The College Hill Independent Volume 42 Issue 5 - ALL THINGS BLUE

VOLUME 42 ISSUE 5 5 MAR 2021

ALL THINGS BLUE

THIS ISSUE

STAFF COVER

Untited Cyanotype Experiment Louis Rakovich Week in Rigorous Journalism Deborah Marini & Alina Kulman

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT IS PRINTED BY TCI PRESS IN SEEKONK, MASSACHUSETTS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

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The Forgotten History of Little Liberia Bilal Memon

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02 WEEK IN REVIEW 03 NEWS

Data and Power Sacha Sloan

05 S & T

SKAM Peder Schaefer

07 ARTS

After the Apocalypse Olivia Cruz Mayeda

09 ARTS

Poems Hannah Gelman & Henry Bohan

11

Eros Reimagined Anabelle Johnston

13

FEATS

Voids and Vacuums Ella Spungen

15

FEATS

How to Grow Raspberries?

Qinru Zhang

17

Untitled Hannah-Rose Albinus

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LIT

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WEEK IN REVIEW Loughlin Neuert Nick Roblee-Strauss NEWS Bilal Memon Rhythm Rastogi Giacamo Sartorelli ARTS Amelia Anthony Nell Salzman METRO Mara Cavallaro Ricardo Gomez Deborah Marini SCIENCE + TECH Bowen Chen Anabelle Johnston LITERARY Audrey Buhain Alisa Caira FEATS Alan Dean Edie Elliott Granger Emily Rust DEAR INDY Gemma Sack Cal Turner Sara Van Horn EPHEMERA Liana Chaplain Anna Kerber X Yukti Agarwal Seth Israel SOCIAL MEDIA Justin Scheer

EPHEMERA

FROM THE EDITORS Advice on how to be blue [not sad. just blue] from the Indy: Pirate and sink a WaterFire gondola. Have no content to run in this week’s Indy. Receive a picture from your mom of springtime at ‘home’. Learn that your roommates don’t enjoy the same pasta shapes you do. - metro Walk down Benefit street wearing a blue coat and smoking a cigarette. Put balsamic vinegar on your blueberry pancakes. Dye your leg hair blue. - arts Stand inside a walk-in freezer. - news Read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Remember that you are not Maggie Nelson. - s&t Nonverbally communicate (i.e., with your ‘blue’-face): bussdown thotiana - features No other mixture of colors will ever get you blue. Now accept your primary feelings.

- literary Sit on a bench in a populated park. Celebrity is a fickle friend. - wir Listen to Sometimes by the Flamin’ Groovies [see relevant lyrical content]. - x Da ba dee - ephemera Sit down in the shower and stay there for at least 15 minutes. - dear indy Read a special blue edition of the Indy. - apa

BUSINESS Jerry Chen Evan Lincoln Isabelle Yang DESIGN EDITOR Ella Rosenblatt COVER COORDINATOR Sage Jennings

STAFF WRITERS Leela Berman Osayuwamen EdeOsifo Tammuz Frankel CJ Gan Lucas Gelfond Leo Gordon Gaya Gupta Evie Hidysmith Rose Houglet Amelia Wyckoff Muram Ibrahim Nicole Kim Alina Kulman Olivia Mayeda Drake Rebman Issra Said Justin Scheer Ella Spungen

DESIGNERS Malvika Agarwal Anna Brinkhuis Clara Epstein Miya Lohmeier Owen McCallumKeeler Issac McKenna Jieun (Michelle) Song Mehek Vohra COPY EDITORS Sojung (Erica) Yun Alyscia Batista Grace Berg ILLUSTRATION Elaine Chen EDITOR Megan Donohue Hannah Park Nina Fletcher Christine Huynh ILLUSTRATORS Madison Lease Sylvia Atwood Jasmine Li Hannah Chang Ophelia DuchesneMANAGING Malone EDITORS Camille Gros Alana Baer Sophie Foulkes Anchita Dasgupta Baylor Fuller Peder Schaefer Mara Jovanovic Olivia Lunger SENIOR EDITORS Talia Mermin Audrey Buhain Jessica Minker Andrew Rickert Rachelle Shao Ivy Scott Joshua Sun Xing Xing Shou Evelyn Tan Cal Turner Joyce Tullis Sara Van Horn Floria Tsui Dorothy Zhang MVP Bilal Memon

MISSION THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT IS A PROVIDENCE-BASED PUBLICATION WRITTEN, ILLUSTRATED, DESIGNED, AND EDITED BY STUDENTS FROM BROWN AND RISD. OUR PAPER IS DISTRIBUTED AROUND PROVIDENCE’S EAST SIDE AND DOWNTOWN, AS WELL AS ONLINE. IN ADDITION TO PUBLISHING 20 PAGES OF ORIGINAL WRITING, REPORTING, AND ART ONCE A WEEK, THE INDY FUNCTIONS AS AN OPEN WORKSHOP IN WHICH WRITERS, ARTISTS, AND DESIGNERS COLLABORATE AND PROVIDE FEEDBACK ON THEIR WORK. THROUGH AN EXTENSIVE EDITING PROCESS, WE CHALLENGE EACH OTHER TO BE RESPONSIBLE, INTENTIONAL, AND SELF-CRITICAL. WE ARE COMMITTED TO PUBLISHING POLITICALLY ENGAGED AND ACCESSIBLE WORK. WHILE THE INDY IS FINANCED BY BROWN UNIVERSITY, WE HOLD OURSELVES ACCOUNTABLE TO OUR READERS ACROSS THE PROVIDENCE COMMUNITY. THE INDY REJECTS CONTENT THAT EXPLICITLY OR IMPLICITLY PERPETUATES RACISM, SEXISM, HOMOPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA, XENOPHOBIA, ABLEISM AND/OR CLASSISM. THOUGH THIS LIST IS NOT EXHAUSTIVE, THE INDY STRIVES TO ADDRESS THESE SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION BY CENTERING THE VOICES, OPINIONS, AND EFFORTS OF MARGINALIZED PEOPLE IN PROVIDENCE AND BEYOND. THE INDY IS CONSTANTLY EVOLVING: WE ARE ALWAYS WORKING TO MAKE OUR STAFF AND CONTENT MORE INCLUSIVE. THOUGH OUR EDITING PROCESS PROVIDES AN INTERNAL STRUCTURE FOR ACCOUNTABILITY, WE ALWAYS WELCOME LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

WEEK IN REVIEW

LOCAL PIN OAK PINING FOR PEDESTRIAN-PROTECTOR

A DUCK WALKS INTO A PODCAST STUDIO. THE DUCK IS RACIST.

After being burned by the fast pace of modern media too many times before, we at Week in Review have decided to dip our collective-toe into the icy world of glacial news. This piece is the first in an eighteen-part series about trees, mosses, and dandelions.

There’s a theory of the Internet, put forward by Australian cartoonist Ben Ward, that attempts to capture the speed and hellishness with which viral content implodes. In 2016, Ward tweeted, “The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist.”

On February 4, the podcast Reply All, a show from the network Gimlet Media that tells stories from the internet, began their own Milkshake Duck implosion. The podcast released the first episode in a four-part series examining accusations of racism at Bon Appetit, the food magazine turned astronomically popular Youtube cooking channel, that ultimately led to massive turnover at the publication over the summer. Reporter Sruthi Pinnamaneni recounted how the magazine, once beloved for its simple-yet-chic dinner recipes and shiny office at 1 World Trade Center, had consistently excluded, undervalued, and underpaid BIPOC staff. The Milkshake Duck theory of the case went ahead, and no gourmet soft-serve recipes could rescue it. Several Bon Appetit contributors and editors, integral members of the Youtube channel’s rotating cast of characters, were accused by their BIPOC colleagues of creating a toxic and racist workplace culture. In June, Adam Rappaport, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, resigned amidst these accusations and after a particularly damning Instagram photo re-emerged on Twitter of him and his wife dressing as a Puerto Rican couple for a Halloween party in 2013.

Thousands of retweets and comments praised the Reply All series and demanded to hear the following episodes tracking the downfall and transformation of Bon Appetit. The podcast’s producers, however, seemed to be throwing stones from a glass house—or rather, throwing milkshakes from an equally glamorous Brooklyn podcasting office. Eric Eddings, former host of “The Nod,” a podcast about Black culture, posted a long Twitter thread about how Reply All hosts PJ Vogt and Pinnamaneni had actively undermined unionization and diversification efforts at their own podcasting company, Gimlet Media. From there, more accusations emerged—Vogt had allegedly harassed female colleagues for years, while simultaneously boosting his public persona through connections with celebrated internet people like Phoebe Bridgers and Antoni Porowski. Vogt and Pinnamaneni stepped down from their positions, and the show was placed on temporary hiatus. Milkshake Duck made a reappearance and became twofold; the podcast recounting another media outlet’s downfall led to the ultimate downfall of the podcast itself.

When the podcast boom began a decade ago, podcasts were often billed as a more creative, intelligent form of media. Popular narrative shows have long thrived on telling stories of marginalized people—whether it was the hit series S-Town about a gay clock restorer in Alabama who committed suicide, or Ear Hustle, which tells stories about life during and after incarceration in San Quentin State Prison in California. Nowadays, there’s serious money to be made in podcasting networks. Gimlet was sold to Spotify for $230 million in 2019; Wondery, another network, was acquired by Amazon for $300 million. These massive acquisitions do not benefit rank and file podcast producers fighting for better wages and unionization. Most of the time, the marginalized subjects of these narrative podcasts do not see a penny of Amazon or Spotify money. When the former Bon Appetit BIPOC staffers agreed to tell their intimate stories of workplace trauma to Reply All, they did so under the impression that they would be part of a larger reflection on widespread racism in media. The Milkshake Ducking, or put more candidly, the reckoning, must go beyond the one-time exposé and high profile firings of a couple of scapegoats. Perhaps it requires an entire reformation of the power dynamics between media managers, reporters, contractors, sub-contractors, and their subjects—far beyond what this Indy writer can draw up in this Week In Rigorous Journalism.

The pin oak on the corner of Thayer and Williams Street absorbed another eighth-of-a-millimeter of stop sign this past Saturday, according to an anonymous tip received by the College Hill Independent. While it’s unclear which came first—the tree or the stop sign—starting sometime in the late2010s the two began to merge into one in a violent and unending spectacle on a quiet Fox Point street corner.

A local thirteen-year-old, currently enrolled in Mrs. Gardner’s eighth grade Earth Science class at Nathan Bishop Middle School, told the Indy that two things could be happening here: it’s either a symbiotic relationship between tree and sign, or a parasitic relationship between sign and tree. A Fox Point resident and frequent Dear Indy reader told our reporters that only two conclusions can be drawn: it’s either an unhealthy and debilitating codependency between two lovers who need to work on their sense of independence, or the tree is gaslighting the stop sign. Another local, an editor of the Indy’s Metro section, told us two things as well: one, that we could make up sources every now and then if we’re chill about it, and two, stop signs are geographies of state violence.

After talking to the experts, Week in Review’s team of award-winning correspondents, statisticians, and high-brow consultants settled on three prevailing theories that could explain this municipalian monstrosity: 1. The tree wants state employee healthcare benefits.

Unlike all of the other deciduous trees on the block, this pin oak still has not dropped its leaves, which is evidence of underdeveloped abscission tissue.

Most affordable PPOs (Protection for Pin Oak) plans, such as Blue Branch Blue Bird, exclude such preexisting conditions. By becoming an integral part of the stop sign—whose pole has been entirely replaced by tree—the pin oak guarantees itself state-managed coverage (which includes dental, much needed for those who have ground down their molars on aluminum and rebar).

2. Nothing makes sense anymore, especially if you’re a tree.

The weather’s in flux, bird numbers are down, the soil is a bit more acidic—everything is bad and senseless and now there’s also a tree-looking thing right next to you so you might as well just bump into it and see what happens. If you eat it, good, if you don’t eat it, maybe it’ll eat you. Also good.

Modern sense and senselessness is even trickier for stop signs, who have a very specific sense (not in a sentient way) of how things should sensibly operate, and when that one thing (stopping) is skipped (by senseless Rhode Island drivers), you might as well stop and get eaten by your neighbor. Also good.

3. Trees live in a society, and they hate it.

Long have the trees been an enemy of urban infrastructure. According to the 2006 Providence Tree Tally, from the 2008 State of Providence’s Urban Forest, 36.1 percent of all sidewalks adjacent to trees were either cracked, raised, or missing. This same study found that 16.2 percent of trees were in conflict with “surrounding infrastructure of some kind,” which included 120 trees (0.5 percent) in conflict with “Awning/Sign.” Trees fall, trees leave leaves, trees (Ents) hurl stones at industrial Tolkien hellscapes, etcetera etcetera.

Outside of these theories, the Indy is stumped. Additional unsubstantiated reports claim that the lichen found on the stop sign is working in cahoots with the pin oak, but, at press time, the lichen declined to comment.

- DM

TEXT DEBORAH MARINI + ALINA KULMAN DESIGN XINGXING SHOU ILLUSTRATION JOYCE TULLIS

WEEK IN RIGOROUS JOURNALISM

- AK

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The Forgotten History of Little Liberia

NEWS

Rediscovering Bridgeport’s affluent community of color in South End

According to her 1883 obituary in the Bridgeport Standard, Mary Freedman “had during her life accumulated considerable property, which is variously estimated from $30,000 to $50,000,” or in 2021 dollars, somewhere between $800,000 and $1.4 million. A woman of African and Paugessett Indian descent from Bridgeport, Connecticut, Mary Freedman amassed fifty-five times more wealth than the average African American today, despite living most her life in a country where slavery was legal. The magnitude of this imbalance speaks alternately to the century-long stagnation of Black wealth and to the exceptionalism of Mary’s life. Given how mainstream history often overlooks abolitionists and civil rights leaders’ related struggles for economic justice, the lives of affluent Black Americans—like Mary—provide a fresh opportunity to imagine the future of Black wealth.

Mary was a prominent member of a nineteenth century community of color in the present-day South End of Bridgeport, referred to as Ethiop or Liberia by its inhabitants and Little Liberia by contemporary residents of Bridgeport and surrounding areas. For a Black and Indigenous enclave, the community achieved a rare degree of affluence. Several prominent residents in addition to Mary are recorded with estates valued in the tens of thousands. The presence of two churches, a school for children of color, a free lending library, a seaside hotel resort, and a Masonic lodge all distinguished Little Liberia as a prosperous and refined community.

Today, nestled between a hair salon and a popular Salvadorian restaurant, lie the last two houses of Little Liberia. Once proud landmarks, the Mary and Elizabeth Freeman houses—so-named after Mary and her sister, the original owners of the properties—now stand in a grim state of disrepair. Over the past decade a coalition of amateur historians, city officials, and local residents have fought to protect the houses from demolition. The Freeman Center, founded in 2009, has been working to preserve the sites with the eventual goal of transforming the space into a community center with affordable housing units and green space.

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Unlike the parochial quaintness that characterizes many local historical societies, the mission of the Freeman Center feels deeply relevant.

The history of a self-sufficient Black and Native community thriving in the midst of slavery, racial violence, and bitter discrimnation offers an alternative to current disparities that plague the greater Bridgeport metropolitan area, one of the most—and according to some statistics, the singular most—economically unequal and racially segregated regions in the country.

While the owners and managers of New York’s financial capital reside in Connecticut’s ‘Gold Coast,’ the city of Bridgeport contains some of the poorest areas in the state. In recovering the history of Little Liberia, the organizers of the Freeman Center hope to catalyze a larger movement to invest in and support the working-class communities of color in Bridgeport’s South End. +++ On April 10, 1821—two months before Bridgeport became independent from the town of Stratford—two men of color, John Feeley and Jacob Freedman, purchased an existing house one-half mile to the south of Bridgeport’s center. The arrival of Feeley and Freedman marks the birth of Little Liberia. At the time, the South End was marshy and mosquito-ridden. While the white population avoided the area, fearing disease, Paugusset Indians and free African Americans followed Feeley and Freedman, settling Main Street, Broad Street, Whiting Street, and Gregory Street. In 1831, a man named Joel Freeman moved from Derby to Bridgeport. Freeman’s name is scattered throughout extant documents of the time. A leader of the community, Freeman officiated weddings and conducted baptisms in his backyard. He also helped to found the Zion Church and a school for children of color. His sisters, Mary and Eliza Freeman, later followed their brother. The three siblings accumulated several properties throughout their lifetime, eventually becoming significant landlords in the neighborhood.

Little Liberia was a seafaring community.

Joel, like many of his neighbors, earned his living as a sailor on a West Indian schooner. With men often away at sea, women played an important role managing the affairs of the neighborhood. Most likely, Mary and Eliza directly oversaw the growth of the Freeman real estate empire while Joel provided starting capital.

Across the North, female labor force participation was higher for free African Americans than for whites—and consistent with, if not higher than, rates of Black male employment. Indoctrination into the cult of domesticity proved harder for Black Americans, who were systematically denied the middle class employment that made a single-income household possible in the first place. The distinctness of Little Liberia is not simply that women labored alongside men in working-class employment, but that women pulled the strings even in the highest echelons of business and influence.

The density of seamen also provided Little Liberia with a distinct ‘Atlantic’ character.

Sailors promoted the attractiveness of the community to their contacts throughout the West Indies. Little Liberia soon possessed a sizable Haitian and Cape Verdean contingent.

The mere title ‘Liberia’ testifies to a transnational understanding of Black liberation. While the white-led American Colonization Society advocated sending free Blacks to the newly founded West African country of Liberia, residents of Bridgeport reappropriated the title to refer to their organic, self-determined project of building a prosperous community for Blacks from across the Atlantic world. +++ Beyond the details of the Freeman family, the neighborhood’s churches, schools, libraries, clubhouses, and various social institutions distinguished Little Liberia as an especially affluent community of color. In white society, such amentifies often designated the arrival of the new 19th century middle class. However, to conceptualize class in Little Liberia, students of history must modify familiar notions of the middle class in order to account for the unique

NEWS

In the 1980s, before he became Bridgeport’s city historian, Charles Brilvitch worked for a nonprofit tasked with locating cultural assets in the city. Brilvitch—then a young historian with a handlebar mustache and a predilection for labrusca wines—was getting his pants hemmed in the South End when he noticed that the tailor shop was cobbled onto a dilapidated Greek Revival house bearing little resemblance to the architecture of the area, save a similar house directly adjacent. Cross-referencing land records with city directories, Brilvitch discovered that the grand structures were previously owned by the Freeman sisters. Although Brilvitch recognized the significance of two houses built in the first half of the nineteenth century owned by women of color, the Freeman houses largely remained in the realm of interesting dinner conversation among friends and colleagues. More than a decade later, in 1997, Brilvitch was asked on short notice to prepare a lecture for the Bridgeport Historical Society in lieu of a previously scheduled speaker who had suffered a case of acute appendicitis. Returning to the city archives, Brilvitch identified properties, no longer in existence, neighboring the Freeman houses and owned by other people of color. Quickly, he pieced together the skeleton of Little Liberia—there was the mayor’s personal chef, the owner of a popular general store, a reputable barber—all influential community members until then erased from modern memory.

“I thought it was a pretty successful talk,” Brilvitch told the College Hill Independent as he recalled participants exclaiming, “‘why don’t we teach this in our schools?’” In the front row of the lecture sat Charles Tisdale, director of Action for Bridgeport Community Development (ABCD), a local social services agency.

After the talk, Tisdale told Brilvitch that he owned the Freeman houses, which had been donated to ABCD by an out-of-town widow.

Astonished by the coincidence, the two men rushed to list the Freeman houses in the National Register of Historic Places.

The excitement was short-lived, however.

The city threatened to destroy the property to

ILLUSTRATION OPHELIA DUCHESNE-MALONE

+++

make way for new development. Joe Ganim, Mayor of Bridgeport from 1991 to 2003, attempted to tax the houses for blight, and collect additional back-taxes in order to foreclose the property. (Ganim would later serve six years in prison for corruption before successfully running again for mayor in 2015.) Through community pressure, the houses avoided foreclosure and ABCD retained control. While disaster was avoided, there was little progress in restoring the houses. ABCD, already stretched thin, lacked the personnel capacity or funds to begin renovation.

In 2008, Maisa Tisdale, Charles Tisdale’s niece, offered to take over responsibility for the properties. Equipped with experience writing grants for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, Tisdale hoped to accelerate the restoration of the Freeman houses. Soon after taking the lead, Tisdale received a tip that the newly elected Finch administration had consigned the houses for demolition. A second, more widespread public outcry just barely saved the Freeman houses. In its wake, the properties were transferred to the newly created Freeman Center.

The Center grew from a series of workshops and charrettes conducted by University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Department of Regional Planning and Landscape Architecture. Community stakeholders expressed their desire for a historical and cultural center that not only educated the public on Little Liberia, but also served the present needs of South End residents. The explicit goals of the Freemen center include: to “use the restoration of the houses as a catalyst to revitalize the South End by creating a cultural district that reflects the area’s historic Black and immigrant roots” and to “provide a forum (and historical context) for discussing community and state-wide initiatives that promote racial healing and socio-economic justice.”

Due to almost a century of urban planning that invested in poor neighborhoods only to displace local populations, the term ‘revitalization’ often raises alarm bells in the minds of activists and residents fearing rent hikes. The Freeman Center aspires to an alternative vision of revitalization where the welfare of current residents is, and remains, the singular object of importance. While raising millions of dollars and preparing to break ground on the site of the Freeman houses, the Center has also organized workshops on environmental justice, piloted a children and adult literacy program, commissioned local artists to assist in depicting Little Liberia, and taught lessons in the Bridgeport public schools about neglected aspects of African American history. Beyond material support through various social services, the Center also hopes to disseminate a message of Black and Native empowerment. Through her involvement in public schools, Tisdale described how children in Bridgeport at a young age develop feelings of internalized inferiority compared to their more affluent peers in neighborhooding towns. The prosperity of Little Liberia in the face of slavery and violent discrimination demonstrates the perservernce and ingenuity of Black Americans—a simple enough message, but one that bears repeating.

As a community hub grounded in local history, the Freeman Center is uniquely positioned to combat the market-logic that often accompanies revitalization. The Center, in drawing from the legacy of Black and Native people, commits itself to marginalized communities. Rather than wasting away in dusty tomes, the history of Little Liberia—albeit with it’s own instances of class-conflict—has provided the impetus to regenerate Black wealth in Bridgeport’s South end.

DESIGN MEHEK VOHRA

Many formerly enslaved Southerners settled in Little Liberia and assimilated into the city, giving additional resonance to the community’s name.

Buoyed by a unique level of economic prosperity, some Little Liberians advocated self-sufficiency and developed an incipient form of Black nationalism. In a letter to Fredrick Douglass, published in Fredrick Douglass’ Paper, a Brooklynite using the pseudonym ‘Ethiop’ wrote of his stay at the Duncan Hotel in Little Liberia, a seaside resort catering to people of color. Recounting his stimulating discussions and Little Liberian’s “improving condition,” Ethiop declared Bridgeport an ideal vacation destination for Black elites. He decried the tendency to follow whites to their preferred vacation spots, writing, “Let us execrate that foolish pride so prevalent among us, to assimilate the whites in matters that tell so wonderfully to our discredit, and make us feel, that of ourselves, we are nothing … In the fashionable watering places, I have mentioned, the whites now rule and reign. In Bridgeport, the blacks may reign.” Squarely focused on a small minority of wealthy African Americans, Ethiop nevertheless anticipated the integration-separatism dichotomy that continues to characterize much civil rights discourse.

And then, for still unknown reasons, the community dissipated. Its affluence, Atlantic character, gender roles, class conflict, and devotion to Black liberation were all lost to the annals of history for the next hundred years.

TEXT BILAL MEMON

preoccupations experienced by communities of color. Historians of the antebellum North often describe the small but influential Black middle class through its adherence to a cultural system characterized by the belief in racial uplift through hard work, temperance, and—arguably most important—education. While white middle class culture also emphasized hard work, temperance, and education, the Black middle class employed these virtues to the ultimate end of collective Black liberation.

Little Liberians worked to promote the moral and intellectual elevation of their community. In 1841, a dozen members of the community successfully petitioned the Connecticut General Assembly for funds to build a school. According to the petition, the fifty-eight children in Little Liberia lived a great distance from the nearest colored school, preventing them from receiving an education. The petitioners went on to remark, “The distinction of color, and the prejudices existing in the community upon the subject…render the situation of colored children extremely unpleasable.” In addition to the long distances children traveled, violent attempts in recent history to prevent Black education in Connecticut were undoubtedly in the back of their minds. Over the course of the 1830s, attempts to build a Black college in New Haven resulted in mobs of disgruntled white working-class residents; riots in Canterbury erupted in response to efforts to establish a school for Black girls; and Connecticut passed ‘Black Laws,’ prohibiting the education of African Americans who were not state residents. In the face of overwhelming violence, African Americans persisted in calls for secular and religious education. Soliciting used books, a group of Little Liberians wrote, “The colored people’s Elevation Society of this city, have undertaken to get up a library, for their moral and educational improvement.” Succinctly, these volunteers expressed their belief in education as transformative power, enabling self-improvement.

While relatively affluent overall, most inhabitants of Little Liberia were laborers of a more common sort. In addition to sailor (most of whom were not wealthy landlords), city directories and census records list cook, waiter, laundress, and washerwoman as other popular professions. Limited circumstantial evidence points to conflict between laborers and the more affluent residents. An 1882 article in the Bridgeport Standard described the public outrage against Mary Freeman after she refused to let an elderly tenant who had been burned in a fire, and later died, pass through her house to get onto the street. And in 1873, members of the Doric lodge, an elite social club for Freemasons, prosecuted non-members for selling liquor on their grounds. Given the scarcity of primary documents, it is difficult to definitively determine whether these incidents were isolated occurrences or represent flashpoints in a continuous struggle between antagonistic elements of the community. Perhaps the likeliest scenario is that class conflict in Little Liberia ebbed and flowed through the decades, sometimes reaching peaks of deep animosity and other times fading into the background in the rhythm of daily life.

A potential dampener on class conflict was the universal threat, felt across class lines, of racial violence and the corresponding cry for liberation. Bridgeport residents were prominent members in the state’s Colored Convention, meetings of Black leaders to discuss the political and economic problems facing Connecticut’s Black population. In the conventions, participants denounced slavery, demanded suffrage, and invoked the necessity of education as a prerequisite for true freedom. Little Liberia also housed an Underground Railroad location.

BILAL MEMON B’22.5 encourages readers to learn about neglected local histories.

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DATA and POWER

TEXT SACHA SLOAN

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

ILLUSTRATION FLORIA TSUI

S+T

The disproportionate impact of the descending digital panopticon

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On January 20, 2021, as the opening day of President Joe Biden’s tenure drew to a close, the Senate confirmed Avril Haines as the first female director of national intelligence. In announcing her nomination, the Biden team sought to emphasize Haines’ experience and her academic bona fides: after serving as Obama’s deputy Central Intelligence Agency director from 2013 to 2015, she spent time at several prestigious research universities and think tanks.

But, despite her attempts to scrub it from her online biographies, Haines is also fresh from a cushy consulting job at Palantir, the shadowy ‘data integration’ firm whose infamous people-tracking software has been indispensable to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) abhorrent maltreatment of undocumented immigrants. Trump-affiliated nationalist entrepreneur Peter Thiel co-founded Palantir in 2004, after receiving a $2 million seed investment from the CIA. Since then, the company has built its business model on multimillion-dollar contracts with Western governments, for which Palantir outfits intelligence agencies with Orwellian digital dragnet technologies that fill civil libertarians’ nightmares.

Immigrants, activists, low-wage laborers, minority groups, and other primary targets of systemic persecution have watched in horror as their oppressors approach digital omniscience.

Given her close ties to a much-criticized surveillance juggernaut, Haines’ ascension to the nation’s preeminent national intelligence position is concerning—but it should come as no surprise. In response to the sweeping societal upheaval ushered in by the digital age over the past 40 years, the United States and other governments have formed close relationships with the tech sphere to keep an ever-closer eye on their citizenry. Rather than being incidental to the rise of mass digital surveillance, many mainstays of the digital world—such as Google, and the internet itself—came out of government projects and investments. Today, experts describe a robust revolving door between Silicon Valley and the US intelligence community; federal officials frequently forge covert ties with the Big Tech world and then go on to land lucrative consultant gigs with those same companies. Former principal deputy director of national intelligence and current senior tech consultant Susan Gordon enthusiastically described this pattern, of which she and Haines are both prime examples, as “cross-pollination.” Government surveillance efforts have flourished in recent decades, largely owing to these symbiotic alliances with data-accreting corporations.

Tech conglomerates, for their part, have serendipitously found themselves in a world ruled by data collection. Due to the value capitalism places on shrewd predictions of consumer behavior, the capitalistic hierarchy has rapidly reshaped itself to favor tech companies—the most successful corporations are now those that most effectively exploit or sell their consumers’ data. But companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon are now under renewed scrutiny because their power has come to rival that of

the governments who once fostered them. Facebook has even established its own version of a Supreme Court, with an authority that arguably rivals its governmental counterparts. Still, despite their clashes in the media, the digital sphere and the Beltway need each other—there’s a reason Biden’s transition team was suffused with tech executives and tech-adjacent functionaries like Haines. As these dominant private and ‘public’ entities amass more and more power, both individually and through opaque collusive networks with each other, it has become increasingly difficult to tell our technocratic overlords apart. +++ Companies like Palantir rose as answers to a new problem in contemporary surveillance. Rates of surveillance cameras in the United States and China continue to skyrocket, at this point surpassing five cameras per citizen, and our phone apps provide corporations and governments with constant streams of information about every aspect of our lives (at a price). However, for officialdoms presented with this endless deluge of data, the ballgame has become less about acquiring further material and more about the processing of it.

As Palantir announces on its website, “Data integration is the seminal problem of the digital age.”

Imagine finding all the needles in every haystack in the universe, but then realizing that this development has yielded yet another impenetrable buildup—a needlestack, if you will. That’s where data integration companies like Palantir come in. They take the incalculable heap of needles and separate them into neat, accessible stacks with the click of a button, cutting a process that may have taken weeks or years into one of hours or minutes. Unruly swathes of data are marshalled into simple lists, averages, and graphs.

This type of software also goes by the anodyne names ‘multi-intelligence fusion network’ or ‘correlation engine.’ Data integration technology may seem innocuous—like a simple organizing tool—but, in reality, it may be the most insidious surveillance weapon yet. There used to be a natural obstacle protecting the surveilled from the surveilers—time.

It takes people time and effort to sift through data and make the connections necessary for effective surveillance. Correlation engines remove this barrier entirely.

Around the world, governments, militaries, hedge funds, megacorporations, law enforcement, and other powerful enterprises have seized on this new technological frontier. Data integration companies and the data-providing tech giants have been more than happy to oblige. While Palantir has provided software to ICE and the Pentagon, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have all provided web services and software to Chinese state surveillance organizations, which underpin China’s monitoring and imprisonment of pro-democracy activists and ethnic minorities like the Uyghurs. Just like the US, the Chinese government relies on correlation engines

to run its panoptic surveillance empire, synthesizing material from facial recognition cameras, iris scans, required questionnaires, financial and medical records, cell phone geolocation data, and untold other sources.

US citizens often balk at particularly egregious caricatures—and genuine examples—of Chinese surveillance, such as its notorious social credit system.

But the US government simply outsources similar work to unaccountable tech behemoths. In haughty media statements and op-eds, Mr. Thiel has repeatedly castigated Silicon Valley—specifically Google, which he has called “treasonous”—for working with the Chinese. Palantir, as noted in its initial public offerings filings last summer, will only offer its services in support of ‘Western liberal democracy.’ But lofty national convictions don’t matter much to people languishing in ICE detention centers and Uyghur internment camps. +++ Amid the upper class panic over potential user privacy violations and the hypocritical mud-slinging between gilt-edged software bigwigs, the real victims of wanton government and corporate surveillance— undocumented immigrants, low-income workers, and other historically marginalized communities— often get lost in the noise. For the wealthy and otherwise-privileged in the US, surveillance and moribund privacy rights are akin to an academic exercise; in theory, nobody wants the government or their employer to know their intimate secrets. This all-inthe-same-boat narrative bases itself on the notion of privacy as a universal human right—which, ideally, it should be. However, the harm of surveillance intensifies exponentially as privilege fades. In addition to losing their privacy, racial and religious minorities face heightened police persecution; undocumented immigrants are more likely to be detained or deported; impoverished families must go through more arduous hoops to obtain welfare benefits; and mistreated workers are fired for discussing unionization in private conversations. To disregard this disproportionate impact is to ignore the already-subjugated communities who suffer the brunt of surveillance’s real-world consequences.

Indeed, with the help of a multi-intelligence fusion network called Investigative Case Management, custom-made by Palantir, ICE has expanded the database informing its immigrant-seizing operations from jail records to most everything: DMV records, purchased cell phone records, electricity and water service records, license plates, and even social media.

ICE also contracts with Clearview AI, which puts undocumented immigrants in its facial recognition database from any picture on the internet. This formidable technology is available for installation on every agents’ phone.

Biden campaigned on reigning in ICE’s crimes.

But not only has his administration so far failed to curtail deportations or meaningfully restrict ICE’s

S+T

authority, it is also currently working on enhancing Trump’s inhumane immigration system to fit the digital age (or, as Biden’s campaign website puts it, “Modernize America’s immigration system”). Construction of the physical border wall has largely been ended, but in its place will rise a virtual biometric surveillance apparatus of dystopian proportions.

This ‘smart wall’ has been in the works since as far back as 1995, when Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) started buying patents, finding contractors, and drawing up plans for a theoretical biometric security apparatus powered by face scanning, DNA, and voice and palm-prints. In the past months, growing numbers of Customs and Border Protections (CBP) contracts have gone to the defense tech startup Anduril, whose CEO, Palmer Luckey, is a Palantir associate and a virulent anti-immigrant nationalist. Palantir’s tendrils have spread from the nation’s borderlands all the way to the heart of Biden’s cabinet, and will likely spread further still.

What’s more, despite the tech giant’s promises to never let its technology facilitate the violation of human rights, Google is also quietly selling its artificial intelligence(AI) to CBP through a third-party party firm to be used with Anduril’s hardware in the virtual border wall. Anduril has already received $35 million out of a planned $250 million from CBP for its Autonomous Surveillance Towers program. Far from slowing down, under Biden’s leadership ICE will be handed untold levels of power in the form of new surveillance capabilities. The rogue agency, having already proven itself to flagrantly disregard the lives of its victims—and direct orders from the federal government—will doubtlessly use its new-

found superweapon to inflict further devastation on the immigrant community throughout the country. +++ ICE is not the only oppressor harnessing the might of surveillance capitalism. In a manner reminiscent of the company’s robber baron forebears, Amazon currently employs frightening levels of surveillance to maintain its chokehold over its million-plus warehouse workers. For years, Amazon warehouse workers—who are disproportionately Black and brown—have reported being treated like robots, losing their jobs for going to the bathroom, and enduring abysmal safety standards, especially amid the coronavirus pandemic. Yet, not one Amazon warehouse has successfully formed a union. An upcoming unionization vote at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama may change that, but Amazon is doing everything it can to prevent this by leveraging its expansive union-busting apparatus—which is centered on employee surveillance.

Last year, leaked documents revealed excerpts from plans of Amazon’s new ‘geoSPatial Operating Console’, which reportedly analyzes and integrates 40 different data sets—including outside employee activism and interests, nearby national union chapters, patterns in the money flowing from unions, and something ominously called ‘The Union Relationship Map’—to track workers and estimate unionization likelihood. This project is part of a broader effort: in recent years, Amazon has brought dozens of former US Federal Bureau of Investigation agents into its ranks, some of whose job descriptions consist

entirely of tracking and suppressing potential unionization. Teams of analysts form the company’s Global Security Operations Center, which gives corporate executives regular, secret reports on incipient labor activism among the workforce. Amazon has been caught surveilling warehouse worker union meetings, tracking pamphlet dissemination, compiling “dissatisfaction reports” on individual workers, and making fake social media accounts to catalog online activity of labor activists. The company scrutinizes its workers with an unnerving level of detail—at one warehouse strike in Leipzig, Germany on February 28, 2020, analysts ultimately concluded that strike turnout was “46.37% of expected”. In the words of one anonymous analyst, they “knew everything about the private lives of these people”.

Now, Amazon is installing AI-equipped cameras in their delivery vehicles that record drivers 100 percent of the time, ostensibly for their safety. Amazon’s dangerous weaponization of data to stamp out labor activism before it even starts is as opaque as it is unmatched. This 1984-style repression-through-surveillance assumes various forms, whether in a state-sponsored concentration camp or a corporate-owned Alabama warehouse, but in practice the end results—systematic subjugation and dehumanization—often look the same. +++ These are just a few salient examples from the innumerable instances of 21st century surveillance—and its palpable effects. There are some signs of progress as public awareness of these problems grows; for instance, the majority of Democratic Manhattan District Attorney candidates have pledged to end the New York Police Department’s relationship with Palantir. But, as Biden’s elevation of Haines demonstrates, campaign-trail idealism will never stem the encroaching tide. Mass digital surveillance has seeped into every aspect of civilization, inexorably fortifying pre-existing pillars of oppression.

The modern era, which was supposed to bring about radical democratization of technology, has instead produced a further consolidation of hegemony.

Under the facade of universal progress, the powerless have been made more vulnerable than ever before.

We simply don’t know what the government and its corporate bedfellows are actually doing with our data—our current dystopia could just be the tip of the iceberg. The coronavirus pandemic has worsened the crisis, giving governments an excuse to more openly track our locations and store levels of biometric data that would have seemed ludicrous before. And as the impending onset of 6G networks promises more world-changing surveillance technology in just a matter of years, our window for action is shrinking. By the time the full extent of our totalitarian technocracy is clear, it will already be too late.

However, as last summer made clear, digital developments like social media have transformed social justice organizing. Today, a mere hashtag can propel world-changing social movements. Decentralization is key to these digital groundswells of activism: there is rarely one leader the government can vilify, and online social justice campaigns—while existing on injurious platforms—still enjoy an unprecedented level of accessibility. As the vice of data-based persecution strangles traditional methods of resistance, the path to a brighter future may lie in the digital world itself.

SACHA SLOAN B’23.5 is clearing a space on his wall for a Party-provided telescreen.

06

TEXT PEDER SCHAEFER

DESIGN ALANA BAER

ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES

ARTS

SKAM

07

Partying at a distance with Norway’s teens The first episode of SKAM—really all of SKAM— climaxes with a party. The parties in SKAM are large and full of activity; the revelers are in close contact and give off the feeling of being young and alive. The soundtrack has energy, a mix of familiar American rap music—Drake, Nas, Kanye—and less familiar (at least to my American ears) techno-sounding Scandinavian beats—A-Laget, Imogen Heap, Kamel. At the first party in the series, our protagonist is trying to make new friends at the Hartvig Nissen School in the Frogner neighborhood of Oslo, Norway. Dozens of high school kids wander around a poorly-lit basement, drinking out of red plastic cups, the music too loud to hear what anyone is saying. Few of the characters know each other, yet.

That’s the nature of a big, spontaneous party.

I watched the first episode of SKAM in my parents’ house in Providence towards the end of December, in the midst of this dark Covid winter. I had not been to a real party, or really any spontaneous social gathering, for ten months. I had forgotten, until I watched the first episode of SKAM, what it felt like to enter a space where you know no one and no one knows you.

What drew me to SKAM was not any particular character or storyline, but instead the capacity the show had to bring to life a fantasy far-removed from the present isolation of this global pandemic.

Watching SKAM made me realize again what I had lost when our world shuttered last March—the excitement, spontaneity, and emotional world of being a 20 year old.

Once hooked, I went down a wormhole that brought other, more critical questions to the surface: the role of social media in our viewing habits, the promise of the welfare state, and what identities might connect millions of viewers around the world, all who have an obsession with a rather obscure (at first glance) television series. +++ SKAM is a fictional Norwegian show—a teen drama—that follows the lives of a dozen or so teenagers in Oslo. The show was produced by NRK P3, a station of the Norwegian public broadcaster, from 2015 to 2017. Even with no advertising budget nor promotion, the show went viral. By the end of season two, 98 percent of Norwegian teenagers were aware of the show, and since then it has been subtitled illegally into dozens of different languages. The

first episode of SKAM is the most watched episode of NRK TV online ever, and the show was met by critical acclaim in Norway—winning the Gullruten, the Norwegian version of the Emmys—for its portrayal of adolescence and sensitive topics like sexual assault, sexuality, and religion. During the show’s run, an international internet subculture erupted on Tumblr pages and Instagram profiles, trading links to various Google Drive folders where you might find a coveted English-subtitled copy of the show to download. I know these pages well. I’ve scoured through many of them, seeking my next SKAM episode fix.

What makes SKAM unique in the realm of teen-drama-binging is the way the show was created and the rabid internet following it engendered.

SKAM is Norwegian for ‘shame’ and, broadly speaking, each of the four seasons deals with the shame felt by a different central character. Before writing SKAM, Julia Andem, the 39 year old producer and show-runner, did hundreds of interviews with teenagers between the ages of 16 and 18 across Norway. She tried to understand what they wanted to watch and what sort of show would be beneficial to them. Her ‘field studies’ informed the topics, or ‘shames,’ she chose to focus on—relationships in season one, sex in season two, sexuality in season three, and religion in season four. The way Andem shared the content was also unique. NRK released the show in bite-sized clips on social media with no warning, accompanied by relevant text threads or Instagram posts. On Friday of each week the different clips were compiled into a full episode that was released

by NRK. If a couple got into a fight on a Monday morning before school, the clip would drop then, at “MANDAG 08:15 AM,” the time and day marked in trademark SKAM block yellow text.

The show’s characters—many of whom were not professional actors, but instead were discovered

by Andem in open casting calls—had social media profiles that the team from NRK crafted to capture in detail what it felt to be a Norweigian teenager in 2018. Scrolling through the feeds today, I feel—if not for the Norwegian language barrier—these could have been the profiles of any number of peers I knew in high school. SKAM’s creators were able to channel the addictive qualities of social media, using short clips, curated posts, and text message chains to provide a slow drip of the latest teen drama.

That slow drip also makes for good business.

SKAM’s dazzling distribution model is addictive to current fans and a perfect way to win over new ones,

as the show’s clips travel across the social media ecosystem, from news feeds to Instagram posts, and, finally, into advertising dollars. The American remake of SKAM, SKAM Austin, premiered directly on Facebook Watch, as part of the platform’s premiere. That the SKAM model travelled from public television, NRK, to private enterprise, Facebook, in such a short period of time suggests that the show may be the future of television. This is not because of its unique distribution strategy or educational value, but because it’s an easy way to make a buck. Still, that hasn’t kept millions from all over the world from watching. +++ In SKAM, the teens don’t waste too much time on school. None of the characters seem to have parents or stable families, which poses a lot of challenges, but also an ungodly amount of freedom for a bunch of high schoolers. Aside from going to school (merely a subplot in SKAM) they also throw ragers, get too drunk, hook up and break up, rinse and repeat.

There’s a lot of action.

NRK is a public broadcaster, and SKAM approaches life—loneliness, sexuality, mental health, religion, friendships, romance, and more—in a way that seeks to educate, even if not explicitly. When things go sideways for the teens in SKAM, they often end up in the school nurse’s office. The nurse, with a giant plastic penis sticking straight up on her desk, dispenses wisdom—how to put on a condom, how to support a friend in trouble, how to combat insomnia. In every instance she gives good advice, or even better, directs the teens towards something, usually a government program, that can help them: a therapist, a doctor, legal help. Norway, like most Scandinavian countries, has a robust welfare state that guarantees universal health care, free public schools and colleges, and functional public transportation, even if that welfare state is built on the back of oil money drilled out of the North Sea. Having those resources budgeted for the social safety net means that there are figures like the nurse who are ready to jump in when the teens in SKAM are about to make really poor choices that could put themselves or their friends at risk.

In other commentaries on SKAM, I’ve read that the show’s principal message might be the popular show quote “Alt er love,” love conquers all, or the idea, as proposed by D.T. Max in the New Yorker,

ARTS

“SKAM is more than a form of escapist entertainment. The show engages with social media as a form of distribution—possibly hinting towards the future of television— and how our watching habits are influenced by ideas of what is ‘normal’ and the pervasive power of global capitalism. SKAM also delivers a cautionary tale about the ways we do, and don’t, support young people growing up in the 21st century.” that “if you keep trying, things will come out all right in the end.” Both of those takes seem shortsighted to me. The world is big, and many young people don’t have access to the same resources and support—from friends, family, and most importantly, the state—that the teens in SKAM have. Most don’t have a friendly nurse—a symbol of a trusting and supportive Norweigan welfare state—who can step in when you have nowhere else to turn. Most don’t even have the freedom to fully express themselves, such as in their sexuality or religion. A belief that “things will come out all right” serves a false, pull-yourself-up-byyour-bootstraps narrative that undermines the harder reality that SKAM illustrates: some teens have people ready to catch them when they fall, while others don’t.

For the millions of teens around the world who watch SKAM without living in a supportive welfare state, the show’s central message—that someone will catch you when you fall—might be misleading or dangerous. Using the SKAM teens as a model would be a poor choice if you lived in a place with a repressive government, a police state, or a shoddy social safety net. My inclination to fetishsize the Nordic welfare model in SKAM also hides the more complex realities of those systems. SKAM is a way to dream of a different, more caring, vision for society and government. It’s also a medium—teen drama!—that is devoid of the complexity those kinds of political and economic questions deserve. +++ Growing up in Providence, I wasn’t privy to the intricacies of the Norwegian school system or the significance of specific cultural differences in the lives of Norwegian teens. I may have a Scandinavian sounding first name, a confusing gift from my dad, but I am not Scandinavian. What is relatable about the show to millions of fans around the world, like me, is that in the 21st century, common challenges—social media, friendships, sex, loneliness, religion—connect coming of age experiences in different cultural contexts. Andem has crafted remakes of SKAM, using scarily familiar storylines, in places like France, Italy, Spain, and the United States, showing the reach of the fanbase in Western countries. Rabid followings have also developed online in South Korea, and in China over six million people have watched pirated and translated episodes of SKAM.

SKAM’s international appeal might be better understood by examining the specific slice of life it captures so well—the high school dramas of well-supported Norwegian teenagers. The vast international viewership suggests that young people across the globe are captivated by the fantastical world of Oslo teens enjoying relatively carefree lives. Those teens live in a country that gives them the time, freedom, and resources to explore their sexuality, mental health, and relationships with others. For poorer viewers—or simply viewers who live in a place without the high quality of life of Norway—the show represents a ‘normal’ life in a country made wealthy by global capitalism. Fantasizing about the ‘normal’ teen life in SKAM leads fans in less affluent and less free countries to a dangerous conclusion: that their own life is ‘wrong’ or backwards, and that important topics—like sex, social media, or religion—can only be explored openly and gracefully in a comfortable welfare state like Norway. A desire for the idealized coming of age experience in SKAM unites viewers around the world.

I felt that same desire, and it made SKAM addictive to watch—a part of me wished I had lived like the SKAM teens in high school, which I very much did not. I swore off social media junior year, I didn’t go out much at all, if ever, and I sat in my room doing homework most of the time, or playing an organized sport. I lived a rather ascetic lifestyle, to put it lightly.

On the screen I watched characters act out a life I did not have back then, nor could have now, but felt like I perhaps could have lived. SKAM was a voyeuristic window into an alternative world four years in my past and free of Covid.

The setting of SKAM felt familiar to me—the lunch room, the school yard, the classroom—but the substance of the show, that is, the way the characters choose to live their lives—partying, loving freely, snorting uppers in the bathroom—was very different from my own high school experience. I often found myself dumbstruck that a bunch of 16-and 17-yearold kids would have the audacity to behave in such a fashion. My surprise didn’t come from the fact that the kids were Norwegian—many American teen dramas chronicle similar escapades—but that SKAM showed me a high school fantasy so remote from the life I lived during those years. Sometimes watching SKAM felt like a form of therapy, filling in the emotional gaps for parts of my past that I had never lived at all. I’m drawn to art because it allows me to exit my own experience and enter another’s. So is the same with SKAM.

+++ The first episode of SKAM ends with a party. The last episode of SKAM does too. After four seasons almost all of the characters have had their time under the sun. They’ve had their budding relationships and painful break ups, shameful pasts and hopeful futures, all chopped into bite-sized bits for hyper-emotional viewing on social media, esoteric Tumblr pages, and hidden Google Drive folders. In the final scene all the characters are celebrating Eid al-Fitr, the feast that marks the end of Ramadan.

One of the characters rises to give a speech on a chair. It feels like a high school stunt, and it is. The entire cast is close together, and yet none of them are wearing a mask or sitting apart, socially distanced.

Instead, they’re living a high school fantasy, touching and feeling, happy to be in each other’s presence, oblivious of a world that requires constant vigilance against an unseen enemy.

SKAM is more than a form of escapist entertainment. The show engages with social media as a form of distribution—possibly hinting towards the future of television—and how our watching habits are influenced by ideas of what is ‘normal’ and the pervasive power of global capitalism. SKAM also delivers a cautionary tale about the ways we do, and don’t, support young people growing up in the 21st century. For a lowly teen drama, SKAM—as entertainment or lens for criticism—hits upon a kaleidoscope of topics. It’s also just great fun. You should watch, if only for the party scenes—forget the capitalist critiques.

Watching SKAM reminded me again of my human need for touch, spontaneity, and emotional connection. In a present without the ability to fully be a 21 year old, SKAM can act as a part-time fillin—and I’m glad that it can—but I hope that before too long I won’t have to live vicariously any longer.

Soon, I want to just live.

As soon as Covid is behind us, PEDER SCHAEFER B’22.5 will be hosting many parties. All are welcome.

08

TEXT OLIVIA CRUZ MAYEDA

DESIGN MIYA LOHMEIER

ILLUSTRATION ANNA KERBER

ARTS

09

On a cold night in April 2019, Michael Greyeyes lay on the icy asphalt of the Van Horne Bridge in eastern Canada, covered in blood. A ravenous, middle-aged white woman had pinned him to the ground when the nose of a chainsaw suddenly erupted from her face, bathing Greyeyes in macerated brains. “New chain,” says his rescuer and fellow tribal member in Mi’gmaq as Greyeyes shoves the limp corpse from his chest.

The blood was actually red dye stirred into corn syrup, and Greyeyes was portraying the sheriff of a fictional Indigenous reservation in the 2020 film Blood Quantum. Greyeyes, as Sheriff Traylor, shot take after take of his rescue from the clutches of the ‘Karenesque’ zombie. In Blood Quantum, only Native folks are immune to a zombie epidemic that is laying waste to Canada. It was so cold while filming that the faux blood had frozen solid on Greyeyes’ face and neck, and the actor—known widely for his superhuman patience—was reaching a breaking point.

“Michael’s looking at me like he wants to punch me in the face,” recalled the writer and director of the film, Jeff Barnaby, from his home in Montreal.

Shooting the bridge scene was gruelling in the cold, and the crew had to stay through the night until the sun was already creeping up over the horizon. But even in the frigid weather, the crew drew an audience. Several members of Barnaby’s own community, the Listuguj Mi’gmaq, watched the action from lawn chairs a little further down the bridge.

In January, I spoke with Jeff Barnaby and later with Michael Greyeyes about their film and the importance of fiction to Indigenous creatives. Barnaby, who usually sports a close buzzcut and a graphic T-shirt, told me that while explicitly fictional, the film alludes heavily to the history of the Listuguj, the First Nation in Quebec of which Barnaby is a tribal member. By fictionalizing the Indigenous experience in Quebec, Barnaby is able to subvert the narratives around indigenity and whiteness that he has confronted his entire life. Fiction becomes a way for Barnaby to tell a radically different story about the Indigenous past, present, and future.

The setting of the film is the first place Barnaby blurs fiction and reality. The film was largely shot on Mi’gmaq land, where he grew up, and which appears in Blood Quantum as the fictional Red Crow reservation. The bridge where Greyeyes’s character has his first encounter with a zombie is a central part in the film but also in Barnaby’s community. He recalled his brother, a Listuguj council member, telling him how big a deal it was that Barnaby was shutting the bridge down for the movie. The Van Horne is an interprovincial bridge that links the majority white New Brunswick to Listuguj Mi’gmaq territory, and it plays an integral historical and contemporary role in Native-settler relations. In October 2013, Mi’gmaq demonstrators blocked the Van Horne in protest of natural gas extraction by one of the industry’s largest producers. “Indians keep shutting that bridge down for their bullshit,” Barnaby told me, laughing. Over the phone, his voice is insistent and there’s full-bodied conviction in every word, unless he’s being sardonic, which is often. +++ As a kid, Barnaby was obsessed with the classic horror films of the late seventies and early eighties.

Right next to the movie theater he grew up going to was a store called Roger Bernards. It sold furniture and household appliances, but it was also where Barnaby got his movies: “In the back, in the way back, almost like a porno section, there was a section of beta tapes of nothing but horror.” In that dingy treasure trove, Barnaby found films like Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist. But one of the most impactful films of the era for Barnaby was Pet Sematary, the Stephen King cult classic about a man who reanimates his loved ones by burying them in Mi’gmaq burial ground in Maine. Barnaby’s own maternal side of the family is from a Mi’gmaq reservation in Maine, so the film held a lot of meaning for him, and not just figuratively—Barnaby’s grandfather actually shows up in the film as an extra.

Yet Pet Sematary, like so many other genre films, capitalizes on white fears of Indigenous and Black spirituality for entertainment. The Shining is another example of what happens when the real estate agent forgets to do the routine ‘Native burial site’ check.

The Hollywood zombie archetype, which carried a similar mantle, originated in Haiti among the French-enslaved Africans. To Africans in Haiti, the

How a Mi’gmaq filmmaker is zombifying settler colonialism zombie was a representation of their own condition: tethered to a mindless life of slavery, inescapable even through death. To white American culture, zombies were a symbol of the dangers of Haitian spirituality, a distorted appropriation that made its debut in the 1932 film, White Zombie.

Over time, Black and Indigenous creatives have subverted these horror tropes to elucidate racist power structures. In Get Out, Jordan Peele horrorizes the already horrifying white suburban neighborhood to comment on anti-Blackness, in much the same way that Barnaby zombifies white Canadians to comment on the continuation of colonial violence. +++ Walking the line between reality and fiction is critical to what Barnaby is trying to do for his viewers.

“They need to understand that there is a distinct line between Natives on screen and Natives in real life,” he said in an interview with the Indy. Horror, by nature of its otherworldliness, allows Barnaby to

depict Native stories without giving his audience members a free pass to project what they see in theaters onto every Native person they meet. Historically, when Native people have been depicted on screen, if at all, non-Native audiences are quick to tokenize them, to form their understanding of all Native people around singular—and often racist— representations. But in using horror as his medium, Barnaby is able to make the settings and situations of his characters so unrealistic and hyperbolic that it would be much more difficult for audiences to interpret them as representations of all Native people everywhere.

Horror, and more broadly fiction, points to a truth that works of nonfiction cannot. “Where documentaries can provide really undeniable facts, I think what fiction does very well is give you the viscera of the emotion in the moment,” Barnaby said. The absence of contemporary representations traps Native peoples in the past and obscures their continued existences. The challenge for Barnaby in Blood Quantum was finding the perfect balance be-

tween the two. “All great lies are half truths” is one of Barnaby’s favorite quotes.

In the opening scene of Blood Quantum, Sheriff Traylor’s father, played by Stonehorse Lone Goeman, hauls salmon from his nets in the Restigouche.

A title appears over the darkened silhouette of Goeman: “Red Crown Indian Reservation 1981.” The Van Horne looms in the background as Goeman slides a blade up the belly of a massive fish. But as he discards a handful of pink intestines, the eviscerated salmon begin to flop around on the bloodied cutting board as Goeman backs towards the water, horrified.

In 1981, when Barnaby was four, Mi’gmaq fishermen were making $1,800 per person from their seasonal catch of salmon. For centuries, salmon have swum the Restigouche, the river that flows beneath the Van Horne bridge from the Appalachians, and the Mi’gmaq have relied on them as a vital food source. But on June 11 of that same year, the Quebec Provincial Police stormed the Listuguj reservation in full riot gear, assaulting and arresting several members of the community for fishing on government land. Game wardens confiscated $30,000 in nets from Mi’gmaq fishermen from the banks of the river, and nine days later, the police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at the residents and took more nets.

The film and the raid—one of Barnaby’s earliest memories—take place during the same year, but he’s not trying to reenact historical events. Instead, Barnaby gestures to them and infuses them with new emotional context using the zombie fish as a device. The undead fish may be fictional, but they stand in for centuries of colonial destruction of the environment and the relationships between the Mi’gmaq and the land. More specifically, the fish refer to June of 1981 when colonial powers tried to sever the Mi’gmaq from their ancestral food supply.

When lesser-informed viewers viscerally react to the sight of bloody, undead fish, they are also reacting to the destruction of Native resources without knowing it.

Over a year since Michael Greyeyes was covered in corn syrup on the Van Horne, he wears a blue hoodie and a ponytail over Zoom, his eyes outlined by tortoise shell frames. “Indigenous people are re-litigating the post colonial tropes and reinventing them, acknowledging and deconstructing the racist mechanisms and storylines and media that we’ve had to contend with,” he said. For Greyeyes, The Accidental and Unnatural Women, a surrealist play that fictionalized the true story of a white serial killer that murdered Indigenous women in downtown Vancouver, is able to expound on real events in a newly powerful way. Greyeyes believes that Barnaby is doing similar work by positing Indigenous stories in an imaginary world. “By hijacking storytelling and the mediums of film, which have been typically racist, we can deconstruct colonialism in front of people’s eyes.”

After Greyeyes, as Sheriff Traylor, shoves the chainsawed zombie corpse from his chest, the film jumps forward 6 months to the electric thrum of Cedric Burnside’s “We Made It.” The camera pans from the Van Horne bridge to the majority white province of New Brunswick, where black smoke billows from every other structure—a sign of colonial civilization decomposing. On the Listuguj side of the Restigouche river where Barnaby grew up, Sheriff Traylor’s son, the nihilistic Lysol, guards a fortified camp where the surviving Mi’gmaq now live. A group of white survivors approaches the camp seeking help, but one of them has a sickly, scarlet crescent at the base of her neck. While tribal members converse in Mi’gmaq, deciding what to do, the girl’s father screams at them to speak English and is met with apathetic glares. Traylor executes the girl with a battle axe, as the father is led inside.

Noticing that the father is still carrying the wool blanket that his daughter was wrapped in, a woman in the tribe tears it from him. “Are you fucking crazy?” she says, tossing the blanket into a fire, “You can’t bring that here.”

The scene is infused with historical allusions: the legacy of European colonizers infecting Native communities with smallpox blankets and the forceful re-education of Native people as a means to eradicate their cultures and languages. But in this case, the appearance of these images marks a reversal of power: in this world, a white man cannot

force them to speak English any more than he can infect them with disease. Barnaby employs all the usual scaffolding of the genre: flesh-eating zombies, a beleaguered sheriff, his estranged son, but retrofitted with Native tropes like plague, ecological destruction, white violence, and exclusion.

Barnaby told me, “That’s kind of part and parcel of what makes being Native so awesome and kind of so shitty in a way, that you have all those images, prior to your project to riff on, but at the same time, you have to kind of deal with all the prejudices that come with an audience’s experience of Native culture only to those images.”

In pulling together what’s expected of zombie films and of Native experiences, Barnaby attempts to disrupt both. Instead of recreating the 1981 raids, Barnaby transforms the riot gear-donned settlers into bloodthirsty hordes of settler zombies.

The audience is given another opportunity to react viscerally to something absurd and grotesque, yet directly reminiscent of Canadian colonialism.

And instead of reaching the reservation side of the Restigouche, the mindless zombies encounter a Mi’gmaq man operating a giant snow blower with revolving blades. +++ For many critics, Blood Quantum contributes something new to the genre. Native protagonists fighting off white zombie hordes is pretty unheard of. “I’ve grown up, you know, on a reserve watching horror films, and I’ve never seen that film in my life, so that’s why I decided to make it,” said Barnaby.

What Barnaby did not account for is how the pandemic would transform the reception of Blood Quantum.” The scenes of apocalypse, confinement, and the collapse of white communities couldn’t have come at a more prescient time. If it was not clear already, the COVID pandemic has proven that capitalism begets public health crises. In Blood Quantum, capitalist settler colonialism literally cannibalizes itself. For Barnaby, who was worried

ARTS

that white people would not understand his film, the pandemic clarifies his meaning that plague, colonialism, and capitalism are interconnected.

On a cold Friday morning in November of last year, sixty Listuguj students and parents marched over the Van Horne. They held posters that read “Didn’t think I’d have to protest segregation in 2020.” In October, the Quebec Health Ministry instituted travel restrictions between New Brunswick and the Listuguj First Nation in response to rising COVID cases. Listuguj students, who attend school in New Brunswick, were barred from going because they lived on reservations on the other side of the Restigouche. The settler colonial structures that failed to prevent the pandemic also confined Native people to their reservations once again. The students and their families marched over the shores where provincial wardens had seized their salmon nets 39 years prior, and they passed the stretch of concrete where white zombies had been chewed up by a snowblower a year before. As they blocked both lanes of traffic, the glow of police headlights followed them.

While many non-Native horror productions obsess over the apocalyptic, many Indigenous communities experience and have experienced something akin to an apocalypse for centuries. By accident, Barnaby asks his audience to consider how the pandemic is something that Native peoples have always experienced.

“Indigenous communities have been utilized primarily in a historical context, but otherwise completely absent in a contemporary context,” Greyeyes told me towards the end of our conversation.

“So one of the things that I found is that in post apocalyptic stories, when society’s gone,” Greyeyes pauses and smiles to himself, “it’s possible that we live there.”

OLIVIA CRUZ MAYEDA B’21 thinks you should stop what you’re doing and watch the Korean zombie film Train to Busan.

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tricky ivy-shrouded and stone-stained nearly swallowed by woodland and waterfall which cloaks like the veil of a Biblical bride.

But if you manage to find the manor and swim the moat the lapis-clad prophets will open the great oak doors grin and welcome you to magically re-enter the Great Time.

The Birds and The Bees Remember, dear, when I taught you to make medovik, how we spun together the eggs and the honey, until the yolk was indiscernible from the sweet?

You see, each soul rides a bird like a swallow in a chiffon scarf.

They roam the entire world together, a quick flit of blue, then eternity.1 When God whispered ‘Awaken,’ the Earth was dry and the blossoms were wet, and the song of the turtledove flushed Eve’s leaden breath.2 And the fourth Judge of Israel was both Bee and Prophetess, a muse beneath a date palm and a victor war-painted with beldi olive ink.3 So, don’t be alarmed when your lover transforms into a gorgeous swarm, or a throng of shoulder-scented feathers, for ‘the one who sells a beehive sells all of the bees in it, and the one who sells a dovecote sells all of the doves.’4 Sefer haZohar 1:12b 2 Song of Songs 2:12 3 Book of Judges 4-5 4 Bava Batra 78b:9

1

Ritual I. Each evening I stand before my toothpaste-caked bathroom sink streaky mirror and pray.

Fresco myself with cleansers ointments oils and creams my face a church ceiling mural of goddesses heroines and halos that weep.

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II. Mircea Eliade’s theory of religion is geographic: a mystical moat [revelation] insulates a castle [the Sacred] from a spilling bistre metropolis [the profane].

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The palace is somewhat slippery

III. When I was a girl my guardian angel visited me every Thursday Friday and Saturday evening before dinner and drinks in her knee-length red silk robe which she bought on business.

Incense was ironed hair and perfume that only smelled like itself plus lemons. Taupe walls and framed charcoal nudes were gold-leafed icons and my father was an usher shirt untucked leaning against the doorframe perhaps the only congregant who knew what it meant to witness the divine.

IV. From my icy pew on the edge of the angel’s white marble bathtub I learned the key to the ritual is in the wrists in the moving of the fingertips in circles.

In Plato’s cosmology Earth is beautiful because it is perfect because it is round.

V. Elaine Scarry describes beauty as that which prompts the mind to move chronologically back in the search for precedents and parallels to move forward into new acts of creation.

In other words beauty is a teetering which may very well be the immortal.

When Renaissance artists painted on wet plaster the image became a permanent part of the wall.

VI. I wrap my hair and wait for the choir’s lukewarm cues and only after the crescendo do I perform the signum crucis anoint myself with thick white medicinal paste tap forehead nose right cheek left cheek chin.

In the stained glass I see the miracle story my hands are tissue paper overlaid on string I smell strawberry chapstick eucalyptus

eye cream cheap drugstore charcoal strips I am starting to notice spider veins stretch marks sore nipples forehead lines bone definition sun spots freckles.

VII. My hair-clogged basin is the hearth of the hidden holy castle the serum in my palms the moat and beauty the hostess beyond the everyday everything else.

satsuma story once a small ivory gem born in an unknown underworld was left on the doorstep of an ant orphanage beneath a patch of wet balmy land. the ants didn’t know what to do with the odd stone so they delivered it to the nearest school which was for satsuma snails who mistook it for a lost tooth. it did not occur to the bugs that inside of the tiny tanniny pearl might be a phoenix waiting to grow her saffron wings. but so it was and she blossomed into magnificence and named herself after her three syllabled neighbors that silly gastropod genus the only word she knew. solitary in the dying and drying of winter satsuma learned to crystallize. chills made her strong so she built herself a home. no blueprint only orange ovular mansion with spongy white siding warm wedge rooms thin organza curtains and furniture that squished. hers was a planet shaped sanctuary always alit with candles tepid and sweet. thick skinned and alone sometimes young satsuma liked to play in the suburbs to roll around in lunchboxes and get squashed and stirred with ice cubes and gin. other times she preferred to lounge in the more eclectic spots sprawl as marmalade on morning after toast and soak as artisanal soap for busty redheaded women. on sundays one freckled cannellini bean of a girl liked to bring satsuma to chapel. together they carpooled from garden to god in the pocket of someone’s mother ’s pleated blue puff sleeve dress. in the post prayer mid morning the girl would roll the canvas ridges of her companion between beetle sized fingers and thumb to let clouds of her bright bubbly scent sing over the choir of flat soda egg salad cherry jello and vanilla dollar store sandwich cookies. it was one of these paper plate saltwater taffy sundays when a handsome brown fox stopped by after the service. he was a friend of the

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of a satsuma. pastor and was hungry so he plucked satsuma from her seat on the edge of the parkthe rancid puddles of the young fruit will ing lot where a weird dandelion had sprouted. return to the womb of the mysterihis elegant predatory poise went unnoous tunnel from where she came and she will rise ticed in the jungle of chewing chatting wrinagain in floral flames. kles pinstripes and pastel. as for the seedless fruit soon the angels say from the thornless plant bred for harsh

but they read time like the conditions she remained hushed. trees.

the fox did not bother to return to his den HANNAH GELMAN B’22 recommends taking a with such succulent loot. on the RELS class. threshold between the sacred and the profane against a sky of molding paint and bird shit he peeled back satsuma’s skin with ease delicious burning phoenix fat vivid white veins jabbed in a claw and tore her apart cleany bit by soft bit mashed her ripe flesh between his gristly tongue and yellowed teeth licked the tart honied juice that dribbled down his chin. sated with pith in his gums sugar in his spit and sinews dangling from his thin black lips he discarded the stale scraps of the phoenix and stole away from the now swarming flies and gnats. oh but rot organic life. birth and death

TEXT HANNAH GELMAN DESIGN MICHELLE SONG ILLUSTRATION TALIA MERMIN

is part of occur in the shape

50 Yards of Broken Glass

Months of Cold Skulls

First Bloodshed of the Near-Summer

Knees made of mud and Swamp trees With roots that curl down like frozen hair Can be seen from across Rooms and oceans.

They are pressed into screens that flash wildly And graze the chance of maiming spectators, while I hold a candle shaped like a pink Mary Who has folded hands and the melted forehead of someone at the beach alone, And listen to the ice whose crystal sounds form a crisp crash against the gravel parking lot as the Weather simmers for the snippet of afternoon.

I think about how in heaven we’ll have to introduce ourselves To the men who died of Mediterranean Strokes boiling under fresh tans And the people whose stoves were unlit due to appliance error.

Before that we’ll slide against floors like bowling balls towards rectangular holes And greet people whose cars won’t start And people whose license plates Are the blank backs of poly blend t-shirts, And as they go to use the bathroom You write down what you see there, As if they spewed out leagues of carnage In their wake.

The road is sodden to mud on this pearl-fogged day.

I wring the reins latched To the thin air and float toward the Coming hour, which rides in on a veneer of Lime scent on a white shining couch that Bends in the fetal position in the stale cave I’ve entered.

When I emerge From the back door, my cousin lays bricks into the development dirt and looks Like a carnation frizzed into the open sky.

The grass looks dry the way someone’s skin Would be after they’ve not sweated On a balmy day and have nothing to think Of. Matte and unbothered they suck at What they can with a straw into their Lashful eyes before they’re chock full of Blood. I walk on the path carved into the grass and and back toward days where my Head was like a desert spider and I tried To act dry in the sopping sun.

I thought I heard a pop sound.

His head split in the following silence; The humidity was in full swing.

When we turned to him blood drained from A crevice running down his dark hair.

He just grinned and looked up to where The daylight glanced off glass windowed Towers, so we walked him to the hospital With a few older girls.

One of them was blond and had Shoulders like fine-grain dunes, the fistful Of boys whose shoulders were full of Pebbles, and insects that bit and stung, That had scientific names like demonic code.

My friend used some homework to curb The bleeding. It was thick copy paper I Think, so it didn’t absorb the blood As much as it held it like a clamshell.

When we got to the hospital, the sweat Began to sting and my cotton shirt was Stiff and thick.

We wondered later if a vessel in his head had exploded, or some projectile, But in the years later where we didn’t see each other anymore, I decided it was probably construction Debris.

TEXT HENRY BOHAN DESIGN MICHELLE SONG ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

Haunting the Turnpikes California dreaming dwells softly until the Flood of Tri-state waking up, Where the skin of deer shreds across bones across Four lane blasts of four-by-fours.

Young men watch, hairless as the Six-thousand-and-seventieth day after their birth.

The windows they peer out sound like Rushing streams as their heads collapse Softly against them.

These observers dream of how many pillars of ass A person can have, but not of whether Those frozen mineral-masses form whole People’s perimeters illuminated against Something I know they look through Like glass coffee tables: blazes raging so Feverishly the hairs of flame become a Solid glacier.

HENRY KIRWAN BOHAN R’22 has to walk 30-40 minutes to class everyday.

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EROS REIMAGINED

TEXT ANABELLE JOHNSTON

DESIGN XINGXING SHOU

ILLUSTRATION LOLA SIMON

XConfessions and erotic pornography

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“[The erotic] has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling. The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”

– Audre Lorde, Uses Of The Erotic: The Erotic As Power

content warning: sexual assault Out of instinct, I avert my eyes. (For years, my mother cupped her palm to block my view, performing an act of rudimentary censorship like a black box containing the sensual. When I protested, she argued that physically redacting sex scenes bore no effect on my overall understanding of plot.) I didn’t mean to turn away. Sitting in a puddle of blankets with my roommates and a carton of strawberry ice cream, I am no longer a child watching movies on my family couch. I am an adult, living thousands of miles from home, willfully viewing pornography with my friends. Yet, as the introductory sequence plays on my laptop—perched so all can see—I feel myself fold inward momentarily; I revert back into the version of myself that relegated desire to euphemism, the one that constructed boundaries between quotidian and sexual life. Our shared voyeurism brushes up against everything I believe about the value of passion and pleasure. I forget how they inform each other, how they push the boundary of what I can ask from myself. Involuntarily, I turn Genesis 3:7 over in my mind. The eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

What populates the screen, however, conveys no shame. A large butterfly stares back at us, its dendritic wings shimmering slightly as they flap. It stands alone in womb-like cocoon while a voiceover reads a confessional poem: “When I’m with her, / we are butterflies / I wanna feel your skin / melt on my skin / and never leave this candy land / Where I’m a candy boy and you’re my / candy girl and we teach / each other how to fly.” My roommates’ glasses reflect the fuchsia colored set. Single shots of the symbolic butterfly interrupt the slow crescendo

of actors Stevie Trixx and Kaya Lin stepping toward one another. They embrace behind a mesh curtain and for a moment, the focus blurs. The camera slowly pans until they are in full view, gliding in tempo as Lin transitions to straddle Trixx’s lap. Their bodies move in unison with the lens and each other.

Through the camera, we trace his gaze up the contours of her stomach, her chest, her quivering chin.

As he thrusts his fingers, we are thrusted forward; as they lock eyes, we sit directly in their line of sight. +++ The film, Like a Butterfly, directed by filmmaker Maximus Skaff, couples a trans love story with the metamorphic transition of a butterfly. Like all films on adult indie porn site XConfessions, its premise is based on an anonymous sexual confession and portrayed by compensated and consensual actors. “This doesn’t really look like porn,” one of my roommates remarks offhandedly. The sound of distant crickets punctuates the moans emanating from my laptop speakers. Animated butterflies flit across the screen.

In some ways, my roommate is right. Unlike its free counterparts, XConfessions hosts no pop-up ads, nor does it promise any horny singles in the area.

While the mainstream porn sites provide an erratic experience with virus warnings and chat rooms that remind the user that they too are being seen, XConfessions allows its audience to slip into the comfort of a curated experience. Instead of feeling unstable and artificial, XConfessions serves as a reminder of how fundamentally human the inclination toward pornography truly is. Pornography in its many iterations pops up time and time again. The earliest erotic depiction of the goddess Venus can be dated back 28,000 years, and some of the oldest surviving

motion-pictures featured their subjects entirely nude.

The popularity of pornography—sexual representations designed to stimulate an audience—has remained relatively constant throughout history (although the term was only coined in the 18th century). We create and consume porn to excite, to arouse, to evoke the primal.

Critics and theorists claim that pornography teeters between the erotic and the obscene, often positioning the two in a false dichotomy that cannot be untangled from classist conceptions of vulgarity. The erotic, as Audre Lorde posits, begins by stimulating physical responses then unfailingly transcending them. The obscene, however, can be characterized by its limitations. As ruled in Roth v. United States, only “material that deals with sex in a manner that advocates ideas, or that has literary or scientific or artistic value or any other form of social importance” is permissible in the public sphere. The purely sexual, the distilled desires of the obscene, remains unprotected in conversation and court of law. In The Secret Museum, Walter Kendrick defines pornography not as a thing, but as an argument. From all sides, pornography has been attacked for not only what is explicitly represented on the screen, but how and to what degree. Antipornography.org, “a nonreligious, nonpartisan, anti-censorship, anti-violence, pro education, pro-free speech, pro-safe, healthy, and equality based sex, love, and relationships” nonprofit, has produced over 40 anti-porn documentaries, 200 short videos, and over 100 pages of propaganda.

Amidst this argument, XConfessions chooses to emphasize eroticism without suppressing the obscene.

Presenting kink in its fullness, founder Erika Lust undermines taboo, allowing pornography to serve as an expression of the erotic which collapses the space between desire—what we deeply want—and fantasy—what we know we cannot have. In entangling the two, Lust asks if fantasy may be rooted in unfulfilled desire. Perhaps pornographic fantasy is simply the condition of wanting but not having.

On XConfessions, the dreamscape subsumes reality without denying it entirely. Each film is accompanied by interviews with actors and behind-thescenes content, which breathe life into an otherwise sterile 12 billion dollar industry. (The detailed economics of the pornography industry remain fuzzy.

MindGeek, the company that owns Pornhub, owns 8-10 of the largest tube sites. Those tube sites—the term for pornographic sites with interfaces that close-

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ly mimic the Youtube model—own very few, if any, of the videos displayed on them and instead act as an aggregation of stolen links and clips. Piracy hurts actors, filmmakers, and the overall economy, accounting for an estimated 2 billion dollar loss annually.)

In comparison, XConfessions is refreshing, but it is also one of my first few leaps into the world of porn.

For years, I stopped myself from joining the ranks of the 120 million daily Pornhub visitors. Put off by the rampant degradation of all parties on screen, I firmly gripped the belief that “pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”

Like most algorithm-employing sites, Pornhub collects data and spits back predetermined consumer demands. However, in prominently displaying their lists of recommended videos, tube sites wield the power to not only inform sexual taste but warp and construct desire. Pornography accounts for approximately 37 percent of all internet traffic, but little research has been done on the relationship between automatically populating the screen with titles like used my neighbor’s girlfriend in both holes when he is away and viewers conflating sex with ‘usage.’ Psychologists at Stanford University argue that many pornographic videos reinforce the perception that participants always ‘want it,’ a phenomenon that extends past Pornhub to the courthouse as victims of sexual assault often face disbelief and dismissal.

Hardcore pornography has been found to increase male aggression and negative attitudes toward women, all while further upholding strict gender binaries.

To paraphrase a friend on the subject, porn makes me kind of sad. This rang true for me until a few months ago, when I received a call from two friends and their witness, who—understandably—laughed in hearty disbelief. They were purchasing a year-long subscription to a feminist ethical porn website. They were calling to ask if I wanted in. +++ XConfessions films are beautifully shot and represent a departure from the painfully impersonal sex found on the Pornhub homepage. Since purchasing, I have scrolled through the site with many friends and marveled over the body diversity, prominence of BIPOC actors, and LGBTQ+ representation. The site does not delegate queerness to a distinct category, though users can certainly filter for those if desired, but rather presents all videos in congruity. By focusing on the ways bodies interact through interlaced fingers and lips running over curves, XConfessions celebrate the varying physical expressions of love without drawing harsh distinctions in value. While free online porn often relegates queerness to fetish, emphasizing the unusual nature of this desire, XConfessions emphasizes the beauty of pleasure in its many forms.

For me, even more astounding than the existence of high quality erotica is the presence of the confessional. There, desire is not a sin to be atoned but rather a need deserving of recognition. XConfessions offers a pornographic encounter that captures the fullness of erotic experience without splintering sex from the self or sequestering it to the bedroom.

With a brief confession at the start of every film, it is impossible to forget that at its core, XConfessions aims to bring its users’ deepest—but not necessarily darkest—dreams to light. The site would not be the first to connect film to fantasy. In What is cinema?, film critic and theorist André Bazin posits that the impossibility of explicit sexual imagery in mainstream media is a part of its appeal. Our lack of control of the screen contributes to the dreamlike quality of moving images. Erotic imagination thrives in the space between our deepest desires and what is permitted on screen. Allusion and suggestion are powerful modes of maintaining audience interest and arousal, demonstrated by the fascination with Marilyn Monroe’s infamous white dress or Shakespeare’s characterization of Venus’s body in Venus and Adonis. (Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, / stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.)

Much of mainstream porn foregoes this imaginative play. With explicit thumbnails and video titles that leave little room for interpretation, Pornhub eradicates ambiguity. Save for the ever-popular power imbalances of step-parent relationships and school girls, the site provides little rising action.

There is no setting, no character. Attraction and

consent are assumed—though in many cases there is evidence to suggest otherwise. Here the obscene exists in isolation; our deepest desires lay distilled from humanity itself. In this vacant chamber, mainstream porn often seeks to show the impossible. In offering a divergence from accepted reality, mainstream porn speaks to a desire for the impossible, in a fundamentally human way, without the fundamental humanity.

Pornographic sex is not an act undertaken by real people sharing an experience. Taboo acts as both the verb and the noun.

XConfessions offers an entirely different experience with thorough exposition and lightly scripted dialogue. Setting appears as a complete manifestation of desire. In Domestic Servitude, a 29-minute short film that “blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, and voyeurism and exhibitionism,” two submissives spend three minutes cleaning their dominant’s home before anyone removes a single article of clothing. When the domme arrives on the scene (a purple-hued apartment with high ceilings and an abundance of candles), she first appears inverted, her image refracted through a crystal ball stationed in the center of the frame. Immediately, director Poppy Sanchez plays with the viewer’s sense of reality as the subs shuffle into a grated closet, doomed to watch as the dominatrix entertains another lover.

As his tongue travels up the dominatrix’s inner thigh, the camera swings back to the closet, this time offering the perspective of the onlookers. The tension is palpable. We, the viewers, linger on actress Shay Noir’s ecstatic expression before being bombarded with a quick succession of scenes in which all three men are involved, cut between close ups of a curious eye. Sanchez positions the camera behind the grating, which provides momentary censorship while blending real and imagined. In creating space for imagination, Sanchez ignites the erotic fire within the viewer that seeks to know and understand what cannot be seen.

Other XConfessions films also make use of omission and offscreen pleasure with close shots of hands gripping sheets, nails digging into skin, toes curled in delight. Hazme las uñas follows the motion of two pairs of hands as their owners explore each other’s bodies in a sparsely decorated bubblegum pink nail salon. A close shot of actress Gia Green’s palms placed on the small of partner Jane Jones’s back makes use of metonymy, drawing upon notions of the hand as a site of action, manipulation, and control. In I’m Obsessed With Owen Gray, actress Cintia Shapiro bends over to untie her co-star’s shoes for a suggestive but not explicit allusion to the fellatio that’s to come. If the dreamscape is populated by symbolic representations and refractions of our desires, these films bring them to the screen in their purest and most fragmented form.

XConfessions is not the perfect solution. Unlike OnlyFans, which places complete creative control in the hands of the content creators, XConfessions is a small production house with scripts to follow, stories to tell, and an interior bureaucracy. Constructed personas and pseudonyms are the rule, as they are everywhere in the industry. Still, it feels more egalitarian than the selective anonymity of Pornhub, where P.O.V. shots and blurred faces protect only those with power. While I celebrate the site’s forefronting of hidden desire, I am wary of the assumption that all fantasies should be realized. I don’t know if there is a right way to view porn or engage with sex work. I don’t know if I’ll ever know.

We are taught to view our desires as a source of shame, to fear the parts of ourselves that “pleasant company” does not engage with. We look away involuntarily and cover our own eyes out of instinct, but that sheltering of the sensuous only disserves us. It robs us of our richest experiences of ourselves and each other. Beyond merely helping me maximize my subscription value, sharing XConfessions has dissolved my discomfort with the blurring of the bedroom and broader world. Our group chat (half-ironically named new yorker xcolumn critics) is regularly populated with one-off reviews of different videos, along the lines of “sex and storytelling and 8mm my pretentious ass transcended.” We bookmark favorites, marvel at logistics, and enthusiastically share our findings with other friends. We argue about the ethics of the voyeuristic security guard in Don’t Touch the Art, Touch Me without passing judgment on each other’s preferences. We laugh as a latex bodysuit crinkles repeatedly in Rubber Feel without denying the goosebumps that appear on the backs of our necks.

And so they were all naked and were not ashamed.

ANABELLE JOHNSTON B’23 is learning to submit to the chaos of her strongest feelings.

“If the dreamscape is populated by symbolic representations and refractions of our desires, these films bring them to the screen in their purest and most fragmented form.”

+++ Despite its power to bring to light our deepest knowledge of ourselves, the erotic (and pornographic) remains woefully taboo. Sexual discourse has been long defined by strict delineation between public and private spheres. Organizations such as Women Against Pornography (WAP) and conservative anti-porn advocates have treated pornography as an epidemic in popular imagination, making it the subject of ‘feminist crusades’ and ‘moral argument’.

As the conjugal family took custody of the sexual, silence ruled in public dominion. The quiet is oppressive. By repressing sex in the public imagination, pleasure becomes condemnable by association, ensuring an unchallenged puritanical rule. Furthermore, the sidelining of sensation has given rise to the untethered obscene, which thrives off exploitation while furthering stigma. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle; the further taboo pushes sex away from society, the harder the erotic becomes to recover.

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VOIDS AND

TEXT ELLA SPUNGEN

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

ILLUSTRATION IRIS WRIGHT

FEATURES

A meditation on the American desert

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The thing that struck me first in the desert was the weight of the silence on my ears. At home in Brooklyn, the omnipresent hum of traffic means quiet is just white noise. But in the broad plains of the Mojave Desert, out of earshot of buildings or cities, all noise falls away. The sound of nothing—no wind through the trees, no insects chirping, no grass swaying, not even the footsteps of coyotes—was thick, heavy, physical, novel. The empty, a presence unto itself, marked my distance from home and defined my time in the desert.

It seems fitting that I came to the desert without expectations. I had chosen to spend a month working on a date farm over an hour from any major city simply as a rejection of my personal status quo, a selfish desire for difference against the stagnancy of months of life on pause. The desert was the blank slate that I hoped would absorb my desires. I had wanted to work with the land, do something different, learn in a new way, but the place itself was a hole in my imagination. And so too is it in our collective imagination.

The scientific definition of a desert is simple: to be considered a desert, an area must get no more than 10 inches of precipitation a year. In this sense, a desert becomes a place of absence rather than fullness, a place defined by what is missing rather than by what is there. Into this vacuum of a definition fall spaces that seem to not quite fit: the endless dunes of the Sahara, the rocky, canyoned Mojave, and Antarctica, with its miles and miles of ice, all deserts.

The nutrient-poor South Pacific Gyre, smack in the middle of the largest body of water on the planet, is also a desert. The very concept of ‘desert’ is a classification that falls short of reality, a futile category that groups spaces together that have more differences than they do commonalities. A lungfish is more related to a cow than a salmon.

As strange as this definition of desert is, at least it is rooted in fact. Other definitions of the desert, the ones that sit in our collective consciousness and functionally describe the space, are not so precise or impartial. Deserts, generally, are understood as barren, desolate, hostile, uninhabited. Devoid of life.

With these common definitions, we do a poor job of describing where I was last fall. The reality of the arid desert—which we think is evoked with descriptions of sand and sparse vegetation and hostility—falls through the cracks of gaping and clumsy descriptions. The desert is a biome: a collection of plants and animals that share characteristics corresponding to their environment. To have a collection of life defined by its lack of life and inability to support it is fundamentally contradictory. Though it may seem like splitting hairs, these misrepresentations are not simply semantic concerns; they have had and continue to have tangible implications.

When a place is nullified, everything within its borders—biodiversity, community, history—is too. And these voided areas are only growing.

Prior to my arrival to the desert, the null definition was all I knew. The first sight of Las Vegas from the plane was surreal. After hours of otherworldly landforms, canyons, mesas, mountains, and winding ribbons of river, this city seemed to burst from the ground itself, expanding furiously into the surrounding space. Far from the Strip, miles and miles of identical, vacant stucco cul-de-sacs felt like they were waiting for some cue to become real, living communities. I supposed they were designed to reflect the

geography. The wall of haze imported from California’s nearby fires only made the sight vaguer. The city, built precariously on sand and a depleting water supply, felt still in need of definition and clarification.

The shift to desert was gradual. On the drive to the date farm, my farm host pointed out transitional plants—noting the changes in vegetation, Joshua trees and yucca—as we went up and down in elevation on the mountain pass out of Las Vegas.

With each mile, the buildings and cars got sparser, the landscape spreading out wider and wider against the sky. That hour and a half long drive felt a bit like teleportation; in the last 20 minutes, as my cell service spluttered out, my proximity to the city made it difficult to understand just how far, conceptually, I had come. The remoteness and peripheral nature of the desert was undermined by its easy access, blurring the already hazy borders of the Mojave.

The contradictions between the desert in concept and in reality hit immediately upon arrival.

To reach the date farm I was to work on, one must drive directly down into a canyon. Walls of packed sand rise above you, abandoned gypsum mining shafts dotting them, and it seems you are heading for nothing until a veritable oasis bursts into view. In the eroded hills of the badlands, beside our pocket of river-fed green, coyotes and kangaroo mice darted along ridges and into valleys as vultures circled overhead. The supposedly hostile desert exploded in a patchwork of reds and browns, pinks and oranges, grays and purples.

In the desert I grew to fill the space I was in, the hyper-awareness of my own consciousness filling the vast plains. It felt like I was always on the edge of something, a revelation or a breakdown, or that I was about to be shown something true. It was like holding my breath for a month straight. Even surrounded by life and fertility as I was, I felt a certain hollowness: I was outside of myself at that time, disconnected from my desires and fears. There was too much openness to feel grounded. +++ The place was rich with history, but that past was difficult to pinpoint. My host talked of mining communities and the former owners of the farm, traceable back to 1850, but the most physical evidence I saw was the crumbling remnants of a railroad and a hollowed out building without a roof. Farther along the canyon was the site of a homestead from the early 20th century—all that remained was a mountain of tin cups. Glaringly absent amongst the physical evidence altogether was anything at all from the Indigenous people who had dwelled there for thousands of years. Their presence had been erased, along with their removal.

In the American desert, the myth of emptiness has been wielded as a weapon for genocide, displacement, and land grabbing. The date farm I worked on in the Mojave was a beneficiary of this, as was I in my presence on the land. The Chemehuevi (of the Southern Paiute) and the Western Shoshone people, known to themselves respectively as Nuwu and Newe (“The People”), were among those indigenous to the part of the Mojave Desert I stayed in. Prior to the early 1800s, they were nomadic, traveling seasonally in extended family units to hunt and gather. The land, water, animals, and plants of the desert supported them—a land of plenty, if treated

with respect, not a barren void. These people were displaced from the land, forced into reservations, or murdered in several variations on the same theme: white explorers, ‘pioneers’, fur trappers, miners, and ranchers treated the land as vacant free real estate, stripping it of its carefully tended resources and plundering it for material wealth. White Europeans traversed the desert to reach settlements further west in California and eventually called in military force when Indigenous people fought to protect and maintain their land. The existence of the Chemehuevi was forcibly erased when the Federal government declared their traditional lands public domain in 1853. The myth of ‘emptiness’ became a dangerous tool against those who called the desert home.

Indigenous people remain in the desert. Though they have faced violence, cultural genocide, and legal pushback to land sovereignty at each turn, many of the groups mentioned above still live in reservations or on some segment of their own land in or near the Mojave. It is the continued and pervasive discourse of Indigenous existence as past rather than futurity that erases their ongoing presence—a mental emptying of the people in addition to their physical landscapes.

Emptiness has not been a prerequisite for the violence of settler colonialism in what is now known as the United States or beyond—rather, the fallacy of emptiness has been maintained as a justification for this expansion. Indeed, the construction of desert vacancy upheld the 19th century belief in Manifest Destiny, which relied on the concept of a ‘wilderness’ in need of taming. The construct of the ‘empty’ desert provided that readily.

The desert fulfills environmental historian William Cronon’s argument in The Trouble with Wilderness to an extreme. Cronon contends that wilderness, as it exists in the American consciousness and environmental movement, is an unnatural, Western creation, a “cultural invention.” The construct of wilderness, he argues, places humans and nature at two opposite ends of a spectrum, suggesting that true wilderness must have been untouched by humanity—a delusion, as the two have never existed in isolation. Despite having been a part of the landscape as long as many nonhuman features, Indigenous people and their relationship with the land were forcibly removed in the construction of this manmade and manless wilderness.

The American desert is the ultimate example of this invention. The word ‘desert’ itself can be traced back to the Latin ‘desurtum,’ literally ‘thing abandoned,’ out of which was borne a version of the word translated to mean “wilderness, wasteland, destruction, ruin.” The desert combines the ‘sublime’ and the ‘frontier’, the constructs that Cronon believes together form our modern conceptualization of wilderness. In the desert, the Romantic idea of the sublime suggests that one is close to the face of God, and it is that proximity which ignites such terror in the viewer or traveler. Frontierism, in turn, is the concept of movement east to the “wild unsettled lands of the frontier” onto “gifts of free land” to reinfuse the spirit of American democracy and freedom unto oneself.

The desert furnishes the farthest reaches of the frontier, providing the ultimate challenge for rugged individualists.

My journey into the desert, perhaps, mirrored those of Romantics and frontiersmen before me. I found myself thrilled to the point of terror by the

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VACUUMS feeding into post-9/11 imagery of the desert as a war zone. The willingness to pretend that the desert is a no-man’s-land, unvarying and vacant between its borders, allows for people, places, waste, and rules to disappear.

On my fifth day at the date farm in the Mojave, I sat down with my journal and attempted to capture where I was. “The sun rises red over the desert,” I wrote. “I am not alone, far from it, but when you stand on the ridge of the canyon within which the farm sits, it truly feels like you are the only human being on this planet.” That day, I had reluctantly followed another volunteer into the area forbiddingly known as the badlands. He urged me up through ravines and up ridge after precarious ridge until, hands shaking, I found myself at the top of a hill of dried sand. From that vantage point, the empty seemed to go on forever, in every direction. +++

austere beauty around me, brought to tears by sunrises, sunsets, star-filled skies, and intense, breathtaking silences. The sky has never been bigger, or the darkness darker, or the heat hotter, or the animals more sentient. Moreover, I ventured into the unknown to prove something to myself. It was all a challenge (just like for early cowboys and trappers), an opportunity for personal growth bestowed upon me by the harsh climate and forbidding earth. I learned how to wield a shovel and use a machete and drive a stick shift pickup truck and cook for myself. +++ Even today, proponents of the American desert from seemingly diametrically opposed perspectives—environmentalists who value ‘unspoiled’ open space, and those who believe in the extraction of resources from the land—both fail to acknowledge the reality of the place, instead clinging onto a vision of emptiness and/or lawless American individualism.

Any truth to desert emptiness in the present day is not an intrinsic feature of the place but rather a product of our misconceptions and the imposition of these individualistic and imperialist American values. Settler colonialism and resource exploitation to the point of destruction has created an emptiness where there was none before.

Conceptions of wilderness and white supremacy led to the removal of Indigenous peoples, constructing that particular emptiness. On a much broader scale, the environmental degradation that is a direct output of capitalism—climate change, drought, misuse of resources—is continuously removing aspects of the landscape. Joshua trees, endemic to the Mojave, are in danger of extinction; shrinking watersheds and non-native species widely threaten

biodiversity and survival.

Furthermore, the very thing that brought white settlers to the desert in the first place—the resources available for exploitation in the land—is also responsible for creating a dearth of culture and community in the desert. Once the gold, copper, gypsum, borax, and lead were sucked up, the communities that formed around those pockets of potential wealth dried up just as quickly, leaving ghost towns behind.

In their wake, too, was the destruction and indelible markers, yawning holes in the landscape caused by their hasty mining. Once, I drove through a stretch of road barely 100 feet long called Death Valley Junction, or Amargosa. What had for a brief period in the early 1900s been a town of 300 with a number of permanent structures (hotel, post office, theater, rec hall) was reduced to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fragment of a place with a standing population of around four when the Pacific Coast Borax Company left.

The blue and white adobe Amargosa Opera House, housed in the old hotel, had a revival under actress Marta Becket from the 1970s through the early 2000s. Now, it sat silent and shuttered, a looming reminder of a colonialist culture that used to be.

The Mojave Desert has served as a dumping ground and hiding place for various governmental and military secrets, exploiting the blind eye we collectively turn on that swath of land. The family who owns the date farm seemed almost proud to tell me their radiation levels get tested once every few years due to their proximity to the Nevada Test Site, where nuclear weapons were tested from 1951 to 1992. The ever-elusive Area 51, of course, sits on the edge of the Mojave. Perhaps most bizarre and imperialist is Fort Irwin, a military training base that contains several mock Afghan towns, complete with Afghan actors and a fake insurgent troop,

In my understanding of the desert, or lack thereof, I took up the mantle of settlers and colonizers before me, though I didn’t know it at the time. I fed into and off of narratives of emptiness: obsessing over the wilderness, emphasizing my aloneness, not questioning when my host spoke of indigeneity in the past tense. Looking out over the rocky landscape and seeing little else from that macro view was enough for me, like so many others before me, to conclude that there was truly nothing there.

Perhaps an antidote to the myth of emptiness I perpetuated is to focus on the fullness the desert did allow me to feel. In the desert, I built relationships of reciprocity and compassion. I eagerly absorbed stories of others’ lives and offered my own. I ate dates and pomegranates from the tree, staining my fingers with juice.

I observed Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in the desert, abstaining from food and water for just over 24 hours. Isolated from my community, struggling with the impressive heat and my belief in God, I thought it was sure to be an impossible fast. It was the easiest and most meaningful Yom Kippur of my life. I felt wiped clean, relieved from the mistakes I had accumulated and carried with me for a year. In the midst of my fast in the desert, so often an experience of hollowness and deprivation, I was filled with meaning. I had never felt anything but hunger in the past. I realized I had previously misunderstood Yom Kippur: emptiness had no place there. The juxtaposition of the day against the desert—both spaces of perceived emptiness but true fullness—illuminated my misconceptions about both.

That night, I reasoned that even if I didn’t believe in God as Judaism ascribes, the world, nature, this existence—that is the divine.

ELLA SPUNGEN B’23.5 misses the nightly communal coyote howl.

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Project LETS Trauma Healing Fund for Black Folks A Disability Justice organization, Project LETS seeks to prioritize solidarity in action and redistribute funds to those who are most directly impacted by structural violence. This fund centers the healing needs of Black folks, especially those who are disabled, queer, and trans.

Donate at www.PayPal.me/projectlets or Venmo @ projectlets.

Fang Community Bail Fund The FANG community is an abolitionist group that seeks to free folks being held in jails in Rhode Island and Massachusetts because they cannot afford bail. As the COVID pandemic has resulted in massive outbreaks within prisons, this work has found renewed importance. To oppose the cash bail system—an oppressive tool utilized by the carceral and capitalist prison-industrial complex— you can donate via CashApp at $fangbailfund, or at this link: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ fangbailfund.

AMOR Community COVID-19 Support The Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance’s fundraiser helps purchase basic necessities such as food, cleaning and sanitation supplies, and baby formula. It also provides direct financial support for childcare, housing, and other basic needs for the most marginalized of our community, including undocumented folks, laborers, and people with chronic illness. You can donate at this link: https://gofund. me/09e8b76b.

Prospect Park Coffee Exchange The Coffee Exchange is our tried and true favorite at the Indy.

What can be more rejuvenative on a Sunday morning than a freshly brewed London Fog in hand, a walking companion, and a sleeping city to explore? While Coffee X is closed to indoor service (as well as Indy distribution) for the time-being, you can order and retrieve your drinks on the porch and walk to your favorite Providence spots—consult our list on the right for recommendations.

Small Point Cafe If you’re looking to get off College Hill, take a look at Small Point Cafe. Tucked away on brightly lit Westminster Street, grabbing a drink at Small Point gives the feeling of being in a much larger city.

The buildings tower unimaginably high into the sky. Sitting out on the sidewalk, you might think you’re in New York or Boston, but you’re not. Sorry.

Make your own damn coffee The Indy is an advocate for de-growth models of consumption.

In that vein, we think that one of your best bets is to just make your own damn coffee (it’s not that damn hard) and carry it (yes, with your own damn hands) to your favorite spot. The coffee will probably be worse, but it’ll be cheaper and you’ll be the purveyor of the products of your own labor. You might even make enough to bring for a special friend (and look real smooth in the process).

This goes without saying, but if you’re looking for a place to enjoy a cup of joe, solo or with others, you can’t beat the view from Prospect Park. There are lovely, sometimes ice-covered, faux-wood benches to perch on, and the statue of Roger Williams, colonizer-in-chief, peers out over the city majestically. You can even spot the Johnston landfill in the distance, if you look hard enough. Try and spot the circling vultures.

Very romantic.

River Road This is a spot the locals know well, so if you’re asked about how you got there, don’t tell them the Indy sent you. This stretch of road is marked Gull Avenue, but the locals call it River Road. Rumor is that lots of drug deals happen down there, but we wouldn’t worry about it. There are a few scenic benches along the water, pointing across towards the dilapidated buildings on the far East Providence shore.

Swans abound, so do ducks, and at low tide the salty smell of the estuary is ever present. Nothing more Rhode Island than that.

Go down whatever damn street you want One of the wonders of a coffee walk is that you can go wherever you damn please. Coffee is a mobile activity. Take the advice of Thoreau, that old rascal, who advised his readers to “saunter” about the countryside. So be mobile with your coffee, and perhaps “saunter” down the streets we mentioned in last week’s Bulletin Board. Maybe not Friendship Street though—too much asphalt.