The College Hill Independent Vol. 31 Issue 4

Vol. 31 Issue 1 Vol. 31 Issue 4

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a Brown/RISD Weekly a Brown/RISD weekly

Vol. 31 Issue 1 Vol. 31 Issue 4

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the NEWS 02 Week in Transposition Wilson Cusack, Julia Tompkins & Francis Torres

Volume 31 No. 4

03 Feeling Hot Hot Hot Maria Camila Bustos 05 Mechanics Mickey Zaslavsky METRO 04 Pimp My RI Jamie Packs 11 Another Brick in the Wall Ben Berke ARTS 09 Hot Wheels Alec Mapes-Frances, Jonah Max & Athena Washburn 13 Freestyle Dash Elhauge FEATURES 07 Bread & Butter Piper French 16 Debt Becomes Her Zeke Reffe-Hogan

From the editors: Found: one bright orange coffee mug, 3/4 full of what smelled like an Ethiopian dark-roast. Stumbling out of my car this morning, I was confronted with this object and subsequently with the problematic experience of “finding.” For what does it mean to “find”—is it simply the ability to be at the right place at the right time, when fate or chance or a greater power has spat out some relic? Did I now have a responsibility to this lonely ceramic? And if so, how could I return it to its rightful owner? After this experience, I have decided to put together an incomplete list of found objects, just in case you have noticed any of them missing.

Found: Whitey Bulger + Monito del Monte + Werner Herzog’s penguin + Milton’s Paradise + The Secret City of Paititi—possibly the City of Gold—now believed to be located somewhere in Brazil (NB: there has been a lot of potential interest in claiming this item, so if you believe this might be your city of gold, please be ready to answer some specific questions about the item) + “Fruits on a Table or Still Life with a Small Dog” by Gaugin + Waldo. –IE

OCCULT 15 Cross My Heart Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa LITERARY 17 L Yousef Hilmy EPHEMERA 08 Between a Rock & a Sandwich Jake Brodsky X 18 Intrastellar Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan & Pierie Korostoff

Managing Editors Sebastian Clark Kim Sarnoff Maya Sorabjee News Wilson Cusack Dominique Pariso Francis Torres Metro Jamie Packs Shane Potts Arts Alec Mapes-Frances Jonah Max Athena Washburn Features Piper French Yousef Hilmy Henry Staley Science Camera Ford Tech Dash Elhauge

P.O Box 1930 Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

Literary Gaby Hick

Staff Writers Jane Argodale Ben Berke Liz Cory Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa Julia Tompkins Erin West

Metabolics Eli NeumanHammond

Staff Illustrators Caroline Brewer Teri Minogue

Ephemera Jake Brodsky India Ennenga

Copy Miles Taylor

Interviews Madeleine Matsui Occult Lance Gloss

X Layla Ehsan Sara Khan Pierie Korostoff

Web Charlie Windolf Business Kaya Hill

List Jay Mamana Ben Ross

Senior Editors Tristan Rodman Rick Salamé

Cover Ben Ross

MVP Lance Gloss

Design & Illustration Nikolas Bentel Polina Godz Alexa Terfloth

theindy.org

@theindy_tweets

WEEK IN TRANSPOSITION

by Wilson Cusack, Julia Tompkins & Francis Torres illustration by Rob Polidoro

Bud, Not Buddy For anyone who grew up in the era of the 1978 book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, things falling from the sky is nothing new. Rain? No problem. Stars? They do it all the time. Meatballs, unlikely, but hey, if Death Eaters can swarm Hogwarts when the weather gets foul, a downpour of groundbeef-balls doesn’t seem that far from possible. Meteorology: there’s something for everyone.

For Hulk the German Shepherd in Nogales, Arizona— near the U.S.-Mexico border—this possibility took a weighty turn for the real. While Hulk slept, 26 pounds of Mary Jane, dope, weed, hashish, herb, ganja, bammer, skunk weed, mountain cabbage, fatty boom blatty—you get my drift— landed atop his dog house.

In the wee hours of the morning, Hulk’s owner, Mary Donnelly, awoke to what she thought was thunder. Poor, unassuming Mary. Poking around her carport that morning, Mary found splintered wood on the ground and one 26 pound bundle wrapped in black plastic up on the roof of her Hulk’s abode. “It’s all right on top of our dog’s house. It just made a perfectly round hole through our carport.” Due to the family’s proximity to the border, Donnelly assumed the package was drugs and called the police.

Officers told Donnelly and her husband that the bud drop was the likely error of an ultra-light drug-smuggling aircraft, which prematurely released part of its load down on sleeping Hulk. NB: if you are expecting an airborn bundle, quell your hopes for a baby. As Nogales Police Chief, Derek Arnson, said following the incident, “Someone definitely made a mistake.”

Thanks to the tumble-bud, the Donnelly’s face $500 dollars of home repairs. Our only question: why not pay for them with the gift of the sky? –JT

Oct 9, 2015

Bom Jardim and Clyde Chief among the purported allures of the globalized economy is the home workspace, from where a click of a mouse pad can beam you in and out of your morning conference without the need for a dreary commute—or the lower half of your work attire. Who among us doesn’t dream of untethering professional life from the soul-crushing monotony of the cubicle office?

One entrepreneurial Brazilian public official, Lidiane Leite, took it upon herself to explore exciting new frontiers in remote work. The 25-year-old former mayor of the small Brazilian town of Bom Jardim broke new ground by running her office primarily through WhatsApp conversations with members of her cabinet. Taking the same approach to governance that so many 20-somethings do for most personal relationships, Leite eschewed personal meetings and public speeches for the power of texts, voice memos, and the occasional emoji.

This allowed her enough time to also work on her tan, which was pretty solid after months of running Bom Jardim’s affairs from the tropical shores of São Luis, a city 176 miles away.

Leite’s legally questionable practices became so infamous that the Brazilian Federal Police granted her the singular distinction of “the most wanted person in the state of Maranhão.” Perhaps she felt gratified. If most of us manifest our desire to feel wanted through our use of social media, it is only a notable few that succeed at garnering such outright celebrity. Granted, Leite attracted police attention primarily because she syphoned funds from public school lunch and refurbishment programs to pay for her high-rolling lifestyle in São Luis—documented extensively through a high-profile Instagram account. Perhaps she felt gratified once more when her constituents started calling her the “Show-off Mayor” and took to the streets in protest. How many other corrupt small-town politicians can boast such an extensive catalogue of expertly framed selfies at lush nightclubs and tropical beachfronts?

It turns out that Leite’s ex-boyfriend, Beto Rocha, planned to run for mayor of Bom Jardim in 2012. But when he was confronted with corruption charges some days before the elections, she stepped in to take his spot. Leite later hired Rocha as her main advisor. A fling may just be a fling, but nepotism is forever. When the Federal Police issued an arrest warrant accusing both of them of corruption in late August, she ditched her cyber-office (and her boyfriend) and went off the map. Her Snapchat remains active. –FT

The Year of the Russian Volunteer Some people volunteer at soup kitchens, others help dictators stay in power. Didn’t you hear? “A unit of Russian volunteers, conflict veterans, will probably appear in the ranks of the Syrian army,” as Vladimir Komoyedov, head of the armed forces committee in Russia’s Parliament, so carefully put it in a statement to Russian newspaper Interfax on October 5.

That’s right, Russian conflict veterans, widely known for their goodwill and generosity, might be on the road to Damascus, literally. Where will they be coming from? Well, they might be the very same benevolent Russian combat veterans that were determined to be in Eastern Ukraine after that whole “Those aren’t Russian soldiers…oh wait actually they are but…” debacle, which has been ongoing since the Russian invasion of Crimea. These generous soldiers, acting on their own, “cannot be stopped” from making such a trip, Komoyedov said.

“What brings volunteers there besides the cause?” Komoyedov answers the question in keeping with the Kremlin’s new signature style of international diplomacy: “Of course, it’s probably money.” So, mercenaries. He’s talking about mercenaries.

If you volunteer for a job and then get paid for it, you’re an employee. When that job involves killing people in service of a foreign government, you’re a mercenary. And of course it helps that the Russian government, according to US intelligence officials, is building housing for up to 1,000 people near an airfield in Assad-controlled Syria. Look, I don’t want to get bogged down in all of these technical details. These things can be very confusing for the Russian military: accidentally going into Ukraine, accidentally bombing the US-backed Syrian rebels instead of ISIS, as they claimed, and accidentally flying into Turkish airspace. The guys can’t catch a break! Or can they? Must be a fun time to be in the creative writing bureau of the Kremlin. –WC

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by Maria Camila Bustos illustration by Kara Fan

y l l a u ct A ht g i M 5 1 0 2 y o u Wh Q s u tat S the e k S ha The Changing Politics of Development and Climate Change

On September 21, 2014, over 400,000 people marched in the streets of New York City to demand action on climate change.

The People’s Climate March was the largest climate march in history, marking a day some media outlets have referred to as “the day that climate change action went mainstream.”

The march was also historical given its composition: it was the first time environmental justice groups and large green organizations like the Sierra Club joined together in such a massive scale. Frontline communities, labor groups, students, anti-corporate campaigns, scientists, faith groups, and many others marched through the center of Manhattan for several hours. There were also demonstrations in more than 150 countries around the world.

Building on the momentum and energy of the People’s Climate March, a coalition of climate and non-climate groups have organized a day of action that will take place on October 14, 2015, across the United States. The march will bring together front-line communities, workers, immigrants, faith leaders, and activists working on racial, economic, and climate justice in order to promote the notion that a clean energy economy must also be inclusive, just, and improve peoples’ lives. This national day of action has been planned to precede the United Nations climate negotiations at the end of the year.

From November 30 to December 12, representatives of more than 190 countries will meet in Paris to negotiate a global agreement on climate change. For over two decades, Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have met to debate a possible solution to climate change—however, they have yet to reach a major breakthrough. Moreover, referring to climate change as an 'environmental issue' paints an incomplete picture. What is really being discussed at the UN negotiations is not 'the environment' per se, but the way we understand economic development in the 21st century.

Shifted Status Quo Since their beginning, the climate negotiations have been framed as a battle between rich and poor countries. Only until very recently, a majority of developing countries refused to engage in robust climate action. They argued that they would not sacrifice their right to development when developed countries were responsible for the problem in the first place.

This narrative was particularly relevant in 1992, when the UNFCCC was created. Yet, today’s world looks very different.

As climate expert Monica Araya has said, “the negotiations are always told as a battle of North versus South, rich against poor, but each time this explains less and less of what’s happening.” Since 2009, the increasing fragmentation in the G77 and China negotiating bloc has become more visible on account of changing geopolitics, divergent interests among countries in the Global South, and the emergence of new negotiating groups at the climate talks. The assumption that

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the negotiations remain a battle between the developed and developing world is an anachronistic oversimplification.

The economic and political rise of Brazil, Russia, India, and China pose a challenge to conventional wisdom at the climate negotiations. These countries' economic capacity—as well as their greenhouse gas emissions—have significantly increased since 1992. Together, they account for over 36% of the world’s total emissions and have a combined population of over 3 billion people. The economic emergence of these countries has even allowed them to challenge the Western financial order, exemplified by the launch of the New Development Bank earlier this year. Although they continue to deal with widespread poverty and low per capita emissions, the international community has pressured them to demonstrate leadership on climate change given their present and future contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. The same is also increasingly true for other emerging economies like Mexico, Turkey, and Indonesia.

After the Kyoto Protocol failed to reduce global emissions by a significant amount, the negotiations have sought a different approach to a global climate agreement.

Rather than a top-down method where commitments are imposed, countries are now expected to develop a strategy internally. By the time the Paris talks start in November, all countries are expected to have submitted their national plans (also known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDCs) to combat climate change, offering an individual mitigation target as a contribution to the global climate regime. This would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when only developed countries were expected to present commitment reduction targets. These contributions will then be included in a broader global agreement that—in theory— will push towards decarbonization of the world economy.

The New Climate Economy The submission of these national plans has presented a unique opportunity to foster domestic debates on climate change.

They are a way of integrating environmental consciousness into development plans that engage all government agencies. Indeeed, one of the biggest challenges has been communicating to other sectors in the government that, though the problem is environmental, climate change is inherently tied to the myriad aspects development.

INDCs have been an opportunity to fight the inertia of an economic system dependent on the undisrupted flow of fossil fuels. As expected, there has been some pushback against increasing ambition in all countries. There are still those who argue that climate action is too costly, that climate change should not be a priority, and that environmentally sustainable development is something only rich countries can afford.

This has been the argument presented by ministries of foreign affairs in India and Brazil as well as by industries interested in

preventing climate policies from stifling energy, transport, and agricultural sectors.

This stance too often drowns out the voice of the parts of civil society and government that are interested in taking action. It reinforces the false idea that prosperity and development cannot be decoupled from environmental degradation or greenhouse gas emissions. It has become increasingly clear that countries can reap economic benefits from climate action. In 2014, The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, a major international initiative comprised of former heads of government and finance ministers, released the New Climate Economy. In essence, this report explains how climate action and economic growth are not mutually exclusive. For example, building better connected, more compact cities can save over $3 trillion in investment while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving quality of life. Similarly, decentralized renewable energy in developing countries can create jobs and provide electricity for more than a billion people.

The 2015 climate talks are not just about stabilizing climate change; they are about inclusive development, clean energy, and better cities. If countries fail to look beyond traditional narratives of development, the public will lose an opportunity to realize that something else is possible and within their reach. Government, civil society, and businesses will miss their chance to leverage the momentum around climate change action in order to push for a transition towards a better tomorrow.

Negotiating Climate Justice is Not an Option What is at stake if countries fail to secure a robust agreement?

The livelihoods of millions of people around the world.

Climate change is, and will continue to be, the biggest threat to human rights; it will aggravate existing inequality and conflict and impact those who are already most vulnerable and marginalized. While understanding that transformative initiatives often occur at the local, regional, and national level, countries cannot afford to give up on an international strategy.

This is the time neither for developing states to hide under traditional discourses of “historical responsibility” to justify climate inaction nor for the industrialized world to keep postponing serious emission reductions while marginalized populations (outside but also inside their countries) suffer the most. The world is running out of time.

2015 may be the year when we understand that climate justice also means economic justice, the year when we add more capacity for renewable power than for all fossil fuels combined, the year when, with a little bit of luck and the voices of people all over the world, we actually shake things up.

Maria Camila Bustos B’16 will be making a lot of noise in Paris.

The College Hill Independent

STEPPING UP TO THE PLATE

Rhode Island Seeks a New Image

by Jamie Packs illustration by Pierie Korostoff

In October of last year Governor Lincoln Chafee unveiled his design for a new Rhode Island license plate. The simple proposal consisted of a dark blue background with a small golden silhouette of the 1903 America’s Cup winning sailboat and the words “Beautiful Rhode Island” in a slick font.

Current Governor Gina Raimondo, replacing Chafee after the 2014 elections, is not satisfied with the design. In fact, she has much loftier aspirations in mind and has decided to put Chafee’s license plate proposal on hold in favour of something far more ambitious. Raimondo recently introduced her plan for a total rebranding of Rhode Island’s image. “If we are going to do this, we’ve got to be all in,” said Raimondo, who is hoping that a fresh image will attract more tourism and business to the State.

The State is devoting $4.5 million to this complete makeover, which will be headed by three different firms. One of these firms, Milton Glaser, is responsible for the iconic “I Love NY” campaign of the 70s. Local creative firm EpicDecade is interested in the community-building potential that such a moment offers. Founder Seth Goldenberg mentioned the possibility for forums and events around the State, advocating for the exciting potential of “public discourse about the future.”

This is not the first time that the nation’s smallest state has decided to rebrand itself. A 1981 campaign under governor Joe Garrahy attempted to do just that, conjuring up the motto “the biggest little state in the union.” Indeed, beyond merely changing the State’s license plates and welcome signs, Raimondo’s campaign is driven by a desire to redefine Rhode Islanders’ image of themselves. Hopefully this new image is something brief, catchy, and easily stamped into metal.

In honor of the State’s forthcoming marketing campaign, the Indy offers some possible license plate designs for the new Rhode Island.

JAMIE PACKS B’17 is riding dirty.

Oct 9, 2015

METRO

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Considering the Stampede at Mecca

On September 26, a deadly stampede occurred during the annual Hajj pilgrimage when two waves of Muslim pilgrims collided on streets a few miles outside of Mecca. One group had just finished the symbolic rite of stoning the devil, Ramy-al Jamaraat. They were returning from the site where Ramy al-Jamaraat is performed­—the Jamaraat Bridge, a pedestrian walkway that can hold 300,000 people—just as the other group was heading there. At the time of writing, there are over 700 confirmed dead and nearly 1300 injuries from the incident. Various sources put the death toll at twice as many. Some governments, notably Iran’s, are blaming the Saudi Arabians who planned the event. Khalid al Falih, the Saudi Health Minister, has come out with a statement attributing blame to “pilgrims who didn’t follow the guidelines and instructions issued by the responsible authorities.” It may be hard to find culprits in such a crowd, though, as the attendance rate for the ritual this year was over two million.

One of the rites in particular, Sayee, illustrates how logistically hectic the Hajj pilgrimage can become. This custom entails running the 300 meters between the hills of Safa and Marwa back and forth seven times, as a symbolic reenactment of the story of Hajar, the wife of Abraham, whose son Ishmael was dying of thirst in the desert. It is said that she ran to and fro seven times between the hills, desperately looking for water, and that on the seventh run an angel appeared before her and said Allah had heard Ishmael’s cries. In the year of 2015, it is more than just her who is running back and forth—it is a few million people that must complete this rite in one day.

The recent horrific Hajj stampede is unfortunately on the bottom of a very long list of stampedes at religious gatherings. India, a country home to many religions and many collosal religious events, appears on this list far more than any other country. In 2013, 115 people died in a stampede during the Navaratri festival, worshipping Hindu deity Durga. In 2011, over one hundred died in a stampede near the Sabarimala temple of Kerala. The list goes on and on.

So what exactly makes these events turn deadly? +++ In the first half of the 19th Century, the Spanish word estampida, from which ‘stampede’ came, meant a “general scamper of animals” caused by an unexpected and alarming event. Today, however, you are more likely to see ‘stampede’ in a headline. Perhaps this is due to increased urbanization, population growth, and the relative ease of intra and international transportation, which allow for massive agglomerations of people (the Hajj pilgrimage is the largest outdoor event in the world). In many cases the word ‘stampede’ refers not only to tramplings, humans walking over other humans, but to a phenomenon called “crowd crush,” when a constrained space is filled up with people until asphyxiation occurs. People can literally be lifted out of their shoes, completely trapped in the vertical axis, until they suffocate to death.

To avoid such tragic disasters, the Jamaraat Bridge was completely remodeled in 2006.

Almost one billion dollars was spent to increase the number of entrances, exits, and emergency escape routes. But, as the numbers show, spending money is insufficient. The journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness reports that since the 90s the amount of “stampedes” has more than doubled every decade. In 2010, a John Hopkins University study reported that 215 stampedes occurred between 1980 and 2007, resulting in over seven thousand deaths.

These stampedes are not exclusive to mass religious congregations. “The Who Concert Disaster,” in which eleven people were asphyxiated by a throng trying to claim their general admission seats in 1979, is one of the most notorious examples of concert crowd disasters. Black Friday in the United States has historically been a day when stampedes are almost expected, as excited buyers frantically rush into stores to get the best deals.

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The influx and resulting plight of the pilgrims this year can be debated as unexpected, but surely it is less so than a random event like a fire. The Hajj pilgrimage is at this point a highly organized process. The Saudi Arabian government has spent billions on infrastructure (in 2012, The Daily Star reported that the Saudi government plans to spend 120 billion dollars on renovations for the Hajj in the coming decade): from pedestrian bridges and fireproof tents, to expanding Masjid al-Haram, the biggest mosque in the world, from about 356,000 square meters to 400,000 square meters. This prodigious spending, is not, of course, without its returns: in 2014, the Saudi Arabian government made well over 10 billion dollars from Hajj-related revenues. A typical Hajj tour package costs $5,000. One would hope this investment in infrastructure would prevent tragedies. But even with the best efforts of event planners, there is only so much the Saudi Arabian government can coordinate. Still, Ali Khameini, Iran’s Supreme Leader, claimed that the Saudi Arabian government had mismanaged the event, and as recently as September 30, threatened retaliation. “Saudi Arabia failed to fulfill its duties concerning the desperate wounded (pilgrims).” +++ Both animal and human stampedes occur in high-density situations. But there are two key differences. The first is that the latter is a sort of spatio-temporal vacuum created by humans themselves. A concert is a good example of an event that embodies this isolated, socially constructed realm that one enters: a staccato in the flowing symphony of life. To first gain access to a concert, one must buy a ticket. After the purchase, the arrival of the event occurs, and one sits or stands, presumably in a room where music is played. Then the music fades, the concert is over, it is time to exit, and, having experienced the concert, you enter ordinary life. The second key difference helps explain the particular psychological situation of humans within these bounded bubbles: they are goal-oriented and thus directional. In such events, humans can’t help but move toward something. In a concert like the Who’s, many would like to get as close to the musicians as possible, squeezing against people as much as space allows. In the Hajj pilgrimage, the many rites that need to be performed by millions of pilgrims at different geographical locations within a limited space and limited time makes for a very directional situation.

These types of existential interruptions have been studied and theorized in terms of preliminality, liminality and post-liminality. The three stages, originally coined in the early 1900s

by German-French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, are one analysis used to define the bounds of a ritual. Pre-liminality is the process of stripping away a subject’s role and function in society. Liminality, as described and expanded upon by British cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, is the transitional, ‘betwixt and between’ phase during the ritual. In this phase, subjects of the liminal space-time exist in a form un-differentiable from each other. Post-liminality is the reincorporation of subjects into society as changed beings with new identities. These three stages imply movement by their very definition.

And the liminal stage does not have to be limited to formally ritualistic situations. Victor Turner wrote in his Rites de Passage about how even entering another room could be a micro-ritual of sorts. The pre-liminal stage would be the decision to change rooms; the liminal stage, the process of crossing a threshold, would be the opening of the door; and the post-liminal stage, returning to a concrete environment and exiting the “in between state,” would be entering the next room.

In the particular case of the Hajj pilgrimage, all men don white, simple robes, which puts them in the state of Ihram, a state of purity absolutely required before crossing a Miqat, one of the ten “stated places” that are entrances to the Hajj pilgrimage. Vincent J. Cornell, author

The College Hill Independent

by Mickey Zaslavsky illustration by Polina Godz

of Voices of Islam: Voices of Tradition, writes in his book that these robes are put on specifically not to draw any attention to oneself; to concentrate fully on the sacred rites; and to symbolize equality under the eyes of God. If we apply liminality theory, this would indicate the stripping away of the subject’s original place in society. The rites performed in the Hajj pilgrimage between the eighth and thirteenth day of the last month of the Islamic calendar constitute the liminal stage. The completion of the pilgrimage can be thought of as the post-liminal stage— one returns having experienced the ritual, having fulfilled the fifth pillar of Islam.

Victor Turner developed the concept of liminality from observation of tribal rites—mostly those of the Ndembu tribe of Zambia, with whom he lived for five years. Liminal spaces nowadays, however, are very different from those rituals on which the concept was based. Ceremonies can take place on a larger scale than at any other time in history—a Muslim from Indonesia would have had a very tough time getting to Mecca even 30 years ago (in 1950, only 50,000 Muslims participated in the Hajj pilgrimage, but in 2015 it was over two million). Liminality, if applied to high-density situations in the contemporary era, presents an anomaly: in increasingly global and interconnected societies where inequality is often seen as on the rise, liminal spaces are some of the only ones where the strict hierarchical boundaries of status in society are blurred, a startling vacuum approaching equality. This liminal characteristic inevitably leads to an important question: is order dependent on some sort of hierarchy? +++ If liminal theory is applied to today’s crowds, a few things are clear. The combination of a bounded space in a bounded timeframe, with enormous crowds, has high potential for disaster and is notoriously difficult to control even if extensive measures are taken. The Hajj pilgrimage section on the Center for Disease Control website reads: “in such dense crowds, little can be done to avoid or escape a stampede once it has begun, but the physical environment of the Hajj has been engineered specifically to minimize this risk.”

The science behind what causes stampedes and what exactly happens during one is unclear.

Edbert Hsu, leader of the 2010 John Hopkins University study, expressed the difficulty of getting this sort of epidemiological data. But one fact is known and may prove critical in dealing with stampedes in the future: human psychology changes when ten people are lumped together in a single square meter.

This year’s Hajj stampede raised outcries over the massive death toll. This was not even the worst stampede to occur in Mecca during the Hajj; in 1990, a stampede inside a pedestrian tunnel led to 1426 deaths. In the face of such tragedies, theory may not be able to help at all.

An unpredictable, harrowing event, such as the Hajj stampede, should perhaps be insulated from theorizing, at the risk of making it poetic.

MICKEY ZASLAVSKY B’18 is passing through.

Oct 9, 2015

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STRINGS ATTACHED Marionettes Take on Capitalism

by Piper French illustration by Andres Chang Off the back roads of Glover, Vermont, forty minutes away from what most people would deem civilization, there is a grass amphitheater in which people convene regularly to act out messages of justice and peace and righteous anger using enormous, crudely constructed puppets. The audience—old men with creased faces and flyaway hair, teenagers in overalls and flannels, families with young children—huddles on picnic blankets, engrossed by the scene before them. It is a pageant at once crazed and solemn. Afterward, the players and the audience gather together at the bottom of the natural basin in order to break bread. In the summer, these spectacles happen each Sunday towards midday; for many, they take the place of church. +++ Very few young people who are not from Vermont have heard of The Bread and Puppet Theater. Even among young Vermonters, the theater is often seen as an oddity—something remarked upon during Fourth of July parades, when their signature raven puppets float through the crowds, tattered wings flapping eerily. But Bread and Puppet was once a central part of American counterculture, revered for its revolutionary blurring of theater and protest. A German artist and baker named Peter Schumann founded the troupe in New York in 1963. He and his friends started out performing simple puppet shows for children, though their aims were much grander. A group with myriad artistic talents, they envisioned a spectacle that incorporated performance art, dance, music, and puppetry, and focused on the most relevant social and political themes of the day.

Along with these elevated ideological aims came the need for more interesting puppets. The troupe began to construct figures using whatever material they could find: clay, papiermâché, scraps of wood and cloth, even trash left on the streets outside of their Lower East Side lofts. The puppets’ aesthetic has remained refreshingly unpolished, the roughness of the forms belying the care with which they are made. They are rarely beautiful—many are bizarre, even grotesque, with distorted faces and gaping mouths.

Armed with their singular tools, the theater’s initial skits quickly expanded into a radical critique of American politics and culture. Bread and Puppet became leaders of the counterculture movement, demonstrating against US involvement in Vietnam, speaking out in favor of nuclear disarmament, and staging massive performance pieces with members of some of the most economically disenfranchised communities in New York City. +++ Even if you’ve never heard of Bread and Puppet, you’ve probably seen their posters. They are large and roughly drawn, the designs chiseled from woodcuts and printed in primary colors. Simple images—flowers, birds, branches—are set against words like peace and resistance and phrases that exhort insurrection against the existing order of life.

There was a time when these posters were everywhere.

Today, period shows like Mad Men, or the short-lived Pan Am, use them to connote ‘60s leftist sentiment and Greenwich Village radicalism. Even the puppets make an occasional pop

culture appearance (memorably in Across the Universe, the 2007 Julie Taymor musical about the Beatles). The Romanian writer and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu once wrote: "The Bread & Puppet Theater has been so long a part of America's conscious struggle for our better selves, that it has become, paradoxically, a fixture of our subconscious.”

Although people often assume that Bread and Puppet’s name derives from the Roman phrase panem et circenses (bread and circus), it is actually both a reference to the theater’s original practice of distributing bread to its audiences in a sort of radical communion, and the belief that art is as necessary to human life as bread. “Art is food,” the founders write in their Cheap Art Manifesto—“You cant eat it but it feeds you.” The manifesto, which was created in 1984, proposes art as a tool to “soothe pain” and “fight against war and stupidity.” “ART IS NOT BUSINESS!” it proclaims.

There is no separating Bread and Puppet’s art from their critique of capitalism. They are explicitly anti-globalization and anti-capitalist and have tried to keep their organization as far outside of the reality of the American economic system as possible. The spectacles themselves have always been gratis, available to anyone who cared enough to show up.

Interestingly, Schumann has consistently and repeatedly refused government grants of his work. He even shuns exposure that doesn’t come on his own terms: when the producers of Across the Universe contracted him to build the puppets for the film, he refused, telling them to do it themselves.

Of course, even an arts organization with the most radical and pure intentions cannot exist outside of market relations. Even though the creation of art may not be in itself a business, its reproduction and dissemination is. The artist himself must eat. Schumann’s original $60 monthly rent on Delancey Street was subsidized by wealthier friends, a tradition of patronage that has long existed between those with artistic talent and those with capital. Since their inception, Bread and Puppet has relied on donations of both time and money in order to cover their costs and keep the organization afloat.

The theater’s survival into the 21st century is testament to their ability to exploit the link between the economy and the arts. They have skirted the edges of the system, implicated within it but also clearly distinct from it. Today, Bread and Puppet is largely run by a team of dedicated and unpaid volunteers. It also offers a number of “apprenticeships” wherein the apprentice pays the organization, instead of the other way around. And Bread and Puppet’s online store, featuring posters that sell for upwards of twenty dollars, is a far cry from the prints that Peter Schumann and his troupe once hawked for ten cents from their Cheap Art school bus.

Still, given the impossibility of a true retreat from capitalism, the theater remains a rare example of an organization has refused, to the greatest extent possible, the commodification of its art. +++ Bread and Puppet arose out of a period in American history when broad-scale social change seemed within reach, and it appears they’ve outlasted it. In 1970, facing increasingly high rent and a society growing weary of the hippie movement, the troupe packed up and left New York for the more peaceful enclaves of Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. They were not alone in their exodus. During the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, in response to growing disillusionment with, among other factors, the United States’ continued involvement in Vietnam, many hippies abandoned cramped apartments for farms, the city for the commune. At Goddard, Bread and Puppet found many of the things that had motivated a broader cultural ‘back to the land’ movement: space, cheap living, and a more unified community. As the experimental college’s “theater in residence,” Bread and Puppet’s audience was much smaller, but it was also more engaged and

sympathetic. They had been standing on a soapbox for so many years that it may have been a relief to start preaching to the choir.

The troupe stayed at Goddard for four years before making the move to the property in Glover, where they still reside and perform. Even in 2015, Bread and Puppet remains an active presence throughout the state, performing at community events, making regular appearances at public celebrations, and even joining protests, recently against the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. Vermont is still a bastion of hippie liberalism, and its denizens tend to be far more receptive to Bread and Puppet’s message than those in Manhattan, a city where the possibility of a vibrant, low-budget counterculture has been all but snuffed out by astronomical rent. The Lower East Side, where Bread and Puppet created their first puppets and advocated for squatter’s rights back in the day, is now characterized by its plethora of restaurants and boutique shops. Rampant gentrification has pushed out artists, activists, and disenfranchised populations from the communities they once called home. Even extremely successful artists such as David Byrne have criticized the city’s increasing economic stratification and its negative impact on culture and the arts. The culture of artistic creation that was so rich during the counterculture movement has in many ways been subsumed by one of business, of making money and spending it, and many of the art forms and outlets that do still exist have become closed off to all those but the very rich.

New York has, for the most part, moved on.

But Bread and Puppet also moved on from New York.

Schumann has always been characterized by a relentless desire to not be implicated in the system—and as ‘practicing’ true counterculture became less and less viable in New York, perhaps he felt that removing himself spatially would be the best way to uphold his commitment to ideological purity. In Glover, miles from the nearest paved road, Bread and Puppet remains ideologically uncompromised in a way that wouldn’t be possible had they remained in New York. However, the communities they engage with tend to be politically and demographically homogenous—overwhelmingly progressive, white (Vermont is 94 percent Caucasian) and middle to upper-middle class. Their geographical isolation means that there are certain people—including both the richest capitalists in Manhattan and the very communities that they once worked to create performances alongside—that they simply can’t reach.

+++ Still, the show goes on. Stop by Glover any Sunday, and you will still see the puppets and drums and strange pageantry of the theatre. Today, the grass amphitheater is rarely half full.

Gone are the VW buses; muddy Subaru Outbacks dot the adjacent parking field instead. Instead of Vietnam, the troupe performs skits about Syria and Palestine. Climate change has become a popular topic in the more recent past, while other skits attacking capitalism and the Military Industrial Complex have much longer histories.

The property in Glover includes a museum of sorts, housed within a barn. Inside, brushing away the cobwebs that cling to rafters, one can find ephemera from years gone by: yellowed photographs of protests, reproductions of their most iconic prints, and, of course, the puppets themselves.

The barn’s loft contains hundreds of puppets of all shapes, sizes, and political implications. A grim-faced Henry Kissinger figure hangs next to a group of refugee women, their faces shrouded in black kerchiefs. Technicolor dragons are propped up against grinning demons and somber, faceless creatures.

There is neither order nor organization, and the didactics are few and far between; many serve to explain empty space. Most of the wheat paste figures have been eaten by mice.

The objects in the museum are not preserved or curated in any way. Fixtures of America’s subconscious or not, they have been placed there so that they may decay.

PIPER FRENCH B'16 is at once crazed and solemn.

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FEATURES

The College Hill Independent

TIRED OF ART

by Jonah Max, Alec Mapes-Frances, and Athena Washburn

Allan Kaprow, Yard (1961), courtesy Hauser & Wirth Gallery

+++ “I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.”

—Claes Oldenburg, “I Am For An Art,” 1961 +++

permanently installed; these were wrapped in black tar paper for the occasion. Visitors were encouraged to climb on the tires, throw them, and move them where they pleased.

“Environments, Situations, Spaces” was the title of the show, and it featured six artists:

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1995 – After removing nearly a million tires from his property over the previous year, Davis ceases the cleanup, claiming that new government regulation and the suspension of Oxford’s tire incineration service ren-

used in the production of cement and wood pulp.

der, and begins to remove the used tires, selling them to Oxford Industry

the tires from his property.

to fund a cleanup of the state’s tire piles, levies a 75-cent tax on all new tires sold.

the heat-retaining rings hospitable, now colonize portions of the pile.

for storing and recycling tires. Davis refuses to comply.

(Wikimedia Commons)

the Davis land are declared a superfund site and renamed the Davis Bulk Liquid Waste Site.

1987 – Davis estimates that his lot now houses over 30 million used tires. rinated hydrocarbons seep into the wetlands, discoloring the surrounding

Environmental Protection Agency enter into what would become 20 years of continuous litigation with Davis.

1977 – Following the US government’s passage of environmental legislation, the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management

services in the greater Providence area.

1973 – William Davis begins accumulating used tires on his expansive

cousins in California and New Mexico.

Mora County, New Mexico, reams of car tires scarred the dusty arroyos.

Provided below is a brief timeline of the Davis Tire Pile, located just

stockpiles blooming across the country. In Modesto, California, the peaks

by modern tire technology, which reinforced the tire’s natural rubber with carbon black polymers and steel cords, rendering the petroleum unextractable. What was once thought to be “black gold” soon became an eco-

In response to the 1970s energy crisis, citizens around the US began collecting used tires, believing that the rubber rings could be melted

Robert Smithson, A Heap of Language, 1966

(Wikimedia Commons)

George Brecht, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Walter Gaudnek, Robert Whitman, and Allan of an exhibition regarded by one critic as an “invasion” of the “terrible children” and their “noncommercial commodities.” Jill Johnston’s bemused Village Voice review, a month later, read: “I don’t know what [gallerist] Miss Jackson thought about those tires. I didn’t think much myself, I mean I perceived a bunch of tires there in the yard and then asked my son if he wanted to stay and play around in them while I went upstairs to see the rest.” Widely disliked at the time, the show, in retrospect, was an art-historical landmark—a foreshadowing of the Pop, Fluxus, and Conceptualist currents that would emerge in the mid-to-late ‘60s. grave, Modernist sacrality latent in the Abstract Expressionists (Mark Rothko’s chapel paintings, Barnett Newman’s obelisk, Robert Motherwell’s black elegies, etc.). Of many AbEx reference points, the most important was Jackson Pollock, whose “Action Paintenough. Tied to the intentionality of an individual author, Pollock’s gestures reinscribed

The College Hill Independent

into his objects a quasi-Romantic cult-value, a chronic European contagion. Kaprow’s work, on the other hand, sought to pull Pollock’s gestures away from their wall-mounted

the institutional supremacy of straight white masculinity persisted. Moreover, capital found new forms of abstraction. Smithson’s rubble was brought back within the gallery walls and Kaprow’s sketches reached astronomical prices at auction; the compulsion to fetishize and commodify the artistic gesture was undisturbed (and perhaps even

later began using the term “Happenings” to denote more ephemeral, ritual-like events.

“Forget all the standard art forms,” Kaprow urged in a recorded 1966 lecture called “How to Make a Happening”. “Don’t paint pictures, don’t make poetry, don’t build architecture, don’t arrange dances, don’t write plays, don’t compose music, don’t make movies, and above

of bricks: leitmotifs of an art that had tried to exit itself, and found that there was no outside.

sive materials used in Environments and Happenings were mostly indistinguishable from junk, and the procedures emphasized a certain orgiastic abjection. Bodies were primary, as

Make it unsure even to yourself if the happening is life or art. Art has

of Art, imaged and proportioned, but real bodies—multiplicities that smelled, ate, swam, avant-garde tradition of disposing with culture, a tradition inherited from 20th century European sources like the Dadaists and Marcel Duchamp. A rich scene had developed around Black Mountain College, a progressive art school in North Carolina, whose faculty and alumni included composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and painter

chemical and enhanced biodegradation to address contaminated groundwater.”

20, with the last truckload of tires carted away. Deep gullies now run across the land—the extent to which carcinogens and other toxins have permeated the surface remains unclear.

tract with the state of Rhode Island to remove tires from the Davis lot at $78 a ton. Over the following year, Casella will shred and dispose of over 3 million tires.

Davis Tire Pile. In addition to these funds, the DEM also receives support from the state’s Oil Spill Prevention, Administration, and Response Fund.

1998 – Over one million dollars, raised from the 1992 tire tax, are trans-

1997 – Under a separate contract, United Technology Incorporated removes almost 1.5 million tires from the portion of William Davis’s land that had been deemed a superfund.

sent to a garbage recycling service, BFI, in New Hampshire, where they

1997 – Under a contract with the Environmental Defense Center (EDC),

birthed the anarchic, anti-art approach known as Fluxus. “Anti-art is life, is nature, is true reality—it is one and all,” Fluxus ringleader George Macunias declared in 1962, while Robert Filliou, another Fluxus artist, quipped that “art is what makes life more interesting than art.”

be “nature” or “life,” unpredictable and uncontainable—both institutionally and physically. by art’s shock troops. Accordingly, Fluxus events and Happenings were frequently staged in spaces that weren’t ‘cultural,’ that hadn’t been demarcated as places where art was expected

For the avant-garde, the next step would be to do away with architecture, that technology of cultural power, altogether; this would be most strikingly realized in the late ‘60s, in the “non-sites” and “earth-works” of Conceptual and Land artists. Claes Oldenburg made “anti-monuments” by excavating public parks (Placid Civic Monument, or , 1967).

Michael Heizer dug “negative sculptures” in Nevada desert mesas (Double Negative, 1969).

Gordon Matta-Clark painstakingly sliced up houses. (the Anarchitecture projects, 1970-1976). Robert Smithson created geoglyphs and other geographical interventions (Spiral Jetty, 1970, or Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1-9), 1969). And so the built world along with the earth itself became a medium for a generawhite rooms and the well-dressed, well-educated professionals who’d previously policed its boundaries. It goes without saying that even here, amid the anti-institutional bluster,

+++

keep it all blurry. Two cars collide on a highway. Violet liquid pours out of the broken radiator of one of them, and in the back seat of the other there is a huge and the drivers go home to dinner.

—Allan Kaprow, “How to Make a Happening,” 1966 +++ Black highway painted black, tick tick of yellow bands. Such a strange zebra skinned on the asphalt. Low growl of the tires on the belly of a huge machine, their rubber-patterned surface grooved so they sing deep like that, so rain sprays out like that. Spin so fast they look like perfect circles on the slick skin of the road.

Where did the tire come from? A clue in the code stamped on the surface, this one is DOT J3J9 1001, useful in recall.

Michael Heizer, Complex City (1972)

On Wikipedia, someone says, “the last four numbers represent the week and year the tire was built. A three-digit code was used for tires manufactured before 2000.

For example, 178 means it was manufactured in the 17th week of the 8th year of the decade. In this case it means 1988. For tires manufactured in the 1990s, the same code factured in the 17th week of 1998 would have the code 178∆. In 2000, the code was switched to a 4-digit code.”

Born in the tenth week of the year 2001 under the hot gaze of a 90 watt. Pushed from the churning womb of the manufacturer mother to the slick roads of national father. Evidence of birthplace: serial number molded into the sidewall. Roots can be easily traced in case of malfunction. rubber, butadiene rubber, carbon black, silica, ancient substances pulled from the body wheels black and fuels them forward. Tires made of fossils and carbon, ancient life. In breaks down and excavated time leaks back down through the earth, contaminating the present with distillations of the past.

the events of his life skitter behind his lucky shocked face. Later that night he sighs slightly bruised into his armchair at home, watches his son construct a zoo on his computer. In under the screen, unobserved strange precious metals copper and coltan pawing at the ground. Within the coltan, the story of immense movement across space and time. Locked in its geometry, memories of a mining operation that altered the habitat of a zebra, pushed it farther so that its striped image could be manipulated on parts sent to China, heaped on huge cargo ships, transferred to large trucks. Forward, tire, this concept, those places, heaped time.

Styrene-butadiene (Wikimedia Commons)

Oct 9, 2015

ARTS

10

IN THE ZONE The Dense Future of Student Housing

On September 17, Mayor Jorge Elorza approved a zoning ordinance that will restrict the spread of student housing into single-family residential areas. Elorza signed the ordinance following its approval by the City Council. This decision came after a summer of forums, council meetings, and hearings addressing friction between college students and residents in Elmhurst, one of the neighborhoods adjacent to Providence College.

The new amendment to the zoning ordinance reads, “In the R-1A and R-1 districts, a single-family dwelling, that is non-owner occupied, shall not be occupied by more than three college students.”

This amendment has been misread by some as an eradication of student housing. Early news stories announcing the zoning change confused many who were unfamiliar with zoning parlance. Under the new ordinance, most off-campus students will still be legally occupying their homes.

Few students live in single-family homes, so most of them are immediately excluded from the purview of the new ordinance. Landlords who follow zoning laws and lease houses to more than three students have registered and renovated their properties as multi-family dwellings.

Many of these student-occupied multi-family houses are in R-2 or R-3 Residential Districts in any case, higher-density residential zones where the new ordinance also doesn’t apply.

The new zoning ordinance wasn’t designed as a tool to evict students from certain neighborhoods—it was designed to prevent students from expanding into new ones. The question is, which ones? +++ According to Providence’s zoning ordinance, R-1 Residential Districts are “intended for detached single-family dwellings of low density residential development.” R-1A zones are defined similarly, only with lot sizes “larger than those typically found in the City.” These zones typically correspond with middle- and upper-class neighborhoods like Elmhurst, College Hill, and Wayland Square. Though existing multi-family homes in these zones are legally grandfathered into the zoning code, detached single-family homes—off limits to student housing groups of more than three—are the only new residential developments permitted in these areas.

The new amendment to the zoning ordinance was brought to the City Council by Councilwoman Jo-Ann Ryan of Ward 5, a jurisdiction that encompasses Providence College, Rhode Island College, and much of the Elmhurst and Mount Pleasant neighborhoods. The majority of residential land in Ward 5 is classified as R-1 or R-1A. In a nutshell, the new ordinance’s most pressing objective was to prevent Providence College students from moving into single-family homes in Elmhurst. According to Bob Azar, the Deputy Director of Providence’s Department of Planning and Development, student housing developers have recently started buying single-family homes in Elmhurst and leasing them on a room-by-room basis to students. Residents complained about rowdy student behavior and contacted their representative, Councilwoman Ryan, who felt that the situation demanded a more robust approach than the traditional disciplinary measures of noise complaints, trash removal citations, and calls to campus police or university officials.

Ryan cites these developments as the impetus for the zoning amendment. “The change in intended use of single-family homes is undermining the character of our neighborhoods, diminishing the quality of life, and creating health and public safety concerns,” Councilwoman Ryan told GoLocalProv. “The new zoning ordinance will give the City a critical tool in addressing the negative impacts of student housing in single-family districts.”

Negative impacts of student housing in single-family districts can mean a number of things. Most of all, there’s the noise. Students stay up later, play louder music, have more parties. Councilwoman Ryan told the Providence Journal, “around the same time working families are trying to turn in for the night, college students are just getting started with late night activities that make lots of noise.” Councilman Seth Yurdin of Ward 1, a jurisdiction that encompasses Fox Point and Downtown, said smaller issues concerning littering and trash removal fuel frustration among community members.

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METRO

There are also concerns about students degrading the housing stock they occupy. “There’s a difference between the way college students reside on the property and families reside on the property,” Ryan told NBC 10 News. “Families are invested in the house, invested in the community, college students typically are transient.” Homeowners have vested interests in taking care of their houses. Well-maintained homes keep neighbors happy and fetch higher prices when it’s time to sell. These incentives don’t exist for short-term renters. Landlords often remove detailing and install vinyl siding in anticipation of bad care from renters.

Though the City Council voted in favor of the amendment two times over, the new ordinance certainly has its critics. The City Planning Commission, a citizen board that advises the City Council on zoning decisions, recommended against adopting the ordinance. So did the American Civil Liberties Union. In the final vote, three members of the 15-person City Council voted against the amendment, including Yurdin and Councilman Sam Zurier of Ward 2, a jurisdiction that encompasses most of College Hill.

“The proposal didn’t seem targeted to dealing with the problem,” said Yurdin. “Sometimes there are houses that have problems in terms of parties and things that disrupt the neighborhoods. Sometimes there are landlords who aren’t very good at working with the tenants to make sure they’re respectful of the neighborhood. But passing something that was a blanket prohibition on students seemed to be much broader than was necessary to actually address the problem.”

Yurdin wanted to address “town-gown” relations more directly. He co-sponsored a proposal to form a Community and Student Relations Task Force that would make policy recommendations based on studies of best practices in other cities, and data on calls for public safety response to off-campus student housing. The Task Force would include a mix of City Council members, students, community members, landlords, realtors, and university administrators.

The proposal went before the City Council on October 1, where Yurdin was surprised to see it garner little support.

Yurdin’s proposal aims to mend student-community relations across Providence, though the mechanics it lays out for achieving this are vague. The zoning ordinance’s approach is to keep peace by severing these relations, at least in low-density, single-family neighborhoods.

Critics are also wary of the precedent the amendment sets. “I’m not comfortable supporting zoning that actually singles out individual people based on what they’re doing in terms of choices of education and otherwise,” said Yurdin. “I feel like it’s a bad precedent to start discriminating against people on this basis.”

The ACLU’s advisory letter to the City Council also found the amendment’s targeting of such a specific population “quite problematic.” James Kennedy, a contributing writer for RI Future, went as far as calling the new ordinance an act of exclusionary zoning.

Without a doubt, the amendment to the zoning ordinance excludes a specific population from moving into a given community, which fits within the widely used definition of exclusionary zoning. But the ordinance’s getting tagged with an unattractive buzzword is different from its violating the law.

By signing the amendment into law, Providence is arguing that this ordinance “promotes the public health, safety, and general welfare” of the city, the primary purpose of zoning as laid out in the Zoning Enabling Act. Providence is essentially telling college students that they cannot be trusted to harmonize with residents of single-family neighborhoods, that their inconvenience to the community outweighs the inconvenience they face in being excluded from that community. This is a pessimistic conclusion on the part of the city, but few would argue that it is groundless. +++ With regards to housing on the East Side, the effect of the new ordinance is unclear. Neither Azar nor Yurdin felt that the ordinance would have much of an immediate impact outside of Elmhurst. Azar described the East Side’s student housing market as fairly stable: “For the most part, the existing student houses were established as such many years ago. While on occasion you’ll see an owner-occupied house sell to someone who turns it into student housing, it’s not as common on College Hill as it is in Elmhurst.”

The College Hill Independent

by Ben Berke illustration by Polina Godz

But this may only be a short-run equilibrium. As the number of Brown and RISD students increases annually, more and more students aren’t fitting into university housing and neither school is constructing new dormitories.

The new ordinance could funnel much of this overflow into Fox Point. College Hill and Wayland Square are comprised primarily of R-1 and R-1A Residential Districts, areas where developers are now prohibited from expanding the student housing stock. Single-family homes in Fox Point, which is zoned almost entirely as R-2 and R-3 Residential Districts, aren’t protected from student housing developers under the new ordinance.

Without an effort from the city of Providence to create and protect affordable housing in Fox Point, where average income is lower than in College Hill and Wayland Square, student encroachment could mean residential displacement. An influx of students might raise rents and price out some of the neighborhood’s long-time residents. This would regrettably fit into a historical narrative of residential displacement in Fox Point, one that began in the 1960s when the East Side Urban Renewal Project and I-195 construction pushed a Cape Verdean immigrant community off of land desired by the universities.

In this light, large-scale student housing developments like 257 Thayer can seem an attractive solution to city planners and policy makers. Similar to a dormitory, these developments soak up university growth, preventing student encroachment into neighborhoods and mitigating residential displacement. And unlike university-owned dormitories, privately-owned student housing developments pay property taxes.

Large-scale student housing developments are appearing at the periphery of urban campuses across the country. Gilbane Development Company, the Rhode Island-based developer behind 257 Thayer, has built or assisted 12 large-scale student housing developments at 10 different college campuses. Gilbane’s developments have names like “The Edge” and “The Verge”, which are both located within a block of their respective main campuses at Iowa State University and the University of Cincinnati. They have a trademark on the catchphrase “the next level of student housing.”

Azar attested that in the wake of 257 Thayer’s initial success, his office has spoken with more developers interested in “doing something similar with student housing in different areas of Providence, including College Hill.” This is in addition to the South Street Landing development, which features a proposed 220-unit housing complex that will cater to students from Brown’s medical school, Johnson & Wales University, and the forthcoming University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College joint nursing school. These types of developments will likely play a major role in the future of student housing in Providence.

There are, of course, downsides to large-scale student housing developments. The privatelyowned dormitory is an emerging building type that often necessitates the destruction of a lot of older buildings. The supplanting structure is usually a monolith that dominates the streetscape, despite supposed efforts to match the neighborhood’s architectural character. In the case of 257 Thayer, this effort seemed to start and end with the brick facade.

There’s also something to be said about the strangeness of building a massive housing complex in a desirable part of town that essentially only opens its doors to students. Similar to the new ordinance, the 257 Thayer approach inches toward a Providence in which students are residentially segregated from the community, a scenario with obvious benefits and drawbacks.

Such an approach circumvents student-community friction by minimizing student-community contact. In absence of an expansion of on-campus housing, Yurdin’s proposed Task Force may be the best way to foster a comfortable student-community relationship in the denser neighborhoods that students are heading towards. Either that or Providence must embrace “the next level of student housing®” in full force, for better or for worse.

BEN BERKE B’16 occupies a three-family dwelling unit in an R-1 Residential District.

Oct 9, 2015

METRO

12

RADIOS IN OUR HEADS Thoughts on Songwriting

by Dash Elhauge illustration by Rachel Hahn

In a tower on an island by a dock with a kayak, I write songs. The boat is built for one. The rolling waves strain the plastic in a low, resounding creak. There are other boats in the harbor.

Sometimes, in the shadows of the red flashing lights, I wave from a distance and think I see a face. Sometimes I worry I’ll be forbidden to return. Sometimes, late at night, without a guitar or a notebook, in the churning of the waves, I hear something.

Lou Reed once said he doesn’t write songs: he tunes into the radio in his head.

Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday” while awaking from a dream. The melody was in his ear. He spent the next month or so asking everyone he knew where the song was from.

What’s a writer supposed to make of this? Are we supposed to wait in our beds with the same eager tossing and turning of a child before the last day of school? Can we, too, listen to radios in our head?

I don’t call, I fuck-up Just numb for the break-up Say what’s up, I freeze-up Like some fucking screw-up That attacked me one winter on the way to a hill. I was dragging my friend in a sled behind me.

It beat at me. The hill was full of children. The snow was powdery and the sledding was awful and the kids held flakes in their arms. I felt old and walked back alone in the blizzard.

In class the phrases shook my leg, cut with each crinkle of paper, rested on each exhale… I dismissed them; they seemed too simple. But they form a stanza that clicks, aligns, disaligns, and bangs in a painful, playful way. They sting at my jaw. They plague my internal monologue.

They’re not perfect, but they’re alive.

Is songwriting then, just listening? Is it wading through daydreams until some mistakenly strummed chord change brings you to shore? Is it waiting for a lilting phrase to be misheard as melody? Is it an endless hunger to hear music all around you?

As a child I liked to hold my head under water and listen to the muddled screaming of children during swimming lessons. I remember little of the actual lessons. Feet must keep kicking, always pushing; if you stop kicking you sink. Our perception of speed is based on the heart. 60 beats per minute. Turn your head to breathe. Not too much; if you breathe too much, what are you left with? Don’t look straight ahead. You cannot destroy the water you can only relocate it.

Water moves from one swimmer to the next. Breathe in. Breathe out. If you stop you sink.

The form, in many ways, is not up to you. You must keep swimming: your ear demands it.

Finding a writer’s intention is like gathering breadcrumbs, or following a swimmer’s wake. The bubbling from the mouth; the little indents in the rapids from your foot; the slow ripples of churning hands. The writer moves too fast to give answers. All we can do is wonder about floating bubbles.

Rivers Cuomo, the frontman of the 90s power pop band Weezer, was after a master formula for writing pop songs. He analyzed hundreds of songs for form and tonality in what is now known as “The Encyclopedia of Pop.” Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Bridge-Chorus, Pre-Choruses, PostChoruses. These structures make the songs familiar; keeps them moving. It’s hard to cut a series of carefully crafted melodies that aren’t working, but it’s easy to cut a Pre-Chorus. Sometimes the drummer in my band comes into practice and says, “so after the pre-post-chorus leading into the post-verse there’s the pre-hook so I play the post-riff?” He laughs.

More often than not, a song that I’m writing emerges with a structure I’ve seen before. Songs are old in this way. They are all telling the same story, spouting from the same universal consciousness. They are the listening child with the submerged head as much as the swim-capped adult doing laps. In “Some Notes on Song” John Berger declares “songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came.”

In the open ocean, wind reigns free, and seven times more water is sprayed into evaporation than on land. Climatologists estimate a water molecule spends about 3,200 years in an ocean.

The water cycle, then, is mostly composed of ancient molecules, spraying in a constant, churning wind.

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ARTS

Once I went on a sea kayaking expedition. The moon lit the crests of the waves and the bioluminescence churned with our paddles. We rose with the sun. In the afternoon waves swelled to immense heights. Staying on the water became dangerous. We followed simple rules. Let the waves flow underneath. Keep your body steady. Paddle from the abdomen. The key is to not try to push through the waves, but to place your paddle in the water and let the turning of your body propel you. The most experienced kayakers don’t fight flips—they lean in, roll, and pop back up.

The most memorable song fragments seem to be those in which melody and lyrics align perfectly, as if they always existed in that form. I told my friend Sam as we watched the tremendous, glacial docking of a cargo ship by the bay, to listen to the inflections of McCartney’s “Hello, Goodbye.” Hel-lo. Stress-unstress. Good-bye. Unstress-stress. McCartney flips them, and all of a sudden the stresses seem to complete each other. Unstress-stress-stress-unstress. The phrase resolves to an unstress as if Hello is the proper response to Goodbye. The Beatles were masters of making phrases with this kind of resolve. In Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles, Dominic Pedler notes that a huge chunk of Beatles songs pair returns to the tonic chord with the lyric “home.”

I write songs in a tiny office with big windows and lots of light. I only go in at night. I sit at a desk and swivel in the chair. When things get hard I pick at the wood on my guitar. I pass out and take naps. I click the lamp back on, shake my heavy eyes, and dive in.

I read Neil Young used to mix like this: just south of San Francisco, he’d take a small row boat out onto his lake, push his way to the middle, and stand. He’d have his friend play the left audio channel play from his cottage, the right from his house. To raise the left channel he’d wave his left hand; for the right his other. The boat rocked between his feet. Keep your body steady.

This story might be true. Things sound different in different contexts. The field of audio mastering, the last step in producing a record, is devoted to homogenizing the listening experience across platforms. Many mastering engineers listen from their car, from outside the room, with and without headphones, drunk and sober. But these situations are radically different: do we want them to sound the same?

Music is one of the few types of art that is expected to function in several forms. The lyrics must seem reasonably good when read on the page. The song must have the drama to carry weight in a live setting, to engage the wandering eyes of a gussied-up audience in a dark, sweaty room. To seem careful and crafted when cradled against a listener’s ear. A good song is a supple structure, full of moving parts that are interchanging, rotating, fighting.

I reorder and I rework. The first existence of “Bored” is an iPhone recording from a few months ago. Bumps of the phone on the table and scattered singing. Gibberish, but the contours of the words are there. “Maybe Baby” never makes it into the song but has that gnawing sense of playful monotony. The words churn, the riff cycles, notes ring in my head; I fill six pages. Most of it stays gibberish.

“Do you consider yourself a songwriter?” someone once asked me. I thought, what an awful thing, to be a songwriter. Songwriters are dead. They have no potential. Hank Williams. Nick Drake. Elliot Smith. Their work is done. Of course I want to write Smith’s “Miss Misery” note for note and swim in the ocean until the world ends. I want that the same way I want to sink so deep into my bed one morning that I never come back. The same way when, hanging miles and miles above the ocean, I hope the plane never lands.

I saw Dan Wilson, songwriter and leader of the 90s band Semisonic, play in a café near the Berklee College of Music this past winter. He had thinned with age and his clothes hung loosely on his bones. He told stories between each song, about how they were written. At the end of the night he gave us each a copy of the setlist he’d made in gold calligraphy. He said, here is something to look back on in a few weeks, to tilt your head at and go, “ah.”

I had arranged for us to speak a few weeks earlier. I sat behind the merch table while he signed autographs. With each new fan his smile folded up and down. His eyes sparkled.

I tell Dan: I have a problem. I love the bassist in my band, but his bass lines just aren’t melodic enough. Do I add another person? Do I replace him? He tells me, you know, people will always try and tell you so-and-so is the weak link. But you get rid of them, and someone else will be the weak link. And eventually, you’ve just got a whole new band. When he started Semisonic, he said to his friend, “I wanna make music with you so we’re starting this band. You’re gonna play drums.” And his friend said he couldn’t: he hadn’t played drums since college. But Dan

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said, “hey, look, I wanna play music with you, and this is what we have to do.” Dan smiled. “It wasn’t his dream to be a drummer, but it was his dream to be a rockstar.” Semisonic’s second album, Feeling Strangely Fine, went platinum.

Even when I write songs alone—and I always write songs alone—my bandmates linger. Sometimes I’ll be fiddling around with some chord progression and I can hear them. Evan’s frantic, sprawling drumming. Hariz’s deep, marching bass lines. Learning to write for a band is all about learning to recognize pieces that light something up in all of you. The direction to paddle is that which puts the wind to our backs. Those melodies which, for reasons none of us understand, all of us know when the drums jump out, and the bass dips in, and the guitar plunges into the depths of the unknown.

In some ways Dan’s advice is wrong­—I’ve pored over the list, and as far as I can tell there hasn’t ever been a successful rock trio with a bassist that didn’t play melodically. But it speaks to a faith, I think, that every songwriter must have. Lou Reed’s radio in his head, Paul McCartney’s melody from a dream: these are terms for listening. Dan’s faith that Semisonic would work wasn’t blind­—he saw something, I think, in his friends, some essence worth preserving. Maybe a band doesn’t make music so much as music takes form around a band. These days the bassist in my band plays nothing but melody. We can’t answer the question “what makes a good songwriter?” but we can listen for the things around us which take form, which keep moving, which make the world seem alive.

DASH ELHAUGE B’17 spent too much time listening to waves when he was supposed to be learning the butterfly.

Oct 9, 2015

ARTS

14

PASTORAL FIXATION The Rituals and Space of Religion and Superstition

by Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa illustration by Juan Tang Hon They are honest and well-meaning Christians of unhealthy constitutions, and melancholy tempers, who are so miserably harrass'd; who above all things earnestly desire an interest in their God and Saviour, and for that reason the least dishonourable thought of him, which insinuates itself into their minds, is so dreadful unto them. …It is not in the power of those disconsolate Christians, whom these bad thoughts so vex and torment, with all their endeavors to stifle and suppress them. Nay often the more they struggle with them, the more they increase… +++ The bishop John Moore’s 1692 sermon marks one of the first references to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) in written history. Humans have probably been dealing with the condition since the beginning of cognition—and even in this speech it’s not given any sort of name—but the sermon is important for alerting sufferers to the biological as opposed to moral basis of their intrusive thoughts.

OCD is a spectrum, with much more diverse symptoms than the common portrayals of germophobia and orderfixation might make it appear. At a basic level, OCD manifests itself, expectedly, as obsessions and compulsions.

An obsession can involve an intrusive thought or persistent doubt—fear of contamination, fear of tragedy, insecurity of self—which is then supplanted by a compulsion to perform an action to assuage the thought.

This compulsion, the resultant behavior, is called a ritual.

Many behaviors can serve as a ritual to alleviate anxiety.

Counting, cleaning, checking, arranging. The characteristic relief brought on by compulsion is, however, fleeting, and only reinforces the compulsive thought process. OCD usually manifests in the late teenage years, although symptoms can start appearing as early as nine or ten.

There are multiple variations of the disorder, many tied to specific concerns. SO-OCD refers to constant obsession and doubt about one’s sexual orientation; pure-OCD manifests with a focus on obsessions, with the individual rarely experiencing compulsions to follow. Hoarding, too, is a related disease, although notably different in that a sufferer doesn’t see anything wrong with their mindset.

All other forms of OCD are ego-dystonic disorders, meaning that a person who experiences symptoms recognize their thoughts and behavior as divorced from reality. Of course, with OCD, there is no intrinsic power in the ritual to affect or influence fate. But the thoughts are there, and there is at least no harm in acting on them. Or so it would seem— the harm is that, in reproducing the pattern, one bolsters the anxiety-producing mechanism.

To the sufferer of OCD, the most powerful fear is the threat of “what if.” What if my dog runs away because I didn’t check the door lock a third time? What if my girlfriend breaks up with me because I didn’t cross the street before the traffic signal hit zero? What if my father dies because I didn’t tell him I loved him? What if any of these happen because I just wrote about them? +++ What if a Communion wafer falls on the ground? The procession stops. It was a mistake of inexperience. The twelveyear old receiving the Eucharist for the first time hadn’t decided whether to take the wafer, the Body of Christ, onto his tongue or his palm, and had done a sort of bait-and-switch with the Priest.

The service stops. A woman holding the chalice of church wine asks the priest presiding how to proceed and he blesses the floor. The wafer is picked up and ceremoniously discarded, and a new one dispensed to the waiting pre-teen.

The church service, as with all religious institutions, is a production of rituals. Take the Catholic practice of confession. If you commit a sin, you are supposed to confess it to a priest, who will then offer a set of prayers to perform in reconciliation. It’s cyclic: action/reaction; sin/confession and prayer. One undertakes ritual in search of the relief that its completion brings.

This is the rosary, too—an exercise of penance through

15

OCCULT

counting, repetitive and time-consuming, that is meant to be performed daily. A series of Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s, the beads slipping through the hands, the sin slipping from the soul.

Many religious teachings, especially in the Abrahamic tradition in which your correspondent was raised, pre-empt feelings of doubt about God’s existence and implicate people as originally sinful. But there is something here, some strength in meditation through repetition—the experience of working through a rosary helps draw out the sense of spiritual peace in a practitioner. When confronted with original sin or one already committed, the ritual offers a means to address the situation.

Taking the Eucharist once a week is a reminder of the sacrament of His body, a way of allowing it to literally permeate your own. Which is why a brush with the floor is instantly contaminating, and why properly cleaning it up is cleansing. +++ Sports is traditionally married to superstition, invoking religious fervor for both fans and players. There are rules that can’t be broken on the field—for baseball, one never points out a no-hitter in progress. Audiences at home and in the stadium often feel some degree of responsibility as devotees.

Take the common media image of a fan wearing a lucky jersey to watch the game. “Luck,” a positive outcome, is ascribed to the ritual of wearing a particular article of clothing in that particular environment.

The idea of luck itself is a branch of secular metaphysics, with people trying to bring it into their lives the way others may seek blessings—through tangible items, through certain practices, the believer does their best to do good and have good come to her in turn. The spectator knows what she wants to happen, but has no direct recourse in the material realm. So, she resorts to the metaphysics of luck, and throws on that jersey. Parents cross their fingers as their child sings a solo in a student concert. A high school senior refuses to wear clothing from their dream school before they hear news of acceptance or rejection. Logically, the people in these living rooms, theaters, audiences, know that they have no physical bearing on the outcome through this sort of action. But this pattern-creating behavior, this ritual, is so ingrained in our culture—perhaps inescapably so—that despite our awareness of its material inconsequence, it delivers some semblance of peace. Even if the team loses, at least the jersey was worn.

+++ When you find these thoughts creeping upon you, be not mightily dejected.... Neither violently struggle with them; since experience doth teach that they increase and swell by vehement opposition; but dissipate and waste away, & come to nothing when they are neglected, and we do not much concern ourselves about them. +++ John Moore continues his sermon with a suggestion to let intrusive thoughts wither, a suggestion that may sound easier in speech than in practice, but is aligned with the rituals of church. Religion at its heart encourages self-reflection and understanding, engagement with doubt. Responding to OCD demands that the sufferer investigate the depths of his own mind. In therapy, those with OCD are taught to recognize their ritual as having no bearing on or basis in reality. For someone incessantly plagued by intrusive thoughts, this is the best option. The anxiety wrought by the disorder needs attention and control.

But for others, ritual is a way of dealing with the unknown. We can climb into inside-out pajamas, hoping for a snow day; hold up a foam finger in anticipation; hold our breath before opening a report card. We hope to find agency amidst the unpredictable. The snow will fall as it will.

MARCELO RIVERA-FIGUEROA B’18 is typically egodystonic.

The College Hill Independent

LATE PAYMENT Jane Austen and the Future of our Debts

by Zeke Reffe-Hogan illustration by Ivan Rios-Fetchko When we act in the world we initiate new beginnings whose ends cannot be known. In the chaotic unfolding of action, we seek ways to fix ourselves in place—to stay afloat. “The four walls of one’s private property offer the only reliable hiding place from the common public world,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “a life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow….The only efficient way to guarantee the darkness of what needs to be hidden against the light of publicity is private property, a privately owned place to hide in.” Property builds fences against a human disarray that fundamentally has to do with being in public—the overwhelming reality of being psychically pulled on all the time by the people around you and their movements in the world.

Property’s force and form—rent, mortgage, buying and selling, etc.—echo between our public and our private lives.

Freud thinks that money follows love; Derrida that money is sperm. Government sanctioned capital binds to our intimacy.

Our relationships move within these structures. They make the houses and apartments within which we meet and miss each other secure and insecure.

In Jane Austen’s novels, the financial standing of the female characters always has to do with love—capital flown and flowing through connections of family. No final chapter lacks to tell us who marries whom, which women are financially cast out because they bet on the wrong man, who remains content or not so content with her father’s inheritance. An “attachment” develops between a bachelor and someone’s daughter. At a later stage of their relationship, she often gives the man a ring with a lock of her tied to it—attaching a fragment of her material self to a precious band of metal as talisman of her love.

In Sense and Sensibility, for instance, this story unfolds from the Norland estate. Newly inherited by male heir, John Dashwood, the property brings in 4,000 pounds a year of rent. Mr. Dashwood commits to supporting his half-sisters, who live at Norland, but ends up helping them very little. He and his wife gradually push the sisters and their mother out of the house, making them feel unwelcome and precipitating their move to scattered locations. Inheritance gives them a place to live and drives them from it. Throughout the novel, these displaced women come close to, into, and sometimes out of flirtations and relationships with a handful of male characters, a few of whom end up providing the sisters’ future homes. Marianne, for instance, the middle sister, enters into a flirtation with Willoughby, who has 600 pounds a year, who eventually ends this relationship to marry Sophia Grey, heiress to 30,000 pounds, leaving Marriane to marry Colonel Brandon, with an income of 2,000 pounds a year. The coordinates of her and her sisters begin the distribution of one household’s wealth, and end in connections and misconnections to the wealth of another. To fail to connect to another in a way that upholds class structure is, in Austen, to fall off the map—or into the hovels of towns far away. Stability and instability are constituted by what house one ends up in and what aura and economic terms attach themselves to it. Their lives are bound within this network as if they owed some debt to it.

In our late-capitalist moment, this sense that life is in debt to the economic system—which corresponds to material reality—persists. The German worker does not want to pay the Greek fisherman’s bills, goes the conservative version of the argument. Countermovements have sprung up, proclaiming: we’re not going to pay the debt. It goes without saying that there have been massive demonstrations throughout the

Oct 9, 2015

last few years—the 2012-2014 riots in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Turkey; anti-austerity and labor action in Greece; Podemos in Spain. The citizens of these countries are, of course, already paying the debt—which is not a sense of guilt, of some material failing, but rather a force hanging over life already bound to particular ways of finding stability. It is a debt somehow attached to society but that no one in society can pay. But such movements highlight debt’s social presence—they bring out its arbitrariness, its moral illegitimacy.

One senses the personal indebtedness to financial structure that Austen described—an inherited form of stability as that which binds us—now rioting, emerging in the public as an explosion. Those who push the ideology of Effective Altruism—who would have the privileged among us work until they have a steady job and then donate to a specific list of charities that do particularly well on utilitarian metrics of health and life saving—come into direct conflict with the reality of an impoverished person on the street asking a wealthy person for money. The logic of this tension points to the analytical force behind a wild hemorrhaging of wealth—that one person clearly has far too much and another too little— and that there is no morally compelling force to stop the rearrangement.

The space we live in acts as refuge, a space apart from this explosive situation, but it is also composed of it. Over the course of Austen’s oeuvre, the composition of that money gradually shifts. In the first books—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice—character’s incomes derive almost entirely from landed estates, from rent. By the end—Emma, the posthumously published Persuasion—fathers and future husbands have income tied up in foreign extents of empire, or in the merchant service at sea. The wealth always flows back to the household—the consistent correlate to an amorphous substance of capital. This is true whether one is a renter or an owner. The days of our lives spend themselves within the tables, chairs, and rooftops of the conflicted forces of capital.

Experience itself riots in these conditions—characterized by chaotic overflow—the self impossible to distinguish from this inexhaustible flood, the ever swelling numbers of worldwide debts, which can never be pinned down.

We might look to an imaginative hope in the negative space of Jane Austen’s books. We might look to the fact that we never see the actual marriage celebration, never witness the characters dancing or eating, talking on through the evening together. We are never told the date, only that a woman has taken a man’s name, that an ending has taken place. Perhaps such a conclusion is necessarily a looking in from the outside.

For the days and hours to which Austen denies us access— choosing the dresses, setting the tent—these are the true experiences. Rather than the fact of the union, what a person undergoes in a concluding celebration is a being together that the event creates, eventually to fold in on itself. It is the hope that the experience of the celebration—the fixing oneself into the contemporary configuration, taking on the debt of home and stable place in capitalism—might overthrow itself.

It is the hope that we might find momentum with those put into the same rooms as us—and in this momentum, a way in which such rooms might explode.

ZEKE REFFE-HOGAN B‘17 is thinking about marriage.

FEATURES

16

L, ANOTHER DAY

by Yousef Hilmy illustration by Aiyana Jaffe

closing in on the parking lot outside where the form is fixed the grass is not allowed rackety red carts curl and slither imbricate in scales after the sun peters out behind the jagged stucco after the sprinklers halt their hissing after felled items return to their place L, the attendant, clocks out… sick of inventories. his walk back to his apartment down the hill & past the bend blurs thick with repetition,

& ambition lies mute.

the cheap beige tiles here in this bathroom the corroding sink coiled cadmium orange here metallic scratches a kind of uncovering toothpastedceramic mint green in crests.

questions mirror in half-tones

his visage a stain these residues do not wash away; to a chorus of leaks coos and caws of a couple still not tired of itself this hum of children cheered by the thought

of emptysundays & their promise of sugary cereal mama’s kisses tender and sloppy

L is pasty and nicked not smoothed out has an unfulfilled desire for grafts

his galley kitchen gutted and emptied of its contents

save for three ceramic bowls

a plastic cup fluorescent blue

disposable utensils still bagged, hooded rusted gas burners flaked with dried food

raspy cabinets with splintered wood

half glued knobs beneath waterlogged herringbone floors

freckled with white paint not the art kind is malady of sorts

the bedroom not much

a plopped old futon without sheeting some used books bent out of shape

a singular candle waxclumped college-ruled notebooks and pens

dozens of empty beer bottles and cans mixed and matched a pair of crusty socks L goes to bed at 11 does not quit work the next day.

Chastises the mirror at home.

17

LITERARY

The College Hill Independent

10.9 The Terms of Media II: Actions Pembroke Hall 305, 172 Meeting St. // 9:15AM–5:45PM // Free Determining the terms of media. What language should we use to discuss media? How does media develop? Does media theory have anything to do with how media develops? Etc., etc. Bonnie Honig will be there and she is among the coolest of them all. Breakfast and lunch served. Make a day of it.

“Mao Meets Muddy” Screening with Anthony Ramos, Part of “Transatlantic Legacy: Full Circle” Rochambeau Library, Community Room, 708 Hope St. // 3–4:30PM Anthony Ramos was born in Providence and has made pioneering work in critical, activist-centered filmmaking for over 40 years. In this film, Ramos accompanies painter Frederick Brown to Beijing for Brown’s gallery opening there. Ramos is a very important artist and has tried to give voice to marginalized communities and individuals throughout his career. Definitely a film to see, and a wonderful person to meet and hear speak.

10.10 The Zombies Park Theater, Cranston, RI // 8PM Here we are one week after “Grobangate”, when a classic rock staple didn’t play in Providence for a week and Josh Groban played instead, and I’d say collectively we know less about the current state of classic rock and its role in our contemporary cultural landscape than ever before. 2015 has been a long year—the longest on record, in terms of heat—and in it we’ve been handed an embarrassment of cultural riches. Do we as a society know how to make sense of our aesthetic grocery list, as it were? Better yet, if one were to inquire as to what authenticity “looks like” in 2015, would you have an answer? Or have we decided once and for all to accept that art and commerce were all along both products of the very same aesthetic framework, a framework that is merely an extension of an ever-evolving global capitalist project into which all notions of aesthetic differentiation will eventually be devoured, as by a supermassive black hole, only to be sublimated into a single massless globule of up-tempo electro-nothing?

Needless to say, The Zombies are thinking about this stuff.

“Odessey and Oracle”, their magnum o-pun, came out nearly 50 years ago in 1968, which isn’t in the Summer of Love but it’s pretty close. The White Album came out in ‘68. Nixon was elected president. And shortly thereafter the idealism of the ‘60s quickly degenerated into the pointless excess of the ‘70s. Thankfully we haven’t looked back since. So go see The Zombies.

Are The Zombies better than Groban? Will “Grobangate” define 2015 as the 1968 Democratic Convention defined its year? Do you remember when Chris Sligh sang “She’s Not There” on American Idol? Is Chris Sligh better than Groban? Let me know at listtheindy@gmail.com.

Free Zombie Dance Class 172 Exchange St. Unit 201, Pawtucket // 3–4PM At this class you will learn how to do the zombie dance from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. This is actually what will be happening here. There will be a performance at an as-yet-undisclosed location on the 27th of October. If ever you have dreamed of doing the zombie dance from “Thriller” in a secret place, this is your chance. Do not pass this up.

tHe lis t .

10.11 Newport Marathon Easton Beach, 175 Memorial Blvd, Newport // 7:30AM Self-explanatory. If you’re finding out about this today, you’ve still got Friday evening and all of Saturday to begin training.

10.12 An Evening with David Sedaris Providence Performing Arts Center // 7PM // $25 David Sedaris is a funny guy. I don’t know what I can say about him that might sound new or interesting! He’ll read some cool stuff.

Maybe it’ll be on the radio eventually. I like David Sedaris. We all do. I wonder if he still lives in Paris. Apparently if you buy 15+ tickets to this show you get a significant discount, which seems like encouragement for scalpers. A guaranteed good time for you and all 150 of your friends!

10.13 Poet Jane Hirshfield to Read McCormack Family Theater, 70 Brown St. // 8–9PM // Free Free poetry. A selection: All the difficult hours and minutes are like salted plums in a jar.

Wrinkled, turn steeply into themselves, they mutter something the color of sharkfins to the glass.

Just so, calamity turns toward calmness.

First the jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.

Color of sharkfins, not color of sharks.

10.15 Thursday Noon Organ Concerts Grace Episcopal Church, 175 Mathewson St., Providence // 12–12:30PM 30 mins of bliss and grace at Grace. How do u find bliss and grace in your day? Sometimes we all need to go to church for a bit of midday bliss and grace because we can’t find it in our regular lives.

I often can’t. Endlessly scheduled. Constantly overwhelming, or underwhelming. Strenuous and difficult to make sense of. We are thankful for the many-horned beast we call the organ for its beautiful noise. Thank u organ.

A GOODBYE For This Week and Next Goodbye for this week. Goodbye for next week, because we are off. Thanks for a wonderful first few weeks at the list. Much has changed since I started doing this so long ago in September. I know I’ve changed, and I hope that we all change along with the list, and for the better, too. This is the LW signing off.

To find events for next week I recommend www.google.com or a friend. It’s what I use.

Fossil Frenzy Weekend Museum of Natural History and Planetarium // 2PM // $3

Another poem by the LW

Apparently it is National Fossil Day on Saturday this weekend. At this particular celebration of this special day there will be discussion of Big Things like “cosmic collisions” and “hypersonic impacts”.

Children under the age of four are not permitted in the planetarium, which seems like an arbitrary cutoff. Possibly it is because this would blow their minds.

All the difficult events and listings are like salted plums in a jar So numerous they turn steeply (not the word I’d choose) into one another they mutter something the color of sharkgills/sharktails/sharkheads to the glass.

Just so, calmnenity turns toward calamnitess.