The College Hill Independent — Vol 48 Issue 5

03.22

Hannah-Rose Albinus

Ben Flaumenhaft & Ilan Brusso

Maya Avelino 06

Charlie Medeiros 07

Angela Qian 08

Nan/Jack Dickerson, Joseph O’Brien & Izzy Roth-Dishy

Sam Stewart

Corinne Leong, Bani Neferkara, Jane Wang, Emily Tom, Plum Luard, Caleb Stutman-Shaw, Luca Suarez & Kolya Shields 18

Olivia Santos-Breslin 19

Solveig Asplund

Emilie Guan & RL Wheeler

“MADAME VICE PRESIDENT: Everything is in context.

My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ (Laughs.)

You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

(MAY 10, 2023, Remarks by Vice President Harris at Swearing-In Ceremony of Commissioners for the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics)

- AKA

Masthead

MANAGING EDITORS

Angela Lian

Arman Deendar

Kolya Shields

WEEK IN REVIEW

Cecilia Barron

Yoni Weil

ARTS

George Nickoll

Linnea Hult

EPHEMERA

Colin Orihuela

Quinn Erickson

FEATURES

Luca Suarez

Paulina Gąsiorowska

Plum Luard

LITERARY

Jane Wang

Madeline Canfield

METRO

Ashton Higgins

Keelin Gaughan

Sofia Barnett

SCIENCE + TECH

Christina Peng

Daniel Zheng

Jolie Barnard

WORLD

James Langan

Tanvi Anand

X

Claire Chasse

Joshua Koolik

Lola Simon

DEAR INDY

Solveig Asplund

SCHEMA

Lucas Galarza

Sam Stewart

BULLETIN BOARD

Emilie Guan

RL Wheeler

DEVELOPMENT TEAM

Audrey He

Avery Liu

Yunan (Olivia) He

DESIGN EDITORS

Andrew Liu

Ollantay Avila

Ash Ma

COVER COORDINATORS

Julia Cheng

Sylvie Bartusek

STAFF WRITERS

Abani Neferkara

Aboud Ashhab

Angela Qian

Caleb Stutman-Shaw

Charlie Medeiros

Charlinda Banks

Corinne Leong

Coby Mulliken

David Felipe

Emily Mansfield

Emily Vesper

Gabrielle Yuan

Jenny Hu

Kalie Minor

Kayla Morrison

Lucia Kan-Sperling

Maya Avelino

Martina Herman

Nadia Mazonson

Nan/Jack Dickerson

Naomi Nesmith

Nora Mathews

Riley Gramley

Riyana Srihari

Saraphina Forman

Yunan (Olivia) He

COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS

Anji Friedbauer

Audrey He

Avery Liu

Ayla Tosun

Becca Martin-Welp

Ilan Brusso

Lila Rosen

Naile Ozpolat

Samantha Ho

Yuna Shprecher

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Eurie Seo

Jolie Barnard

Nat Mitchell

Yuna Shprecher

FINANCIAL COORDINATOR

Simon Yang

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS

Izzy Roth-Dishy

Julia Cheng

DESIGNERS

Anahis Luna

Eiffel Sunga

Jolin Chen

Kay Kim

Minah Kim

Nada (Neat) Rodanant

Nor Wu

Rachel Shin

Riley Cruzcosa

Ritvik Bhadury

Sejal Gupta

Simon Yang

Tanya Qu

Yuexiao Yang

Zoe Rudolph-Larrea

Lucy Pham

ILLUSTRATORS

Abby Berwick

Aidan Choi

Alena Zhang

Angela Xu

Anna Fischler

Avery Li

Catie Witherwax

Cindy Liu

Ellie Lin

Greer Nakadegawa-Lee

Luca Suarez

Luna Tobar

Meri Sanders

Mingjia Li

Muzi Xu

Nan/Jack Dickerson

Jessica Ruan

Julianne Ho

Ren Long

Ru Kachko

Sofia Schreiber

Sylvie Bartusek

COPY CHIEF

Ben Flaumenhaft

WEB DESIGNERS

Eleanor Park

Lucy Pham

Mai-Anh Nguyen

Na Nguyen

SENIOR EDITORS

Angela Qian

Corinne Leong

Charlie Medeiros

Isaac McKenna

Jane Wang

Lily Seltz

Lucia Kan-Sperling

*Our Beloved Staff

MISSION STATEMENT

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, anti-capitalist, 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 Mean Girls

c Mean Girls Sex Week. Sex Girls–Mean Week. Weak Sex, Girls Mean :( . Mean Sex? Girls Week! We’ve been sipping pink drinks from our tiny baby yummy Owala™ water bottles and putting our admittedly oblong heads together for hours now trying to make sense of last week’s SHAG fuck-a-thon… hmm… hmm… Ok, we just decided: we. LOVE. it. Mean Girls Sex Week™ painted the campus pink and littered it with cherry-flavored condoms, which as gay men we have no choice but to LOVE. So, yes, to all you sex-positive diva gremlins! We’re gonna do that thing, that dirty, messy, sweaty, ugly, perfect, dirty, dirty, bad, bad, bad, naughty, bad thing. Damn it, we’re gonna talk about sex!

Specifically, a binary of sexful and sexlesness. SHAG already covered just about all of the, um, mechanics, so we are gonna embrace our identity as RADICAL THINKERS and chart the more ~metaphysical~ realm of sex. In the next 68,410 words, we will wade through an abstraction and distillation of sex, reaching deep into the recesses of our tiny baby yummy minds, bringing forth a trove of examples. Examples that can only attempt to arch toward the real, toward the infinity that is the sexful/sexless binary.

Let us begin with definitions:

Sex-ful: Freedom and fluidity; the gyrations, the abandon, the whim. It has little to do with sex.

Sex-less: An ineffable, in-f-able quality, perhaps sterile, maybe even hollow.

We continue with examples:

Blue Room (sexful) vs. Underground (sexless)

Choosing a milk is as political a decision as any, and it isn’t made easier when the hot Underground barista is wearing cowboy boots that obfuscate their political values. Oat milk is sexless, bad for culture, yet good for the earth. Regular milk is retro, natural, sexful, and at this point subversive. But also it can leave cows sore.

What we have come to realize is subversiveness and coolness do not always overlap… in fact, shouldn’t they be opposites? The most subversive person at Brown is not the denim-clad snatched pussy willow, it’s actually the chick (gender neutral) in a pilling hoodie with sausage B.O. So while the Underground is in fact subterranean, it is actually a die-hard Blue Roomer who is more subversive. With that in mind, Underground = sexless and Blue room = sexful.

LGBT™ (sexless) vs LGBTQIA+ (sexful)

I just got around to watching the Ziwe George Santos interview. George Santos doesn’t know who Marsha P. Johnson is. Actually, I don’t feel like talking about George Santos. A lot of people will say that putting it all out there is dangerous, but maybe it’s kind of awesome, cool, and even flirty. LGBTQIA is putting it all out there: sexful. LGBT™ seems to be holding back: sexless.

BDH (sexful?) vs Indy (sexless?)

There’s this fun activity called trolling for sex where you scroll through the BDH op-eds and find delightfully lackluster takes you didn’t know needed to be etched into the annals of our dear University’s most-storied paper. Two party system is bad! Feminism has more to go! Climate change is less than ideal! It’s strange but true that sex is often found in the banalest of places. Like a passably hot straight man with curly brown hair and tasteful tan Vans typing away in the Barus and Holley Cafe. Actually kind of sexful… think about it.

Then there’s the Indy. Us! But honestly not us. We are mere bottom-ofthe-food-chain copy-editors whose voice has been momentarily lifted and likely never will be again. One and done, bitches! We love the Indy and everything it stands for but we do not read it because we do not understand the Internet and holding a newspaper is so deeply sexless (unless you’re naked and smoking). Also, a lot of people here are kinda… awkward? Hmmm, not really sure about this one. Next!

Peninsulas (sexless) vs Volcanoes (sexful)

We are mature here at Week in Review, and the fact that peninsula without the second N is penisula will not influence our chaste and methodical examination of its value as a sexual object, nor will its phallic shape. Sorry eight-year-olds!

Peninsulas are, in fact, sexless mostly because they do nothing. Like name a thing that a peninsula has done. Exactly. But then think about Pompeii. WOW. Engorging lava exploding out of you and then laying waste to an entire civilization is a perfect metaphor for every gay boy’s first New Year’s peck. A decidedly sexful event.

Democrat (sexless) vs Republican (sexful)

When someone refers to themselves as a nice guy, that is the first warning to check their basement and unshackle each and every tortured barn animal imprisoned within. In the same exact sense with no nuance or difference (not even a trace), a registered Democrat is going to be bad at sex. They’ll ask and try to, um, make the experience enjoyable for you, but it’ll be sad more than anything else. Trust me I WISH this wasn’t the way of the world.

Republicans, on the other hand, are paragons of masculinity. They should be exalted and extolled. They still speak the one true universal language of nature: violence. A person who cannot physically dominate you has no damn right telling you what to do, as the Bible quote goes. Oh and by the way, there are only two gen- ... GUYS! GUYS! I’m so sorry, Camille Paglia just stole my laptop midway through this entry. My bad. Please ignore everything written above. W;OEHG;OIQ Jooegjdfjhjf. Sorry she got to it again!!

Biden (sexless) vs. Trump™ (sexful)

Biden. B is for b∞bies. I is for (the) ick. D is for dementia. E is for equality. N is for no-show socks. SOOO sexless sry!!

Trump™. T is for testosterone. RUMP as in butt. Sexful lol.

Improv (sexful) vs. A capella (sexless)

We do a capella, of course we’re on vocal rest. We do a capella, of course we’re all gay. We do a capella, of course it’s all about sex. Sex on stage, sex in rehearsal rooms, sex while fighting over which group gets to use the fancy new rehearsal room in the fancy new performing arts center, sex while harmonizing, sex while touring the American Mid-South. Sex while driving to get kombucha with your partner. Sex while going down the aisles and finding they discontinued your favorite brand. Sex while driving back home, dejected. Sex while your partner retreats into themselves, losing faith and will. Sex while your partner packs up, this time forever. Sex while you’re alone in your apartment, scrolling through instagram. Sex while you find out your partner has fallen in love again. Sex while you shovel cupcakes into the partner-shaped space aching in your broken soul. Sex while you experiment with Satanism. Sex where you are become Death Destroyer of Worlds. Sex while you take over the universe. Sex while holding your partner in a cute little cage you got for $19.99 at Costco. Sex while you catch your reflection in a mirror. Sex while you’re unsure of what you’ve become and who you are, but sex while the intergalactic court is coming for you, and sex while the only way forward is to double down. Sex while you press the button to destroy any trace of life in the universe. Sex on your futon, sex in your childhood bed. Like, a capella is just all sex, and therefore it’s entirely sexless. Improv is improvisational, so, yeah, it’s sexful.

Welp! That’s all the time we have! Tune in next week for detailed fan fiction starring your mother and every past, present, and future member of SHAG. Hubba hubba!

BEN FLAUMENHAFT B’27 and ILAN BRUSSO B’27 were married in an intimate reception, with tasteful decor and a live band.

Trevor, My Love

Critique of a Black Comedian

FEATS

( TEXT MAYA AVELINO DESIGN EIFFEL SUNGA ILLUSTRATION LUNA TOBAR )

c I first discovered stand-up comedian Trevor Noah in a high school English class. Our teacher was a fan and made us tweet at Mr. Noah daily to ask him to come to our school during our unit on his memoir, Born a Crime, which details Trevor Noah’s life as a Coloured boy growing up under Apartheid in South Africa. He writes about how his Black mother would walk behind his white father and pretend to be his maid in public. The book is funny, earnest, and reflective—all the qualities necessary in a good husband, I decided.

From there, our whirlwind romance began.

I watched him on The Daily Show every day. I streamed his Netflix specials. I even have a small framed picture of him that was gifted to me by a friend.

It’s not that I find him particularly funny—just compelling. He’s made of Jon Stewart stock and evangelizes to the liberal post-30s crowd. In fact, when I saw him perform live, I was the only person in the building who wasn’t alive for the fall of Yugoslavia.

When I found out his tour was coming near me, I got so excited I called my mom at work. I waited for the operator to put me through to her desk. She was nervous, concerned something was wrong.

I drew a shaky breath and said, “He’s coming. Trevor Noah is coming.”

She sighed. “How much are tickets?”

+++

I took the three-hour-long journey from Long Island to the show in Newark, New Jersey. Each of his shows has region-specific jokes, and I spent the train ride imagining what he could come up with for the New York metropolitan area. I approached the show the way teen girls treated One Direction concerts, channeling all the delusion I could muster to imagine him spotting me seated in CEN ORC ROW D.

As the rest of the audience and I settled into our seats and waited for the lights to dim, I felt calm wash over me like a fine mist. Part of Trevor’s appeal is that he invites ease. He does accents and impressions and you never worry if they’re offensive. He speaks with a confidence and moral high ground that disengages any predisposition to critique. He positions himself as a worldly, culturally competent traveler that is laughing with you, not at you.

Being the world’s foremost Trevor Noah scholar, I find the way he speaks worthy of further scholarship and indicative of larger ideological underpinnings. His audience is largely American, and he tailors his content for them in a way that, if I were a less generous critic, I would call disingenuous. He leans into stereotypes and misconceptions about Africa and then mixes them up with progressive messaging that galvanizes his Millennial and Gen X audience without forcing them to think critically.

In his 2017 Netflix special, Afraid of the Dark (my second favorite of his specials), he tells a joke about his first time visiting New York. He begins by detailing how shocked he was by how much trust Americans held in stoplights. When the light turned red, they would confidently charge into the streets without concern that someone would run the light and hit them.

He says in awe, “We have traffic lights in Africa, but we don’t USE them!”

Over the course of the day, while traveling in the same direction as a white

man, he learned this same confidence, stepping into the street without looking both ways.

Rounding off the bit, he proclaims, “I learned that you can do anything when you have the white man on your side!”

(Trevor, this bit is funny. It’s earnest. But it’s also uncharitable and NOT what I expect from you. But don’t worry. I can fix you.)

He speaks of “Africa.” Not South Africa, or even the township he’s from, but Africa as a whole.

He knows Africa is not a monolith and it’s clear he’s pandering to his audience by self-exoticizing. As much as Trevor Noah builds his persona around being a South African comic with jokes about trying American foods for the first time and experiencing awkward cultural translations (“Napkin means something entirely different over there!”), he does so with a vocabulary of lack.

In the imaginary he impresses on his viewers, Africa is a curiosity. A monolith where everything is upside down and backward, which Trevor Noah was lucky enough to escape from and gracious enough to tell the tale of. The physical reality of the streetlight is not enough. Africa’s modernization might never be complete. This alienation reminds me of the discussion of the distinction between man and animal in Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason:

For, if we follow a certain tradition of Western metaphysics, the Black Man is a ‘man’ who is not really one of us, or at least not like us. Man distinguishes himself from animality, but this is not the case for the Black Man, who maintains within himself, albeit with a certain degree of ambiguity, animal possibility.

The lawless Africa that Trevor depicts is one that lives between a place of man and animal sprawl. Africa has all the technology it needs but is still unable to achieve civilization. Africans can travel the world and bring back all the technology they find, and they will still not be able to rise above their station. It is not a dearth of access or opportunity, but an innate quality that

plagues Africans. Any failure is due to an intrinsic inability to succeed.

In this way he reproduces the very oppression he wishes to highlight. By speaking with a vocabulary of lack and underscoring what he perceives as defi cient, he deigns himself One of the Good Ones, one who came to America, was reformed, and now knows better. His critiques are purely cultural and lack any understanding of intentional underdevelopment in Africa by colonial forces.

In the 2013 special, South Africa, Trevor details his recent trip to Zambia. Looking incredi bly young and spry, he pitches the audience a few softballs poking fun at Zambian names. Then, he gets to the good stuff—Zambian escalators.

His tour guide recommended a trip to the mall to ride the escalator:

“I thought he was messing with me until I found out that people in Zambia go to the mall just to ride the escalators.”

“When we were in Zambia there were only five public escalators. Five, in the whole country.”

Incredulous, he says, “The mall is empty... The escalators are PACKED!”

There were guys picking up women: “I am going to take you to the escalator, girl.”

“Oh, you are so fancy, eh?”

Again, here he is laughing with and not at. But how can you laugh with someone who is not telling a joke?

In contrast to the stoplight bit, here Trevor conveys that Zambians have the technology everyone else has and use it properly but still manage to pervert it. Their unsophistication is the crux of the joke and reproduces othering and exotifying notions.

Mbembe writes of this phenomenon:

“In this view Africa as such—and we should add the Black Man—exists only on the basis of a text that constructs it as the fiction of the Other. The text subsequently acquires such structuring power that the self, seeking to speak in its own authentic voice, runs the risk of speaking only in accordance with a pre-constituted discourse that masks, censures, or requires imitation.”

Trevor, in his efforts to speak openly and without censure as an African comedian, traps himself. In this way his content is reductive (I say this with his face as my lockscreen) and uses negrophobic and alienating tropes. Zambians are flattened into quirky cultural objects. Not once does he consider why the first escalators were only built in 2013. Not once does he consider the lasting impact of intentional underdevelopment and exploitation by, for one, the British Empire.

I say all of this not to tear my husband down, but to build him up. People always say if you love someone, set them free. Trevor, what we have is a tale for the ages, and I wouldn’t spoil it by pretending you don’t have room to grow. I can read you postcolonial theory until you fall asleep after a long day of hosting the Grammys.

MAYA AVELINO ’24 is learning how to say “I love you” in Xhosa.

Overheard: Leo Steinberg on Kazuo Shiraga’s Work II

c Leo Steinberg was an American art critic working in postwar New York. Here, I imagine his encounter with a gallery exhibition featuring a collection of Gutai art, a Japanese avant-garde art movement founded in 1954. Known for a range of experimental forms, combining painting with performance, installation, and conceptual artworks, Gutai art quickly reached international audiences and would have been shown at the same time as Abstract Expressionist paintings. I’ve also staged Pollock next to Shiraga at this imaginary exhibition. Leo has stopped in front of Kazuo Shiraga’s painting Work II. Let’s go there together… we can eavesdrop… I wonder what Leo will have to say…

…I want to make clear that the key is not the literal placement of a piece, but its psychological mode of address Pollock’s drips are still ‘nature paintings’ in the sense that they cannot escape being read as depictions of the world. Around 1950, with Robert Rauschenberg, a shift of great magnitude occurred. Although his paintings can be, and are, hung vertically, these pictures represent accumulative data, “opaque flatbed horizontals,” rather than vertical fields of vision. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this shift: a radical shift from vertical to horizontal, given to produced, nature to culture. The map, or blueprint, or flatbed picture plane, represents a “receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed—whether coherently or in confusion.” The painted surface is no longer the analog of a visual experience of nature but rather of operational processes. Indeed, the shift declares that art ought to move away from glimpsing the world and toward the accumulation of information. This is how we let the world in again, our city-world. We go away from image and toward image of image, and again toward undoing, ambivalence, ambiguity, and miasma. We search for something that one recognizes and yet can’t see—in short, we abandon the optical event for matrices of information. The innovation of the picture plane is to make the course of art non-linear and unpredictable, finally again open and free. This is a change in the very relationship between artist and image, image and viewer. Yet this shakeup is a symptom of a still more profound shift, deepening the inroads of art into non-art, defecting art into strange, ‘impure’ territories, leaving nature behind…

…I have previously suggested that Pollock’s paintings fail to make the step forward in artistic innovation which Rauschenberg has accomplished, but I’m

glad to see these galleries broadening the geography of their offerings. Instantly, Kazuo Shiraga’s Work II caught my attention I was helpless to respond to its scale, and its great sense of movement. Shiraga’s traces of brushwork—in this case, bodywork, or more specifically, footwork—are clearly seen in the thick, black lines exploding from the center of the picture. Some are streaky and some are ridged; others curl in on themselves or rush around the

perimeter of the central form. The variable textures suggest a certain quality of movement, a swiftness or spontaneity of action: Shiraga makes no effort to hide his process nor the materiality of the paint. One can sense the pressure and speed with which he creates this line or that line, and can easily trace the movement of the stroke. The picture’s muted base underlies a series of explosive red layers, each with increasing boldness of tone—here I couldn’t help but read a kind of accumulative act. I would like to respond to Shiraga’s work here, as well as a topic I have recently taken much interest in for both its distance from my theory-making and its connective nodes: Gutai art as a movement…

Certainly, it’s not difficult to imagine why

( TEXT ANGELA QIAN DESIGN NOR WU ILLUSTRATION ANNA FISCHLER )

Shiraga’s painting has been staged with Pollock: their common emphases on materiality; process; individual, subjective expressiveness; and the unconscious are striking. But when one examines the two movements, it becomes clear that their relationship to each other, as well as to my theory of horizontality, is more fraught than it appears. Although the movement certainly borrows language from the Abstract Expressionists, it responds principally to its own political context. Indeed, the investment of Gutai artists in creative freedom in the face of totalitarianism to me is striking. This fact might seem self-evident, but joint exhibitions such as this one staged by curators overeager to cultivate visions of ‘happy globalism’ in the wake of the war run the great risk of conflating the two styles…

…I have classed Pollock’s drip paintings as essentially vertical in address. They cannot escape being read as thickets. Shiraga’s painting, too, acts reluctantly as a window rather than a matrix of information. It still addresses itself as sense data to be collected uprightly; there is no intentional accumulation of information as I have detailed in my recent essay. However, there are certainly connections to be made…

…To Gutai artists, the union between spirit and body and the distaste for “falsifying the material” manifests in a move against illusion. Although my essay by and large neglects mention of the material, I, too, argue for a move in this direction, which is away from art as a glimpse of the world. I fail to place as much an emphasis on material as the Gutai; my flatbed picture plane cares less about materiality than accumulation Gutai art emphasizes the irreducible, the material, the truthful; the urban landscape, which must loom larger than any other landscape, is the ultimate devaluation of this ideal. The emphasis on process and giving in to medium, while not unimportant, are less important to me than the great shift away from the optical event…

…The unifying key here, I think, is the emphasis on psychoanalytic principle. Rauschenberg, whose work I consider emblematic of the shift from nature to culture, and who stands as a counterpoint to both Shiraga and Pollock, suggests a vision of the mind as a mess of information and its detritus, a “consciousness immersed in the brain of the city.” The painting, which is a representation of the mind, must become a projection screen, a blank accumulative space onto which conscious thought and repressed, libidinal impulse may exist in equal measure. Work II also pays its dues to the unconscious. Its use of body as material, a technique which loosens control of conscious will, attempts a purer and unmediated expression. I recognize that the two movements perhaps share their origins in the same gesture. I hope it is now clear that despite the marked differences between my theory of the flatbed picture plane and the foundational philosophy of Gutai art, I respect the commitment of Gutai to discovering a yet-undiscovered world. This ambition, to me, seems correct in scope. We are reaching for nothing other than the creation of the world, which lies in its representation…

ANGELA QIAN B’24 https://www.you-

tube.com/watch?v=iDLmYZ5HqgM

Non-Digital Bytes

c These days, when we hear “technology,” we think “digital.” But science and technology are, of course, concepts that far preceded the advent of the digital, and that continue to exceed the boundaries of digitality. This week, S+T asked our intrepid writers to send us their reflections, musings, and lamentations about the nondigital. Here’s what they came up with.

1

Non-digital snail compass technologies can help you communicate with your made-up long-distance escargoic friend:

c In October of 1850, Jacques-Toussaint Benoît introduced a device intended to communicate across the Atlantic Ocean using the telepathic abilities of snails. A limited record of the device and Benoît’s comments on it was published in the same month by a French journalist named Jules Allix. Sabine BaringGould’s translation of this interview is the closest English record of the event, published in his 1889 book: Historic Oddities and Strange Events. A year later, Charles Dickens cited this book as an accurate description in his own account of the machine, though a review of Historic Oddities from 1889 notes the book’s petty errors in proper names and possibly misspelled nouns.

(

TEXT NAN/JACK DICKERSON, JOSEPH O’BRIEN & IZZY ROTH-DISHY DESIGN MINAH KIM ILLUSTRATION SITONG LIU )

had an unembodied American in his telegraph, I’ve got about a million in my phone. Drawbacks considered, I think cellphones are pretty neat, and I’m glad I don’t have to glue snails to anything to call my mom.

NAN/JACK DICKERSON B‘26 hasn’t been responding to text messages.

2

Blend Your Thoughts into Smoothie

c Dear Mother/Nolan,

Allix’s interview was initially published in the journal La Presse, and gives a sketch of the invention’s components. It notes that once two snails have come into “affinity” with each other, they have an enduring sympathetic connection and are able to use the Earth as a conductor for communication. To quote Baring-Gould quoting Allix, the snail system is driven by a wholly new “galvano-terrestrial-magnetic-animal and adamic force,” a compound noun that Baring-Gould translates, but declines to explain or define. Indeed, an explanation may be impossible for those who are not in communion with snail forces. This is to say that I also don’t know what that hyphen-salad of a phrase means.

The snail communication system requires a whole mess of fluids but the “sympathetic escargoic fluid” is the driving component, for anyone keeping score at home. The snail telegraph, referred to more fully as the Pasilalinic Sympathetic Compass, is made of a wooden box that contains a rearranged battery rotating around an iron axis, and circular channels of zinc. Linen soaked in a solution of sulfate copper is riveted to the bottom of these troughs. Finally, a matrix of live snails are glued at intervals in the midst of the chemical cocktail in the zinc channels, and a spring is deployed to record their movements in the rotation of the battery. Letters are fixed around this spinning plate. This process is duplicate for each sympathetic snail pair, so that one can dial a letter to be communicated to another compass with these escargoic forces. The whole contraption is held up on a scaffolding of ten-foot-long beams.

Benoît insisted that he could communicate from his snail-telegraph in Paris to one built in America. One of these devices was in the hands of Benoît’s partner in revelation, one American “Biat-Chrétien.” Benoît claimed that he and Biat invented the device simultaneously. Clearly, there was a strong sympathetic neurological connection between these two

I begin with my friendly friend’s recommendation to write this as if I was writing to my mother. I found help in seeing you right in front of me, you who could provide sound honest feedback and yet also so that I could take your motherly hand as I walk you through a park of unfamiliar metrics. great men. Both Baring-Gould and Dickens agree that Benoît’s co-inventor simply did not exist. BaringGould says of Biat: “There was no such man,” he was “a hallucination or creation of the fancy of M. Benoît.” This makes sense to me. If you’ve invented a communication device but you’ve got no one to talk to, you might as well invent an interlocutor. Is the cure to male loneliness simply hallucinating some new friends? Benoît allegedly was able to stay in communication with Biat by snail-telegraph; when Biat moved a snail in America, its Parisian fellow would record the movement, and the correct letter would be indicated. Benoît conducted a demonstration of another pair of these compasses at two opposite ends of a room, having the La Presse journalist Allix manipulate one wheel so Benoît could receive the message on the other. Allix claims he was able to send (misspelled) words with some success to Benoît. When a spectator wanted to then see the wheel record missives from America, the incomplete and halting motion of Paris-based snails wasn’t enough to convince a highly skeptical crowd that letters were being sympathetically sent by the “mythical Biat.” Benoît promised a more public demonstration, but neither he nor any fresh proofs ever materialized.

Wasn’t Benoît on to something, though? Well, no. Even his contemporaries immediately recognized the whole production as a sham. Even so, I hold out hope for possible secret snail-forces. The modern snail is still as compelling as his nineteenth-century counterpart. Do they have sympathetic community connections? Do they know about situationships? How do they experience time? Since 1850, humans have invented a myriad of digital ways to communicate (most of them more practical than the Pasilalinic Sympathetic Compass), but what has changed for the snail? I don’t know anything about snail-consciousness. The very exercise reminds me of the immutable distance between any two subjects, the differences in perception and understanding that force us to intercommunicate in the first place. This distance is the common ground and the perpetual foil of connection. I can’t talk with a snail, sure, but can I even really talk with other people? I’m still looking into it. If Benoît

Thinking about networks, entanglements, companions, symbiosis, and other accurate philosophical concepts can be so tiring! I just want to sit on the beach and drink smoothie. Life today can seem a bit sad, complex, and snotty, maybe mostly due to the digital blah that permeates everything. Yes, we live in interdependent networked ecologies, but don’t you get a little queasy in the stomach sometimes when you think about how decisively unplayfully we are told this? Techno-science is great at digesting interdependence and equally apt at self-diagnosing its own terminal illness. It might be worth looking at some ways to think a bit more smoothie—fresh and lovely—about the heavy sweaty weight of digital networked life that could be thought alternatively and less decisively.

Alexander Galloway, the media theorist, links philosophy to the digital (yes this will be way broad) in Laruelle: Against the Digital:

“The crux of the matter is that philosophy is rooted in distinction… [and] digitally entails a basic distinction, whether zeros and ones or some other set of discrete units.”

Galloway’s digital discussion doesn’t spend much time thinking about the usual computers, chips, and codes; instead, he treats digitality as a concept to rethink the basic terms of digital inquiries.

In his collision with non-philosopher François Laruelle, Galloway finds a way to think a bit more smoothie about digitality by bringing the convo

way back to those decisive authoritative my-dad-issmarter-than-yours postures many of us are taught at a young age. This throwback causes Galloway to read Laruelle as a profoundly non-digital thinker in his ability to think non-representationally.

A few quick and incomplete notes to clarify Galloway’s argument: (1) “non-” is not a rejection but a mutation of philosophy akin to the “non-” in “non-euclidean geometry,” in that Laruelle observes what standard philosophy can and cannot do, (2) philosophy’s blind-spot is its decision to reflect on the Real or One, (3) the One is foreclosed to thought, (4) non-philosophy simply withdraws from the philosophical decision that endorses “the position that anything and everything [the One] is a candidate for philosophical reflection.” What is the One? It’s a bit of a touchy subject for those introducing Laruelle, but it can be non-thought as that which is indistinguished.

Considering these grand claims, Laruelle would be first to admit that this is not the next all-encompassing theory: quite the opposite, he wants to see what an un-authoritative (non-) philosophy can do. If he’s not interested in explaining anything, then what does Laruelle offer us?

Laruelle gives us an odd, very present thought: John Ó Maoilearca writes,

“What Laruelle offers us instead is a new way to experience philosophy: neither as the right nor wrong representation of reality… but as a material, immanent part of it.”

Rather than positing “heterogeneity or difference,” Galloway observes that Laruelle’s non-philosophical method suggests a “unilateral relation” that might sit funny next to “today’s hegemony of multilateral ecologies of difference”—but might cause you to look up from pages to consider the layers of awkwardly fitted authoritarian postures stuffed into you from, at least, the schools of grades.

At the end of the book, Galloway answers your question about how this has anything to do with the digital: “The goal was to show that the [digital] question has never adequately been posed. The digital is a precondition of contemporary life, but, more important, is a precondition of the standard [philosophical] model as a whole.” In as-easy-asfalling-off-a-log words, Galloway wants to talk about the digital decision to split one into two, and then distinguish between the two, as if they did not come from one, and then think about how there was never two in the first place, there was simply just “one”!

You might find this off-putting or refreshing! I think this non-philosophical smoothie is pretty good on a fresh-air beach. You might just find that it lets you notice something new when you’re not under the pressure of tracking digital networks and keeping up with what artificially distinguishing machines learned overnight.

SUPER COOL 3D PRINTED RIGID HEDDLE LOOM TUT BELOW

c 1. CHOOSING A MODEL—There are around seven different models of rigid heddle looms available for free download on thingiverse.com, a site for finding 3D models. Last October, I chose to use one uploaded by user “ProgressTH.” This was an error on my part. After assembling the project based on the sketchup model provided, I could not get the gears to turn, and I went off to winter break defeated. I returned to the site once more in January feeling an immense absence left by my project that could have been. I discovered that one of the oldest rigid heddle loom models on the site (from 2011) happens to have been designed by a math teacher from my middle school, Mr. Paranya (he was known as the STEAM guy back in 2011 when this seemed to be the hot new thing in all-girls school pedagogy). This was surely a sign for me to try again.

2. FINDING A GUIDE—Having decided to start anew, I found guiding light in the form of a YouTube channel that goes by the name of “HackaweekTV.” In the 30-minute plus video, the viewer is guided through the assembly of a loom model by user “ten16.” This seems much more promising. Dean Segovis, who goes by the name of Dino on his HackaweekTV blog, is a man of an indeterminate age between 48 and 70 who wears a shirt that says “I VOID WARRANTIES” and works in his decked-out garage. Before embarking on the assembly journey, Dino describes how his wife Lisa really wanted a loom, so he bought one for her on Amazon. However, Lisa has outgrown this inferior, non-3D-printed, non-customizable loom, so he has decided to make her a new, larger one. In a corresponding blog post, Dino begins by saying “My wife Lisa and I recently got into weaving.” I like the image of them weaving together. Dino is an ideal guide.

3. PRINTING While there are no instructions on the Thingiverse page for assembly (thankfully, Dino takes care of this issue!), there is a guide on how many of each file must be printed. Using this guide, I set up the different parts into five different ‘plates’ in my slicer to get them ready for printing. Dino recommends a higher percentage infill on some of the parts, but I ignore this because I am trying to be conscious of print times and PLA consumption. It might come back to bite me. It is fundamentally a bit absurd to 3D print a loom. After printing (which took about seven hours per plate), you file down the parts and clean off their supports to prepare them for assembly. Weaving has been around for centuries and has a rich heritage from many parts of the world. As a practice, it is deeply embedded in histories of labor, gender, industrialization, and craft. 3D printing is at once incredibly exciting in terms of its opportunity for innovation and production (printing affordable houses, eliminating waste from subtractive manufacturing, rapidly making customizable prosthetics etc.) but at the same time is also the sort of thing that is used to make a lot of fan-art statuettes and

DIY guns. Personally, I feel the energy of the 3D printer to be tied closely to that of a 43-year-old man with a beard and a newsboy cap. Yet, contemporary looms in the industrial sphere are almost entirely electronic at this point, and the textiles industry is very closely tied to technological innovation. One only needs to walk by the Metcalf Building on RISD’s campus to see an open garage door revealing the ginormous contraption of their new “state of the art” Jacquard Loom, which feels reminiscent of an imagined computer room in a mid-century film.

4. ASSEMBLY—Take this time to reflect and get into the meditative flow of following Dino’s instructions. The loom build is not entirely 3D printed and includes a few different sized dowels which hold the elements together. The first loom I attempted to build used scuffed-up PVC pipes that I found in the beloved scrap pile of the BDW. This build instead opts for elegant wooden dowels. While cutting the dowels, I think about why I am making this loom. Well, mostly I like to use the 3D printers because it makes me feel like I am taking full advantage of the university’s resources. Plus, it makes me feel like a cool engineering student instead of the ever-existential-anxiety-producing state of being a humanities major on their way to some class to discuss the blood memory of a gendered gesture. (Don’t think too much about this or you will end up writing a whole treatise on the quality of plasticity in your loom and people will roll their eyes at you.) Combine this with my insatiable desire for new hobbies to obsess over so as to avoid all other responsibilities (as an avid knitter, crocheter, and sewist, weaving feels like a logical next step) and add in a dash of my inescapable desire to make everything more complicated than it needs to be by thinking “I can DIY this,” and the fact that as a BDW monitor, it’s always good to have a project to make yourself look knowledgeable and innovative. It’s also important to reflect on your anxieties about how you idealize the aesthetics of an artisanal world built on handiwork and craft which can maybe never exist (and never did) and how silly it is to waste plastic like this (even if it claims to be ‘recycled’) and how your attachment to hands-on process perhaps reflects an ultimately problematic bourgeois fetish of the idea of labor.

5. WEAVING—I have not yet gotten here. But when I do, I have collected many instructional warping tutorials, all led by women between the ages of 57-73 in a farm-chic store. They all wear a little shawl that they have indubitably made. My personal favorite is Jeannine of The Blue Fiber Tree fame. I hope that she and Dino are friends.

6. READING THE COMMENTS SECTION— On Dino’s video, user “upl1nk.v01d2” asks “time to move on from electronics?” User “DeanSegovis” answers “There’s a few in the works…”

IZZY ROTH-DISHY B’25 has been meaning to learn Fusion360 (for three years).

JOSEPH O’BRIEN B’24 George, you are so nice to me, let us find time to share One donut.

Lcating a Parallel gram

“When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

– Sol LeWitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art

( TEXT SAM STEWART

DESIGN SAM STEWART )

c The Location of a Parallelogram is one of a half dozen etchings from American artist Sol LeWitt’s The Location of Six Geometric Figures (1975). The work situates a tilted parallelogram, surrounded by faint construction lines, within a square border. A block of text below the frame provides specifications for the geometry:

A parallelogram whose top and bottom sides are two and a half times as long as its left and right sides and whose top side is located between the points where two sets of lines cross; the first line of the first set is drawn from a point halfway between the center of the square and a point halfway between the midpoint of the top side and the upper left corner to a point halfway between the midpoint of the bottom side and the lower right corner, the second line of the first set is drawn from the midpoint of the top side to a point equidistant to the center of the square, a point halfway between the center of the square and the midpoint of the bottom side and a point halfway between the midpoint of the left side and lower left corner, the first line of the second set is drawn from a point halfway between the midpoint of the top side and the upper right corner to the lower right corner, the second line of the second set is drawn from a point halfway between the midpoint of the right side and the upper right corner to a point halfway between a point halfway between the center of the square and the upper left corner and a point halfway between the midpoint of the top side and the upper left corner, the left side is drawn on a line to a point halfway between the point where the second line of the first set of lines ends and a point halfway between the midpoint of the bottom side and the lower left corner.

Between text and artwork lies an implicit game: Can you verify that this run-on string of clauses actually describes the given form? The object of the diagrams below is to work through this proof graphically; each box represents a single graphic operation, and each row of boxes results in a line segment used to locate the parallelogram.

Despite what it may seem, SAM STEWART B’24 isn’t really into Sol LeWitt like that.

the mouthfeel of capitalism

the gelation of the present

balaclava

baklava

YAS Chicken

Naur Beef

Sunrise Movement

A loaf of white bread

Turf

Surf SWERF

TERF

Xiu Xiu

Miu Miu

Indy sleaze

sleazy Indie

Sophomore Twinks

Bear’s Lair

Dyke Night

Gay Day

topology

bottom surgery

k-hole

your hole

clit-dick

clit-flick

Hunter Schafer

Hunter Biden

Lacan

Lacking

pharmopornography

pornopharmacology

MARCH MADNESS

BMP premiere

The Eras Tour

Anarchestra

MEME Ensemble

Editor

Redditor

Kabbalah

Kamala

Claudine Gay

gay sex

Moten

Harney

GCB

2CB

8.5" x 11"

11" x 17" n+1

lusotropicalismo v.1

laïcité

Guggenheim

googoogaga

Asher White

Hannah Black

Paul Preciado

Paul McCartney

Sam

Lucas

TLC

SWV a.k.a.

AKA

Charon

( TEXT CORINNE LEONG ILLUSTRATION JULIA CHENG DESIGN ASH MA )

c Sometimes I wish her debt had survived her. I’d take it on. It would be like when you get sick, and there’s no question who passed you the bug, you go around carrying so much of what was once theirs they cling to your back and drip from your nose.

It wasn’t as much as we thought it would be. Debt is infectious. Debt is the most heritable affliction in all of America. Every time I drove my mom to the casino I tallied its cost upon the atlas of the future: here is the length of your mortgage, which will also be the length of your life. On your left, clock the spire of the fancy college where you’ll never be able to send your own son, no matter how much he screams and begs. On these Fridays my baby babbled at home with his sitter, the car empty three seats. It takes four hours and fifteen minutes to get to Las Vegas, eight hours en route to Reno, and a single lucky spin to repair your broken relationship with fate. Sometimes the destination changed, but this was our routine, the only one we’d ever shared.

Having a kid taught me nothing about the woman who raised me. Pinned between eyesore carpeting and needy LED screens — magnets to metal, dim flickers to moths — I finally understood I’d become a mother. Youth is a coin, I think, dull

c I write this to wake you from a dreamless haze. We as a species are drowning in a sea of glass and steel and precious metals. Insipid, pervasive tech has flooded our world and spilled into the collective consciousness, bursting it like a child’s water balloon. The kicker is that we’re the ones who hooked ourselves up to the hose and cranked the faucet without forethought.

At first, it was a drop. The radio cast voices across the country, and communication infrastructure carried them worldwide. We learned to move images in vivid color and sound and chiseled away at mechanized behemoths until they fit in our pockets. It was astounding, this surge of innovation and potential. How could we resist more? Now we find ourselves miles below the waves, helpless to the pull of the tides as shining monitors cast the miracle of man-made light into our retinas. The photons move to the energetics of persuasion, each advertisement a living phantasm that moves us in turn. We lurch through our lives with obsession for each new commodity. Powerless, we become cogs in the endless churn of capitalism, an intricate order refined through focus groups and the calculus of control: envy, rage, shame, lust, each exploited to drive capital gain at our unwitting

and seemingly inexhaustible. Mama took four from the palm of my hand and slotted them gently into the machine. I watched their dour eyes disappear; she spun herself new losses.

The house deals in paradoxes. Free merchandise depending on how much money you sink. I was touched the first time my mother proudly offered me a birthday gift, a thin set of crockery with gilded edges. “From the casino,” she clarified. Once I’d seen her cry after winning five-thousand at craps. Another time after jackpot on the slots. On both nights she’d blown it all within an hour at other machines.

At first there were air fryers, memory foam pillows, crossbody bags. The gifts from the casino soon grew strange, pulled from impossible places. One weekend the staff at Harrah’s gave her the clay bird I’d made for Mother’s Day in second grade, blue as the world with her and without, sure as I was that it had shattered into fragments during one of our pettier arguments. She claimed it was her reward for joining the Players’ Club. Then there was the engagement ring from Bill With the Money, who when I was twelve became Bill With the Whore. I was surprised by its spotless surface, that a precious thing could still come out clean after being flung among blades in a blender by a woman who jammed her spite on the switch. For the whole month of April, Baldini’s partnered with Gold Dust West to distribute essays Danny and I had written for English class without help, about sex and warfare and family. When she reached 777 points in one sitting they gave her a small painting on a square canvas. She refused to let me look. It was the

only work salvaged from the gallery she’d once pooled all her savings into, which had closed due to a lack of customers and people who cared in general.

On the last day mama was unusually placid. The casino served us wine and steak. She offered me a Nicorette. After she got tired of the games I wheeled her to the gift counter, a silent corner she insisted was in possession of everything, meaning everything I wanted, idling among all that clutter, hands that could part the curtain over the present and pull forgotten parts of me out. I requested all twenty of my childhood teeth, valued at roughly fifty cents apiece, which the gangly teenager behind the counter handed to me in a satin bag I lost before I ever opened.

CORINNE LEONG B’24 is all in.

Salvation of Humanity in a Technological Age:

( TEXT ABANI NEFERKARA ILLUSTRATION JULIA CHENG DESIGN ASH MA )

An Argument for the Directed Evolution of Homosapiens

expense. The reasoning and inhibitions that once moored us have long been rendered obsolete, leaving us with our nerves unsheathed to stimuli, blindly twitching in response. The so-called food they put before us makes us sick and fat, yet our limbic systems can’t help but crave more. Our need to procreate is weaponized against us in order to make us act in our own worst interest. Our shame drives us like naked apes to collect whatever glimmering valuables and socially significant splendors we can veil ourselves in. Anything we might otherwise aspire toward is cast from our minds to make us all the more obedient. This is no way to live, clutched by the undertow of technology, which pulls us further toward the depths. The light is waning and the tap roars with unending deluge.

Let us back up a little. We relied on evolution,

raging like a mad god, to pull us from the mud and shape us into the flawed beings we find ourselves as now. Yet its presence has been exorcized from the human era, a series of natural pressures and selections that have vanished in a world whose premier species molds and twists it as they see fit. We, as a web of the living and the extinct, have ground to a screeching halt. In the tidal waves and tempests of digital technology that swirl through the man-made world, evolution as a last arc to deliver humanity has taken on water and been brought down below the waves. Nothing drives us to change, yet change is the only way we can pull ourselves from the deep.

That is why we must become the masters of our own biological destiny. We must pull ourselves from the grip of this current with biochemical and neurological mastery. By reforging the fundamental biology exploited for the gain of the elite few that reside atop a global physical and digital cosmopolis, newfound freedom is assured. Our biology is just the beginning, from which I can lead us all to embark on the true journey of humanity. No longer shaped by the chaos and chance of selection in the natural world, we can become more perfect beings by our own design. Once the journey has been completed, we will thrive in a renaissance of anatomy and psyche. A new version of humanity will house neurotransmitters that can no longer be driven to consume by food packed with fats and sugars, enlarged prefrontal cortices coupled with the partial silencing of the limbic system to become a bastion of rational thought in a world of irrationality. These gifts, the body unbridled, would be the first of many, and in time, as more join us, humanity will grow and bloom above the organic masses with our stewardship. In this age of science, we will engineer evolution into ourselves. The path is a thousandfold and full of electrifying possibilities.

ABANI NEFERKARA B’24 is content with the size of his prefrontal cortex.

An Explanation For the Girl Who Worked at the Phone Factory I Used to Manage Before It Got Shut Down and Guilt Consumed Me

( TEXT JANE WANG ILLUSTRATION JULIA CHENG DESIGN ASH MA )

c Walking home through the end of a cold fourth quarter, with the old familiar buildings and tired curves and corners, struck suddenly with the emotion that nothing was ever changing, I reversed conviction toward the known truth. That each tick of my perception depended upon the angle of an object that in every other tick was shifting persuaded me of a falling away. A disappearing of the world if I closed my eyes. To keep them open, on the screen, on each moving part so it stayed as it should, that was my responsibility; theirs was to stand still. So each building that passed and fled my field of view became for me another cross to bear. Before these structures became waste they housed assembly lines, and before the assembly lines quit they churned out phones. Like my father before me, I manned the chips. Then I ascended to the floor above, manned the concept instead. Through the glass floor. Stretched my eyelids and maintained, held the world together. Now I watched each building flee this plane, each I blessed to relinquish their connectivity and record. Now I could not bear it, to take on more or less, helpless except to keep walking. Sorry, goodbye, there you go.

A toe past the parallel line in the sidewalk and another structure whisked from our not-so-charitable reality. Convinced this was my doing, averting eye contact, hence demolition. No turning back because that would mean a retraction of granted rest. The last time I was here I couldn’t let you in. The phones dashed to the floor and your angry look happened because I did or did not look away? Your locker emptied anyways, and waiting, we stood outside with the emotion of change flying like a ghost that could enter and exit our ears and eyes at will. Now I see it different. I did not watch each building collapse, that is not what I meant to say. Only I am certain they did not defy my expectations. As you did not. Expressing instead faith and a relational congruency—I was to each as each was to me. And the others inside, in the offices where I’d once trodden, where did they go? Did they disappear, too?

The last time, here together, we were loading things into a pickup truck, on a different trade or principle. In there the things would disappear and come back out the same, feel the same, your uniform, keepsakes, and knicknacks. But each structure’s façade belied not the movement or growth of what lay inside, came, and went. Away, I remember the evenings when I left you late and thought it was me, not the buildings.

JANE WANG B’24 likes to stand on glass floors and look down.

Samson

( TEXT EMILY TOM ILLUSTRATION JULIA CHENG DESIGN ASH MA )

c His room, jaundiced in the lamplight. My earrings on his nightstand. Our heads on the same pillow, he told me about alternate universes. In one, he is born under a different moon and God chooses someone else. In another, his first wife lives and we never meet. In another, he survives the lion attack, but when he reaches into the corpse, he is killed by the wasps inside.

I asked him, Are you happy?

He frowned. I think so, he said. Why?

I mean. All this thinking you do about other worlds. Is it something a happy person does?

Samson was quiet.

I don’t know, he said. His eyelids were heavy. Does it really matter? If I’m happy, I mean.

Of course it matters. But he looked at me in a way that said he didn’t believe me.

I’m just so tired, he said after a while. There’s nowhere I can go where I’m not already written.

That’s when he asked me to cut his hair. We didn’t speak any more after that. I took him to the bathroom. He straddled the toilet, facing the wall. The scissors were dull. The tile was cold. Each lock fell to the floor like a prayer gone unanswered, and I knew there was no god who loved him more than I did.

And it hit me all at once. All the grief I had yet to feel. My chest hollowed to make room for it. I knew, with more certainty than I’d ever felt in my life, that the poets and prophets would speak nothing of my life before I met him. I was his, and he was not his own. The scissors sundered. This was my rebirth without redemption.

I wish I could say that I cared, but I didn’t. All I could think about was the hair on the bathroom floor, the way I would collect it in my fingers and throw it away after Samson fell asleep. The way it would not feel like a chore because the hair belonged to him.

EMILY TOM B’25 is frying a double-yolked egg.

c Yes sometimes. Yes, sometimes there’s period blood in the toilet. When I’ve eaten enough. Or slept enough. Or taken a breath, maybe. Drops that sputter and screech like a cigarette dragged from perfect, pink lips in the rain. Ha. I remember it. Those wispy puffs. Drops that collapse. Blood, sometimes, yes, sometimes found on my hands or in my hair. Under fingernails. Or caked to strands like old ear-wax. Ha. My body is moving with me, today, I suppose.

Jack, baby, I drag you to sit by the toilet and stare on days I’m scared of you. In our egg-shell blue bathroom with dainty curtains. I’d long since taped over the mirror with the big newsprint of articles I said I would one day read. You have your daddy’s eyes. So red I feel it in my stomach when you look at me. Yes, Jackie, I can hear you at night. Counting your push-ups under your breath. “18…19…20” before a body slams on our wood floors with a groan. We’re sitting over the bowl together with your sweaty hand in mine. Here, those beads on your cheek, baby. They look like they’re coming from your eyes. There are red figures dancing in the water, if you look close. A watery little wiggle. Or are they writhing? All together? Here, look closer. Can you hear them?

I remember those boys were here. I remember there were boys here, once. With inky eyes. There was meat in their shoulders. Those shoulders that popped from their perfect sweaters. The droplets of knit seamlessly contoured, a second skin. They liked to cover their red eyes with those long horse lashes. Because their fiery color leached into those they loved and tore apart. Like the muscle in those slippery swelling shoulders. The muscle that bent to mend. That ripped to grow. Do you see? Can you feel it, Jackie? Wobbly legs slowly breaking?

They say they were slurping up creatine at night. Mixing the white ash into a glass of water.

Kingdom Aestus

c FWOOSH

And thus enters the age of the Kingdom Aestus, Sovereignty of the Sea! Glory, what glory! Hang the banners, ring the bells, perhaps this one will last.

The coming of a prosperous era for all those who within these walls reside, laurels deserved, we have here everything needed, most everything wanted. We will thrive together, praises to the divine right and bounteous gifts of Deus Maris.

Come with us, and we will illuminate for you the wonders of this world.

First, the Drapes of Alga, sprawling plants who throw light with abandon, no definite green in particular, emeralds soft and then sharp: the luster of the Kingdom. Look up, behold the shine, witness the flow. These members sustain and are sustained, protect and are devoured, but are ever so populous in this land that they certainly must not mind. The breath of this place endures here.

See, here is a lure of Aestus, as an eternal body. There is an order to this place, which cannot be moved or revealed. Slow down, keep the ground below you, and observe.

There stand the Echinos, strong, sleek, unapproachable, armored and plated. They sit almost stationary, spheres of purple or blue, blanketed by spines. Only moving to macerate the Alga, Echinos have almost no use for speed. Some other valiant or intrepid creatures, when times are right, can dismantle these beings and feast. The Piscium especially, with opalescent rows of scales and fins, peering this way and that, eyes set flat atop strong desperate mouths. Some manage to break though the spines; see there is a half an Echinus, sat up, entirely empty. But that Piscis, belly up and with a quill thick through his grand left eye, has not found success. He never will.

( TEXT CALEB STUTMAN-SHAW ILLUSTRATION JULIA CHENG DESIGN ASH MA )

Around this rough bend now, do you feel the world rush on your body? Do you feel the thrill? The Cocleae abound, look around, grand in number and stature, soft or sharp, depending on your angle. They spiral down from a point, in bone white and gleaming brown, hard shell over supple, limbless body. Pulsing inside of their welded homes, never far from ostensible safety, and yet… Bend down, low now, glance up under. Do you see the lesions? Can you see the Asseculae, those small, vicious things, burrowing into the flesh, headfirst, drinking slowly what is inside? Notice the writhing Cocleae, how they turn away, how they swing their eyes and glare, and how the Asseculae are unheeding.

Behemoths of this place, Cancri stand watch. Incarnate, or, incarnadine, deft grabbers roam and find, and touch, and piece apart with pincers. They devour, are only sometimes devoured, and can leave, if they wish. They can take their slender legs and their saucer body, and their too-small globe eyes, and run. The Cancri are not confined to this place. But here they are.

Now, a lone Piscis, born into the world a few days prior, has spent his existence moving. As he glides through the quintessence, sunlight falls and fractures, and he blinks and dashes. He can feel himself turn.

He can feel the world begin to spin.

Something has shifted, the sky descends, the flow picks up, the walls are sinking.

A rock falls, from the clouds, it seems. The Cancri are now nowhere to be found. The Piscis hears a deep noise, feels a tremor through his skin.

Things are changing.

FWOOSH

The Piscis is lifted by a wave, over, and up, and out. As he is pitched up, he shifts his long body to look

And were sheepish when asked about it. Why the water was murky. Why they gulped with such aggression. Their sweaters fit a little snugger. Their hands would be bulging tomorrow. Look. Look close.

Go on, Jackie. Ask about their scars. Pale patches where their bodies attempted to conceal the mark of collapse. A skinned knee with a scab they couldn’t resist but pick. Gushy and glistening. Yes, that one, that one took longer to heal. We were in bed together when it bled again. Morning silvery sun mingled with the stream running down his shiny calf. A little redder. A little more time, maybe.

I held everything in my chest on the nights they promised would be dreamy. With boobs puffed so far out to give the illusion of a shrunken stomach. Each breath pained and calculated so that my belly wouldn’t dance with my diaphragm.

Their shoulders popped from their perfect sweaters one day, tearing away from the perfect knit stored in the perfect room with those mirrors that stood for staring. To see the veins all busted and blown and about to burst. Watch, look, the vein on his forearm. A vine suffocating a tired tree. And they poured the powder and brought the glass to their perfect lips and closed their eyes so they could walk around together and explode.

Stretched skin. Swelling toes peered from perfectly tied shoes. Shoulders swallowed up necks. And so they screeched empty screeches for air.

Hey, look at me. Hey, can you still feel it? Your body? Is it still yours? Those boys were here, once.

Look when the water settles, the figures will melt away. Pale and pinky. Hey, breathe, today. Take my hand. I can feel your pulse. It’s screaming, again. Look at me, please. No, please, please, look at me now. Stop it, stop pawing the water, they’re gone. You can’t stare any longer.

My body’s bleeding today, yes, and that’s why you’re here, baby.

PLUM LUARD B’26 is a proponent of applicator-less tampons.

down and sees his home now from a distance. Beside the Kingdom is another, just like the first, and each is surrounded by four or five more, and they tile outward endlessly, and he turns around and out there, there is nothing.

There is no understanding this infinity. When he looks back down he cannot tell which place was his.

Gone is singularity, is certainty, is anything but everything. Here there is nothing to be held, all to be seen and remembered.

There are so many. Next time is coming.

CALEB STUTMAN-SHAW B’25 loves tidepooling, hates empire.

SEEN FROM ABOVE

“Although the figures have been said to be virtually indecipherable from ground level, some claim that one cannot understand their meaning without walking what are now believed by many to be the sacred paths.”

c Someday, you will be right. Someday, this will all be powder drifting in the wind, another cluster of blurry landscapes in my camera roll ultimately deleted for space. Someday, I might regret asking you to defy the law for the sake of enlightenment. But right now, the dust whips at my face with unbridled rage, sunlight gleams on the faces of distant mountains, and the rocky red landscape spreads out before us in a twilight haze. Despite its status as a World Heritage site, the only thing that separated us from our final destination was a single hand-painted sign. “Prohibido ingresar. No entry.” For a moment, I saw you hesitate, wondering if the sign’s hastily scrawled words were a binding contract we were about to break. But the families and the tour guides clambered back onto their buses long ago, and only the wind whispers in our ears as we stagger through the desert like lonely soldiers.

The pamphlet from the visitor center claims they were discovered in 1926, but we all know they were neither “found” nor “discovered.” I was sitting in the rental flipping through its pages while you checked if any security guards were still roaming the highway. Every thirty minutes, a deafening roar rang out from above, and the ghostly shadow of a mechanical vulture would slither over the car and across the plains. These days, the conquistadors cram themselves into tin cans with wings and fly a thousand miles into the air just to try and glimpse the “meaning” of the enigmatic markings.

To us mortals tethered to the ground, they are a series of winding roads that lead to nothing and connect even less—the ancient guidelines of an obsolete civilization whose meaning has been swept away by the sands of time. But the plastic leaflet on the dashboard reminds me that once the tourists buy a premium package and squeeze themselves into a sweaty leather chair two seats from the nearest window, the paths rearrange themselves like ciphers slithering into script, and they suddenly understand the secrets hidden in their folds. Birds with wings larger than houses rise up from the dunes, spiders skitter past on legs built like stilts, and spirals spin endlessly into the abyss of barren soil. They see the source of divine ambition as the desert whizzes past, the Tower of Babel written in sand. Suddenly, the thirty minutes are up, and the plane bows its nose in feigned respect as it drags them back to earth, and they are left catching their breath while the tour guide politely asks for a 5-star review.

Hours later, as the sun dips beneath the horizon and the last plane kisses the runway, our boots crunch gently against petrified soil, molded into clay by the wind’s dry breath. The sky becomes a dome of stars and the moon glimmers overhead as we set down our packs and enter the labyrinth of trails. I shiver as we cross the threshold between the sacred and the mundane, breaching an unspoken contract we had signed in our blood. But are we trespassing any more than the colonizers already have? Is it an invasion if we are returning home? The air is fresh and cool, and I follow the imprints your shoes leave in the hallowed grounds. The sun lets out one final burst of flames, flooding

Phone in Bed Time

c “I’ve been getting text messages from unknown numbers. They start with these strange strings of numbers, which wouldn’t be odd enough on their own, but they eventually morph into these sentences—like, We’ve been waiting for you or Anne, the crossing will be painless and glimmering. Fine, fair enough, right, whatever, weird spam, I block the number. But then there’s always another number, they find me again—a series of emoticons, an intricate, tesselated iris flower constructed from parentheses and colons. Mastery always eludes Chase it during the pause. I even changed my number.”

“It continued?

“Yes! This is so disconcerting. I feel like I know what I’m doing online. Like, I have this friend who sometimes calls me to ask if a text or email she’s received is spam. It always is, and always obviously so. It’s like a misspelled message with three broken attachments asking for a credit card number to confirm a package or a bank asking you to Zelle them to confirm a transaction. What company would use Zelle? But it’s so endearing to me, her gullibility online. It’s like, retro, she’s so immersed that she doesn't get that it's a different language.”

“Does the mystery number send you links?”

“Yes, it’s the same every time. Lots of percentage signs. Of course, I can’t open it, that’s insane, I’m not trying to give my credit card number to the whole wide web. But I have this old chromebook I’ve wiped a few times and sometimes I use it to download torrents and jailbreak things. The other day I got so annoyed that I copied the link and sent it to my burner email, so I could try opening it on the laptop. But when I click on it, even though it’s highlighted blue and underlined and my cursor turns to the like little gloved hand when I hover over it, I can’t click it. I mean I try, I’m pressing down on my mouse, I’m on the link,

it should be working, but it acts like normal text.”

“So it’s just a fake link?”

“That’s what I thought, right? That would make sense. Weird but fine. But I’m so annoyed I go back to my phone and hold down on it and it starts to open and the link is real! I see a black screen come in before I get scared and let go and it closes.”

“And no one else is getting these texts?”

“No! I asked people. No one. People send me screenshots of their spam messages, but nothing is even close. Yesterday I got one that used well-spaced periods to construct a pointillist drawing of a plane with George Bush’s face leering across the side of it hitting the Twin Towers.”

“Do you agree with them?”

“About what?”

“That Bush did 9/11.”

“No! What kind of question is that? At least not to an interesting extent. I guess I’m like an American empire truther or whatever. My mom’s like a truther truther though, isn’t that funny? Fuck. I brought up my mom in therapy.”

“How did she become a truther?”

“God. Ok. So. She’s like really woke, right? Like she had long pink hair down to her knees as a high school art teacher in NorCal in her twenties, she’s straight but half her friends were gay and dying in the 80s, it was really sad, she loves Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, etcetera. And when you’re her age, Facebook is a great way to do all that with other people. She’s always sending me these insane MS Paint infographics, but about global cobalt mining pollution conspiracies instead of like Lock Her Up, right? So a couple years ago she started sending me all these really post-left Bush-did-9/11 articles. At first, I was like whatever, skimming them they’re just talking about interventionism and oil money, I was like, close enough. No harm. But they kept coming

the plains with a cascade of light and sending liquid gold trickling down the channels of the geoglyphs like fresh blood coursing through the veins of a carcass. And the world grinds to a halt and the stars stand still, and I swear that you are glowing brighter than the setting sun. As the words die on my lips and the wind howls in agony, I try to capture your essence with my phone’s glassy lens. In the photograph, your eyes are dark and shining, frozen in time and twinkling like distant constellations. But up close, the lines dissolve into a million stars, and I get lost at the crossroads of their paths.

LUCA SUAREZ B’26 is reliving the past in the present.

( TEXT KOLYA SHIELDS DESIGN ASH MA )

and kept getting crazier, it’s like these people needed an individual paper trail of neocolonialism, that it couldn't just be the World Bank, the work of an irreducible collection of actors under ideology or whatever, it had to be George Bush contacting Al-Qaeda and asking them to bolster his campaign in exchange for killing off Bin Laden as part of an elaborate decade-long coup or something. I was like Mom, maybe it's true, but who cares? What does it change?”

“What do you think she gets out of it?”

“Well, community, duh, right? Superiority, in a sense? She works from home and spends hours talking to these random accounts without profile pictures that are probably just Russian bots. I don’t know. I remember her telling me that in the first few years after 9/11, her dreams would suddenly end, out of the blue, with a plane careening through the sky. It wouldn’t matter where she was in the narrative or REM cycle or anything. It wasn’t like how sometimes when you’re about to reach a climax or find some big answer in a dream you always plunge off a cliff and wake up or something. She’d have just started, just figuring out the characters around her, and suddenly a crash of glass and she’d burst awake.”

KOLYA SHIELDS B’24 ,

OLIVIA SANTOS-BRESLIN R’26

The Indie Style Guide:

WWW, WWWW, and Indie’s too cheap to be with it

( TEXT SOLVEIG ASPLUND LINNEA HULT DESIGN OLLANTAY AVILA )

c My friends and I are suffering from NeckCraning Syndrome. What is that, you ask? NCS is a non-fatal but mortifying disease that afflicts many of our peers—especially the nosy ones. Symptoms include: rapid head movements, your less discrete friends loudly asking WHO? WHAT?! WHERE? and/ or worst of all: awkward eye contact.

As I’m sitting on the Green, my butt getting damp in a regrettable pattern, I wonder, for the sake of my sore neck, should I stop caring so much? Well, after very little consideration, my answer is no. I, for one, need to judge what people are wearing (it’s in a feminist way, sorry if you don’t get it). I’m kept up at night by grave existential questions like: why, against all odds, are UO corset tops still circulating? Just how resilient can the cowboy boots trend possibly be? Should my professor get microbangs, or would that throw off her vibe?

But the unfortunate consequence of all this is that if we’re always looking, we’re always being looked at. And what to do about the subsequent fear that if we’re judging, we’re also being judged? Dismantling the fashion police isn’t a bad answer, but they only give me a page and World’s got more important policing to dismantle. So instead, here’s some advice on how to be more intentional about how you present yourself. What a lovely transition into my topic. I’m a genius!

Dear Indie,

I’m a freshman – what clothing items do I need to make Brown my bitch?

Dear Indie,

The trend cycle depresses me. I feel like I dress like everyone else, and when I finally think I’m doing something original, it just turns out to be another trend. Gah! How do I find my own style?

Dear Trendy,

Indie: Trends are a primordially frustrating concept. Do you want to be on them? No. Do you want to be off them? Also no. Does that make sense? Not at all. Following trends feels like balancing on a tightrope, if you can imagine that the tightrope is always moving, and that Bella Hadid has something to do with it. Also, some of it’s on fire.

For most of my life, I’ve avoided trends by being inordinately frugal. By the time I’d worked up the courage to buy a pastel Fjällräven backpack circa 2016, the trend was already over. But if your bank balance isn’t stopping you, I don’t know how much I can help you. So, as a treat (and not because I’m out of ideas), I’ve decided to recruit my most fashionable friend, a Londoner with a vague adjacency to Italy that I think lends her some cred. Yes, you all know who I’m talking about – the one and only Miss L.H. L, what’s your advice for Trendy?

Helplessly, Trendy

LH: Indie, you are too terribly kind. Trends try to tell us that dressing swaggily1 is quick and easy, but that’s not always true. Our zeitgeist is oversaturated with image; trim the fat and take a break from internet fashion. Fixating on the idiosyncrasies of campus style instead will teach you secrets about its citizens. You may not want to dress like them, fine. Dress against them. It’s okay to hate if you know exactly why (that’s critique).

As you watch trends weave through your friends and enemies, you’ll realize that just because something is ‘French’ does not make it timeless (nothing is beyond time) and you’ll learn more about what you actually like.

Hm. Maybe step into GNSS0120 next shopping period to discuss expletive choice, but your goal is a noble one. So here you go:

If this sounds like a lot of work to pick out what to wear, I understand. I similarly likely have a unique set of neuroses. Luckily, Indie and I have picked out outfits on your behalf for pretty much any situation you might encounter.

1. Fracket [Frat-jacket]

A dark puffer you’re willing to leave in the Scary Pile,2 knowing the risk it entails. Ideally, it has an identifying feature that helps you remove it from said pile when you’ve had enough of sweaty men bumping into you.

2. Party Pants Pants that make your butt look great. These don’t have to be patterned or glittery, but most of mine are.

3. Emergency Cunty Sunglasses

These provide a false sense of privacy in an overly surveilled world. Essential for hiding hangovers, ill-timed tears, and the occasional stye.

4. Worst Shoes Ever

They give you a blister and are damn ugly. People will compliment them, not because they actually think they’re cute, but because they’ll respect your boldness in wearing something so grotesque.

5. Silver Ring

Then people can be like, “Hey, I love your silver ring!” And you can be like, “Thanks! It was once a spoon.”

An Indie Style Guide WWWW (WONDERING WHAT TO WEAR WHEN)

You’ve been invited to a party without a theme

LH: Rejoice! You’ve been freed from the whip-lash of alternately niche and overdone themes. No more togas, Pitchfork 2011, apresski, Bauhaus …wear whatever the fuck you want. In a panic, a cute [read: slutty] top with jeans and a miniskirt—revolutionary, I know.

Indie: In situations like this I like to imagine my own theme.

Bieber? Summer in winter? Waterbottle type? Breakfast for dinner? The options are endless.

You think you’re going to get broken up with

LH: Your instinct will be to dress cute, but if you know you can’t change their mind, a big hoodie will do—you can store the shattered pieces of your ego in the pocket.

You think you’re going to break up with someone

LH: Be kind. Look like shit. Don’t forget to collect that nostalgic childhood shirt you left there though, you’ll miss it.

You want to seduce your professor

Indie: Find out who they’re actually married to and dress accordingly. This might mean a blazer, it might mean blue light glasses, it might even mean corduroy. But if you truly want something, you’re going to have to fight for it—go work on that discussion post you’ve been putting off.

LH: See: Gisele Bündchen in The Devil Wears Prada.

You want people to know you’re single

Indie: Nothing.

You want people to know you’re taken

LH: Wedding ring.

You want to let people know you’re gay

LH: Button-up, buttoned all the way up. Carabiner, obviously. Bleach your eyebrows? Face piercings. Tiny little Telfar bag (God, I’m literally so jealous of these.)

Indie: I agree—but nothing will be more effective than some intense eye-contact during the DJ set.

That’s all, folks! Tune in next time. Or don’t. We don’t care, we can’t even see you from behind our Cunty Sunglasses.

1.

this is not L.H.’s word of choice

2. You know the one: beer-scented and wet, it’s where jackets go to die.

Arts

TheBulletin03/22/24

Doyouhaveanevent,action,orotherinformationfortheProvidencecommunitythat you’dliketoseesharedonthispage?Email usatindybulletinboard@gmail.com! (

RLWHEELER EMILIEGUAN DESIGN OLLANTAYAVILA

Feature

Students for Educational Equity Teach-in and Rally to End Legacy Admissions

On Monday, March 18, and Wednesday, March 20, Students for Educational Equity held a teach-in and rally, respectively, to further the fight to end legacy admissions. The teach-in included information on what legacy admissions is, its history rooted in white supremacy and classism, common myths, and what the movement has looked like up to this point.

The movement’s increased momentum comes after the Ad Hoc Committee on Admissions Policies concluded their five months of meetings, meant to address “equity, access and diversity” in Brown’s selection process. Yet, the meetings resulted in the decisions to continue allowing for Early Decision applications, reimplement standardized testing, and maintain its legacy admissions policy. Community members have spoken out against all of these inequitable practices, especially in the face of the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action.

Students for Education Equity has included a series of informational graphics on their Instagram page. Posts include quotes from students speaking out against legacy admissions as well as quotes from Brown’s very own administration that point to the harm of this admissions practice. As they point out, President Christina Paxson herself has said that should the University be “concerned primarily with socioeconomic diversity, it would make sense to eliminate” legacy admissions. You can find the link to sign the petition and support the movement in the bio of @s.e.e.brown.

Indigo Girls: With the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra

Saturday, 3/23 @7PM

Providence Performing Arts Center, 220 Weybosset St, Providence, RI

Iconic ‘90s music duo, Indigo Girls, are performing at the Providence Performing Arts Center with the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra. The group consists of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, and their musical talents range from folk to classical to pop. Come watch one concert in a series of collaborations with various local orchestras!

Open Mic featuring Beau Williams

Wednesday 3/27 @7PM-11PM

AS220, 115 Empire St, Providence, RI

Come join The Providence Poetry Slam at AS220 for an open mic! You can start trickling in at 7:00, and there will be a sign-up sheet to read a piece under five minutes. The night will feature Beau Williams, a poet based in Dublin. The admissions donation is sliding scale with a recommendation of $5.

Writers Like Us: A Creatives of Color Celebration

Saturday 3/30 @1PM-7PM

400 Harris Avenue, Unit E, Providence, RI

Spend the afternoon participating in a range of literary activities and meeting other writers! There will be a writing session with blackearth collective + lab, an intergenerational group of creatives, educators, and organizers of color. You can also get feedback on your pieces during a flash fiction workshop with Christopher Gonzalez and learn more about the industry through professional development panels and networking opportunities.

Verified by Proof Conference

Wednesday 4/3 to Saturday 4/6

RI Convention Center

Interested in printmaking, graphics, or other paper-based crafts? Immerse yourself in this multi-day conference at the Rhode Island Convention Center to meet others interested in the same! From exhibitions to portfolio sharing to an array of panels, the Verified by Proof Conference has it all. Some of the participating organizations include AS220 Community Studios, Binch Press, and New Urban Arts.

*Mutual aid is “survival pending revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.

Haus of Codec Wish List

Haus of Codec is a nonprofit organization committed to ending transition-aged youth homelessness in Providence, and since operating, they’ve provided services to 60+ youth through arts and workforce development. Their supply closets are running low—if you’re interested in supporting their services, please check their Amazon wishlist (link in bio of @ hausofcodec) for basic goods such as toilet paper, bath towels, and hand soap that you can help buy.

Plant Sale and Pantry Drive

Saturday 3/23 @10:30AM-4:30PM

Jordan’s Jungle, 545 Pawtucket Ave, Pawtucket, RI Youth Pride Inc. is partnering with Jordan’s Jungle to host a plant sale and pantry drive!

Swing by to bring an item for YPI’s Basic Needs pantry—music, light refreshments, and snacks will be provided! A portion of the sale proceeds will be donated to Youth Pride Inc., Rhode Island’s only LGBTQ+ youth organization.

UpcomingActions& CommunityEvents MutualAid*& CommunityFundraisers

A Spring Thing

Friday 3/22 @3PM-6PM

Public Shop & Gallery, 27 Sims Ave, Providence, RI

To celebrate the arrival of spring, join Public Not Private this Friday for an afternoon of community activities! There will be nature art making with real leaves and flowers, sharing and swapping of plant propagations and seeds, and plant pot and rock painting. Supplies will be provided, and the art activities are child friendly. This event is free and open to the public, and you can drop by anytime!

Empty Bowls

Wednesday 3/27 @5:30PM-8PM

WaterFire Arts Center, 475 Valley St, Providence, RI

For the first time since 2019, the Rhode Island Food Bank is hosting Empty Bowls, where you taste to give back. This year, you can enjoy tastings from more than 30 local restaurants, as well as hand-made art from local artists and makers! Each attendee brings back a hand-made bowl as a reminder of the bowls they are helping fill in the RI community. Tickets and a list of participating restaurants can be found in the bio of @rifoodbank

Teaching Artist Grant for RI Indigenous and African Heritage Teaching Artists

Rolling from 3/11 to 5/1

AS220 and Interlace are sponsoring teaching artist grants for African heritage and/or Indigenous teaching artists, especially those who have decreased income or increased expenses post-pandemic. Although not every applicant is guaranteed an award, all eligible teaching artists are encouraged to apply with the short application, which is open now and closes May 1st. Further information, including eligibility, timeline, and application link can be found at https://www.interlacefund.org/taggrant