does strike a sour note when the rare police raid does happen, only to put one pimp and 12 prostitutes behind bars. (This is not a hypothetical situation: in 1974, before indoor prostitution was decriminalized, 87 percent of prostitution-related arrests in Providence were on women. In a 2003 study conducted in Boston, 11 women in prostitution were arrested per male customer.)

But Shapiro maintains that while arresting the women sounds bad in theory, it’s the most realistic way to help them.

“A night or two in jail, where [law enforcement] can figure out who they are and what’s going on, compared to a night in a brothel where they’re raped 10, 15 times a night—people just don’t like the idea of arresting someone,” she said. “But it’s necessary to hold people for a period of time to understand their situation.”

Additionally, having spoken to numerous government officials and law enforcement officers, Shapiro believes that the police are essential in helping the women escape their situations. “After arrest, if the women don’t have a place to go, or immigration documents, or anybody here who can help them, police should be directing them to services that are available in this region,” she said. “If they’re not from this country, there are visas that they can apply for so that they can stay if they want to.”

While this process sounds rosy in theory, its translation to real life rarely goes so smoothly—the women might be deported instead, police might not have the necessary resources to conduct investigations, or perhaps law enforcement simply isn’t fulfilling its responsibility to combat human trafficking.

Until something shifts, though, the circumstances look as dismal as ever. Five years have passed since 2009, and very little has changed. Hundreds of victims of sex trafficking across Rhode Island are still getting raped by johns every day. Ads still run in the Adult section of the Providence Phoenix, proclaiming, “The A S I A N GIRL of your DREAMS is here! Don’t make her wait!” And who knows—that advertised girl might be huddled in the corner of a room on Atwells Avenue or Fountain Street or South Main Street, waiting to see her 20th client of the day, wondering what her little brother looks like now, if she’ll ever see her family again.

After all, Downtown Spa is still tucked behind an artisan bakery, disguised by the blandly bourgeois exterior of College Hill—hidden under the radar of the apartment complex across the street and the university just blocks away.

J.G. B’17 would prefer not to explain her browser history.

This is the first installment of a series titled Seeing Color, which features articles with racial issues at their forefront.

+++ What can be done today?

In Shapiro’s time investigating and staking out the brothels, she would often go inside and pretend to be an unassuming customer, asking to book an appointment for a massage. Other times she would pose as someone looking into real-estate. But every time, without fail, whoever was at the front desk—usually the owner or madam—would tell her that she needed to leave immediately. Sometimes she was physically removed.

“One of the madams chased me down the street once,” she said.

The chokehold on the prostitutes at the hands of their pimps, their brothels-owners, their madams—this is the top reason why the women refuse to go to the police, she said.

And, in most cases, it’s simply impossible. According to Shapiro, the women are kept on such a tight leash that they are “unable to leave the brothel freely or independently.”

Today, one of the top arguments in favor of legalizing prostitution is that it would benefit the prostitutes. Opponents of the 2009 law argue that legalizing prostitution would be the only way to regulate it, to protect women currently ignored in the face of the law. Shapiro, however, disagrees.

“Legalizing something legitimizes it,” she said. “I don’t support legalizing the exploi-

SEPTEMBER 12 2014

FEATURES

□ 10

PIGSKIN PIGS

Race, Money, and the NCAA

by Zeve Sanderson

The NCAA, a non-profit institution with 501(c)(3) tax exempt status, is governed by a Board of Directors—eighteen college administrators and NCAA officials, seventeen of them white—who vote on rules that determine everything from recruiting guidelines to eligibility standards. Though not able to dole out profits to shareholders, the organization generates roughly a billion dollars in yearly revenue and pays its top officials over a million dollars a year, mostly off of the work of black football and basketball players. “Ninety percent of the NCAA revenue is produced by one percent of the athletes,” said Sonny Vaccaro, a marketer who ran successful sponsorship campaigns at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. “Go to the skill positions,” the ones who bring people into the stadium, the ones whose jerseys sell out and whose faces are on billboards: “ninety percent African Americans.” Dale Brown, a retired Louisiana State basketball coach, has also come to see the racial dynamics of the college sports industry: “Look at the money we make off predominantly poor black kids. We’re the whoremasters,” he said in 2011. But as mostly white university administrators, NCAA officials and college coaches make millions of dollars, the Board prohibits its athletes from receiving any compensation above their scholarships. Schools can’t pay them to play; agents can’t sign them to contracts; shoe companies can’t offer them endorsements. The Board even regulates moneymaking endeavors that are seemingly tangential or even unrelated to athletic participation. Athletes can’t model; they can’t endorse products; they can’t become brand ambassadors; they can’t use their names or pictures to advertise businesses they start; they can’t receive free meals from local eateries. No money can be made using their name, image, or likeness in fear that their status as a student-athlete will have contributed to their profitability, rendering them professionals. It’s effectively ownership.

And the free education, their current payment for athletic services, offers little benefit. Thrust into an environment that values athletic victory over academic achievement, many athletes, especially black athletes, don’t earn a diploma. A study by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics describes a near-professional culture in which “athletes are often admitted to institutions where they do not have a reasonable chance to graduate… As soon as they arrive on campus, they are immersed in the demands of their sports.” The gradu-

ation rate is roughly 70 percent for Division I football and basketball players, and the number is often 50 percent lower for black athletes. In 2013, Florida State graduated 90 percent of its white football players, compared to only 38 percent of its black players.

The whole system seems more suited to a 1950s white suburb than a 2014 diverse national audience. And yet, its breed of racism also seems wholly modern—a system built around purportedly race-neutral rules negatively affects one group more than another. It’s what we see in the prison industrial complex: a body of law that makes no mention of race incarcerates five times more black men than white men.

Phillip Goff, a social psychologist at UCLA writes, “Most of the way race functions is without the need for racial animus.”

It’s not that the NCAA offices are filled with children of the Jim Crow South; it’s that the NCAA has put in place a system that benefits their administrators (disproportionately white) while hurting their athletes (disproportionately black) who produce value. But for most viewers, this “racism without racists” is invisible, shrouded in ambiguities and impenetrable euphemisms.

The NCAA’s stated mission is to “initiate, stimulate and improve intercollegiate athletics programs for student-athletes and to promote and develop educational leadership, physical fitness, athletic excellence and athletic participation as a recreational pursuit.” Within this mission statement, though, is a vocabulary constructed to legitimize the system in which a predominately white NCAA has total control over a predominately black group of student-athletes. Words like “initiate” give the organization carte blanche authority to create rules about what athletes can and cannot do while words like “improve” endow the ability to punish any transgressors who it finds to be guilty. “Student-athlete” is a highly political term crafted in the 1950s to defend the NCAA against workers’ compensation claims for injured football players. “Athletics participation as a recreational pursuit” elevates the amateur student-athlete who participates for the love of the game over the professional who plays for compensation; rules, then, are created to ensure that athletes remain unpaid. This political doublespeak rings Orwellian: “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.” +++ On August 8, the NCAA Board of Directors voted to give the 65 universities in the five major athletic conferences (the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, SEC and Pac-12, plus Notre Dame)

increased autonomy, allowing them to create different rules than those that govern the 285 other Division I schools. This autonomy includes recruiting standards, the size of coaching staffs, and permissible practice hours, to name a few, but the impetus for this realignment is rooted in money. The aforementioned 65 colleges generate massive profits from football and basketball; UT Austin, for example, makes over $60 million a year on its football team alone. They want to be able to give their student-athletes stipends above the cost of a full scholarship. The latter colleges, which have less lucrative television contracts, can’t afford to do so. A day later, on August 9, a federal judge ruled that universities with Football Bowl Subdivision football or Division I basketball programs will have to pay their athletes “a limited share of the revenues generated from the use of their names, images, and likenesses.” In practice, this means colleges must put at least $5,000 per athlete per year into a trust fund accessible upon graduation. Given that only 23 athletic departments are profitable, it’s unclear where the money is going to come from, especially for those colleges in conferences without major network contracts.

From these financial disparities, writer Alexander Wolff prophesies a disintegration of the college sports machine.

Set in 2039, Wolff’s recently published thousand-word Sport Illustrated essay entitled “Members Only” describes a forthcoming reality that, when we look back, will have started with that fateful August day. “Don’t things that come to pass have a way of seeming inevitable in retrospect?” he asks rhetorically about our future-past. And what has come to pass in Wolff’s world-in-thought a quarter century from now? Governed by separate rules and funded by higher television contracts, the 65 schools are able to lure high profile recruits with more and more money, and competitiveness between the athletic haves (Duke, Michigan, Alabama) and have-nots (Butler, Creighton, Brown) disappears. Without the possibility of upsets or Cinderella stories, March Madness and its correlate bracket are stripped of their fun, nobody watches or joins the office pool, and the tournament ceases to exist in its current form.

Gone are the unending days of competitive intrigue at Buffalo Wild Wings. The NCAA goes bankrupt after losing its $10.4 billion TV contract with CBS, which accounts for roughly 90 percent of its revenue, and the rest is history—or, rather, the future. It “all happened the way Hemingway described going broke—gradually, then suddenly,” he reminisces. His piece reads like a kind of college athletics eschatology.

Wolff is bracing himself for universities that merely educate, and he isn’t the only one. Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delaney foretells the end of college football if players are paid.

Jonah Rosenbaum, an LA-based writer and avid Michigan sports fan, told the Indy, “Nobody wants to see their college’s players paid. There’s commercial value in fans thinking these college stars are just like the rest of us in every way other than they’re amazing athletes and we’re not. Paying players will ruin the façade, and that’s what we’re buying—a beautiful, empty façade. The moment it comes crashing down, so does the whole industry.” If the NCAA can’t survive fairly compensating athletes, can’t survive building a system on truthful language, can’t survive remedying its post-racial racism, perhaps it’s time to let it collapse. Or, even better, blow it up.

ZEVE SANDERSON B'15 will take cash or money order.

11

□

SPORTS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

MAKING SPACE

by Erin Schwartz illustration by Polina Godz

An Interview with Yellow Peril Gallery Owners Robert Stack and Vanphouthon Souvannasane To get to Yellow Peril Gallery, you take the ninety-two bus west, passing through downtown Providence and Federal Hill.

Get off at the stop variably named Price Rite/Eagle Square/ Valley Street, soon after the bus enters Olneyville. Take a left and walk down Valley Street, past Donigian Park, and turn at the second historic mill complex refurbished for hip artistic endeavors and light industrial use. The first such structure in this neighborhood is Rising Sun Mills, but you’re looking for The Plant. You can find Yellow Peril Gallery in Building 5.

The gallery shoulders up alongside triple-decker apartment houses in need of paint, a scrap metal company, and a smattering of empty lots. Its newness alone represents a spatial rupture. The Plant, as well as Rising Sun Mills up the road, is an anomaly within a largely Spanish-speaking immigrant neighborhood for young professionals, artists, and business owners who are attracted to Olneyville’s reputation for an underground art scene and its industrial past.

There are several discourses on what Olneyville means to its residents—whether it is a supportive working-class community, an up-and-coming neighborhood for the creative class, or a post-industrial wasteland, gutted of its factories and drained of its population. These identities are not necessarily incompatible, but still, the story is familiar. In time, the group that has the most capital and privilege wins out and transforms the built environment in its own image.

Yellow Peril Gallery seems aware of the need to navigate these tensions. The gallery’s mission statement encourages community participation, and ten percent of their art sales are given to a charity of the artist’s choice. The gallery recently hosted an oral history of the neighborhood curated by Olneyville Housing Corporation, a local nonprofit. I stopped by on the gallery’s day off to talk to gallery owners Robert Stack and Vanphouthon Souvannasane about their take on art, place, and politics. Stack (a Providence native) and Souvannasane have the rapport of friends and business partners who already know what the other is going to say.

The College Hill Independent: Let’s start off with your perspective as curators: why did you choose to locate in Providence?

Robert Stack: We actually specifically came for Olneyville.

[Co-owner Vanphouthon Souvannasane] found the space originally online. I grew up in Providence and Olneyville was in some ways quite different then, so when he first suggested it, I was like, “Absolutely not!” He brought it up again and we looked at it and said, “Oh, this is really cool.” It was a work-live situation, which was what we were looking for.

The whole building is work-live apartments for artists, so we were attracted to that. We just made this conscious effort that we would have the gallery where the artists were making the work, and that would keep it fresher and keep us more tapped into the scene and what was happening.

The Indy: I know you also do Art Basel and some international art fairs. How do you navigate being plugged into the local art community but also trying to have an international presence?

getting invited to fairs. But it also became sort of what you were talking about—it was a group show of all the art that we were interested in that fit our mission statement, and it was a combination of people we had met in the time we'd been in Rhode Island, people we knew before from when we were doing this in New York, people we knew internationally that we had come to know through the gallery. It was this great mix: painting, photography, illustration, with this big melting pot of different media in contemporary art. But there were also these ideas of showing the local versus the international, so that sticks out to me.

Vanphouthon Souvannasane: It was great to follow through on a commitment. When we met a lot of local artists, we talked about strategy and what we hoped to achieve. Sometimes we got this look, like, “You guys are just out-of-state bullshitters. You say you'll take care of your artists, you say you'll take us to fairs, but how much of that is true?" And for us, it was a challenge. Yes, these are things we'll hope to do, and this is what we'll do on a strategic level to get there, and so far everything's been falling into place and we've followed through on a lot of our commitments.

The Indy: I’m curious about the name of the gallery—it clearly has a lot of political connotations. What made you choose it?

VS: It's had its controversial moments. I grew up on the East Coast, and I didn't really understand this whole concept of “the yellow peril” until I read A Separate Peace in high school.

I thought, "Yellow peril, what a weird slur to call someone."

It wasn't until I was in college that I learned more about the history of Asians in America... For someone who grew up around mostly non-whites, I didn't really have an understanding of my place in history, so it was pivotal for me in terms of understanding who I am, where I came from, and how people see Asians in America. So I took it in an empowering way. A lot of young people who come to the gallery ask, "What does Yellow Peril mean, what's so threatening about the color yellow?" A gallery with a name like "Yellow Peril," it's provocative but at the same time you're able to have conversation with people about context, and a lot of what we do here at the gallery involves context…

I think "Yellow Peril" for me is finding confidence in your heritage and who you are. For artists, it's important, and also for political reasons—I think it's important to remind people that not everything is as bright or as cheery as it seems. That doesn't mean it's a bad thing, it just means that you have to be cognizant of history.

RS: One of the lines in our mission statement is about “showcasing art that creates a conversation that will last after the viewer leaves,” so that's the reason we show a lot of topical stuff and some political stuff. But I think it’s also important that the name of your gallery has that same point of view.

So, the name is provocative, and a conversation starter, and indicative of a lot of the work we show.

The Indy: Your mission statement names “inclusion, diversity, and participation” and “giving back to the community” as some of your central goals, which is pretty unique for an art

gallery.

VS: I think it's unique for a commercial gallery. We are a commercial gallery—our business is the business of selling art—but at the same time, it doesn't mean we're heartless.

Having been involved in nonprofit organizations in other ways, you want to give back to where you live. That's how you have a more fulfilling life. You can't just take the money and run, you have to really celebrate where you are. The only way to reach different audiences is to be inclusive; snobbiness or elitism is not what we’re about. We like to engage with people who come in; we like to walk them through the works.

RS: Galleries are interesting because, on one hand, it's a business model that's kind of like a hardware store; I have something to sell, you have something you need, you come in and I sell it to you. But it actually operates more like a coffee shop or a bar, in that it becomes a social setting. It's quite a hub for the artists and the community; they meet each other at the opening and form new friendships. So there's a community center aspect to it, because it becomes social as well as commercial. It's like a hardware-store-slash-coffee-shop.

The Indy: How is your work informed by your location in Olneyville?

VS: We are probably the only gallery in the entire state that showcases work from contemporary Latin American artists.

We have a strong base of contemporary Latin American artists, like Raquel Paiewonsky from the Dominican Republic, Quintín Rivera Toro from Puerto Rico. We also have Diego Rodriguez-Warner from Colorado, Rodrigo Nava, who’s Mexican, Anabel Vásquez-Rodríguez. We try to work with artists who we think would connect with the community. A lot of these artists’ work is political; it deals with issues like race and gender. So when we've had shows with these artists, we've hoped to bring in a different demographic other than the normal art crowd. We've been on Spanish-language radio, doing interviews. We've been in the Spanish press and I can't speak Spanish, so that's kind of embarrassing. But at the same time, a lot of the issues that these artists encounter resonate with the community. And, as a minority, I understand what they're going through. So we work a lot to promote their point of view.

RS: It's a very interesting neighborhood with the river and the mills, and it's really great to get to know it on that level.

I grew up in Elmhurst but since I've been living here, I've found out how much my family had ties to the neighborhood.

But by the time I came around, they had moved out. A couple blocks away, my uncle had opened up his first business; my dad's first job in Rhode Island was in Olneyville Square.

There's all this genealogical, archeological sort of stuff. In a way, I'm not only getting to know the neighborhood better, but also my relationship with the neighborhood that I didn't realize was there before.

Yellow Peril Gallery is located at 60 Valley Street, Building #5, Olneyville. Their website is yellowperilgallery.com.

ERIN SCHWARTZ B’15 is no out-of-state bullshitter.

RS: The first thing that comes to mind is a pop-up show we did in Bushwick called Work Harder. That was a crossroads for us because it was during Freize Week; we weren't in the Freize Fair yet, we hadn't yet been invited to our first major fair, so we did our own. We got a space in Bushwick and we mounted our own group show. We gave an opening and everybody came. In one way, it was important to us because it showed the Fair people that we could do it; then we started

SEPTEMBER 12 2014

arts

□ 12

YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF Boyhood and universalizing nostalgia

by Lisa Borst

illustration by Layla Ehsan

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, which finished its run at the Cable Car last week, is not afraid to date itself. The film, shot incrementally over the course of twelve years, chronicles the twenty-first century Texas childhood of a boy named Mason and his family. It is a portrait of both an individual and, peripherally, the first decade-and-change of the 2000s.

The film’s temporality and pacing is anchored by the cultural landscape through which its protagonist navigates, by the television and music and current events with which he engages. Early on in the movie, we watch Mason’s sister, presumably seven or eight years old, sing a Britney Spears song, and we can deduce that the film begins in the early aughts.

Throughout the film, much of the action is alternately bolstered by or entirely dependent upon these specific, hyper-timely artifacts of pop culture: a song, a summer blockbuster, a presidential election. A Dragon Ball Z poster hangs in Mason’s childhood bedroom; a long scene consists of nothing more than Mason and his step-family attending a midnight Harry Potter book release. The music that plays diegetically during the film’s many car rides—The Flaming Lips, Wilco, Arcade Fire—helps us locate each scene in a specific calendar year (Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was released in 2002 and is played by Mason’s dad early on in the movie; The Suburbs came out in the summer of 2010 and, sure enough, soundtracks a scene between a teenage Mason and his girlfriend).

For films set in the present day, a certain degree of timeliness is unavoidable, often even desirable. The architecture of a film—the cars its characters drive, the cell phones and computers with which they interact—help clue us in to the year of production, along with any music or other pop culture artifacts that surface throughout. Linklater in particular is historically fond of allowing pop music to reinforce or even dictate his films’ temporality: this is the man behind School of Rock and Dazed and Confused, both of which are movies ostensibly about music. Yet rarely do cinematic works—especially those, like Boyhood, that could maybe be called art-house films, or perhaps just thoughtful, non-blockbuster Oscar bait—grapple quite as directly with current popular culture as Linklater’s latest does. For many contemporary films, some illusion of timelessness persists. You could watch Blue is the Warmest Color, for example, and recognize that it was probably made in the early 2010s, but nothing would inform a casual viewer that it was shot exactly between March and August of 2012. Boyhood, though, insistently tethers itself to specific dates and times: Mason discusses the Iraq War with his father, plays Oregon Trail and Halo with his friends, switches out his flip-phone for an iPhone over the years.

As Mason becomes lankier, deeper-voiced, more mature, the pop culture artifacts around him modernize, catching up with those of the present.

Filmed and written as its actors and characters grew up, Boyhood was largely made without the benefit of hindsight; unlike other works that span a large period of time, the film is not told in flashbacks or narrated from the vantage point of the present day, but is rather a slow, continuous crawl through time. Thus, the onscreen pop culture artifacts that mark its temporality have not been curated for their lasting relevance to a viewer in 2014. The songs and TV shows and media imagery that appear throughout Boyhood are simply the ones that seemed, in 2003 or 2006 or 2010, like they mattered most at those points, and felt the most ubiquitous. You or I may have forgotten all about Dragon Ball Z, Boyhood reminds us; or about how much hope a single Obama sign seemed to contain in 2008; but at some point those things felt, in a very real way, like definitive markers that summed up the mood of an entire point in time. For many viewers, one of Boyhood’s greatest strengths is its ability to craft a familiar emotional landscape from the material objects we remember from our own lives.

confusing, wild, unrequited]. There are some amusing choices: My guilty childhood pleasure was [Pogs, intentionally killing my Tomagotchi, Hoobastank]. #Boyhood. The best advice I got growing up was [wear sunscreen, buy gold, always wear clean underwear]. #Boyhood.

There’s something deeply weird about this transparently manufactured nostalgia. It exploits our (very real) desire to connect over our mutual cultural experiences, to share the signifiers of our pasts—the movies, music, television and toys that often feel like they have defined and shaped our development as individuals and as a collective. At the same time, it flattens these nuanced experiences into Tweet-able, hashtagged truisms, the ultimate aim of which, of course, is to drum up online buzz for the film. The whole site— which feels oddly corporate and exploitative for a film that has strived to market itself as independent—calls to mind a lazily written piece of click-bait: You know you’re a nineties kid when…

“We love nostalgia because nostalgia loves us, at least at a very basic surface level,” wrote Jes Skolnik in a piece for the radical online publication The Media this summer, in which she discussed the wave of ’90s nostalgia that’s cropped up in music (think fuzzedout, guitar-heavy indie rock), fashion (the neo-grunge aesthetic that’s become weirdly ubiquitous in the past year or so), and general social media discourse (the ironic return of early web shorthand—“rn,” “u”—and those aforementioned ’90s-themed listicles).

Institutionalized nostalgia, she argues, provides us with “a chance to talk about our shared cultural touchstones, though it does not allow much for different perspectives—the nostalgic reading in mass media is pretty unilateral, assuming that we all come from pretty much the same background.”

Skolnik writes that the imagined universal background implicit in institutionalized ’90s nostalgia assumes a white, middle-class, Western upbringing in which a culturally tuned-in figure—posited, by entities like Buzzfeed and Boyhood’s Nostalgia Generator, as you—grew up with the opportunities and capital necessary to access the movies, television, music and technologies of the era. Clearly, this illusion is false: for every person who watches Boyhood and recognizes with delight a moment from his or her own childhood when, say, Mason plays an expensive video game or discovers Kurt Vonnegut in middle school, there are surely several others who feel alienated or out of the loop: those artifacts, while familiar to many of us, were not natural or present during the comings-of-age of many—even most—people alive today. Mass nostalgia for the artifacts of a dominant culture, Skolnik argues, has the potential to erase perspectives that have already been marginalized. +++ The protagonist of Boyhood grows up in a series of suburban homes of varying socioeconomic value. He reads a lot, watches a lot of television, eventually becomes interested in taking photographs and is given an expensive camera. He starts having sex with a girl-

+++ I grew up in the early 2000s, the chronology of my childhood aligning almost perfectly with that of Boyhood’s Mason. Having been raised in a southern suburb by eerily Ethan Hawke-ish parents (many of my childhood car rides were soundtracked by The Flaming Lips and Wilco), the film struck an almost uncomfortable chord, resonating especially as a result of its reliance upon a cultural zeitgeist I found very familiar.

After I saw the film, I immediately scrolled through its official website, hosted on Tumblr, and found a series of pictures ready to be reblogged. Some are stills from the film, but many are simply images I recognized from my own childhood: a photograph of a water gun, a Pokemon card, a GIF from the TV show Hey Arnold. #boyhood, the pictures are tagged, and #richardlinklater, and then, strangely: #tbt. “Throwback Thursday”? Are these images, created and collected specifically for this 2014 film, really throwbacks for every viewer?

Keep navigating through the website, and you’ll find a page called the NOSTALGIA GENERATOR. The link takes you to a sort of Mad Libs activity, meant to be filled out and Tweeted or posted to your Facebook timeline. “Pick a childhood memory,” users are instructed, and then: When I was ___ my favorite ___ was _______. #Boyhood. Users are provided with a drop-down menu of options: My first [love, kiss, crush] was [perfect,

13

□

ARTS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

friend, he graduates from high school, he goes to college.

Does Boyhood, with its white, straight, college-bound, middle-class male protagonist, assume a universal cultural experience? In many ways, that’s what it’s been lauded for and how it’s been connected to—as a very real, very relatable portrait of a subjectivity and time period that spans backward just far enough to be remembered fondly by many.

Boyhood is a movie that a lot of people are talking about, and I’ve spoken to many people about it, most of whom are college-educated, middle- or upper-middle-class, USraised individuals around my age. I’ve heard the same opinions voiced over and over: the movie is almost eerily realistic, its landscape—cultural and physical—unsettlingly similar to the ones in which we grew up. “It made me feel not unique,” a friend told me. “I felt like it was made especially for me,” said another.

Boyhood is principally about the development of a unique self, the emergence of a thoughtful and creative adult out of a child whose existence is defined primarily by his surroundings. This is a process that occurs everywhere, for everyone, regardless of their socioeconomic standing and access to music or TV or toys or technology. But the thing about Boyhood—and arguably what makes it so relatable and fun to watch for someone like me, having grown up listening to Wilco in my dad’s car, and at the same time so potentially alienating for the countless viewers whose childhoods looked nothing like that—is that Mason’s development of self hinges so strongly on the pop culture with which he engages. There are some raw, timeless, fully human moments in the film—especially between Mason and his mother—but an enormous portion of Mason’s dialogue is him discussing Star Wars or Tropic Thunder or Kurt Vonnegut or the politics of Facebook, and for most of the film, this is the Mason we see most—mediated, tuned-in.

Implicit in the film is the question: what makes you become yourself? The forces that Jess Skolnik calls the “nostalgia machine” (a sinister phrase that bears an uncanny

resemblance to Boyhood’s Nostalgia Generator) tell us that it’s the artifacts we grow up with—that the person you are today is wholly a result of Fisher-Price and Nickelodeon and Myspace and Harry Potter and whatever parts of the zeitgeist felt most present in your childhood. Boyhood addresses the superficial ease with which we associate who a person is with what he or she likes and wears and listens to—“He’s way into Bright Eyes, so that’s not so bad,” Mason says of his college roommate before they meet—but at the same time, the film’s innovative depiction of an entire childhood is a little more realistic and nuanced than that: pop culture shapes us, Linklater’s movie reminds us, but so does a lot of other stuff.

SEPTEMBER 12 2014

+++ There is something almost unavoidably sad about stories that span—and necessarily compress—a great deal of time. 100 Years of Solitude is devastating; so is Slaughterhouse-Five.

But Boyhood is arguably the first movie to do what literature has been doing for centuries: no filmmaker has ever really crawled in increments through an entire coming-of-age in the way that Proust did with In Search of Lost Time, or Joyce with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. As such, its sadness is unique. Guided by the music and pop culture onscreen, we see the film jump through time, always aware of what we are missing between scenes. Toward the end of the film, Mason’s mother, weeping, says of her entire life: “I thought there would be more.” It’s an arresting moment not just because of Patricia Arquette’s virtuosic delivery, but also because we, as viewers, feel the same way: we have witnessed Mason’s whole childhood, sped-up, but we have missed so much.

Twelve years is an absurd expanse of time to compress into three hours. An unimaginably huge amount of stuff happens to an individual in a dozen years, let alone to an entire culture.

Obviously, some amount of curation is necessary to represent the last twelve years of American life in three hours, and the fact that the movie privileges artifacts from that expanse of time that reflect a primarily white, Western, middle-class sensibility is perhaps frustrating, but also unsurprising—Linklater knows his audience, and knows how to cater to the part of a viewer that loves recognizing and relating to shared icons and experiences. But it’s also very difficult to imagine a film that manages to encompass a multitude of experiences and perspectives in the space of three hours: it’s impossible enough, as Boyhood elegantly proves, to do justice even to one.

LISA BORST B’17 doesn’t even like Dragon Ball Z.

ARTS

□ 14

HOW TO

W E N R U O PREDICT Y G N I T A R P L E Y S ' T N A R RESTAU

Alex Sam & k ic n s re B m a

by S

mon

What type of food?

NEW NEW American

Parking reserved for?

Indo-Canadian Data Brunch My Parents Dropped Me Off Photosynthetic Vehicles

Noble Steed

Belgian Bilge

Up and Coming

Loincloths

What's on tap?

Venture capital backing?

Mindfulness YES

YES

Dress code?

General Cacophony

Burlap Sacks Fifth Avenue

Black Eye Black Tie

Bowl Cut

Gregorian Chance the Rapper

#Normcorn Signature dish?

Moisture

The Blood of the Innocent

15

â–Ą

FOOD

A highly curated and tastefully deliberate mix of deep house, witch house, acide house, flaccid house, suburban house, this house is not a home house, white house and halfuny house, tied delicately together by late career switchfoot

Oysters on the HalfShell Silverstein

Building style?

Restaurant powered by?

NO

OK..

Lunch

Carbon Allergies

Bottomless Mocktails

Margaritaville Radio

Neil Degrasse Tyson lookalikes

Sox & Sandals

Dietary restrictions accomodated?

Fred Astaire

Soundtrack?

Did you say "haute?"

Wait staff aesthetic?

Leather Aprons / Assless Chaps

Nobel Savage

Describe your neighbourhood?

Hot Cuisine

Beer-Battered Void Fructose Liquid Modernity

Sleepy Teepee

Good venue for?

Dutch Colonial

Marxist Kareoke

Voter Registration

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

HIKING

by Leah Steinberg illustration by Jade Donaldson

“You know I’ve actually been wanting to do this for a while,” my sister said, sitting in the passenger seat with her feet on the glove compartment. She wore small shorts and a headband to catch her little hairs. We had seen the mountain online in photos of our peers. The pictures were all about angles, using the natural slope of the mountain to gather the light and send it down to the girl, whose thick socks looked wooly over her ankles. I think the girl was preparing for a month long wilderness program. For some reason she was sucking on a juice box.

That summer, hiking was hip. But we weren't thinking about that when we woke up. My plans for the day were pure. I had always wanted to hike, just to move around the mountain.

The way I wanted to hike didn’t really exist. I imagined setting out alone, leaving one person and hiking silently to another. Saying goodbye, beginning my hike, walking uphill through an awful period of time, suffering and continuing and finally, arriving, pained and arriving, into the care of another.

Sometimes we bent over and placed our palms on the trail. We wanted to feel like the mountain was so steep that we needed to lie down on it, not to fall. My sister’s complaints never caught even her own attention. It was hot out and she was naturally weak. We hiked until she got tired. Then we found a tree. We lay, panting, under its shade. This was what we had been hoping for when we set out: improper supplies, dehydration, the eventual conclusion that not hiking is the better choice for those who can avoid it.

As I rested under the tree, she climbed up to its branches. My sister put her stomach on the lowest bough and hung her legs below. That was when she remembered that the only reason she had ever wanted to go hiking was because of the pictures. My sister laughed and said she couldn’t believe she had ever thought that this was something she actually wanted to do. She put her chin in her hands and swung her legs.

“I said, I think I can see the ocean between the leaves,” she said.

She should have been used to knowing that the ocean was nearby. We had always been coastal people. Our mornings were full of fog and a slight wetness around everything. We could sit on the beach, and we had as children, until I realized the sand was so white and expansive it had no texture at all. Stepping out from under the tree, I took off my dorky baseball hat. I tossed my head back and stood there. Under my eyelids, the sky was red and crawling towards me. To close your eyes to the sun, I thought, is a different sort of rest.

My sister’s wants were always new and racing forward, and it was a game for me to be around them, energy I could surf on top of. I didn’t have my own energy. So I liked being near someone desperate like her.

If only we could walk to the ocean my sister saw. If only we needed, with dizzying emergency, to walk to the ocean. There had been no ocean in the photos online. The summer needed to make something flat of me. I put my hat back on so I could see what was beneath the tree. My sister's hanging legs, puckered blue from walking. I entered the tree’s shade, which was like a dark room with a low ceiling where an old person waits.

She was bleeding. Her knees looked rotted with dirt. She propped her face up with her elbows on the ground. She didn't say anything about what I had done. She just looked up at me and asked if there was any water. I pulled a bottle out of my backpack. When she opened the bottle I heard its spinal noise as its seal became teeth.

“Gosh,” she said with an inhalation as she drank.

“What direction is the ocean?” I asked her. She was disposed on the dirt, and I was all we had. I decided we would go to the ocean. I felt bad for my sister because she was tied up on the ground, but I also felt bad for me. For me since now I’d have to carry her. For the ocean because when we’d get there, it would still be moving, and we’d be tired pieces of true material, all hurt through.

We were failing at being wild.

I carried my sister on my back. That was when I realized we both liked to suffer. She liked to suffer like a person starting or ending life, at all hours a show, sometimes a show no one watched. I always watched the show. She shifted on my back but my knees were strong as replacements. I took littler steps to keep her there. We looked like just the cross, coming down lonely from the hill. Red wood.

She ironed me out. She was heavy, but it was more that she was pressing me into the ground, holding my nose to the ripe grindstone, and finally I could smell. I had recently lost my sense of smell due to an over the counter nasal spray I had found in our dad’s medicine cabinet. I had just wanted for once unhindered breathing. No one had told me how deep my sinuses were placed within me.

And then, like how I was suddenly able to smell again, I could see the ocean. The mountain continued down green and yellow until it hit sand and was the water for the rest of its way. Standing there looking at the ocean, the world became a map. And unfortunately I was not on the map but on top of the map, a piece of paper. Moving along like a stranger.

I was trying to get to the ocean, because I was trying. And when we would get to the ocean, I thought, my sister and I would be given all new problems. Our clothes would be wet. Our thighs would rub into redness, a victory.

I dropped my sister and she sledded down the hill. Until the trench she made by digging her toes into the dirt slowed her. I walked towards her and as I did, I learned I could not unbend my back. Even with her off of me, in a pile on the floor with a bib of brown dust on her t-shirt, I was stuck staring at the ground. I hadn’t felt a spinal disk slip, but I knew that one had. From now on one of them was gone forever.

I looked between my legs back up the hill, where the trail was sad and obvious, clearly

+++ She looked like she was trying to sleep. I tapped my sister’s thigh, pale salami. I pulled on her to get her down from the tree. She folded over the branch, screaming and clawing, to try to stay up there, but her stomach slid against the bark until we both fell backwards. I got up and looked down at her.

“My legs,” she said. What luck to have that problem, I thought. I wished I were at least physically exhausted.

16

□

literary

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

the only way to the ocean from there to here. Our trail was pockmarked from when it held rivers for quick gushing moments in the winter. I tried to look forward, down to the ocean, but I couldn’t. I could see only my shoes. The feet of my sister lay ahead. But I did not see farther, I did not see to the ocean. The ocean was where I intended to dissolve whatever was left of me. My sister might be gone, dissolved, before her wound was, I thought. Then I would be left reaching for a thread, and the thread would mean my sister. Or whatever was left of me would be left, grabbing the loop as it spun in the water. I would unwind it until my arms were wide, holding one big circle. I’d turn around in the ocean. I would look up at the hill in awe. I would be alone.

I had always felt like a remote man on a hill. Quiet and serious. Except every day I was just a teenage girl in a car, in a bed, in a toilet stall. My quietness was trapped in the mess on my bedroom floor. Or asleep in front of the television, drooling. I woke up in silence.

I placed my head back on the pillow. I went back to sleep. I had always had an affinity for hills. I assumed when I got on one I’d be doing an activity like a cave does, always gasping.

On the hill, my quietness and seriousness would boom outward into something beautiful.

I’d feel a real sense of magic this evening and it wouldn’t even be the evening. I shouldn’t have gone hiking with my sister, who was a broken engine. I should have known that with her I’d be at work, bringing her body to the water like a jug that’s already full. That was how things had become with my sister. My sister who used to write herself notes on graph paper.

She would fold them up five times and put them in her underwear. She was a little surprised when she found the notes to herself the next time she went to the bathroom. She told me about this a long time ago. When she told me about this I told her she was amazing. I was stunned at how vast her interior landscape must have been. I told her this. I didn’t even get to see any of the notes.

And now, what were her notes to herself? They were nothing. Now, what did she discover, later any afternoon, when it fell to the tiled floor of our school’s tidy bathroom?

walk, especially since I was there.

“Get back on,” I said. “I’m bent anyways.”

I got her on my back by telling her to make herself into a ramp. Her legs bobbed behind me as I walked. I looked straight at the ground as I carried her. My body for once worn at last, or at least citrus pain.

“I’m alone in this,” I said. “In a certain way I am weirdly alone in this,” I said. I said it so she remembered who was on whose back. But I didn’t mean it to be harsh. Really, as cargo, she was a gift. She helped push us down the hill to the water. She had found the water in the first place.

Then we were near the ocean. The hill continued down with us, sloping with us and bringing us. The plants there were more salted, the dirt of the path was off-white. There were giant shrubs, a few dunes, and then the beach in earnest. The shrubs were being slowly blown into the water. When I got to the water I kept going until I was so deep that my sister floated up off my back. When I almost couldn’t breathe I removed the hair from over my nose and mouth, and breathed again. We didn't know what to do, so I said the ocean responds best to weakness. We imagined ourselves as pool toys. We fell asleep floating with our hands together. I hoped that if our fingers came apart it would hurt enough to wake us up. She would wake up first because it would be more than the little pain she could handle.

She would wake up and look around and watch me sleeping in the sea.

+++ “I can walk,” my sister said from where she was, still belly down, limp and providing blood for our trail. She pressed her hands into the ground and tried to get up. But she couldn’t

SEPTEMBER 12 2014

literary

□ 17

september 12 2014

X

â–Ą 18

Start Making Sense Talking Heads Tribute The Met, Pawtucket // 9 pm // $12-14 This Pennsylvania-based tribute band pays homage to some of RISD’s most famous alums. They promise the show will be a “rockin’, funkin’, danceable celebration of the new-wave art punk you loved from the 80’s.” This must be the place.

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite 70 Brown St, McCormack Family Theater // 6pm // Free William Deresiewicz, former Yale University professor and author of “Don’t Send Your Kids to the Ivy League” (New Republic, July 2014) and “The Ivy League, Mental Illness and the Meaning of Life” (The Atlantic, August 2014) is coming to Brown’s campus to discuss the disadvantages of an elite education.

Community Discussion on Police Body Cameras JWW 302 // 7-8 pm Would mandatory body cameras cut down on incidents of police brutality? Come talk about pros and cons of this policy with the Brown ACLU.

African American History Walking Tour RISD Auditorium // 10-12am // $10, $5 for students Led by a local historian, this walking tour will explore African American history on College Hill since 1701. All proceeds go to the RI Black Heritage Society. Reservations required.

Smut Night!

95 Empire // 7:30-9:30 // $5-15 sliding scale The Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health (CSPH) are teaming up with AS220 to present the 2nd Annual Smut Night, with performances, music, DIY erotica, sex advice and a “sexy raffle.” Revel responsibly and pick up some free safer sex supplies from the CSPH.

Speak: Celebrating women and trans writers of poetry Symposium Books, 240 Westminster st. // 6 PM // free Three local writers will be reading their poetry at Symposium Books’ downtown location. Katherine Murphy is the hum of the dust settling. Rebecca Willner / fragments. serena putterman gets inspired in doctor’s waiting rooms.

Slater Park Fall Festival RR1A // Saturday and Sunday 11-5 // Free entrance Enjoy the last weekend of summer outdoors in Pawtucket’s Slater Park, with food trucks, a farmers market, crafts, a haunted tunnel, paddleboat rides and the Stone Soup Folk Festival. Catch the “No Tobacco Day” poetry slam at 12pm on the Kids Stage, then head to Daggett Farm from 11-4 to scope out the Classic Car Cruise.

Restore the Pell Grant Symposium MacMillan 117 // 6-8pm // Free In 1994, Clinton passed legislation denying financial aid to incarcerated students, which dramatically reduced the number of college programs in US prisons. Learn about recent reforms and initiatives to expand higher education opportunities in prisons at this symposium organized by Open Doors and the Education from the Inside Out Coalition.

DESIGN x RI kick off Trinity Rep //8:30 AM - 6 PM Starting on September 17th, Design Week RI promises some “local design superstars, open spaces and design treasure hunt as a part of this inaugural event”. It culminates in the already dear to our hearts Better World by Design, but in reality starts almost two weeks earlier and has a number of talks, lectures and workshops, focused on Providence Architecture and resources. Not to miss: Designing with Light, Keynote Address by Michael Hendrix and Downtown Providence Architecture Walk. Check their full schedule at http://designweekri. com/about/ and keep your eyes and browsers open to find out more.

ShrineBeast: Mixed media exhibition on the transformative nature of love Yellow Peril Gallery, 60 Valley St. #5 // September 4 - October 5 (open Thurs + Fri 3-8 pm, Sat + Sun 12-5) Artist Andrew Paul Woolbright makes art about his love for his wife; his work is forged from the spirit of “Clinton-era American optimism, love, and sentiment.”

Movies on the Block: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

260 Westminster St. // 8pm (dusk) // Free Free outdoor movie screening. Set in Great Depression Era Mississippi, this adventure comedy loosely satires the Odyssey as it follows the treasure hunt of three escaped convicts.

Go a little early to get set up, probably bring a blanket and some snacks.

“Listen to your heart”

by Roxette is released this week in 1988

Cannabis Caucus Aurora, 276 Westminster // 8 pm // $5 Hear about local efforts to legalize and regulate marijuana backed by experimental synth-pop from Philadelphia (Moon Bounce) and other jams at this fundraiser hosted by Regulate Rhode Island.