The College Hill Independent Vol. 43 - Issue 2

THE INDY*

08 CHAMOMILE TEA 09 GRAFTING MODERNITY 15 INTERVIEW WITH CEDRIC RUSSELL

Volume 43 Issue 02 24 September 2021

THE IMAGINARY ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

THE INDY* This Issue

Masthead*

00 “SENTIMIENTOS TRANSITORIOS”

WEEK IN REVIEW Alisa Caira Asher White

02 WEEK IN REALITY CHECK

FEATURES Ifeoma Anyoku Emily Rust Gemma Sack

Valerie Navarrete

Alisa Caira & Nick Roblee-Strauss

03 PRINTING IN RED INK

Ricardo Gomez & Isabelle Agee-Jacobson

05 SHL0MS AND THE FNTN OF YOUTH Lucas Gelfond

07 POEMS

Chanikarn Kovavisarach, Mara Cavallaro, & Mia Barzilay Freund

09 GRAFTING MODERNITY Katherine Xiong

12 “THE KISSING OF POWDERED ASSES AT A PICNIC” Jaden Schoenfeld

13 É PROIBIDO ESQUECER Mariana Fajnzylber

15 INTERVIEW WITH CEDRIC RUSSELL Lily Pickett

NEWS Kanha Prasad Nick Roblee-Strauss ARTS Edie Elliott Granger Nell Salzman EPHEMERA Chloe Chen Lauren Lee METRO Isabelle Agee-Jacobson Leela Berman Ricardo Gomez Peder Schaefer SCIENCE + TECH Lucas Gelfond Amelia Wyckoff BULLETIN BOARD Dylan Lewis Lily Pickett Aida Sherif X Yukti Agarwal Justin Scheer DEAR INDY Amelia Anthony

16 PROGRESSIVE POWER

LITERARY Alyscia Batista CJ Gan

17 “SELF-TITLED”

OUTREACH COORDINATOR Audrey Buhain

18 DEAR INDY

ALUMNI RELATIONS Gemma Sack

Peder Schaefer Anonymous

Amelia Anthony

COVER COORDINATOR Iman Husain

MANAGING EDITORS Mara Cavallaro Anabelle Johnston Deborah Marini SENIOR EDITORS Alana Baer Audrey Buhain Andy Rickert Peder Schaefer Ivy Scott XingXing Shou STAFF WRITERS Hanna Aboueid Rachel Carlson Lily Chahine Bowen Chen Jack Doughty Osayuwamen Ede-Osifo Danielle Emerson Mariana Fajnzylber Tammuz Frankel Leo Gordon Rose Houglet Jana Kelly Nicole Kim Bilal Memon Loughlin Neuert Rhythm Rastogi Issra Said Kolya Shields Sacha Sloan Ella Spungen COPY EDITORS Rebecca Bowers Swetabh Changkakoti Jenna Cooley Megan Donohue Elizabeth Duchan Jayda Fair Sarah Goldman Zoey Grant Anushka Kataruka Madison Lease Jasmine Li Abigail Lyss Addie Marin Kabir Narayahan Eleanor Peters Janek Schaller Gracie Wilson Xinyu Yan

DESIGNERS Anna Brinkhuis Briaanna Chiu Ophelia Duchesne-Malone Clara Epstein Lola Simon Jieun (Michelle) Song Sam Stewart Floria Tsui Sojung (Erica) Yun Ken Zheng WEB DESIGN Andy Rickert ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Sage Jennings Hannah Park ILLUSTRATORS Yukti Agarwal Sylvie Bartusek Ashley Castaneda Hannah Chang Claire Chasse Luca Colannino Michelle Ding Quinn Erickson Sophie Foulkes Camille Gros Joshua Koolik Lucy Lebowitz Olivia Lunger Talia Mermin Jessica Minker Kenney Nguyen Xing Xing Shou Joyce Tullis BUSINESS Jonathan Goshu Daniel Halpert Isabelle Yang +++ The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI in Seekonk, Massachusets.

Mission Statement

Tuesday was the Mid-Autumn Festival. I had forgotten until I came out of my room, exhausted, and saw four small mooncakes arranged on a little pink plastic plate, cut into crumbly little crescent wedges, brought by a friend. We queued every song to do with the moon we could think of on a speaker, its last glowing dot of battery winking at us, and ate. Growing up, I was told that mooncakes were once used to smuggle little hidden messages. The waxy moons on the plate waned to the tide of Frank Ocean’s voice, crooning about crossing lunar shores. My tongue, deciphering the sticky bits of lotus paste that were being held by the back of my front teeth, tasted a whisper that sounded like staying, like being in a place where I could sit still, without having to move, without the world moving away from me.

I am told that Fall has just begun, but it feels like I have been falling for a long time. I wake up with icy hands and feet that feel like they have spent the night flailing in the rushing night air. I would like to think that I am halfway through my fall, that I have to go only as far as I have gone already, that wherever I land, I will land gently. Preferably on the moon.

-CJG THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

DESIGN EDITORS Isaac McKenna Gala Prudent

*Our Beloved Staff

From the Editors

01

Volume 43 Issue 02 24 September 2021

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anticapitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

WEEK IN REVIEW

Week in Reality Checks Ushered Off Air

TEXT ALISA CAIRA ILLUSTRATION ISAAC MCKENNA DESIGN FLORIA TSUI Nowadays, it seems like everything can be formatted into the digestible 30-minute-to-anhour reality television show. There are shows for cooking and shows for being bad at cooking and shows for being moderately okay at cooking.

There is a show to test the skills of every single niche community that exists (still no word on the RISD reality show, though rumor has it we’ve all been living in it unknowingly). My current favorite is Forged in Fire, the reality TV show centering an apparently flourishing and robust metalsmith community. Maybe, wanting to feel relevant and niche themselves is what made (performative) activists so desperate to have

their own show—making television neither the first nor the last thing they’ve co-opted.

The Activist was, not-so-tragically, pulled before it ever aired, but not before it catalyzed a social media storm reserved solely for mistakes as easily avoidable and easily criticized as this one. The premise of the show is technically simple, but brimming with bright red flags. In essence, the five-week show would chronicle six activists competing and being judged in challenges that would ‘prove’ who’s the best activist. Because, as we all know, activism is about being the best at it rather than societal change.

Somehow digging themselves into an even deeper hole, the judges of the show are just as questionable as the premise: Usher, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and Julianne Hough were chosen to judge who could get the most retweets or signatures on Change.org. I didn’t realize that lucrative careers in mainstream music, film, and dance provided such expert knowledge of social justice movements, but I guess careers in performance teach performative activism quite well. In the aftermath, Chopra Jonas and Hough have both issued the classic Notes App Apology™ of celebrities who have fucked up hard enough to endanger revenue streams; Usher has yet to speak up on the show as he debates whether an Instagram Live would be better suited for the situation.

Ultimately, after being dragged on Twitter by activists and ‘activists’ alike, the teams at CBS and Global Citizen (the organization using music festivals and reality TV to ‘change the world’) decided to reframe the work into a documentary rather than a competition and award all six of the activists a cash grant. At this point, one might be wondering why they haven’t read the room enough to cancel the show all togeth-

er. This Indy writer can only guess but it seems that after hyper-capitalizing on fashion, makeup, baking, love, sex, and the precious metalsmithing community, reality television’s well of potential has dried up, leaving us scrounging for third-tier-of-hell productions like The Activist or the newly released D’Amelio Show.

After all, ‘reality’ TV is about as far from the real world as we can get. The Activist is uniquely bad (and uniquely tweetable) because the competitive premise so obviously contradicts the values at the core of most social justice work. However, all reality television relies on the same mechanisms of competition and oversimplification of things, from overactive sex drives (in Too Hot to Handle) to saggy buttocks (in Naked and Afraid). Reality television is bingeable because of this simplicity, the same simplicity that makes queer people too “logistically complicated” for Love Island. While it’s unlikely reality television will lose its high rankings anytime soon, it’s worth being wary of fixation on the plastic lives of plastic people (not to point fingers at any ‘K’ first names in particular) or the commercialization of genuine efforts. If we don’t, fiascos—like Kendall Jenner’s infamous commercial in which she used a soda can (Pepsi, not Coke) to diffuse the tensions of a protest— become a normalized performance of, as Pepsi put it in their own Apology™, “global...unity, peace and understanding.” Despite companies ‘best’ ‘attempts,’ global ‘unity’ is not something that’s going to be created by a brand, by a mass media conglomerate, or by pop-culture sensation ‘Usher.’

-AC

Onika on Fifth?

TEXT NICK ROBLEE-STRAUSS DESIGN FLORIA TSUI ILLUSTRATION ISHA MODY In a week marked by institutional crackdowns against unmasked parties—particularly at universities across the United States—administrators and epidemiologists stood poised for (yet another) interview. And while the ignored talking heads became testy, Trinidad and Tobago’s Health Minister, Terrence Deyalsingh, rose to the occasion, putting to rest the bollocks rumors inflaming the internet.

This month’s largest unmasked event, The Met Gala, has long been known to inspire controversy—most recently in the words of the Brown Daily Herald’s own front page headline—it “underwhelms due to unoriginality.” In typical fashion, celebrities ascended the Museum’s red carpeted steps to showcase this year’s theme, American Independence(?). While red, white, and blue (and spanglings of all kinds) found their way into the mix, many opted for more interpretive options: Frank Ocean carried a robot baby with neon green skin to match his hair, while Barb-turned-rap sensation Lil Nas X came dressed in an imperial cape which he slithered out of to reveal himself as a golden knight only to shed his armor for a gold-beaded bodysuit.

Nas X’s auspicious trilogy of looks best encapsulated the night’s themes of empire, war, and designer fashion. Perhaps the headliner of the night was New York Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who made one of the evening’s boldest entrances with a message that was both progressive and posterior. While her “Tax the Rich’’ slogan may have sent many of her fellow attendees straight to their offshore accounts,

one guest’s absence would spark robust discourse on an international scale their publicist could only dream of.

Once having told us of that boy toy named Troy who used to live in Detroit and, famously, bought her Alexander McQueen to keep her stylish, you’d think Nicki Minaj would have attended this year’s Met Gala, and showed up dressed to kill. A lover of all things in Vogue, Minaj historically bragged of her proximity to fashion’s reigning monarch: “When I’m sitting with Anna, I’m really sitting with Anna/ Ain’t a metaphor punchline, I’m really sitting with Anna.” This year, even Nicki admits she’s not really sitting with Anna. You see, all these unmasked celebs were required to provide proof of vaccination to attend. And as Twitter went into uproar, Minaj justified her own unvaccinated status with a ~viral~ tweet regarding her Trinidad-based cousin’s friend’s vaccine-born swollen testicles, so big that they encumbered him from walking down the aisle at his wedding, which was subsequently canceled.

Enter Trinidadian Health Minister Terrance Deyalsingh. Putting news of postponed nuptials aside, Deyalsingh denied all claims of vaccine mishaps, in turn questioning Minaj’s tweeting integrity. But don’t let this article mislead you into thinking the “Pills N Potions” singer doesn’t take COVID seriously. She’s no longer a Republican voting for Mitt Romney and she’s yet to comment on if Biden’s f—ing up the economy. Rather, she explains: “I have an infant with no nannies during COVID. who mad? Not risking his health to be seen.” and “Wear the mask with 2 strings that grips your head & face.

Not that loose one [prayer hands][heart].”

Still, celebrities and fans await future

unmasked events, each time wondering who will be the night’s breakout star and who will contract the breakout case.

-NRS

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 2

02

METRO TEXT RICARDO GOMEZ & ISABELLE AGEE-JACOBSON

DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

ILLUSTRATION JOSHUA KOOLIK

them don’t really have an organized place to call homebase. And there seems to be a [...] disconnect between people who read a lot of a theory but then don’t do the mutual aid stuff [and] people who do the mutual aid stuff but don’t really engage with the theory all that much. My inspiration for becoming a part of [Red Ink] was to try to link those two worlds, as much as the place could, by giving leftists, whether those involved in mental health collectives or mutual aid initiatives or whatever, a place where they can come and be in a room of like-minded people and read the things that give legitimacy to what they do in practice.

03

The Indy: Could you tell us more about how Red Ink helps facilitate relations between leftist theoretical spaces and other mutual aid or frontline organizers?

Printing in Red Ink Providence’s new community library This month, Red Ink Community Library opened on Cypress Street in the Mount Hope neighborhood of Providence. Red Ink is a leftist community library, reading room, and event space founded

by Providence Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members David Raileanu (he/him), Jackie Goldman (they/them), and Providence Leftist Radio host Alex Herbert (he/him). In the wake of a year that saw Rhode Island’s left gain electoral momentum using mostly digital platforms, Red Ink’s founders saw a pressing need for a physical space for communities and organizers to congregate. At the same time, Raileanu, an avid collector of leftist books, felt that his assortment of radical political, historical, and economic materials should be available to everybody. With the help of artist Daniel Chang, who designed the library’s logo, mural, and developing aesthetic presence, Red Ink was created. Brightly lit red walls, big windows, and comfortable furniture beckon to neighbors, comrades, and strangers, inviting everyone in to make their space their own—whether that means checking out a book of leftist theory, hosting a concert, or organizing an action.

The College Hill Independent sat down with Red Ink’s co-founders to talk about the significance of a community library for Providence’s left, their vision for opening, and about how they think about public space more broadly.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The Indy: Thanks so much for talking with us!

To start, have any spaces or organizing centers (in Providence or elsewhere) been inspirational in creating Red Ink? Dave Raileanu: I got a lot of inspiration from local sources like RiffRaff, Symposium, Books on The Square, and even the Athenaeum which, oddly enough, is another library in the City of Providence that’s not funded by taxpayer dollars.

Obviously, there are a lot of differences between what we do and what the Athenaeum does, but it is still significant that this city can support those kinds of things. There’s also Semicolon in Chicago, which is a Black and woman-owned business that provided a lot of inspiration, especially for its boldness, [and] its sort of audacity in its presentation. There’s Incendium, which is a radical public library in Melbourne, Australia, that provided a lot of inspiration for me.

Jackie Goldman: Alex, do you want to chime in?

Alex Herbert: I mean, Dave was sort of the leader of the [spatial vision] but as far as inspiration for being involved...the podcast (Providence Leftist Radio) only really has mutual aid and outreach organizations on the show as a way of spotlighting them, instead of the political aspect of leftism. And once you start to see them and engage with those organizations—people who give meals to our neighbors without a roof over their heads—you start to realize that a lot of

JG: I think that a part of it is both accessibility and also really trying to have a space that reflects not only some of the things that we care for but also the community. It is our intention to include local artists, especially artists of color, to help contribute to the space. We’re working on getting murals from people who live in the community and represent the community very intentionally. Also, a lot of days we sit with our door open and people just wander through and talk with us about different things the community needs.

For example, two Saturdays ago, a lot of people were coming in and out talking about the fact that parents are scared to have their kids play [at the park across the street] because there’s not enough traffic calming. People are scared that their kids are going to get hit by cars, so [how can we try to] facilitate [action]?—starting with a simple, “Have you reported this to 311 and called your councilor?” If that doesn’t work, then what can we do to get a petition, [or] get community involvement driven by the needs of people who live in this area?

We also try to ensure that the space is open, multifaceted, and can be reorganized to hold different kinds of events or meetings or things like that.

AH: In addition to what Jackie said, there’s also just kind of a fundamental mission to remind leftists that there are fundamental systemic critiques behind the politics that we preach. And that if all you’re doing is responding to immediate needs and concerns you sort of lose the forest in the trees.

The Indy: Just to frame our discussion a little more, can you describe the importance of public spaces in Providence within the context of COVID’s effects on mobility, policing, the housing crisis, and other struggles happening in the city? How would y’all describe the trends or forces in Providence working against spaces like Red Ink? JG: So in addition to just being really involved in municipal politics—and I swear this is going to connect—I do a lot of Ultimate Frisbee playing.

And one of the things that we’re constantly trying to figure out is: where can we play? We’ve been playing for well over a decade, [and] we’ve always

METRO

gone to the fields of Hope High. As a kid (not in Providence) I always thought public school fields were open to the public, but more and more, there have been guards kicking us out. [The fields have] been fenced and stuff like that. And so I think that this is an allusion to the fact that public space doesn’t exist. These are some of the only fields in Providence that these groups were using recreationally [...]

I don’t know that this is the same as Red Ink—we haven’t really gotten a lot of opposition. But there was one person that asked, “Why do you need this to have a library?” not understanding that it’s something distinct. Otherwise, there has been community buy-in from, for example, Senator Tiara Mack, [who] is awesome and lives like half a block away from here. And so, I don’t know that there’s been a ton of opposition, but certainly, we suffer from this loss of public space, which is a real shame because it means that people can’t access the things that they should have to live good, meaningful, happy lives.

AH: To echo what Jackie said, the biggest opposition that I’ve seen has come from other leftists—mostly from the perspective of critiquing the value of having a library, because some leftists, if it’s not, you know, on the front line of some kind of action, then they think that such a project could be distracting people from the boots on the ground activism. But the fact of the matter is that we want Red Ink to be a place for those people as well, to have a base of organizing, for storing signs or posters or whatever it is that they want to bring to to a protest, you can store them at Red Ink for for a little bit, not forever [haha].

The hardest part has been convincing the more radical leftists, like people who identify as anarchists, or those who don’t engage in electoral politics, but are very much outside the Wyatt [Detention Center] or something like that every week, that there is value in a community library that also embraces them even if they’re reluctant to embrace us.

disabled. We want to make sure that it is always an option to everyone, that there isn’t anything subtly exclusionary about Red Ink. [We want] a place with big windows up in the front, very well lit, and with a sort of an open floor plan is the kind of place that people can see as for them.

JG: And it has been cool and encouraging to see that people who know nothing about this space as we were building it, as we’ve been opening, just come in! That has been something that I’ve really loved. [...] There really was this attention to try to make it so that people can just breeze in, because I’ve had experiences where places are invite-only.

The Indy: We’re interested in hearing more about your favorite parts of the collection! Or, to contextualize it a bit more in Providence, do you feel like there are any materials that are especially important for the left and organizing in Providence specifically?

DR: For me it’s the depth. They come from primary sources. So, it is not just people in Western Europe and the United States writing about the history of Western Europe and the United States. It is people from Central America and South America, people from Africa, Southeast Asia, writing about their lived experiences in the global postcolonial struggle. Now, the fun part of the collection is the meticulous and obsessive devotion to ephemera. The original collector of all of these materials loved handbills and leaflets and brochures and all kinds of things that were never meant to last the weekend, much less years or decades. In this case, you’ll be able to find it here in our zine library.

The Indy: Hearing you all talk about pamphlets and ephemera, we’re wondering how Red Ink imagines itself pouring out of the building, in terms of maybe publishing pamphlets, zines, or other materials and distributing them?

The Indy: How do public spaces more broadly need to change in Providence? What role can Red Ink play in that transformation?

DR: Great idea, you want to work here?

DR: That’s a very interesting question. [...] I found a place that was downtown, much more accessible by bus, and much more walkable, and yet it was on the second floor, and there were only stairs.

So, even though it was cheaper, it was just not going to work because regardless of whether or not anybody of us in leadership or any of us in our immediate circle is permanently or temporarily

AH: I have brought up, before, the idea of having kind of a community printer in the space, but I think that that will require a lot more time. I don’t think it’s something that we can really do in the first year of operation, but it’s definitely something we’re thinking about down the line because, for the reasons that you say, there are people who may have important things to say that

The Indy: [Haha] Like, yeah! Maybe!

don’t have access to the same distribution channels as others might have. Providing a place where people can print things and get them distributed I think would be great. It’s just a matter of big printers that are capable of doing that in large enough quantities where it matters are sort of expensive and they take up space.

The Indy: And to wrap up the questions, what are some other goals for the future?

AH: I think my immediate goals for the time being are to collaborate with as many groups in the city and state as possible, whether it’s hosting events with them, or hosting their event, or whatever it is just trying to get the enormous amount of groups that are in the city, and in the state, involved in Red Ink, that’s sort of my vehicle right now.

DR: My biggest priority was creating a blank slate, which I feel like we’ve gotten pretty good at. And I love live music. I would love to see live music here. The goal, I think, for me, for the leadership of Red Ink, for the landlord, for the neighborhood, was that something could be of service, and that’s what we’re going to continue to try to do for as long as we can stay open.

JG: I really echo the idea of being of service to the people, the community, the people of Providence.

I’d really like to show this documentary here that’s sort of a primer on Rhode Island politics, build that out, get an event, do a panel. A lot of that stuff really comes from other people who have these great ideas and these needs that are not built in other spaces, and trying to incorporate as many different perspectives, different feedback, and different voices.

RICARDO GOMEZ B’22 & ISABELLE AGEE-JACOBSON B’24 are going to see “The Circus” (USSR, 1936), an Anti-facist Soviet classic at Red Ink this Saturday at 6:00PM!

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 2

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ARTS ILLUSTRATION XINGXING SHOU TEXT LUCAS GELFOND DESIGN MICHELLE JIEUN SONG 05

Nearly 20 strangers show up to an unmarked parking garage in Queens on a Saturday night.

They’re here for an “art-related ritual” hosted

by SHL0MS, a self-described “NFT performance artist.” Everyone has followed directions— they’re dressed in uniform black and have signed nondisclosure agreements that stipulate they cannot share “how devilishly charming [SHL0MS] is” or “how life-changing the ritual was.” The inside of the cinder block garage is flanked by two floodlights illuminating a large object covered in black cloth. A cloaked figure, wearing an LED mask, pulls the cloth off to reveal a white porcelain urinal with “shl0ms. eth” spray painted onto it. Instructions are simple: each attendee will take one swing, with a hammer, at the urinal.

After smashing the urinal, a team filmed short videos of the 185 shards and sold these videos as NFTs, for a project SHL0MS called “FNTN” (fountain). The two largest secondary sales, for shards #69 and #85, sold for 10 Ether (Ethereum’s digital currency) or the equivalent of $30,000. “It felt like everything [that was being sold as NFTs] was just holographic skulls and Ethereum logos,” SHL0MS told the College Hill Independent. “I really wanted to see more absurdity and to challenge the convention of what can be art in the NFT world.”

I met SHL0MS for the first time on Google Meet, where he arrived obscured by a flickering RGB filter, which rendered his face wholly unintelligible. I shouldn’t have been surprised; on Twitter, where we first interacted a few months ago, his profile photo is a noisy outline of a face, he’s filled his bio with bizarre characters ( , repeatedly) and his pinned tweet contains several screen-lengths worth of empty space.

SHL0MS’ sole medium is NFTs. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are one-of-a-kind digital items ranging from visual art, videos, and music to video game avatars and representation of land tracts. Their ownership is publicly tracked and recorded using blockchain technology, most often on a popular blockchain called Ethereum.

Typically, no physical goods change hands: a transaction merely transfers ownership of one digital asset from one user’s virtual wallet to another in exchange for cryptocurrency.

SHL0MS has no formal training as an artist and notes that much of his early work began as experiments. His first piece “1x1” carries the subtitle “a single, transparent pixel.” As the piece sold, he quickly realized others had already released pieces with the same concept, so he decided to take the idea further. His next work, 0x0, is simply an empty file. To engage with people who said the piece was not art because it contained no pixels, he responded with “10,000,000x10,000,000” (in reference to the work’s number of pixels). The work is embedded with millions of copies of itself—the image’s PNG file has 99 million ZIP files within it, each of which contains a copy of the work.

“I don’t think of the image, I think of the file structure,” he noted when describing a similar piece that contains itself, noting that he sees the file as the canvas. Another piece, tall, measures 1 pixel by 100 million pixels; SHL0MS notes that, if the piece were displayed on a vertical stack of televisions as intended, it piece would stand 16.44 miles tall.

SHL0MS embraces critiques that his work is ridiculous. “I think if you’re making conceptual art and 100 percent of people like it, it’s probably not very good,” he told the Indy.

“I think you want somewhere between five and 15 percent of people to think this is fucking stupid.” Most critiques extend past SHL0MS’ work specifically, and instead look to the very act of NFT collecting, often ridiculed as “buying JPEGs” because the images of visual NFTs are typically publicly viewable. This complicates the norms of art ownership—instead of purchasing

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SHL0MS A F

NFTs for personal viewing pleasure, these staggering sums of money are spent mostly for the sake of ownership and status. SHL0MS estimates that his followers seem to take a mixed view: some, he suspects, view NFTs as stupid and think his work satirizes NFTs. Others, he thinks, interpret his work as the conceptual underpinning of what NFTs can be.

As such, SHL0MS notes that he found inspiration for “FNTN” in the 20th-century Dada movement, which played with what art could and could not be, embracing satire and absurdity. “FNTN” is a direct reference to Dadaist Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain”—a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt”—which belonged to his series of “Readymades,” ordinary objects Duchamp argued could be “elevated to the dignity of a work of art by mere choice of an artist.” SHL0MS saw a similar role for “FNTN”: “It’s not a ‘fuck you’ to the NFT movement but a ‘hey, let’s try to make weirder stuff and push the boundaries of how we can make and sell art,’” he told the Indy. “Let’s not just make stuff that people were making on Instagram in 2013 and just sell that in a different way, let’s try to make new art.” +++

“FNTN” draws from a trend of fractionalizing NFTs, where one NFT can be partially owned by multiple people. SHL0MS’ goal was to take this a step farther and make the process of fractionalization part of the art. He notes that the creation of the work was inspired

by French performance artist Yves Klein, specifically his “Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle” from 1959. For the piece, Klein offered to exchange gold for a deed representing ownership of an empty space (dubbed “the Immaterial Zone”). After purchasing, the buyer had the option to burn the receipt; Klein would then throw half of the gold into the Seine river before several designated witnesses. While Klein’s work certainly parallels the transfer of immaterial ownership inherent to NFTs, SHL0MS also compared it to “generative art,” a technique that uses code to create art based on some outside factor, usually either the time or a user’s wallet address—because the process is the same, unique inputs will have unique outputs. SHL0MS said that he wanted to see this in real life.

“The basic concept is [that] you set the preconditions and then have other people create the actual art,” he told the Indy. “Here, the entropy is coming from the real world.

What did the participants eat that day? Did they eat a lot of breakfast and hit [the urinal] harder? Or, maybe they showed up a little later so one specific person gets to hit it at the end instead of the beginning. All of those random data points that are impossible to track ended up making these shards exactly as they are.”

SHL0MS told the Indy that, for “FNTN,” he sees his role as setting up the ritual of the art.

One of the primary draws for NFTs is that, baked into the mechanism for buying or selling them, the original artist will receive a pre-set percentage every time one of their works is sold—for “FNTN,” SHL0MS and his collaborators receive 10 percent of future sales.

Essentially, when works sell out quickly, rather than letting all of the profits accrue to resellers, NFTs allow artists to receive a portion of the transactions. This, SHL0MS noted, incentivizes artists to continue to work on projects after they have been sold, as he did with “FNTN.” SHL0MS said that the urinal used for “FNTN” was the second he purchased. The first one came shattered. “I like to call it ‘prefractionalized,’” he quipped.

The shards from the actual work currently sit in a bank vault, but he plans to destroy them; he wants the NFT to be the only real instance

of the urinal, rather than a representation of a physical piece. He declined a request to display the physical shards at an NFT conference, focusing on the perpetuity that NFTs allow.

“There is only so long that your fragile porcelain urinal will remain intact,” SHL0MS told the Indy.

In the parking garage, just before instructing attendees to smash the urinal, SHL0MS gave a brief speech about his background. He’d felt restricted in his ability to express himself in early life, growing up in an extremely religious, socially conservative Jewish community, and his artwork provided him with a necessary outlet.

He instructed audience members to think about the beliefs they wanted to destroy when smashing the urinal. Toward the end of the event, he took off his mask. SHL0MS declined to confirm whether it was legitimately him at the event, suggesting it could have been a paid actor. “If I was there in person, it might have been really awkward because I wasn’t used to playing a character in real life.” +++

SHL0MS’ identity is tied to his Ethereum address; while a loss of his private key (essentially the password to his wallet) would mean losing all of the earnings from his works, he noted that his biggest worry is a loss of the perpetuity of the SHL0MS identity. In response to intrigue around his identity, he released a piece called “𝚒.𝚍.” that listed various traits about his identity (legal name, date of birth, current address, employer, social security number) to be sold as an NFT, except all of the identifying information is listed in white text on the white background, rendering it invisible. He assured me, nonetheless, that the information is there. Earlier in the year, many SHL0MS fans (who occasionally self-identify as the “shl0mscult”) tweeted “I am SHL0MS,” satirizing his ambiguous identity.

SHL0MS has found this tension— fascination with his identity combined with a vibrant community around his work—difficult to balance. He noted that in the past he’s kindly asked friends to delete posts from Twitter and often paused for divergences off the record when we talked. “I’m trying to be someone who’s creating this cool art that you like but also who interacts with you and who is friends with you on the internet,” SHL0MS told the Indy. “It’s not only because that’s a marketing angle, it’s because I genuinely enjoy it and like to interact with the people who like my art because I love doing it and it’s surreal to me that people enjoy it. Which then makes it harder that I have to constantly be thinking about all these boundaries and navigating all of this stuff.”

A few of SHL0MS’ friends created companion projects that accompanied “FNTN.” Ian Dilick, a 20-year-old product manager, created “this shl0ms does not exist”—an assortment of profile photos designed in the vein of SHL0MS’ profile. SHL0MS also helped with the creation of a project called “this shard does not exist” in which disinformation researcher Mitch Chaiet trained a machine learning algorithm with images of “FNTN” shards to generate new “fake” shards; they minted 666 fake shards, the first 185 of which were reserved for prior “FNTN” holders. All 666 shards, listed initially for 0.069 ETH apiece (roughly $240 USD as of press time) sold out within 15 minutes.

Chaiet told the Indy he doesn’t believe NFTs would be anywhere without their inherent financialization. “I did not give a shit about NFTs until I saw the toilet shards, and I was like ‘It would be funny if I generated more of these,’” Chaiet told the Indy. “It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. I’m a big fan

ARTS

AND THE FNTN OF YOUTH On NFT art absurdism

of ridiculousness [...] It’s a stupider form of exaggeration I guess, like ‘look at what I did, I smashed a toilet and you fuckers gave me money, ha ha ha.’ I’m a big fan of it obviously, but it’s not something I would have paid for myself had I been there.”

Chaiet told the Indy he thinks some buyers view the pieces as investments they will be able to flip in the future. “I view them more as social collectibles that you can use to dunk your friends,” he told the Indy. “It says ‘I’m technical enough to navigate the horrible user experience of web3 [blockchain platforms] across three fake money platforms to buy, you know, a drawing of a gorilla wearing a hat, and now I feel better than you.”

While Dilick notes that the speculation around and financialization of NFT art is common, he doesn’t see it as unique to the medium. “When it comes down to the economics, the whole ‘buying art because you think it’s going to appreciate a huge amount,’ that is exactly what happens with art investment in the real world, but it’s something made more explicit because it is available to far more people,” Dilick said.

Shira Eisenberg, a 23-year-old tech founder who attended the “FNTN” smashing, noted that she sees the NFT rush as similarly excessive to hype cycles in the traditional art world. “You see media where’s it’s like: ‘oh, at Art Basel, you have the banana taped to the wall,” Eisenberg told the Indy. “It’s very similar to ‘oh somebody spent $2 million on a picture of a squiggle.” +++ “FNTN” was by far SHL0MS’ most financially successful work to date. He listed the shards on a website for a flat rate instead of an auction, in hopes that friends who had been priced out of previous releases of his work could purchase one. In spite of this, the platform crashed during the auction, and shards sold for 50 to 80 times their initial price on the secondary market. “Something that I feel definitely weird about is that people take me more seriously now than they did a couple months ago because my art sold for a lot of money. I personally really don’t like that,” SHL0MS told the Indy.

“Especially because of how easily this stuff can be manipulated and how many ‘big whale’

collectors there are who are investing for more social and financial reasons than artistic reasons.”

He notes that he initially conceived of “FNTN” several months ago but waited because he felt there was less that he could get away with conceptually. “It’s a different type of capital than social capital because you could be a very socially capitalized conceptual artist [without legitimacy],” he said. “It’s more of an air of conceptual legitimacy, and if you have a lot of it like Duchamp, you can do literally anything as long as it’s not unethical. No matter how incomprehensible it is or how banal it is, people view it as an amazing work of art.” He criticized the mentality of British contemporary artist Damien Hirst, who noted that he “can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it.” SHL0MS, instead, views his increased legitimacy as “more liberation to make art that I think is interesting to me.”

He sees the current buzz around NFTs as a rush. He considers himself risk averse and still works a full time job, although he recently switched positions and now works in crypto after being hired under his pseudonym.

Seemingly capricious spikes in crypto price are now common, sometimes spiked by speculative activity, others by celebrity tweets, and, most recently, by threats of government regulation, often targeting illicit money transfer. In addition, while development on technologies that will reduce Ethereum’s power consumption by 99.95 percent are promised by the end of the year, and while each additional NFT does not change the power consumption of the entire Ethereum network, current estimates suggest that a single Ethereum transaction consumes the equivalent amount of power used by the average US household over 4.55 days, according to the Hill.

Regardless of questions about the technology, he maintains a belief in NFTs as compelling technology for artists. “There’s the [ability] to sell a digital representation of a digital art piece instead of maybe making a print of a digital art piece and selling that,” he told the Indy. “[If you sell prints], you’re also selling a reproduction of the actual art, which is inherently digital.” SHL0MS notes that, because NFTs are so new, there is more that remains unexplored. “There’s just a lot of conceptual

ground to play with,” SHL0MS told the Indy.

“If this didn’t exist, I don’t know how much I [would] personally have to say in the traditional conceptual art world because I’m like 70 years too late to it.”

SHL0MS plans to keep experimenting with the NFT as form. He has yet to address smart contracts, the technical mechanisms that facilitate buying and selling of NFTs, and could play around with how these function.

He’s also considered involving his community in a decentralized autonomous organization, a blockchain-enabled structure that allows for coordination and fundraising from its members.

The group could fundraise and work on projects together, and he could give fractions of the final piece to those who contributed.

While NFT prices may be shaped by a few “whales” who own large amounts of Ethereum, platforms allow ‘anyone’—those who can bypass the technological and financial barriers to entry—to purchase NFTs, and discourse about what is valuable or significant happens on Twitter or Discord. “Regardless of whether crypto crashes, I think long-term, it is a means to create art or become artists without input or control of stodgy gallery owners in the traditional art world who would’ve never allowed people like me to become artists because we’re making art for people like us, like technologists and cryptopunks,” he told the Indy.

In 2016, the Museum of Modern Art hosted a retrospective for 100 years of Duchamp’s readymades. An art historian who attended the event told the New Yorker he felt the message of the readymade had been misunderstood. “It was decoded to mean that when anything can be art, anybody can be an artist,” he said. “But it’s the other way around. When anybody can be an artist, then anything can be art.”

LUCAS GELFOND B’24 is minting this piece as an NFT.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 2

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Poems b/o/d/y A finger dipped in water. A scalpel marking cross-stitches into clay. A figure, half-made, un-baked, dis-jointed.

LIT

In the brief, passing months of summer, something strange happens to you: a ceaseless disorientation, an intangible disconnection. It happens over and over again, a destruction and reconstruction of the body, so intimately connected to yet so untethered from the mind. Why is it impossible to put yourself together even when you know all the constituent parts?

You see it in the mirror, a line drawn through your body: blunted fingertips to a fragile wrist. Wrists to elbows, elbows to shoulders, shoulders to collarbones. A body fully made, with flesh and blood and bone. A body that moves through each day, from second to minute to hour. Yet, a body disjointed, disconnected by the paradox of summer, losing time but still having copious amounts of it.

There’s liminality injected into each day’s heat, each day’s being. Every moment of every passing day blooms into life all at once, layered on top of and in between each other, blended into an unidentifiable singular reel of beaming sun rays and shuffling papers and roaring waves and glasses clinking with your friends and startling awake, dizzied, over and over and over.

Water seeping into clay, rivets of stitches filled. A gentle force, pushing two clay limbs together. A moment of cohesion –

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

ILLUSTRATION CHANIKARN KOVAVISARACH

Considered in isolation, moving through the day makes perfect sense. When is there any confusion? Like clay drying, routines settle into place. You wake, you dress, you eat: every task is fulfilled. You go through the motions and you pass the hours by. You smile, you talk. You see friends, you pet a dog. Rooms are inhabited and streets are walked.

Bangkok, London, New York. How do metropolises measure up against the minutiae of everyday? A set of keys, a stiff window, a favourite spot on the couch. Getting lunch, working late hours, showering with the same travel bottles of shampoo.

– followed by immediate collapse. Arms and legs and torsos, parts falling onto the table, slamming into the plastic cover.

But in those first and last moments, of consciousness gained and lost, what is that itching uncertainty? Dried but unbaked, all it takes is a drop of water to undo solid clay. Disorientation of who you are, where you are, what you’re doing. A simultaneous persistence and fragmentation that is present yet obscured as the day unfolds, confusion from the moment sunlight first streams through halfshut blinds to the soft glow of a waning moon.

Reoccurring soundscapes and murmured rustling of blankets, the rows of restless passengers, Chance meetings on the street, faces did you meet them last month? Who is Awkward half-gasps of misrecognition, unlocking eyes with someone who looks

landscapes: the hum of a plane and the hushed crinkles of pretzel bags and a perpetual cocoon you can never shake off. Another bored mind among fervently waiting for the landing. too familiar and yet too strange – did you know them as a child or that walking by? Slowed footsteps, like a wind-up toy losing steam. an excitement crushed by the realization of averted intimacy, too much like someone you once knew.

Every day you ask, Is this my home? Is this what where you’re moving to, when you’re moving but an unmoving desire to return to where you Diaries and journals with pages that are filled, but through those days? Is the one reading these diaries Memories strung together, paint bleeding across desigmagnets with the same poles facing each other.

I’m meant to feel like? You start at a certain point and know there, and yet when you’re there, there is nothing in your heart came from. they’re pages you don’t remember writing. Was it really you going the same one who wrote them? nated lines, a Bildungsroman with all its chapters sliced and pushed apart, like

A deep sigh, a deep breath. New stitches, same body. A new whole of the same parts.

Is perpetual ephemerality still fleeting? House to house. City to city. Is it not all the same, these crowds of blurred faces, these looming mountains of glass and steel? Half-empty cafes and half-empty parks occupied by a reflection you know too well. What grows out of disjointedness?

Heat of the summer, power to solidify or to melt. Bodies emerging from the oven, some whole, some cracked: who are they now? What comes next?

TEXT CHANIKARN KOVAVISARACH

Baked but unglazed, a human figure caught in the middle of creation. Re-constructed, re-moulded, re-assembled. Again, again, again.

07

CHANIKARN KOVAVISARACH B‘23 is looking for a pottery instructor.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LIT

TEXT MARA CAVALLARO & MIA BARZILAY FREUND

chamomile tea chamomile tea tastes like nothing but looks like honey, yellow petals, warm creaky wood, melting sunshine, blonde hair. i used to stand outside my grandma’s door clutching my towel-cape with fingernails stained red by the thirsty earth i grew in while my mom poured a bucket of chamomile tea over my black hair, to make it lighter. this ritual meant half an hour of anticipation in the beating equatorial sun and an infinity of staring at the mud reborn beneath my flip flops, praying my hair would similarly be transformed into golden yellow strands.

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

i touch a finger to my scalp at noon and expect a sizzle but feel instead a warm pulse, the gentle pull of gravity. my hair, forever stubborn, is unchanged but i am transformed by the chamomile, reborn a daffodil. for as some flora, like the sunflower, stretch toward visions they’ll never reach, the daffodil leans down to the earth it came from, drinking in its own beauty, in awe of the mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers I came from, their black hair and knowing eyes.

MARA CAVALLARO B’22 is growing daffodils in her family garden.

Purple mountain majesties are tall women in plummy robes trimmed with ermine hair.

I think I saw them pass me on East 93rd Street when they peeled back the orchid wrapper of a sanitary napkin like a petal and offered it to me after my IUD insertion.

My grandma’s purple wool sweater fits me like an ill-fitting glove. I wish she could wrap me up and be young and vital on contact, a bright light turning her hazel eyes into Elizabeth Taylor’s.

I would ask her if she could make me a suit of violet tweed–– there must be some among the bolts of cloth she took back from Cuba during those years of Hitler and Batista and purple bruises on her backside from the man who pinched her on the hill to the Havana streetcar. Today, her feet are purple with veins, swollen, not like feet at all.

ILLUSTRATION CLAIRE CHASSE & CJ GAN

Majesty

MIA BARZILAY FREUND B’23 lied that her favorite color was blue in first grade (it’s actually purple).

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 2

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Grafting Modernity

TEXT KATHERINE XIONG

DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU

ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES

S+T

Reimagining urbanism beyond the smart city

09

“District by district, they had transformed the old city.

Like termites swarming over a wooden house, they had chewed up the wreckage of the past, overturned the earth, and constructed a brand new world...Brick by brick, they had walled themselves off until they could no longer see the sky...Finally, when the completed building stood up before them like a living person, they had scattered in terror, as though they had given birth to a monster.” - Hao Jingfang, “Folding Beijing” This description of Beijing’s fictional reconstruction from the ground up marks a defining moment in Beijing’s urban history in Hao Jingfang’s 2013 novelette “Folding Beijing.” Hao’s Beijing has finally run out of room. To optimize space and time use, the city has been divided in three: the 5 million most wealthy live in “First Space,” the next 25 million in “Second Space,” and the remaining 50 million live in “Third Space.” First Space is the largest, temporally and physically. Its residents go about their lives for a full 24 hours. When they’re finished, they retreat into their homes to hibernate. Meanwhile, First Space itself breaks down into standardized building blocks that reorganize themselves beneath the earth’s surface. The ground then flips over to reveal the compressed Second and Third Space, whose denizens have undergone their own hibernations. Second Space unfolds itself for 16 hours, then seals itself away again. Third Space, whose residents are the poorest, takes the remaining 8 hours before the 48-hour cycle begins anew.

This orderly system kills several birds with one stone. It affords everyone enough space and

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

time as their status can buy. It eliminates visual reminders of income and housing inequality, such that no one can imagine anything better or worse than what they have. And it gives the government an excuse to carefully control the population, particularly the burgeoning underclass of Third Space.

Present-day Beijing’s compartmentalization of space and time isn’t so extreme, but it comes close. When the Ming dynasty Yongle Emperor moved the capital to Beijing, he laid out the streets on a grid to represent the order of the cosmos, with his seat of power as the symbolic heart of the nation. After the Chinese Communist Party’s ascension in 1949, much of the historic city came down, making way for subways and the city’s famously congested ring roads. As the Cultural Revolution gave way to economic liberalization—and restrictions on rural-urban migration loosened—the city’s rapid-fire modernization accelerated further. Today, Beijing is still known as China’s heart, but also as a city of smog, overcrowded public transport, and housing insecurity, a city with millions of migrants who make up China’s “floating” population. For all past attempts at planning the city from the ground up, however, modern Beijing’s progress has always been more of a grafted modernity, constructed in frenzied moments in whatever space developers can find.

It’s easy to imagine a fictionalized future like Hao’s Beijing, where characters shuttle themselves into the woodwork at the author’s discretion. In real life, building from the ground up with the goal of ‘optimization’ is far more

difficult. Cities built on modernist architectural and urban planning philosophies are often very orderly in blueprints but notoriously expensive in practice. Brazil’s capital Brasilia, famously built from the ground up in the less densely populated highlands west of the country’s well-populated coastline, was envisioned as an egalitarian masterwork and symbol of a ‘new Brazil.’ Urban anthropologists now consider the project a costly failure: recent estimates put its construction costs somewhere over $40 billion USD. Its careful planning, which accommodated 500,000 residents in the city, now buckles under a population of 2.8 million. Now, having failed to entice major businesses and industries away from Brazil’s coast, Brasilia’s job market consists almost entirely of government positions.

Its inhabitants commute hours a day to work every morning and flee for the suburbs as soon as the closing bell rings.

Providence’s planned city projects run into similar problems. Providence 1970, one of many ambitious urban redevelopment proposals that was implemented in the late 70s, tried to draw white, middle-class, suburban consumers into the city by car in a direct attempt to force out communities of color living in those areas and thereby annex those areas for a new commercial downtown. The decision to redirect the river and to move the highway on top of established communities of color also worked to create a white consumer-focused Downtown. This emphasis on commercial development and the enforcement of racialized, classist visions of ‘safety’ in public areas still persists today. Both

S+T

state and city governments are currently working to decentralize Kennedy Plaza—one of the busiest areas in Downtown Providence, both as the primary bus hub and a provider of public amenities. A city with everything in its place, except for the people.

Contemporary development now has the potentials of ‘smart’ cities to contend with, but such urban experiments have also met limited success. Songdo International Business District, a 1482 acre extension of Incheon reclaimed from the Yellow Sea, was meant to serve as a sustainable, high-tech alternative to Seoul’s main neighborhoods for the high-flying business-class consumers its developers wished to draw. The largest and likely most expensive private real estate development in history ($40 billion USD by the time development finishes in 2022), Songdo ostensibly features every amenity a smart city could offer. Its app-controlled homes, automatic trash disposal, a massive waterfront park with self-sustaining irrigation systems, walkability systems, streets armed to the teeth with computer sensors that track and report on everything from traffic patterns to energy usage per block make it one of the most technologically advanced cities in the world. Its rents are cheaper than nearby Seoul’s by 40% (still out of reach for average Koreans, but certainly enough to draw in well-to-do, young families with children). Yet it has been described as “cold” and “deserted,” akin to Chernobyl, by its now more than 100,000 inhabitants. No poor people, street vendors, or elderly people frequent its streets—and not many of its residents

do, either.

Masdar, a zero-carbon ‘utopian’ neighborhood of Abu Dhabi, envisioned by its private developers as a post-oil alternative future, has faced different problems. Like Songdo, Masdar’s buildings are LEED certified; the neighborhood’s layout capitalizes on natural ventilation, misting, and a wind tower to regulate the city’s temperature; it emphasizes walkability and an urban-chic friendliness, á la New York’s Greenwich Village. However, Masdar’s 1,300 or so residents, whose futuristic stomping grounds are currently constrained to a single city block, never linger in public, rendering Masdar’s humanity practically invisible. Ironically, reaching this walking city-in-a-city requires driving and parking in several football field-sized parking lots across from the district entrance. The greater irony, of course, is the existence of Masdar itself. With a seed cost of $20 billion, this supposedly forward-thinking block underscores the hypocrisy of Abu Dhabi’s income and housing inequality, its reliance on exploited migrant labor from South and Southeast Asia, and its central role in the global fossil fuel industry.

Why do cities and private contractors keep making big, utopian promises if we know we don’t like the results? If we know “optimized” isn’t a stand-in for “liveable,” “accessible,” “equitable,” or “human”? The plans keep coming: Google’s parent company Alphabet launched Sidewalk Labs, its urban planning and infrastructure arm, in 2015, with plans to redesign entire sections of cities like Toronto into privatized smart cities. World-renowned start-up

incubator Y-Combinator launched a research project in 2016 positioning city-making in terms of supply and demand and employee productivity. Its overarching goal is to design the best possible, privately owned city from the ground up. The city benefits everyone—if you’re rich, tech-savvy, and from out-of-town. +++ Here is one vision of the future: Whiteness, everywhere. Huge, bleached white slabs curving into the sky like the bones of a beached whale. Mirrored windows so clean they camouflage themselves in the surrounding sky. Huge expanses of green space and water, not a dry patch in sight. The streets are clean, glowing under an ever-shining sun, pinned at the apex of an ever-blue sky. There is no traffic.

Everywhere around you are sensors; everything—from air quality to restaurant hours—can be widgetized; everything can be adjusted with one swipe on your phone. Your hands are bound to invisible strands of data—how long you spent looking into a nearby shop window, what problems you’ve griped about to your friends in a chic new coffee shop (and how to solve them via retail therapy), which areas have been claimed by unhoused people and need to be ‘cleansed.’

This kind of idealistic vision is what shows up in aestheticized computer drawings of “futuristic cities” found in tech magazines and all over Google, drawings so ubiquitous that they’ve become visual cliches.

Here’s another, the kind that has loomed

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S+T ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU TEXT KATHERINE XIONG 11

over dystopian sci-fi in the popular imagination since 1982’s Blade Runner. Here it’s always night, the moon and stars blocked out by smog.

Jagged black skyscrapers as far as the eye can see. The only light flashing from LED billboards and office windows, a sea of sickly yellow and blue spots. The streets, either spilling over with people or lying barren, save for a few lurkers creeping through the shadows. Close up, noise floods the streets as people move between cramped, sweat-stained buildings; far away, the

tion—turning almost every public social space into one that requires consumption, removing benches or building hostile architecture to discourage loitering, enacting laws against ‘vagrancy’ or ‘loitering’ as a means of keeping people inside or moving between commercial spaces—forces out those who cannot consume.

Their modern city—like Hao’s imaginary Beijing—marks class by the right to use and belong in space. The poorest people will disappear into metaphorical Third Space: out of sight, out of

year, for example, constant, organized community opposition, including local investigative reporting from the Toronto Star, forced Sidewalk Labs to back out of its Toronto development projects. Even something as innocuous as a library can be a site of resistance: apart from providing a public space entirely separate from the logic of consumption, libraries can offer life-affirming community resources to those who need them most. This very month marks the opening of Red Ink Community Library, an

A city built around optimization alone—a city that steamrolls over generations of city heritage as if it is rooted in no past at all—isn’t fit for human life. cacophony fades to an ominous rumble. No one will look out for you, but the roving eyes of hidden cameras are always watching. Lao Dao’s Third Space, active only from 10 PM to 6 AM every other day, exists in this perpetual night, a vision of an alienatingly distant, but also eerily familiar, future.

These light and dark extremes both emerge out of the capitalist crises that have defined the modern era. For even as cities have come to represent modernity, the site of the future in contrast to a more rural past, they’ve done so as the sites of cataclysmic economic and social change.

City populations swelled with the Industrial Revolution and have only increased ever since; they are now the sites of some of the greatest social inequality in the world. After World War II, mid-sized American cities fell into post-industrial slumps while East Asian cities—Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul—compressed a hundred years’ worth of urban redevelopment and economic growth into a few decades, fueling the now ever-present terror of outsourcing and job loss. Today, city anxieties manifest in response to gentrification, growing wealth gaps, and the financial and legal precarity so many city-dwellers face around the world. Hao Jingfang’s story emerges directly from those anxieties and their manifestation in China.

Now we have our two imaginary cities, light and dark. Proponents of one vision treat crisis like opportunity—opportunity to raze huge swaths of a “failing” city to the ground, displacing whoever may be trying to reinvent life in the “ruins.” Those who warn of the other vision see a future in which globalized capitalist networks of supply and demand have turned the winners into losers, siphoning off jobs to where labor costs and collective bargaining power are lowest. Crucially, however, both imagined cities can be defined by relationships to capitalism, particularly the urge to “optimize” limited city space around capitalistic principles. The modern city, meant to optimize the experience of people with the power to consume, looks “light” to those consumers. The process of that optimiza-

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

mind.

Looking at urban planning this way, it’s no wonder why our understandings of the “city of the future” either bleach out people’s everyday lives or zoom in on dystopian visions of people living forever in the dark. And it’s no wonder that our attempts at building that future city—everything from modernist experiments like Brasilia to contemporary smart cities like Songdo and Masdar—have only met with failure. Even those who uphold consumption as the necessary logic of daily life don’t want to live at its mercy. A city built around optimization alone—a city that steamrolls over generations of city heritage as if it is rooted in no past at all— isn’t fit for human life. +++ Hao’s Beijing was torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, a shadowy expansion of Beijing’s rapid development today, in order to optimize space and time for its users—the 5 million and 25 million whose opinions matter, and the 50 million whose opinions don’t. Within this carefully maintained framework, trash collector Lao Dao takes on the dangerous, illegal journey from Third Space to Second to First and back again. As he worms his way through dim alleyways and past CCTV cameras, this urban monster unfolds around him: incomprehensibly divided, internally inconsistent, self-contained and all-consuming. But I find his ability to dodge the cameras strangely comforting. Others before him have adapted their lives to this movement, smuggling contraband into an otherwise bleak, strictly regulated world. Even under intense pressure, they make Beijing their own.

No one just waits around for dystopian futures to come, after all. People in the real world constantly negotiate and renegotiate space in their own cities in ways more complex than can ever be written into data. Community activists have faced down the demands of developers in force, rallying against unworkable urban projects and making space for each other. Just last

event space and reading room that aims to directly support local organizing efforts and make political education more accessible to all.

All of these behaviors—pushing back on unsustainable development, creating public spaces for each other to exist, and fighting against inequality—are present, material, and grounded in people’s lives. They’re creating a present, not a far-flung, abstracted future couched in tech-y platitudes. The everyday, live-giving work these city dwellers put into shaping their cities in the present moment is perhaps a more profound imaginative act than imagining a city free of history and moving parts, as proponents of privatization typically do.

Of course, we also have pure imagination: everything from alternative development plans to sci-fi. In 1974, RISD professor Gerard Howes and his architecture students independently drafted a counterplan for downtown Providence.

Rather than focusing on drawing in consumers, it emphasized stronger public transport, public parks in place of parking lots, and less rigid zoning regulations in favor of mixed-use buildings and higher density housing. Though the plan never made it to fruition—lacking the political cache to be approved for development—it galvanized downtown advocates who prized historic preservation, walkable streets, and the maintenance of public space. And it means something that these students and their surrounding community could imagine a better future. The biggest deciding factor for whether a city is liveable is, after all, its people.

KATHERINE XIONG B’23 wants to have hope for the present.

JADEN SCHOENFELD “THE KISSING OF POWDERED ASSES AT A PICNIC”*

EPHEMERA

*Collaged from past Indy work

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FEATS TEXT MARIANA FAJNZYLBER DESIGN SAM STEWART ILLUSTRATION QUINN ERICKSON

Tropicália and the construction of a Latin American memory

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I loved gaping at our CD cases as a child: criss-crossed on the floor, my eyes darting from shelf to shelf. There was a code, I soon learned. Dark spines marked the more serious of tunes, to be played after dinner with a book or newspaper in hand. Brighter sleeves in deep purples and vibrant greens—the ones I would slip out of their plastic encasements to read and reread—were savored with quick samba steps in the kitchen while sunlight streamed through our windows. Then there were the ones with heft, the compilations my dad made an accidental collection of. As I made my way toward middle school, I gravitated toward my own collection— with its centerpiece of Madonna’s greatest hits—but when I didn’t feel fit for the material world, I came back to the weighty red and blue doublediscs. I’m not sure if these compilations, stringing together the Beatles’ discography from 1962 to 1970, are the same copies that my dad first purchased in 1973. I doubt it. Regardless, they were always his favorites from our collection and for that reason, they are mine.

As my father settled into Mexico City many months after his Beatles purchase, amidst the turmoil surrounding him he found solace in strawberry fields and all of their loving. “My first English lessons,” he loves to say. Earlier that year, Salvador Allende’s government in Santiago de Chile—the place where my father was born nearly a decade earlier—was toppled, throwing my father’s family for a loop that would take them around nearly all of Latin America. In my mind’s eye, I can see him: the little boy from the picture frame in our living room, crying as this all transpired around him, his roots hanging in suspension. I wonder if he wept like the day he was born or on the drive over to my first college tour, feeling overwhelmed by the intense dislocation involved in the process of coming into this world, or sensing the terrain shift under the wheels of our Subaru as he let go of the person he brought into it. In the majority of these moments, the sounds of John, Paul, George, and Ringo hummed in the background. I often wonder what made them a source of comfort for my dad, if their ubiquity in the face of his own life’s mutation somehow released tension.

In the same period, Brazil, my mother’s home country, also wrangled with its own turbulence. Mere months before those first tears of my father, on March 31, 1964, the Brazilian military overthrew the democratic president João Goulart’s government in response to its proposed leftist reforms. In the first years of the dictatorship, artists and intellectuals could express ideas without the explicit, codified threat of censorship and repression. They were stifled—their microphones were shut off, their leaders were arrested—but they were not yet legally silenced. The

authorities, however, would not allow this semblance of unsuppressed speech to persist much longer. In 1968, General Costa e Silva, the fascist front’s leader at the time, issued the Fifth Institutional Act. This decree, the fifth and most infamous of a series of seventeen, indefinitely suspended Congress, authorized any degree of military intervention, required censorship, suspended habeas corpus, allowed the dissolution of political rights for up to ten years, legalized the once-prohibited death penalty, and institutionalized torture. While the ramifications of this order were widespread, the force of its hand fell most directly upon workers, students, revolutionary militants, and others in the resistance, the subjects of the majority of the state’s exiles and murders.

The Fifth Institutional Act marks one of the darkest times of the Brazilian dictatorship, what some call the coup inside the coup. Yet even in the face of the worst acts of violence, the resistance that had taken root in the early years of the regime would not cease to sprout. The political arm organized under the veil while the opposition’s musicians continued to create, each regiment harnessing their power in order to achieve change and cope with these collective traumas. With the release of their album in the same year, Tropicália Ou Panis et Circencis, a new coalition of artists—composed of singer-songwriters Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Tom Zé, the band Os Mutantes, singers Gal Costa and Nara Leão, the writers Torquato Neto and José Carlos Capinan, the maestro Rogério Duprat, and the artist Rogério Duarte—rebuked these imminent threats and took on the task of creating a cultural response to the fascist regime.

Their reaction encompassed their own lived experience, derived mostly from an upbringing in the country’s northeast, while also satirizing that which is thought to be Brazil: the exotic, the eclectic, the tropical fruits atop Carmen Miranda’s head. The result was Tropicália, a counterculture movement that weaved together all of Brazil’s distinct sonic threads in response to the dictatorship’s repression.

I wish I could say that Tropicália ou Panis et Circensis was one of the records my dad and I spent our Sundays slipping out of the CD case. If it was, I don’t recall. But as I settled into unfamiliar territory in the last year, Gilberto and Caetano and Gal became my own Beatles, seeping into the soundscape of Maine, Virginia, and Rhode Island. There were always a few things I could refer to when I lost sense of myself growing up: school and its offshoots, a silly, oft-inappropriate throwaway comment, and the trusty “when I used to live in Brazil.” My parents were integral to all three. Yet through the course of this seemingly permanent state of flux, I felt divorced from all of these strongholds. The feeling of this separation—from my family, from myself—would perhaps be better described as a lack thereof. Yet as I engrossed myself in their music, the tropicalistas were able to meddle in my numbness, pulling away the bed sheet to reveal not a ghostly void, but a tender wound. In this process of attending to the emotional injury, I obsessed over my one linkage: baby, baby, I love you. +++

In one of the places I made my home—the depths of western Maine—I lacked even a single bar of service as I stepped outside of our doorframe.

As a result, my housemates and I became well-acquainted with the green arrow next to our favorite musical projects, sewing our most beloved songs to the seams of our elastic waistbands. In those months I allowed myself to surpass acquaintance with Tropicália Ou Panis et Circensis, and by the end of our tenure in Maine, I felt an immense intimacy with the tropicalistas. I was first drawn to the seventh track on the record, performed

by Gal Costa and written by Caetano Veloso, a song I was already well familiar with, since it is often ricocheted between various Brazilian performers, as Brazilian music goes.

Você precisa saber da piscina...

You need to know about the swimming pool...

Da Carolina About Carolina Da gasolina About the gasoline Você precisa saber de mim You need to know about me

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FEATURES The song’s narrator addresses herself to a young and naive Brazilian.

She tells them about things beyond their reach: about wealthy families wading in private pools on Sunday afternoons, about Chico Buarque’s melancholic verses in his song “Carolina,” about the international trade of oil, about being a ‘real’ woman. There is an audible grin on Gal Costa’s face as the tongue-in-cheekiness of it all slips through her lips. However, the confidence that imbues her voice is insincere; her pool had always been the crowded beaches in Salvador, her artistic cohort often found themselves at odds with Buarque, the extraction of petroleum dominated her home coast, and Gal herself was merely 23, an unassuming, young Bahian woman.

These satirical musings on the Brazilian elite—their comforts, their access, their entitlement—are cut by the song’s chorus: Baby, baby, I love you. This hook bellows atop Veloso’s take on Paul Anka’s fifties hit “Diana”: Oh, please stay by me Diana. Everything Costa criticizes in the verses suddenly has a visible origin: this declared satisfaction with stasis does not speak for the populace at large; rather, it is burrowed into the Brazilian bourgeois, who are more likely to align themselves with foreign elites than their own supposed ‘people’.

As Gal and Caetano’s voices drip honey along sound waves, a pleasant melody rings behind them, drawing from both the traditional bossa nova sound and American mid-century rock that the song takes jabs at. Sonically, “Baby” is a departure from the Afro-Brazilian percussion, guitar, and psychedelia that overwhelm the other tracks on the record.

The song’s critiques are not audible at first listen, shrouded in the comfort of convention. Even so, the amalgam of different musical threads and the politicized verses still feel true to the tropicalista tone. By invoking what is palatable to the foreign public, Costa and Veloso are able to communicate that which is not. This offering of theirs filled me up in Stoneham, Maine. In just under four minutes, it brought me back to the living room after dinner, my mom succumbing to the occasional slow dance with me while my dad cracked jokes from the couch. I spent hours and hours listening to bossa nova in Maine, trying to grasp at my own Brazilianness.

While that brought comfort, it wasn’t until I heard Gal’s vocal velvet that I could cling to something. Tropicália complicates matters of Brazilian life in its music not for posterity, but because that is Brazil—complicated. That is how the different segments of what now make up Brazil survive. +++ Brazilian cultures have been forced to fuse and meld and merge due to the forces of global capitalism: the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, colonization, the proliferation of cash crops, the pressure to industrialize. Yet the dictatorial regime, in their schemes of opening Brazil up for foreign exploitation and smothering political perspectives that serve the collective, were intent on homogenizing the culture, silencing the voices of those historically marginalized and squashing any possible opposition.

As the Tropicália movement entered the mainstream, combining elements of the British rock of my father’s childhood with psychedelia with bossa nova with samba with Brazilian folk, it posed an active rejection of this dominant political narrative.

More than a form of protest, Tropicália provided a sense of kinship: people could identify their own disdain beyond their immediate communities, and in some ways, celebrate themselves and their distinct traditions that had been homogenized by the political pressures of a postcolonial, supposedly monolithic Brazil. In piecing together the parts of themselves that the regime sought to erase, there was some sense in the political chaos, some certainty that what was once (or never was) could be, again.

Scaffolded onto these cultural and intellectual palliatives was Tropicália’s function as a remedy to physical dislocation. The majority of the tropicalistas were from Brazil’s northeast, mainly the state of Bahia: a region composed of the world’s most beautiful beaches, punctuated by its stretch of rain-shadow-induced desert, and the center of AfroBrazilian culture. As Brazil industrialized through the early to mid-20th century, many descendants of enslaved West Africans in the northeast, particularly in Bahia, migrated to the urbanizing Southeast in search of jobs, housing, and the new metropolis. With this movement southward, Afro-Brazilian culture followed, with traditions of percussion, folklore, and samba seeping into the Brazilian canon, and musicians from Brazil’s southeast cities offering their own take on the musical modes. As rural and urban life (and each of its intricacies) collided into one another, many Brazilians began to suffer at the hands of the fascist rule. As products of this migration themselves, Veloso and Gil—the movement’s frontmen— imbued Tropicália with this syncretism, combining the music transported from the northeast with rock genres imported from abroad into the urban centers.

Tropicália, therefore, was as much a mechanism of generating new realities as it was a process of preservation. While the aesthetic and artistic vehicles may have felt innovative, they were actually quite orthodox, encapsulating the values that communities had always utilized in order to support one another. Syncretistic practice has a clear extension to the variety of ways in which such human ‘islands’—folks whose sense of self has little (and yet somehow enormous) grounding in geography and residence—find clarity in their own uprootedness. The product of this dealing with dissonance—call it syncretism, pastiche, collage—thus operates as a survival tactic, a way of making sense of the utter incoherence of these dislocations.

in 1776. I remember memorizing the date of the Chilean coup d’etat not because of its historical significance, or its personal one in my case, but because it shared a spot on the calendar with the September 11 attacks.

When I asked my parents about that time, they brushed me off. “We were kids! I was only two when the dictatorship began,” my mom would insist, as if the regime hadn’t persisted until her twenties. At some point, I conceded, and turned to Tropicália instead. The musical movement came to fill the gaps in my own familial history, much like it continues to preserve a collective memory of political and cultural struggle against the dictatorship.

Even as my parents refused to relay their experiences themselves, the music of the resistance rang through our household. While I might not have a memory of Tropicália ou Panis et Circensis itself, I grew up with Caetano and Gilberto spilling out of our stereo. As I rediscovered their music for myself this year, I was able to see these songs for more than what they were when I was four, bouncing to the percussion in that way only children are permitted to. With my literary trowel, I pored over and picked at the layers of lyricism that Veloso and Gil buried their criticisms of the military government under. In this process, Caetano’s “Alegria, Alegria” came under my magnifying glass.

Caminhando contra o vento Walking against the wind Sem lenço e sem documento Without a handkerchief and without documents No sol de quase dezembro In the sun of almost December Eu vou I’ll go Por entre fotos e nomes For between photos and names Sem livros e sem fuzil Without books and without arms Sem fome, sem telefone Without hunger, without a telephone No coração do Brasil In the heart of Brazil Sem lenço, sem documento Without a handkerchief, without documents Nada no bolso ou nas mãos Nothing in my pockets or hands Eu quero seguir vivendo, amor I want to continue living, my love Eu vou And I will/I’m leaving First performed at the televised Brazilian Popular Music Festival, this song is amongst Veloso’s most well-known and is often credited with being the first anthem of the Tropicália movement. At the time of its release, under the unwavering gaze of censors, Caetano described it as the chronicles of a young man taking a stroll through the streets. The observations this speaker relays, however, could not be summed up so simply.

In “Alegria, Alegria,” whose sardonic title means happiness, happiness, Veloso describes the ways in which the dictatorship’s subjugation seeped into trivial life. This narrator establishes in his first breath that this walk of his is against the current, and that he traverses the city untethered, without a form of identification that would subject him to the guise of those in political power. Later on in the song, he searches for traces of those he once knew in the newsstands, the familiar faces that have disappeared under the dictatorship. Among the faces and names, he finds a people without the pen or the sword at their defense, and without claim to the only mechanisms that can capture the attention of the international public: that of pitiable poverty and distanced dialogue. Some of the last lines of the song are Caetano’s explicit declarations of resistance.

Even empty-handed, stripped of his defenses, he will keep walking in the face of the wind. The line that ends each of the song’s verses, eu vou or I’ll go, changes meaning, signaling a resoluteness rather than the expected compliance.

While I won’t know what a walk through my mother’s city, Belo Horizonte, might have looked like in the 1970s, I can feel the disappointment and disdain such an experience would produce. Through the music of the movement, I have been able to approximate a political education, or perhaps more accurately, a personal history. It’s my hope that one day, this understanding of mine, built by the blend of these ballads, can be in conversation with that of my mother and father’s. Until then, I’ll let it take root in the musical undergrowth.

MARIANA FAJNZYLBER B’23.5 is currently macerating in the geléia geral.

+++ My knowledge about these dictatorships that both my parents lived through was always vague, composed of isolated historical facts that lay along the stretch of time that I was taught in school, the one that began

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 2

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THE BULLETIN THE BULLETIN

Content warning: police violence The College Hill Independent spoke to Cedric Russell, an organizer with Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), who helped to organize and emcee a march this past Thursday, September 16, to demand the release of a fifteen-yearold boy assaulted and arrested by the Providence Police and to “let the state know we will not accept police brutalizing and incarcerating our children!” More details on the police violence that precipitated this action can be found on DARE’s social media and on UpriseRI.com; the Indy will not be reproducing those stories here. Over 100 community members turned out for the march to demand: 1. that authorities release the child who is still in custody; 2. that all of the charges from the Sayles Street incident are dropped; 3. that the Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights (LEOBoR) is repealed; and that the state defunds the Providence police department. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Lily Pickett: How did you feel about the action last Thursday? What has been the overall response?

TEXT LILY PICKETT

DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

Cedric Russell: I really felt like we got a good response from the people. But to be truly correct about what’s going on, I don’t feel as though we’re getting what we really need. Even though we’re making people aware of what’s going on, it’s still not changing the system, if you know what I’m saying. The police are still going to do what they want to do, and the laws are still in place—police are still not going to get any accountability. And that’s the tough part: yes we put together a great rally, yes a good number of people did show up, but the main point of doing what we do is to make sure our points actually get met. We don’t want any charges for any of the people on Sayles Street, and they’re not dropping the charges. The child that got beat up is still locked up. So I feel like it’s great for awareness, but to actually get something done, we got to do more, and I really don’t know what that more is. But I’m still fighting, that’s all I can say.

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LP: You spoke to this at the rally, but what does justice look like in the aftermath of this violence? What does “Justice for Sayles Street” mean to protestors and to the families of the kids who were targeted?

CR: I can break it down situation by situation.

In an ideal world, with the first situation on Sayles Street, you got to realize that when the police got there, there was no friction. Both of the families were on both of their properties.

They had their little spat, but there was nothing after that. The police took it upon themselves to riot. If you look at the tape, you’ll see it was predestined who they wanted to pick out! And it’s like, police being who they are, they have so much power and authority to stop a lot of things. They have so much money, so many resources, that if they really wanted to stop situations...They have ongoing feuds with certain families, and instead of being more loving and more caring and checking up on these families and being a good authoritative role model, just showing love, showing care…Yes we still have people that commit murder, we still have people that rape, and in an ideal world we want people to be responsible and we want people to be held accountable for their wrongdoings. So in that

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

An interview with Cedric Russell, organizer with Direct Action for Rights and Equality

situation, I feel like they mistreated and took advantage of their power.

In the second incident, yes the kids had BB guns, they might have shot out of the car, and yes they did go on a car chase, but they did surrender. You’re not the judge, you’re not the jury, who are you to pull up on kids, pull them out after they’ve surrendered and beat them senselessly? You don’t do that to kids that go and shoot up schools. You find a way to nicely and assertively take them out and put them in handcuffs without getting punched on and beat on, so why do you take it upon yourselves to be so violent against our children?

So in an ideal world, just more peace, more loving, more consideration, you know? We still want to be firm, we still want to have structure, we still want discipline, but we want to be respectful of all people, right, wrong, or indifferent.

LP: One of the demands coming out of the action last Thursday was to defund the police.

Could you speak to the ways in which these actions are connected to the local defund movement? What’s the state of the defund movement in Providence right now?

CR: Defund the police, I don’t feel as though it’s as strong as it should be in our communities because there’s a false narrative in our communities that our police are flawless. And community members, mainly in the suburban areas, see the police as a safety blanket to vicious crimes and petty crimes and things that the people cannot control. And I feel that we need to have some type of control in our communities. I look at the police differently from a lot of people. Everybody don’t see what I see. Some people feel like we need them. I feel like we need to defund the police and put that money into us. We need the money, we’re the ones struggling, we’re the ones paying crazy taxes. The police, they get so much overtime, from police to COs [Correctional Officers], all the way around the board, these officials get taken care of while we gotta struggle just to make ends meet, whether we commit crimes or not. It’s like my mother, she worked three jobs and she went to school, and she was still struggling to pay rent. And she did what she was supposed to do! And it still wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough raising three kids, and I feel as though police get way too much, way too much.

LP: Another thing protestors are demanding is the repeal of the Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights (LEOBoR). How is that connected to these incidents?

CR: The thing about it is the police are an authority, they’re a huge authority in our society, and if they’re not getting any accountability for their actions, they are legal murderers. They’re legal murderers, legal robbers, legal molesters, they can really do anything without accountability. That’s not even human. We’re starting to treat the police like they’re not human beings that make mistakes. And that’s not true. The police are still human beings, they still have malice in their hearts—not all of them, but some of them. Even though I look at the police, all of them, as slave catchers. The majority of them that take that badge, we know what they stand for. I know what they stand for. And there needs to be some type of responsibility for the wrongdoings of human beings.

LP: I know that you’ve mentioned that you’re feeling disillusioned with the lack of response to these demands, and given that, what do you think the next steps are, both for these actions and the defund movement more broadly?

CR: The main thing that has to be addressed in our communities is poverty. Poverty is the main reason that things are the way they are. It’s the top reason why cops are mainly in our hoods doing what they do to us, because they know that crime makes money, and they know if they keep putting us in certain situations that we’re gonna have to pay.

You gotta understand, for example, this last year was COVID, right? And during COVID, lots of organizations and businesses lost money, right? Including the police, right? Because the police are a business, right? And they gotta make a quota, right? And the crazy thing is, their quota is that they got to lock up a certain number of people. It’s crazy, but that’s their business, and if they don’t meet that quota, that means they gotta go double time.

We gotta come up with something different. Because what this is is not conducive to what we need in our society. They’re taking our resources! I remember growing up as a child, there were rec centers and housing that got shut down, all to fund the police. And that’s a problem. These guys already have so many cars, free gas, so much for free. And then you still get to lock people up and take everything away from them. Do you know how much a person’s going to lose from being locked up? They’re gonna lose their house, they’re gonna lose their kids if they have kids, they’re gonna lose everything they have. And then when they get out, they’re gonna have to start all over, plus you’re gonna have a felony, depending on the crime you did, and it’s gonna be harder for you to start all over again, which is gonna put you in a position where you have to commit a crime again. It’s a revolving door, it’s a business, it’s not geared towards rehabilitating us as a whole. That’s what they tell us it’s supposed to do, but we know in all actuality, it’s a business. And if no one commits crime, they don’t get paid.

LP: Knowing that the fight against violent policing is ongoing and has a long history, what are the ways that you’re looking forward and keeping hope?

CR: I’m just organizing. I gotta find more like-minded people that want to organize, and want to see the same vision. I feel as though people are the answer to the problem. Once we can get the message out to everyone, we need everyone on board. We can’t do this with just one community, two communities, three communities. This has to be an everybody-on-board type of thing, because as we know, the police are the biggest gang in the country. This is a huge problem! And the way we can go about it is to organize and educate people a little bit more, and then we just keep moving, keep building, and keep educating, keep moving, keep building, keep educating, and then we just take the power. And then we reform, because they’re not gonna reform, they’re not gonna defund.

So we gotta take the power, and then we make the rules because that’s the only way it’s gonna happen. Truly.

METRO & LIT

Progressive Power is running behind them. Matt and Cynthia are running as part and parcel of the Co-op, a progressive electoral organization in Rhode Island that helps train, support, and elect candidates for office from across the state, mostly from underrepresented backgrounds. Jennifer Rourke, one of the founders of the Co-op and a candidate for State Senate against the current Senate Majority Leader, the conservative Democrat Michael McCaffrey, said in a press statement that “Next year, with 50 progressive candidates on the ballot, the people of Rhode Island will have an unprecedented opportunity to replace the corrupt establishment.” As Mendes mentioned in their campaign launch video, it was Matt who first asked her to run for State Senate over a cup of coffee in 2019.

Matt and Cynthia would never be able to act on the progressive policies they’re backing without the support of a movement behind them, and more specifically, progressive control of the RI State Senate and RI House of Representatives. The Brown / Mendes campaign is envisioning their state-wide movement as a way to support down-ballot allies while also ensuring the passage of their policies once they’re up at the State House. In 2020, the Co-op was a loose coalition of progressive candidates with a shared policy platform and training. In 2022, backed by the state-wide campaigns of Mendes and Brown, the cooperative looks to be positioning itself as a de facto political party in it’s own right, providing voters options for political leadership at more and more levels of state government.

And it’s clear there’s a hunger for this kind of new political leadership in the state—bottom-up activist movements concerning housing, climate change, and carceral justice have blos-

somed since 2020.

The absurd structure of Rhode Island state gvernment emphasizes why the Co-op approach to political power is the right one. Rhode Island has no line-item veto for the governor, meaning that most of the legislative and budgeting power resides in the hands of the State Senate and the State House of Representatives, and in particular, in the hands of the Speaker of the House and Senate President. The current Speaker of the House and Senate President in Rhode Island are long-time conservative Democrats who wouldn’t support progressive legislation, even with a progressive governor and lieutenant governor in office. For the project of the Co-op to succeed, all arms of the state government need to be taken over by progressives.

The entrance of Brown and Mendes into the gubernatorial race means a contested and crowded Democratic primary is expected next September. General Treasurer Seth Magaziner and Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea have already raised millions of dollars, and the sitting governor Dan McKee is planning to run for reelection as well.

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

In 2020, progressive candidates across Rhode Island won shocking upset victories against conservative Democrat incumbents. A litany of organizations backed the progressives, amongst them the Rhode Island Political Cooperative (Co-op), an electoral-focused organization that sought to train, support, and run first-time candidates for office across the Ocean State.

However, the progressives aren’t done making a dent in the conservative Democratic establishment that has run Rhode Island for decades as an ‘old boys club.’

On Wednesday, in a flashy announcement video, Matt Brown and Cynthia Mendes announced that they were running for Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Rhode Island in 2022. In doing so, they are plunging themselves into a wide-open race for governor that has already attracted millions of dollars in fundraising. Brown ran for governor as a progressive candidate in 2018 against Gina Raimondo, and lost with 34 percent of the vote in a three-way race.

Matt Brown is a former RI Secretary of State and one of the founders of the Co-op, while Mendes is a current State Senator who won an upset victory against a conservative Democrat in 2020. Both of them are running on a platform that calls for a Green New Deal for Rhode Island, affordable housing, raising the minimum wage, and a shift to a more progressive income tax system. In the campaign’s launch video, Brown and Mendes also said they would move to make Rhode Island the first net-zero carbon emissions state in the country.

But what’s important in Matt and Cynthia’s campaign isn’t so much the candidates and their platform but instead the larger movement that

TEXT PEDER SCHAEFER

Mendes and Brown announce their run

PEDER SCHAEFER B’22.5 is excited for the littlest state to make a big splash.

summer’s end TEXT MIKE FINK ILLUSTRATION CJ GAN VOLUME 43 ISSUE 2

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ANONYMOUS “SELF-TITLED” (GRAPHITE ON DRYWALL) X

DEAR INDY

This week, Indie dishes out some love advice to the not-so-hopeless romantics of Providence.

Luckily, she’s been in more than her fair share of situationships and is known to have once talked about reading The Ethical Slut. If you know of any struggling singles or conflicted couples in need of desperate help, Indie is available by email at dearindyemail@gmail.com or via anonymous Google Form available using the QR code at the bottom of the page. (Indie also strongly suggests that some of you check out a nearby SLAA meeting.)

Dear Hung Up, We all want what we can’t have. And we all obsess over things that are inexplicable and frustrating. I’m currently overly concerned with a guy 3,000 miles away who has recently gotten into making TikTok thirst traps and also just made a happy birthday post for his ex-girlfriend. :-) Unfortunately, it’s really hard to rationalize or reason your way out of thinking a lot about someone… and an additional layer of self-judgment only compounds the agony… so why not let yourself have a healthy, rationed amount of obsession, online stalking, witchcraft, and manifesting. Try to find a new obsession—maybe strengthen your own hobbies, throw yourself into school, or find another boo—and feel her quickly fade away into obscurity. Nothing is more satisfying than looking back a month down the line and wondering why on earth you cared about them so much. As someone who’s made it to the other side (and then back again), trust me: you’ll get over it. •

Dear Masshole, This fully depends on whether you are still trying to get back with or sleep with your ex. If the answer is yes, you should keep your ‘well actually’s’ about suburban/urban splits to yourself since nothing is a bigger turnoff than being corrected. Otherwise, feel free to keep up the girlbossgaslight-gatekeeping of Boston proper. •

Dear Girlie, Men make money so they can spend it on girls’ dinner. <3 DESIGN GALA PRUDENT

Don’t bring your wallet. •

Love,

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THE BULLETIN Upcoming Actions Action from STOP: Hello to the readers of the Indy. This is a message from the Stop Torture in Our Prisons (STOP) coalition of Rhode Island. We’re a group of advocates and directly impacted people in Rhode Island that are fighting to end the long term use of solitary confinement in Rhode Island’s prisons. Solitary confinement is torture—in Rhode Island, people can be left alone in a cell for months and sometimes years. This cruel punishment takes a serious toll on incarcerated peoples’ mental and physical health, and has proven to vastly increase violence inside prisons. STOP’s primary goals are to end the use of solitary confinement and to shut down the High Security Center (Rhode Island’s Supermax prison), where about 85 people are currently held in indefinite solitary confinement.

We need folks to sign up for a door-knocking campaign happening in Barrington on October 2nd, time TBD. There, we’ll be asking Senator Cynthia Coyne’s constituents to call her and ask her to co-sponsor the Restrictive Housing Act—a piece of legislation that limits the use of solitary confinement in RI—and make sure it gets out of committee this spring. If you have any questions please call (401) 536-0744 or email jascencao@ opendoorsri.org.

From DARE: “Incarcerated people at the ACI have been placed on lockdown in order to accommodate National Correctional Officers Week celebrations. This means they are being denied the little time they have outside cells to shower, exercise, make phone calls and access the outdoors. They are also still being subject to COVID restrictions around visitations as well.

Hundreds are on hunger strike in response.”

The lockdowns are to accommodate a day-long cookout on Mulligan’s island where COs will enjoy golf, volleyball and other activities. The food for the cookout has been prepared by people incarcerated at the ACI. Another lockdown is for ‘Family Night,’ where families of officers will be allowed to tour the facilities—including peoples’ cells and living spaces—at a time when incarcerated people are already facing restrictions because of the risks of the COVID Delta variant.

Accounts to follow to keep up with community actions & efforts @dare.pvd @amornetwork @tenantnetworkri @wegrasptheroot @railroadpvd @abolishpvd @closehighside @blackandpinkpvd @harm_reduxx_pvd @qtma.pvd @coyote.ri

A Solidarity Demo & Car Rally will take place on Thursday night to protest the ‘Family Night celebrations.’

You can take action by calling Director of the RI Department of Corrections Patricia Coyne-Fague at (401)-462-2611 and demanding an end to the lockdown.

TEXT LILY PICKETT

DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

ILLUSTRATOR VALERIE NAVARRETE

Check us out at closehighside.com.

Upcoming Community Events Food Trucks, Coffee, and Canvass for Geena Pham: Co-op & Sunrise RI & BLM RI PAC Saturday, September 25 @ 11AM Join co-op members, volunteers, organizers, and friends for canvassing, free coffee, and free food! Get coffee and canvass in the morning and then enjoy lunch, or come for lunch and canvass in the afternoon. Sign up at https://tinyurl.com/3fvvr4r5 Location: 210 Ives St, Providence, RI 02906 “The Circus” Movie Night with Evan and Alex of Providence Leftist Radio (PLR) Podcast Saturday, September 25 @ 6-8:30 PM “The Circus” (1936) was an Anti-fascist Soviet classic. Join Evan and Alex of PLR podcast for a big screen showing of the film (with subtitles). They will begin with a 5 minute lecture by Alex on the historical context, then watch the film. Evan will lead discussion. Popcorn and snacks provided, BYOB. Location: Red Ink Community Library, 130 Cypress St, Providence, RI 02906 Ocean $tate Ass Fundraiser Friday, October 1 from 7 PM-midnight Wine, music, hot cool merch, hot babes, lots of fun! O$A is a local, sex-worker led organization—all money raised will go towards supporting their mutual aid funds and organizing efforts.

Location: Fortnight PVD, 187 Mathewson St.

Mutual aid* & community fundraisers *Mutual aid is “survival pending on revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers.

Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to a system of institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.

Community Cares: Sponsor a Family for the Holidays (by DARE) Fill out Google Form to sponsor a family for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas https://bit.ly/DareCC COYOTE RI Closet (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics RI) Now accepting donations of hygiene products and new and used clothing at the Love and Compassion Day Health Center; 92 East Avenue, Pawtucket RI, 02904. Contact Sheila Brown (401) 548-3756 to donate or collect items.

PVD Student Union’s Well-Being Fund (by Providence Student Union) Venmo or Cash App @pvdstudentunion Through this fund, Providence public high school students are able to apply for financial support to buy anything from school supplies to laptops.

Providence Community Fridge Location: 640 Broad Street Take what you need, leave what you can. Bring food and other household needs to keep the community fridge and shelves stocked! Or, donate to PVD Community Fridge’s GoFundMe, linked below, to help offset costs of acquiring a fridge and keeping it stocked. Stop by if you’re in need of groceries or household items! https://gofund.me/7ef40d4a