The College Hill Independent Vol. 31 Issue 2

Vol. 31 Issue 1 Vol. 31 Issue 2

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a Brown/RISD Weekly a Brown/RISD weekly

the NEWS 02 Week in Phantasms Jay Mamana, Dominique Pariso & Tristan Rodman

Volume 31 No. 2

03 Briefing: Refugee Crisis Jane Argodale METRO 06 Take a Walk Jamie Packs ARTS 05 Death of a Salesman Jonah Max 07 Hit Me Baby One More Time Athena Washburn FEATURES 09 Compost My Soul Julia Tompkins 11 Die Hard Piper French, Yousef Hilmy & Henry Staley

From the editors: Hey, have you heard of the French thinker Michel Foucault? He’s totally lucid: he writes about all sorts of things—government, politics, sex, the prison, you name it. It’s basically Philosophy. Yea, check out his wiki.

YH / AMF

SCIENCE 13 Faking It Camera Ford OCCULT 15 ^^^^^^^^^^^ Lance Gloss INTERVIEWS 16 Phyllis Randolph Frye Madeleine Matsui LITERARY 17 Holes Sabrina Imbler EPHEMERA 12 Blurred Lines India Ennenga X 18 Guess Who? Felipe di Poi

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

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

Interviews Madeleine Matsui Occult Lance Gloss Literary Gabrielle Hick Metabolics Eli Neuman-Hammond Ephemera Jake Brodsky India Ennenga X Layla Ehsan Sara Khan Pierie Korostoff

Staff Writers Jane Argodale Ben Berke Liz Cory Marcelo Rivero-Figueroa Julia Tompkins Erin West Staff Illustrators Caroline Brewer Natalie Kassirer Teri Minoque Rob Polidoro Web Charlie Windolf Business Kaya Hill

List Jade Donaldson Jay Mamana

Senior Editors Tristan Rodman Rick Salamé

Cover Yuko Okabe

MVP Madeleine Matsui

Design & Illustration Nikolas Bentel Layla Ehsan Polina Godz

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WEEK IN PHANTASMS

by Jay Mamana, Dominique Pariso & Tristan Rodman illustration by Teri Minogue Ladies’ Night There are those who would argue that the ’80s were a dayglo cultural vacuum best left unremembered. But it was the decade that gave us so many important things including: MTV, Madonna, legwarmers, the Brat Pack, and the Chicken McNugget (1983!).

It was a good time that gave us good things.

And like all good things, it must be taken out of the attic, dusted off, and then reappropriated in an endless cycle of sequels, adaptations, and remakes because nobody can come up with anything original anymore. Least of all, it seems, Hollywood.

But out of this gloom can rise shining examples. None as great as the new Ghostbusters movie helmed by the comedic quadrumvirate that is Wiig/McKinnon/Jones/McCarthy. And instead of meeting this news with glee, the Internet went almost as rabid as that one time Donald Glover dared to suggest that he could be Spiderman.

But fans of the 1984 classic can take heart from Monday’s announcement that original ghostbuster Ernie Hudson will cameo alongside Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd in the remake. Despite calling the movie a “bad idea,” and stating thhe doubted “fans want to see” an all-female cast, he agreed to make an appearance in the new rendition. In taking the part alongside the comedienne A-Team, he also offered the sage advice that “if they’re not funny, at least hopefully it’ll be sexy.”

Apparently the idea of a squad of misfit parapsychologists fighting supernatural forces in midtown Manhattan remains totally believable.

The idea that women can be funny? Not so much. –DP

Sep 25, 2015

Dried Up In California’s Coachella Valley, south of the 10, between Cathedral City and Palm Desert, there is a town called Rancho Mirage. In Rancho Mirage, the ground is craggy and dry. In the summer months it is often too hot to go outside without immediately returning to an air conditioned structure. In Rancho Mirage, four inches of rain fall every year. At press time, temperatures are approaching 106 degrees.

Rancho Mirage, like much of the desert, is known for its golf courses. There were once twelve golf courses in Rancho Mirage, though now there are only eleven. The Rancho Mirage Country Club, located at the corner of Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra Drives, has been closed since June. A report from The Desert Sun this week describes the fairways as “dried and deeply cracked,” the tee boxes as “various shades of brown or gray.” It has been a precipitous drop. The fairways were once, according to the Country Club’s website, “mature” and “tree-lined,” the course “perfect for year-round playing conditions.”

Rancho Mirage homeowners, the Sun reports, voted this week to pursue legal action against Oasis Ranch, a Beverly Hills-based LLC that purchased the Country Club prior to its closure. The homeowners claim their property value is plummeting.

It’s right around here that I must intervene.

Rancho Mirage is known for its golf courses, and located in one of the driest regions of the United States. Boosters will tell you that light rainfall and the ongoing California drought have almost no impact on whether or not running a golf course is either viable or responsible. “The drought has almost no impact on the Coachella Valley,” said Craig Kessler, director of governmental affairs for the Southern California Golf Association in 2014. “It doesn’t rain here anyway.”

Rancho Mirage is known for its golf courses, and located in one of the driest regions of the United States. It is a town named in faux-Spanish style for the phenomenon that occurs when it is so hot the land reflects on itself and looks like a body of water. In 2003, Rancho Mirage was voted Best Resort Town by the London Imperial Traveler Magazine.

Rancho Mirage is known for its golf courses, and located in one of the driest regions of the United States!!! Deciding to live in Rancho Mirage, a choice made by many people above the age of 65, means committing to a lifestyle dependent upon air conditioning, water pulled from an increasingly depleted aquifer, and at the very least a golf cart to get from your house to the course.

The apocalypse is coming, but in Rancho Mirage, it has already begun. –TR

A Brief History of Fake Versions of Real People Stop by HologramUSA’s website, home of the company behind the recently announced 2016 world tour of a hologram Whitney Houston and many other bills for sensational fake people who were once real, and you may find yourself in the “Talent” section. Here you’ll find a host of the most dead performers of the 20th century, bios included. We’re talking folks like Nat King Cole, Buddy Holly, and Wilson Pickett, to name a few of these very talented, non-existent people.

Much has been made in the presses lately about these newfangled hologram technologies, at least since dead hologram Tupac decided by a strange corporation’s own volition to perform at Coachella in 2012. The whole thing, what with the dead singers and all, seems to give most people the elusive feeling that this all is very wrong. But the idea of the hologram is not new: this kind of stuff has been happening for centuries, and, aptly enough, many of the technology’s pioneers were dubious occultists and vulgar capitalists.

One Johann Schropfer, a pioneer of Blithe Spirit-esque entertainment séances, created a device using convex mirrors, shrewd lighting, and lies to project apparitions into his coffee shop for fun and profit. He eventually convinced himself that the ghosts he created were real and went insane, which is wont to happen in this industry. The mid-18th century British civil engineer Henry Dircks used a similar invention to project—who’d have thought?—ghostly figures into theaters.

The Dircksian Phantasmagoria caught the attention of a wider audience when a guy called John Pepper saw Dircks’ invention at a fair and decided he could make money off of it. Pepper and Dircks took out a joint patent and renamed the device Pepper’s Ghost, a name which, to Dircks’ dismay, ended up sticking. Weird, considering how well Dircksian Phantasmagoria sort of rolls of the tongue.

HologramUSA says on its website that their tech is merely an updated version of Pepper’s Ghost.

In a CNN report on the Whitney Houston hologram tour, two passersby were asked how the tour made them feel.

“We should let her rest in peace,” said one woman. The other just said, “Creepy.” Which is all just to reinforce that the odd, “this seems kind of fucked up” feeling that some describe when discussing holograms might be rooted in the fact that this technology has historically existed to trick people into thinking dead people are alive again—sometimes to impress those people, but usually to profit off of them. We’re not so gullible, but we seem stuck between wanting our dead people to be dead and wanting to see them do what they did while they were alive. Immortality is achievable and, hey, it’s not that expensive! If all this is about profiting off of the fear of death, then at least we know such impulses are as old as time.

When asked what he thinks about the public’s response to his product, HologramsUSA CEO Alki David said, “It’s not creepy, it’s entertainment.” Methinks the CEO doth protest too much. –JM

NEWS

02

UPPER LIMIT The Refugee Crisis and Islamophobia in Europe

by Jane Argodale illustration by Nik Bentel

On September 8, a video surfaced of Hungarian journalist Petra Laszlo kicking refugees as they ran past police out of a detainment camp near the Serbian border. They were being held there by a government unwilling to let them continue their journey through Hungary. Laszlo was working for a news channel associated with Jobbik, a far-right party notorious for spreading xenophobia in Hungary. Though the journalist was fired, the event is symbolic of the growing confidence of far-right parties in Europe. Before the current refugee crisis reached its breaking point, these parties had been slowly gaining popularity in response to growing migration within the EU. As thousands of refugees, one in five fleeing the ongoing civil war in Syria, cross European nations’ borders, these parties may see an even greater rise in support because of the perceived threat of Islamification that the refugees pose.

The same day that the video came out, a post appeared on the Pope’s official Twitter account urging religious communities to take in refugees. The next day, Catholic Bishop Laszlo Kiss-Rigo of Hungary, representative of the most dominant religion in the southern region of the country—through which many refugees enter—called the wave “an invasion.” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has become a notorious voice in the crisis, asserting that a wave of Muslim refugees would threaten Hungary’s identity as a Christian nation.

It is also construed that many of those arriving in Europe are economic migrants, rather than refugees, coming to take advantage of Europe’s economy rather than seeking necessary protection. The distinction between these terms is key, though they are often used interchangeably. Under international law, refugees must be able to prove they are fleeing war or persecution. Under the European Union’s Dublin Convention, refugees can apply for protected status in Europe, and cannot be returned to the dangerous situations they have escaped. Officials across Europe often refer to those who are probably refugees as migrants to justify restricting their movement.

The vast majority of those coming from Syria, as well as many coming from Iraq and Afghanistan, can be considered refugees. Since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, 250,000 people have been killed in the conflict and 4 million Syrians have registered with the United Nations as refugees. The vast majority of Syrian refugees are not in Europe, but in camps in neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, countries ill-equipped to support refugees outside of giving them a place to live. The situation in many of these camps is grim. One in five people living in Lebanon now are Syrian refugees, but there are no officially sanctioned refugee camps—only informal camps for which many residents must pay rent to landlords. Access to education and healthcare can take months or years to secure for refugees. In Lebanon, attacks against Syrians have been on the rise by both civilians and soldiers. Tents in Syrian refugee camps are torched, and military personnel execute raids and beat residents. With little hope of stability or a prosperous future in the region, many refugees are looking towards Europe.

The appeal of Europe lies in its wealth, and the greater possibility of starting a new life with access to education, permanent housing options, and healthcare. Those who choose to make the journey to Europe often rely on smugglers, many of whom are former drug traffickers who charge thousands of dollars, to sneak them across borders and put them on boats to Greece and Italy. As autumn approaches, conditions at sea are becoming more dangerous. On September 15, the Turkish coastguard detained the survivors of a sinking boat approaching Greek waters, and threatened to deport those who couldn’t pay for flights to Lebanon. Nowar el-Debiar, a recent Syrian arrival in Greece, told The Guardian “the level [of refugees] will be lower because the sea is not good, and maybe the fact that Hungary has closed its borders will put people off. But after five years of war in my country, people cannot bear the situation and

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so those who used to not think of emigration are now thinking about it. So in October the migration will continue.”

The island of Lesbos, a popular tourist destination in Greece, has become the largest point of entry for refugees, due to its proximity to Turkey. There is now a backup of 20,000 refugees waiting to register with authorities on the island, and Coast Guard officials often work double shifts to rescue those who get stranded near the shore. Upon arrival, refugees often must sleep on sidewalks without access to toilets, and face animosity from locals.

After arriving in Europe, the trip doesn’t get any easier. After Greece comes the rest of the Balkan region, where many countries have closed or restricted their borders, with new developments in their policies each day—Croatia has closed its borders, and Hungary has put up barbed wire fences along the south and east. However, the destinations of most refugees are further northwest, like Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. With train service unreliable and disrupted, refugees have resorted to crossing the continent on foot. Video footage from The Guardian early in September shows men, women, and children walking and sleeping along highways connecting Budapest to Vienna, including some with serious physical injuries.

Further west, where many refugees hope to end up, France and Germany serve as contrasting examples of how two wealthy, Western European powers respond to the crisis. In Germany, a common final destination, refugees are greeted by train cars painted with the words “welcome refugees” in Arabic. Germany has been at the forefront of the crisis, with many of the refugees calling Chancellor Angela Merkel their “compassionate mother.” Yet in Denmark, a highway was closed for a number of days to prevent refugees from crossing into the country from Germany, and the government spent $37,500 publishing ads in Lebanese newspapers meant to discourage refugees from entering.

France has been one of the least popular destinations for refugees, certainly in part due to the government’s unwillingness to accept them. The leader of its far-right National Front party, Marine Le Pen warned that “unless the French people take action, the invasion of the migrants will be every bit the same as that of the fourth century, and could have the same consequences,” alluding to Celtic invasions that took place in the Middle Ages, replacing previous populations and causing chaos in the region. Mayors in the country are refusing the Interior Minister’s requests to take in refugees, amid heightening fears of their cities being overrun. In the northern city of Calais, a camp of more than 3,000 refugees hoping to reach the UK called “the Jungle” has formed. French police have repeatedly entered, dismantled makeshift dwellings, and fired tear gas.

Although German Chancellor Angela Merkel had at one point promised there would be “no upper limit,” on intake of refugees, the Munich police have stated that the city has reached the capacity of refugees it can support, and Germany is now increasing border controls.

With even the countries most willing to take in refugees unable to unify support within their own borders, the chances of smoothly executing a broad, effective European agreement to handle the crisis seem slim. With the resources of refugee agencies overwhelmed, Germany has insisted that the refugees be taken in more evenly among European countries. Many countries have been outspoken against such an agreement, particular less wealthy former Communist states such as Slovakia, where every major party has taken a stance against any requirement to accept refugees. On Tuesday, the European Union managed to push through a deal to distribute 120,000 refugees amongst member states. Given that over 350,000 have already entered the European Union this year, this is certainly a political underestimate, a denying of reality in hope that some continental unity can be maintained. Yet Hungary, Romania, the Czech

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Republic, and Slovakia all voted against the decision. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico vowed not to accept his country’s quota of 10,000, telling his parliament “as long as I am prime minister, mandatory quotas will not be implemented on Slovak territory.”

This defiance suggests not only the difficulty of actually enforcing the agreement, but also that EU countries may no longer want the freedom of movement and cooperation that is at the heart of the European Union. This response does not bode well for a weakening European Union, struggling with debt crises and nationalist challenges­—but the human rights implications are perhaps the most disturbing.

Gruesome images continue to appear in the media, like that of an abandoned truck in Austria with the dead bodies of 71 refugees. Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann’s response to the incident emphasized the need for “combating criminals and people traffickers.” The conditions of civil war and instability that would drive a refugee to trust smugglers went unmentioned. As fear and uncertainty build in Europe, it becomes easier for far-right parties to gain power. The philosophy that these far-right groups preach often comes with terrifying consequences for the people they fear are ruining their countries. Militias led by Jobbik have terrorized villages with high Romani populations and led rallies outside of homes, all justified as necessary measures to improve safety. In France, the right wing group Génération Identitaire began conducting “scum patrols” on the Lille subway last year, also justified as a safety precaution, to harass passengers they perceived as not French. The much larger National Front was founded by former supporters of Nazi collaborationist Vichy France, and currently holds two seats in the National Assembly. Former party leader and father of the current leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen was expelled from the party this summer after calling the Holocaust a “detail” of World War II. The National Front largely campaigns on a distrust of immigrants, particularly Muslim ones, who make up a large portion of France’s population.

In light of the dire situation refugees are facing, it’s becoming clear that Europe is grappling with entrenched xenophobia even in circles less extreme than Hungary’s Jobbik and France’s National Front. For example, over the years, France has grappled with controversy over the right of Muslim women to wear traditional head coverings. The controversy centers around “laïcité,” a strict interpretation of the separation between church and state, that essentially aims to keep conspicuous expressions of religion out of public places, such as government-run schools. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy put it succinctly in a 2010 cabinet meeting: “citizenship should be experienced with an uncovered face.” For many Muslims, removing the veil is out of the question, making them, in the eyes of Sarkozy and many other French citizens, unable to truly experience citizenship.

Sep 25, 2015

So opposition to Muslim immigration isn’t simply a value of the far-right, but also a value that fits in comfortably with the values of French citizens across the political spectrum. The France-based feminist organization FEMEN has become known for its topless protests in front of Islamic centers, conflating many Muslim women’s practice of covering most of their bodies with female oppression. The implication is that a visible Islamic presence in France exists in opposition to feminism, secularism, and freedom. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders of the Party for Freedom has warned of the “Islamisation of the Netherlands,” also making an appeal to secular, liberal values. Though Wilders also advocates a ban on immigration from all Muslim countries, and has compared the Quran to Mein Kampf, the basis of his position is also one that appeals to many liberal Europeans.

In spite of such strong oppositional voices, many Europeans have welcomed refugees. In news footage of the refugees walking through Budapest on the way to the Austrian border, ordinary people can be seen handing out food, water, and clothing to refugees. Hans Breuer, a shepherd in Austria, has used his knowledge of back roads and local farmland to take refugees across the border from Hungary. Breuer, the son of a Jewish dissident who had to flee the Nazi regime for Britain, has uploaded footage on YouTube of himself and his passengers singing Yiddish folk songs on the trip across the border. Speaking to The Guardian, Breuer compared the current crisis to his parents’ stories of the Nazi regime: “friends of my mother escaped the Nazis by pretending to be members of the SS. Hearing this story all my life is what has prepared me for this situation.” The sense of responsibility to the people walking down highways and packing into trains in search of a safe home is crucial to any effort to solve this crisis. Perhaps this is why Germany, more aware than any other European country of the consequences of turning a blind eye to human suffering, has taken the lead.

It’s important for any country taking in refugees to consider how they would support this new population. But in Europe the discussion turns far too often into whether it’s even desirable to help refugees who fled war and risked their lives to reach what is meant to be a safe, democratic haven. Dealing with the refugee crisis won’t just be a question of resources, but a question of whether Europeans believe their institutions are strong enough to hold up in a multicultural, pluralist society.

JANE ARGODALE B’18 is Swiss.

NEWS

04

JUST BUSINESS

Trump, The Apprentice, and the Labor of Reality TV

by Jonah Max As a helicopter emblazoned with the Trump logo veers over a rendering of the New York City skyline, the O’Jays sing “For the Love of Money” and the screen begins to flicker with stock footage of luxury brands, the NYSE ticker, obscure currency, and the aphorism now synonymous with the show itself: “It’s nothing personal. It’s just business.” Watching the opening sequence of The Apprentice, with its exhausted images and banal expressions, it’s not hard to feel that the show is entirely depthless. In fact, in many ways, the show itself seems to encourage this reading. In the pilot episode, contestants and viewers are rewarded with a tour of Donald Trump’s gaudy penthouse apartment replete with ornate furniture Trump gleefully admits to never having used. This shallow exercise is followed by painfully prosaic advice from Trump, instructing us to “work hard and have fun.” In later episodes he’ll inform us that “without respect you cannot be a leader” and that “you have to fight for yourself.”

Even though these messages are directed towards the audience in Trump’s episodic asides, they are designed to aid the arc of the storyline far more than they are to provide any insight for hopeful entrepreneurs. All of these moments, it seems, are laiden with the tacit understanding that what is being presented is purely entertainment and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. This apparent shallowness isn’t lost on the show’s critics, either. As Tom Shales writes for the Washington Post: “There's so little happening in The Apprentice … that it's hard to work up an opinion about it.”

Yet, after nearly 200 episodes, as the show’s future is wholly unclear—amid a turbulent transition between Donald Trump and an as yet-unnamed successor—it might serve us to look under its glitzy surface and attempt to locate it in a broader political context. Let me be explicit—I have little interest in whether the show functions as a political platform for the ideologies of the left or right. Rather, I’m interested in the show’s ability to reflect the state of labor today, and to determine what that state is. While any cultural object could be asked to perform this sort of cognitive mapping, The Apprentice—already deeply politicized for other reasons— seems to offer itself as a primary candidate.

Location, location, location In an early episode of the first season, Trump attempts to disprove the real estate mantra, “location, location, location,” by instead telling the audience that “the people behind a deal are much more important than its location.” This belief is enacted by The Apprentice, as it spills out across New York, momentarily setting up tasks and scenarios in discrete locations only to pick up and move on once again.

At a moment’s notice, a contestant may find himself sent to work in an airplane hanger, a restaurant’s storeroom, or the backseat of a minivan. One’s workplace is wherever one is at that moment. In fact, a major conceit of the show centers on contestants’ abilities to adapt to a rapidly changing work environment. Allowing one’s unfamiliarity with the terrain to impede one’s success is often cause for firing; in the first

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season alone, Heidi, Kirsti, and David all struggle to adapt to their temporary environments (a pedicab dispatch, an open air flea market, and a South Street Seaport lemonade stand, respectively) and are all subsequently fired. In the world of The Apprentice, though, it is not only the workplace that is fungible—the tasks that the teams are asked to perform change with each episode. At one point the objective may be to sell the most cups of lemonade; at another, it may be to design the most appealing ad campaign for a Trump casino.

While these labor conditions can be found on numerous reality TV shows, where environments and objectives are constantly in flux, they also speak to the precarity of most post-Fordist labor, televised or otherwise.

In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello sketch out the contours of the late capitalist work ethos, arriving at a description of the employed entrepreneur or “great man,” whose “versatility and adaptability … make him employable.” Not only are these qualities of fluidity and flexibility visible in The Apprentice’s more successful contestants, but the show also helps us visualize another facet of Boltanski and Chiapello’s critique. In using terms like “the great man” and “adaptability,” Boltanski and Chiapello lift jargon from 1990s management texts. This clearly hints towards the fact that underneath all of the local autonomy an entrepreneur may possess, she’s ultimately informed by and beholden to the character and whims of “the Firm,” “the Transnational,” or “the Corporate.” This hint is visually concretized in The Apprentice, a show in which the setting (the front of the house at Planet Hollywood, the auction floor at Sotheby’s, the R&D department at Pepsi) is always the show’s sponsor and always corporate. Though its contestants are freed from the panoptic mansions that dominate reality TV, they are in fact fettered to the far more pernicious practices of product placement and corporate personhood.

On call The contestants of The Apprentice are ensnared not only by these corporatized locations, but also by the rules and schedule of the show itself. When they’re not at a task site, the contestants are allowed to rest at a suite in the Trump Tower. And even here the contestants are still, in a way, on the job. Of course, one could make the argument that for a contestant’s entire stint on the show they are “on the job,” endlessly working as performers for the viewing audience.

Yet the contestants are incapable of punching out in another sense. At seemingly any moment, the suite’s red telephone could ring, promptly summon all the contestants to some exotic (and often unannounced) locale and return them to work. In this way, they find themselves unable to ever truly clock out. By the show’s third episode, a scrawny, middle-aged contestant named Sam finds the conditions unlivable and chooses to take a nap in the midst of a project. By the end of the episode, Sam is fired. This case is not an exception—often during the elimination process in the boardroom, teammates accuse one another of falling asleep or malingering during

tasks in an effort to win Trump’s favor and avoid being fired.

Though the show’s participants are asked to be “creative risktakers,” as Donny Deutsch tells them in the second episode, when and where they are allowed to take creative risks is entirely out of their control.

A similar situation appears in modern-day managerial labor in the US, where the business day has long been 24 hours. As Benjamin Kunkel writes on the state of the American workforce in his essay “Full Employment,” this endless workday, at once the upshot of the global economy and connective technology, leaves white-collar workers “perpetually on call in a way formerly reserved for doctors and firemen.” Much like the contestants of The Apprentice, modern workers—tethered to the fluidity of the workspace and the demands of the corporation—find themselves responsible for work long before 9 AM and long after 5 PM. Kunkel continues that it “goes almost without saying that the celebrated ‘flexibility’ of the US labor market is an honorific for casual dismissal,” In other words, the term shrouds what is blatant exploitation.

Work hard and have fun Understandably, one may object to the comparison drawn between game show contestants and exploited labor. After all, isn’t there endless footage of these people drinking champagne and eating caviar? The show hardly seems exploitative as it whisks away contestants on a private jet for an elaborate dinner in New England. For all of this supposed labor, it’s wholly unclearly whether or not the contestants are really just at play. At its crux, the show, like any reality TV show, is an invented competition in which one strives to complete objectives and win prizes. As such, it can seem totally removed from the unfortunate reality truly exploited workers face.

And yet, even here the logic of The Apprentice neatly coincides with post-Fordist labor practices. This blending of play and work, what’s often called gamification, or, to borrow Alexander Galloway’s term, ludic capitalism, plays a crucial role in “the new socio-economic landscape, in which flexibility, play, creativity, and immaterial labor… have taken over from the old concepts of discipline, hierarchy, bureaucracy, and muscle.” Whether it’s the work of gold farmers—gamers who tirelessly accrue in-game currency on World of Warcraft or Runescape to trade it in for realworld money—or the labor conducted by internet users who unknowingly help Google design more effective advertising through their comments and posts, the line between work and play has never been more blurry. The Apprentice pushes this one step further, grafting the logic of games and childlike competition onto the entire corporate experience. For all the fun we’re having watching it, one gets the feeling that something a little more serious is happening underneath.

JONAH MAX B’18 wants to make The Apprentice great again.

The College Hill Independent

WALKING TO NOT FORGET The Changing Place of HIV/AIDS Activism in Rhode Island

Blocks away from the State House, Usher’s “Yeah” reverberates through the empty streets. The day is grey and wet, but I soon find myself amidst a group of people chatting convivially under arches of red balloons. The atmosphere is strangely celebratory. People seem almost elated to be here, reconnecting with old friends and handing out colorful t-shirts. I ask one of the volunteers why she has chosen to come to the event, but it’s hard to make out what she says over the booming pop medley coming from the speakers.

September 13 marked the 30th AIDS walk in Rhode Island, an event to raise funds for and awareness of those living with HIV/AIDS in the Rhode Island community and the nation. The AIDS walk, which happens annually, takes the form of a 2.5-mile loop through the city starting and ending at the State House. Maybe it’s simply a sign of its old age, but the urgency of the event appears to be mostly gone. This year’s theme: “keeping hope alive!”

“We are here to continue to fight,” began Mayor Jorge Elorza, who was one of many speakers at the event. Before Elorza’s speech, Steve Hourahan, the director of AIDS Project Rhode Island, lauded the Mayor for his support of the fight against HIV/AIDS in Providence as well as of the LGBTQ community. Elorza’s speech followed many of the expected arcs. He emphasized the need to find a cure, but also to educate the community in order to prevent the spread of the virus. Citing the fact that over one million Americans and 33 million people worldwide are living with HIV/AIDS, Elorza finished: “this is a call to action.” He was met with tepid applause.

Seth Magaziner, the General Treasurer of the State of Rhode Island, offered a more nuanced look at the unique state of HIV/AIDS activism in the contemporary moment. “30 years ago, doing this was a revolutionary act,” he said, looking out over a crowd filled with college-aged students, young children, and seasoned veterans. Indeed, there was nothing visibly revolutionary about the participants of the AIDS Walk.

And this is perhaps part of why it felt so strange to be there.

Everyone seemed so­—normal.

In past decades, HIV/AIDS awareness has been assimilated into mainstream consciousness. Whereas HIV/ AIDS activism in the 80s and 90s was linked to marginalized communities and radical politics, such activism today lacks an expressly revolutionary thrust. In a recent n+1 article, AIDS activist and writer Emily Bass defines the transition between these two periods as the “footnote years.” “It was an era in which HIV/AIDS activism began winning remarkable victories in the global arena, and the era in which the HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ agendas cleaved apart,” writes Bass. Indeed, HIV/AIDS is no longer just an LGBTQ issue; it is a global one. The fight against AIDS has been institutionalized, driven by organizations like the Center for Disease Control or the World Health Organization rather than a small group of vocal and frustrated queer-identifying urban youths. Formalized initiatives have replaced the radical LGBTQ-inflected actions of previous AIDS activist groups like ACT UP. Rather than blocking bridges, today’s HIV/AIDS activists line up politely to have their photos taken next to the State House.

These kinds of shifts are accompanied by the changing nature of what is necessary for contemporary HIV/AIDS activism. Magaziner stressed that awareness isn’t the biggest challenge that HIV/AIDS activism faces today; complacency is. And this notion gets at the crux of what it means to be an HIV/AIDS activist today, when the disease has been so thoroughly normalized that it is no longer widely viewed as a pressing issue. The entire event seemed to be a kind of nudge

Sep 25, 2015

towards remembrance. “Don’t forget about us,” it seemed to insist. And now is certainly not the time to forget. With cases of HIV on the rise in Rhode Island, there is perhaps no more important moment for HIV/AIDS activism in the state. Yet the question of who is rendered visible or invisible in this activism remains a pressing though generally unaddressed issue.

Indeed, this “us” is still not an all-inclusive one, often leaving out the very communities that are most affected by the virus. +++ Dr. Philip Chan, an HIV/AIDS specialist working at the Miriam Hospital, and Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott, the new director of the RI Department of Health, offered more tangible steps for addressing the spread of HIV/AIDS in Rhode Island.

Both doctors addressed the need for increased testing as well as more widespread education about Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). PrEP is a daily pill that acts as a preventative measure against the transmission of HIV. “PrEP has been shown to reduce the risk of HIV infection in people who are at high risk by up to 92%,” according to the Center for Disease Control. Some studies have even found success rates as high as 99%. Yet while PrEP is a material example of the progress that has been made since the onset of the epidemic, it offers even more fodder for our disregard. “We cannot grow complacent,” asserted Alexander-Scott.

Both Chan and Alexander-Scott also addressed the need to focus on communities that are disproportionately affected by the disease, specifically youth, communities of color, and men who have sex with men. But despite all the talk of devastation, it was hard to fathom the destructive force of the virus. Save for the occasional commemorative quilt or t-shirt, obvious signs of those whose lives were ravaged by HIV/AIDS were largely absent.

by Jamie Packs illustration by Rob Polidoro

Absent too were the voices of some of these disproportionately affected communities that have been largely overlooked in the activism surrounding the virus. HIV/AIDS is an intersectional issue. It affects a variety of communities and thus necessitates a similarly diverse response. This message stood at the core of a speech given by Ronald Lewis, a Providence-based artist and HIV/AIDS activist who is vocal about his HIV-positive status.

Lewis’ speech was undoubtedly the most compelling of the event. His message departed slightly from the more formulaic and teleological calls to action vocalized by his predecessors, instead emphasizing the need for intersectionality in HIV/ AIDS activism. Often viewed strictly as an LGBTQ issue, HIV/AIDS has, in the process, ignored the lives of other communities, specifically people of color. While people of color make up about 30% of the population, they represent 65% of new HIV infections in Rhode Island. “One can’t talk about HIV in people of color without talking about the history of racism,” said Lewis, who stressed the need for anti-racist and LGBTQ activists to work together. He then quoted the feminist writer Audre Lorde, who famously declared, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Lewis gestured towards a much deeper problem facing those infected with HIV/AIDS, and indeed with the current state of HIV/AIDS activism. The fact that the communities who are most disproportionately susceptible to contracting the virus are also the ones who are excluded from much of the discourse on HIV/AIDS is a problem that cannot be addressed simply by finding a medical cure. Lewis’ proposed solution to this deep structural problem, however, echoed what had already been said over and over again that day: “We must embrace community.” +++ As the tents were slowly being disassembled after the walk, I began a conversation with a representative from the Community Care Alliance, an organization that provides support for HIV-positive inhabitants of northern Rhode Island. When I asked her about the necessity for collaboration, she visibly perked up. “You have to collaborate. This is not something you can tackle on your own,” she said. Soon she began enumerating the other organizations with which the Community Care Alliance has worked, but was not able to finish her list because of an old friend and collaborator who was walking by.

“Just a second,” she said, running to give her friend a hug.

The community of HIV/AIDS activists in Rhode Island is a tight one. And while there is still much space for it to grow and many more voices for it to include, its message nonetheless reverberates throughout the state: “don’t forget about us,” it says again and again. Don’t forget about us.

JAMIE PACKS B’17 lacks an expressly revolutionary thrust.

METRO

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WHAT AM I LISTENING TO? Tell me your wish Tell me that small dream you have within you Draw that ideal person you have inside your head And then look at me — Girls’ Generation, “Genie” This August, shimmering waves of music surged across the hot no-man’s land between North and South Korea. Siren voices filled the ears of North Korean soldiers with Korean-Pop (K-Pop) hits between airings of political radio shows. This unusual form of audio warfare, conducted “so that North Koreans can learn that the world is changing” according to ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok, was performed in response to a land mine incident that had injured several South Korean soldiers earlier that month. In past border skirmishes, K-Pop has proved to be no laughing matter: in a similar exchange in 2011, Kim Jong Il threatened to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire” if the South Korean military continued to play their favorite tunes.

In this bewildering era of unending crises, demand for performer political figures, and creative means of corporate omnipresence, modes of seemingly self-expressive art have been mobilized toward the ends of state violence. +++ Now this world is simply your stage A wave of cheers In my heart, your body temperature, I’m your path. +++ The K-Pop wave has become South Korea’s most potent tool of soft-power. As one of South Korea’s largest exports, K-Pop has contributed to the transformation of its economy, culture, and global image from that of an industrializing nation, manufacturing semiconductors, to Asia’s cultural cutting edge. The K-Pop industry is intimately tied to Korea’s other commercial successes, such as Samsung; K-Pop stars, with their incredible amounts of cultural power, are the perfect platform for national and international marketing.

South Korea created an anthem and then transformed into that anthem’s nation. It was only able to realize its full cultural potential after manufacturing an expression of desire for inclusion into the world of cross-cultural symbols. In 2012 Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sport, and Tourism estimated K-Pop’s economic asset value at around US$5.26-billion. This is no fluke; South Korea has been carefully investing 1% of its national budget in cultural assets since 1994, when South Korea’s then-president Kim Young-Sam allegedly heard that Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park netted more in export value than the sales of a million and a half Hyundai cars. The investment has allowed for the enormous success of a concept called “cultural technology.”

“Cultural technology” is a term coined by Lee Soo-Man, the founder of a leading K-Pop music label, S.M. Entertainment. In a 2011 speech at Stanford Business School, he explained that he created the term in the mid-nineties when S.M. Entertainment’s first decided to launch

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artists and cultural content throughout the rest of Asia, stating that, “S.M. Entertainment and I see culture as a type of technology.” “Cultural technology” comprises a three step process of K-Pop creation and export. In this process, future K-Pop stars are selected, invested in, trained, and contracted for many years. Successful trainees are then placed in carefully selected groups of eleven-or-so members that can reconfigure depending on the audience and culture. The K-Pop stars adjust themselves around specific cultural desires and incorporate the appropriate symbols, allowing every audience to simultaneously experience a sense of individual ownership of the musical product and the popular culture it indexes.

K-Pop is at times overwhelming, at times confounding, and somehow a continually alluring hybrid of beats, languages, and symbols. In a typical K-Pop hit, performers execute precise synchronized choreography onstage under flashing lights, their costumes morphing from schoolgirl dresses to military uniforms in the blink of an eye. Stuffed animals, bling, british guard hats, leather jackets, space suits, taxis: the world of K-Pop is loaded with diverse cultural imagery. The multi-million dollar music videos overflow with a refuse of symbols emptied of cultural grounding and are charged with global appeal. Yet, within all this spectacle, each star’s character remains miraculously unique and completely integrated into the delirium. Each group contains enough individual variety within the members to appeal to anyone within any given culture. The endless possibility of permutation is perhaps the key to K-Pop’s success; it can appeal to anyone and everyone; moreover, it can appeal to you. +++ Have you become buried by your ordinary life?

Now stop and wake up You are my superstar, shining star, super star +++ Recent articles on K-Pop are shot through with militaristic language. The Atlantic’s piece, “How K-Pop conquered Japan,” (2011) and The Guardian’s article “Girls’ Generation lead KPop invasion of Japan” (also 2011) point to K-Pop’s formidable strength in terms of changing global power dynamics. The shifting of cultural and economic power balances between Japan and South Korea is especially striking in light of Japan’s relatively recent occupation of Korea.

That the tables have turned and South Korea is now able to “invade” Japan is an irony made possible only by the Japanese public’s own demand for music.

Despite its ingenious and globally applicable formula, K-Pop owes much to Korea’s specific history. K-Pop is the sparkling consequence of a long love story between occupation and music.

The Korean music scene began to draw on foreign influences from at least the early 1900s. For example, the classic “Oh My Darling, Clementine” transformed into “Simcheongga” and was reworked to express resistance to Japanese occupation around 1915. During the Korean War, American performers such as Marilyn Monroe visited deployed US soldiers in keeping with the United States’ own style of cultural invasion. This style of musical merging continued and grew after the Korean war until the mastermind Lee Soo-Man capitalized on and formalized the successes of these cultural layerings in the nineties.

The College Hill Independent

K-Pop and US Torture Music

by Athena Washburn illustration by Jack Joyce

+++ Dreams, passions I want to give them all to you I’m wanting to answer your wishes Your goddess of fortune +++ While K-Pop is a far reaching and dynamic musical expression of South Korea’s power, the US military has come to deploy American music as yet another weapon in its arsenal. Although the United States has culturally colonized with music for decades, recently, music has come to play a radically different role in US power structures from those of South Korea. Music’s relationship to the US military has become that of a violent tool in the hands of the torturer. From Iraq to Cuba, torture by music has become a method used far and wide by the US military to push suspected terrorists’ mental states to a breaking point.

Music as a violent tool of war (as opposed to early American or K-Pop style cultural colonization and domination) has long and noble roots in biblical times. As retired US Air Force Lt-Col Dan Kuehl told the St. Petersburg Times, “Joshua’s army used horns to strike fear into the hearts of the people of Jericho. His men might not have been able to break down literal walls with their trumpets, but the noise eroded the enemy’s courage.” Musical warfare picked back up during the Vietnam War. At that time experimentations with the effects of sounds and music created some strange occurrences: for example, US planes blasted funeral dirges to unsettle the enemy.

After the Korean War, the US military set up a department named SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) to train US soldiers to withstand enemy capture and interrogation. Now headquartered in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, SERE’s effect has somewhat changed.

As covered by SPIN, an ex-Army interrogator named Greg Hartley who passed through SERE reported use of avant-garde musicians such as Diamanda Galas and Throbbing Gristle in SERE’s interrogation resistance trainings. While documentation is hard to come by, it is likely that those very trainings intended to fortify the soldier against musical torture came to be used as techniques to break prisoners in US captivity down. Importantly, SERE’s chief psychologist advised Behavioral Science Consultation teams at the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Guantanamo Bay has been the site of repeated music abuses. For example, in 2003 two suspected terrorist accomplices—whose names were eventually cleared—Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal, were treated with repeated exposure to Eminem’s “Kim.” Eminem morphed into heavy metal and the repeated sonic torture led Ruhal Ahmed to confess to involvement in the 9/11 operation, something which was later proved to be false. These were not isolated incidents. According to the New York Times, In the spring of 2002, suspected Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was subjected to “deafening blasts of music by groups like Red Hot Chili Peppers.” The list goes on.

By far the United States’ largest investment at a staggering $598.5 billion (more than half of the discretionary budget) the US military forms the foundation of the United States’ power.

In the military’s use of music as a tool of war, one can see other modes of domination—cultural

Sep 25, 2015

and economic—subsumed and executed under its gigantic reach. In this system, music and the individuality associated with its creative production become disposable weapons to break any adversary who has challenged the United States’ power. The military takes music, once what defined the United States, and transforms it into violent dehumanizing noise. The types of music used as torture tools range from 2Pac and Dr. Dre to Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, Britney Spears, Aerosmith, Meatloaf and many others.

In using music as a tool of war, the US military takes American music, some of it originally subversive, and uses it to enhance its power and to demean an Other who in most modern cases takes the form of a suspected terrorist. Does it matter that music was an expression of US culture? Perhaps yes, this element does matter: in using music as painful noise, the military rejects the worth in both an individual’s art and popular culture for the power of a weapon. Torture of a prisoner, torture of American culture at the hands of its supposed protector.

The military’s appropriation of an artistic expression like music completely undermines professed values of US culture like individuality and freedom of expression. While these values have long been called into question, the transformation of such an emblem of US culture into a tool for asserting power over an Other signals a widening void in the place of values. Perhaps this confusion is mirrored in South Korea’s empty symbols, where “Cultural Technology” has imbued music with a new formula to enter into the strange new ordering of power.

A reality TV star is running for President, incomprehensibly huge and widening gaps form between the super rich and the super poor in our cities whose airports screen suspect foreigners so diligently in waiting areas in order to protect the interior from terrorists, who are driven insane by the violence of this culture in cells in other parts of the world. Global hegemony at its finest, consuming the very elements of culture that may counter it and spitting them out as a manifestation of its own power in the face of any opposing system. The military has consumed and internalized American music; art has become the military’s pulsing lifeblood.

And yet we can dance to the same music in our homes as is used in torture chambers and it still feels like art or entertainment. Is this a sonic manifestation of the increasing distance between image and reality? Has the military in fact corrupted and changed the nature of music?

Are we dancing to a tool of war?

It seems to me as though K-Pop manifests something that could be experienced as hegemony’s art, an expression of the system; torture music manifests hegemony’s violence, a corruption of the music that could or could not have been in alignment with the system and its forced inclusion. +++ Just throw everything into my guidance Even if your overwhelmed heart was to explode Even if it all flies away in the wind Right now, this moment, the world is yours ATHENA WASHBURN B’18 is charged with global appeal.

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Katrina Spade wants death in good company.

In 2013, Spade, then an architecture student at UMass Amherst, began to think about being dead—not the act of dying, but being dead. A corpse, remains. Until then, death had lingered in the abstract. She knew it would come someday, but only after she became a parent did the resounding reality come into focus. “I blame my kids,” she told the Independent, “I realized I was going to die someday.”

Spade calls me from Seattle. On the phone she is cheerful, eager, and excited to discuss a subject that most would shy away from. Once she began thinking about death—or, rather, the act of being dead—she realized there might be a different way to do it. An architect with a keen sense of environmental impact, Spade is aware that commonplace methods of burial bear substantial constraints. Traditional in-ground burial is limited by space, while cremation is energy intensive and pollutes the air, so much so that the Massachusetts Environmental Protection Agency requires an air pollution control permit. Neither process is sustainable, especially in the urban environment in which Spade hopes to design. The way she sees it, the “main purpose of architecture is to support us as human beings.” This mission extends past our individual lifetimes to the impact that our bodies, and how they are dealt with after death, will have on our descendants.

Intent on shifting how burial is envisioned in urban settings, Spade devised the Urban Death Project. Despite its alarming name, the project is quite innocuous. The concept, currently a prototype in development, was to design a space in which human remains would be composted, each body eventually transformed into a bag of nutrient-rich soil. In her words, the architecture of the facility “will create a space to comfort the grieving.” Not only would the space be feasible within an urban landscape—think vertical rather than horizontal structure— but much like a graveyard, it would be a carefully conceived environment in which the living could commune with the dead. While other burial methods are still very much in practice, Spade’s project hopes to address the issues of urbanity—in this case, a lack of space in graveyards and a need for increased environmentalism.

Laying in Spade’s project garnered attention early on in its inception. While the idea of composting remains isn’t a new one—animal remains are frequently composted at farms and in the wild, and human remains have been allowed to decompose back into the soil for centuries—the architectural significance of the space, as well as its urban setting, brought new possibilities to the natural death movement, in which bodies are buried in the ground without any barrier between corpse and soil. In 2014, the project was awarded the Echoing Green Climate Fellowship, which funds promising social entrepreneurs, giving Spade the capital needed to increase testing while developing a prototype. Once the prototype is completed, Spade’s hope is for cities to use the design to create their own Urban Death facilities. Since the interior of the space is where the composting occurs, external architectural decisions would be left up to the city in which the space would be constructed. She compares the space to a library branch: each city would receive a basic template for the facility while still being granted full autonomy over the execution of the project. This would allow cities to make decisions on scale, location, and organization. The structure of a UDP facility is functionally akin to any other composting device; it is three

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stories, tall and narrow, and easily nestled in a city block. Before bodies are added, the core is filled with woodchips. Much like a garden compost heap, the core relies on heat and a particular ratio of carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. As Spade described it, the success of any composting system is “all about creating an environment.” Once the ratio is balanced, microbes break down the body. “Nitrogen acts as a flame, creating heat which fuels the microbial action,” she explained. Over the next two weeks, the body makes its way through the structure, blending with the contents of the core (woodchips and other human remains) and emerges as soil at the bottom. Instead of an urn of ashes, families are presented with a bag of soil. The soil created by a human body is rich in nutrients; indeed, those same nutrients that act during life continue to exist after death. In the soil, they fuel new plant growth—integral parts of an ongoing system.

And in an urban setting, that bag of soil can be used to grow a garden or to plant a tree. Either way, the remains will be recycled back into the system, rejoined with the natural world.

In the city, death lacks presence beyond the moment of dying. Deaths happen in homes, in hospitals, on the street—but whatever happens to the body afterwards is far removed from the public eye. The markers of the dead seen in urban spaces are crammed, tight for space. Take, for example, the raised cemeteries in New Orleans, rows of above-ground mausoleums in a square city block; or the sprawling but packed cemeteries of Brooklyn and Queens. Though the process of burial in the Urban Death Project’s core is scientific and necessarily precise, Spade’s vision for the space is deeply rooted in the concept of ritual. The space commands reverence, both for the dead, and for the act of nature occurring within the core. After death, the body can be refrigerated for roughly a week; no embalming chemicals are used as these would counteract the composting process. On the day of the burial, those closest to the deceased wrap the body in a shroud before carrying it to the top of the core, where they proceed to perform what is dubbed by Spade the “laying in,” the moment of farewell between the living and the dead.

On tradition Spade doesn’t have much convincing to do. “The momentum has surprised me,” she says.

Frequently she receives emails from individuals wanting to know how they can ensure that their remains be composted in a UDP facility. At this point, they can’t. A prototype of the facility is set to be built at Western Carolina University, and only in 2020 does she hope to break ground on a full facility. Spade’s work does not ignore the historical precedent of natural burial. Spade examined the composting practices farms use, becoming an expert on the composting of human and animal remains. Every so often, she travels to North Carolina to test the three bodies composting there as part of her partnership with WCU. She checks temperature and smell, allowing nature to carry out its processes uninterrupted. When I ask Spade what her own death intentions are she answers without hesitation: “I want to be composted.”

The tradition of dying and rejoining nature is not a foreign one. In America’s rural areas, natural burial—where a body is simply buried in the soil—is feasible. In fact, the natural burial movement has a following in the U.S., South Africa, Germany, China, Japan, Australia, and the UK, where places like the Tarn Moor Memorial Woodland in North Yorkshire, England offer on their website: “peace & tranquility resting in beautiful countryside.” Many natural burial sites fall on conservation land, helping to mark the space as one designated for nature and natural processes. The practice of natural burial shares the essential characteristic of Spade’s project— the bodies are composted—yet the practice doesn’t face the space constraints of urban environments. The website BeATree.com is entirely devoted to the practice, advertising the merits of the “Back-to-the-Land Movement.” Though not at the forefront of the current dialogue, other forms of natural burial have been in practice for centuries. In Buddhist regions of high altitude and extreme cold—Mongolia, Ladakh, Bhutan, and parts of Nepal—the body is regarded as an empty vessel with no need for preservation. As a result, remains are left exposed to the elements in what is known as a “sky burial.” Birds and other animals feed on the remains, and anything left uneaten decomposes into the soil. In the Parsi Zoroastrian tradition in India, circular raised structures called Towers of Silence hold the dead. Corpses are seen as unclean, and are left to be excarnated by vultures.

The College Hill Independent

Death Goes Green, All Are Welcome

by Julia Tompkins illustration by Sarah Cheung

You are not alone In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the corpse often leads a solitary existence. For those that choose in-ground burial, death is an experience separate from family, friends, and neighbors.

Sometimes grave markers are shared, but coffins are side by side, a thick wall between each of our embalmed selves. In 2013, 48.7% of Americans chose burial, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. However, the rate of burial is rapidly decreasing. Since 1960, cremation rates have increased twelve-fold, from 3.6% in 1960 to 45.4% in 2013. By 2020, the NFDA estimates 71% of Americans will choose cremation, while only 23.2% will choose burial. The remaining six percent of the population choose other routes. If cremated, bodies are often spread in places where they are alone and can be memorialized alone; bodies are socially and ecologically isolated.

Much of Spade’s work aims to counteract the desire for isolation among those that would typically choose burial or cremation. Mankind has allowed the process of death to become chemical, she argues, and not in the natural sense, in the attempt to immortalize our flesh with embalming fluids. One of the most frequent questions Spade receives: will the family of the deceased receive solely the remains of the deceased in the form of soil? “No,” she answers, “you will receive a mixture, remains from multiple composted bodies.” In her response, she stresses the aspect of transformation that occurs during the composting process. Spade’s point here is that the emphasis on individuality is unimportant. During life, humans are integral parts of nature and the way it operates; yet they often fail to realize this. When someone dies and chooses UDP, he or she is given the opportunity to dissolve back into the natural system of decomposition and growth. Each body can fuel the environment around them. The project isn’t trying to redefine death; rather, as Spade sees it, “we need to realize that we are part of the natural world when we die. We decompose, turn back into the natural world. This project is all about embracing that.”

For some, the idea of being composted along with up to thirty other corpses is, well, undesirable. Dying and being memorialized gives individuals something they rarely get during life: complete and utter attention. Loved ones, distant friends, vague relations gather. Stories are shared, eulogies read. Strengths are commemorated, quirks embraced, accomplishments touted.

For an hour or an afternoon, each individual is at the center of his or her world (and, regrettably, not there to experience it). If living a complete life is an accomplishment, as seems to be the prevailing attitude in the United States—a marker of good health, success, even prosperity—then a proper funeral or memorial is a celebration. But being buried alongside others understandably removes some of the occasion of dying, as the moment must be shared with the deceased decomposing inside the same structure.

Burials in the United States are not a bargain affair. Coffins cost in the thousands of dollars—the NDFA estimates $7,045 as the median price of a casket funeral, on top of the cost of a plot, a service, and a meal for the mourners. Yet, the process of memorializing appears almost antithetical to a nice coffin or urn. When loved ones devise a celebration of the life of the deceased, writing down and reading memories and accomplishments, that is the end of life.

The relationship between the soul and the body varies on a cultural and religious basis. However, as a physical being, space-taker, and mass consumer of natural resources, the human body is a product of the earth. If the visceral reaction is one of disgust, think of this: by returning a body back to the earth, letting it become soil to fuel new growth, that body is partaking in the greatest celebration of life, allowing it to go on even after, or if, the spiritus leaves.

The UDP website opens with the lines: “Because death is momentous, miraculous, and mysterious.” Perhaps it is those qualities of death that frighten so many of us: the ultimate shift, removal from life. As populations move into cities, stacking themselves atop one another, reducing the space they can claim, the living must reconsider notions of togetherness, of social engagement, of environmentalism. If our actions in death reflect those of life, lay me into the core, sprinkle my soil in a plot on a sunny city block, make me a lemon tree.

JULIA TOMPKINS B’18 produces sweet lemons.

Sep 25, 2015

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ASHES AND DIGRESSIONS Ruminations on Death Margaret Wise Brown, a children’s book author who generally shunned the company of children, is buried where she once lived—on a small island off the coast of Maine. It isn’t far from the place where my grandparents still live, and often in late summer, when the afternoons are dragging on, I go to see her grave. Her headstone is unencumbered, a simple granite slab hewn from one of the quarries that cover the island. Lichen has begun to bloom across it, obscuring the S at the center of her name. Below, the words: Writer of Songs and Nonsense. The last time I went I noticed a wooden chair had been set unevenly into the grass. Its once dark planks are bone-bleached from the sun that filters down into the grove at the ends of afternoons.

Near this graveyard, where only two bodies are buried, is the white clapboard cottage that Margaret Wise Brown called The Only House. Today it belongs, at least in deed, to a man called Pebble. In 1952, after flirtations with Spanish princes and a ten-year affair with another woman, Margaret Wise Brown met Pebble at a party. He was sixteen years her junior and they were engaged almost immediately. Before they could marry, she died, unexpectedly, of an embolism that made its way to her heart. Pebble married another woman, though my grandparents tell me that he never really dislodged Margaret from his mind. How could he have, waking up mornings to the same sea?

Pebble’s first wife is the owner of the other body in the grove. I have always seen her as a sort of interloper in death, her crumbling bones surely unwelcome to those of the woman lying beside her. Her name was Liv and her own first marriage had been to Thor Heyerdahl, the man who crossed the Pacific Ocean on a raft. In death, Thor chose cremation, and his remains are scattered at his family’s home in Colla Micheri.

Pebble is the only one of the bunch who has made it out alive.

Actually, Thor’s third wife is still around too, but you can’t sit and watch lichen grow over ashes. –PSF

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by Piper French, Yousef Hilmy & Henry Staley illustration by Ivan Rios-Fetchko

The Heierman building in Austin, Texas is now the main office for Equitable Commercial Realty. It was built in 1887 as a hotel for a man named Tom Smith. “The Hotel Provident,” reads the inscription on the building, “operated under various names until the 1920s. In conjunction with the hotel, the lower floor housed numerous businesses, including a newspaper, a law office, the Texas Invention Co., and various enterprises of J. Frank and John G. Heierman.”

I scoured through Austin’s historical records and found a business called “Rosengreen Funeral Home” that used to operate in one part of the hotel. This was also the site of Austin’s first cremation, which happened sometime in either 1905 or 1906. Story has it that a fifteen year-old boy named Boyd Lane, of 600 Harthan street, used to work part-time at this funeral home. He would come after school to help Mr. Rosengreen, the funeral director, embalm corpses, maintain financial records, and prepare for memorial services. One afternoon Rosengreen called Boyd and told him to come to work that night—something new had come up and he needed his help. When Boyd arrived, Rosengreen informed him that an elderly European man had passed away and that his wife wanted his ashes shipped back to Europe. There were no cremation facilities in Austin at the time, so Mr. Rosengreen, thinking on his feet, asked the Heiermans to use their furnace.

Despite their initial reluctance, they eventually agreed. Just as Rosengreen and Boyd were about to begin the cremation process, however, the Austin police arrived, asking whether they were intending to destroy a body. They got approval and the cremation continued, with throngs of curious Austinites observing through the large windows.

The furnace was not hot enough to disintegrate the gentleman’s bones (crematoriums need to be between 16001800 Fahrenheit), and so, after hours of enduring the putrid scent of burning flesh, they ended up with a charred skeleton.

It's unknown what was done with the remains. –YH

When you touch a taboo, the taboo passes onto you. Even children know this. When my sister and I were young, we found a dead bird in our backyard. We solicited our brother, a toddler, to go outside and touch the bird. After he did so, he reported back to us—we told him that contact with dead birds was unwise because it meant that he would incur the fatal disease diabirdies (die-of-birdies), the same disease that took our grandmother. We told him that he had a few hours left to live, laid him in the grass, put oak leaves over his eyes, and informed him that mom would not return before he passed.

In Totem and Taboo, Freud notes that the prohibition on contact with human corpses is universal. He cites Polynesian customs that determine the duration between a death and lawful touching of the corpse. The same taboos applied to the body in life apply in death: if a person is an important figure in the community, the tribesmen have to wait longer before addressing the corpse. Violations of this waiting period warrant the death penalty. Years later, French philosopher Georges Bataille would remark that Freud’s analysis of the importance of the deceased failed to truly explain why contact with corpses inspires fear: we impose threats on those who touch dead bodies because we do not want to confront the fact that, subconsciously, we want to eat them.

The uneasiness we feel toward dead bodies applies to cremated remains as well. The death industry knows this and seemingly capitalizes on related instincts: the sacredness of and ambivalence toward the remains, and the resulting taboo on contact. Survivors of the deceased are wary that being cheap about death undermines both this sacredness and their commitment to the deceased. This is why urns are fancy, untouchable—their structure must comment on and reinforce the constitution of the taboo. If urns are not adequately designed, the taboo could lose its primacy and pass onto anyone. At the Swan Point Cemetery, in Providence, urns can cost upwards of 300 dollars, even without hefty ceremonial and procedural costs. Determining the price points of urns is not an easy conversation on either side, and it’s even harder if those in mourning are not willing to pay for it. Facing this dilemma, The Big Lebowski’s The Dude and Walter Sobchak decide to place the ashes of their late friend, Donny, in a Folger’s coffee can, an accidental gesture of irreverence towards the taboo and the sacred. When Walter attempts to throw Donny’s ashes off a cliff and into the Pacific, the wind blows the ashes back onto them, forcing contact with what is left of Donny. Alone and coated in Donny’s ashes, the offenders are neither threatened with the death penalty nor diabirdies. I guess it depends on who's watching. –HS

The College Hill Independent

BARELY LEGAL The Volatile Chemistry of Synthetic Drugs

by Camera Ford illustration by Cecilia Berriz When the video starts, the woman is already on the ground. She is lying on her stomach next to the open front door of her car, howling and clawing at creatures only she can see. She makes eye contact with the camera and screams, and it is only when the person filming the encounter shifts the camera slightly that you can see lines of cars stopped in the background—she is in the middle of a 3-lane highway. People peer out at her from their vehicles, equally curious and disturbed. When police officers arrive to escort the woman off the road, she fights back with surprising strength—it takes three officers to restrain her. Why? +++ In late 2007, the shipments of ‘herbal incense’ started arriving at a US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) hub in Wilmington, Ohio. They were tested for illicit substances, as required by protocol, and when they turned up negative were sent on their way. As more of the strange shipments began arriving in the US, border patrol officers and CBP scientists began to suspect that something was wrong. More extensive testing revealed that the ‘incense’ was coated in a mix of chemicals that reproduced the effects of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. Before long, the CBP had discovered and banned the first chemical compounds that would become known as synthetic cannabinoids. But the imports couldn’t be stopped—the border patrol labs were inundated with mystery compounds to analyze, classify, and document, and they couldn’t keep up with the pace of the chemical modifications to the arriving substances. And so, synthetic cannabis entered the US market en masse.

Government and law enforcement officials at all levels have become aware of the explosive scale—and health costs—of the synthetic drug market. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officers at customs hubs as spread out as Houston, Chicago, and even Louisville have seized incoming shipments of synthetic cannabis and other synthetic drugs. Shipments have been listed as products ranging from printer ink to cleaning products. When they are seized, they are typically analyzed and identified at a nearby federal forensics lab so that the active chemicals can be added to a list of banned compounds.

But this process can take up to a year. In the mean time, the volatile drug known as “synthetic cannabis” or “synthetic marijuana” has been creeping into corner stores, gas stations, and online marketplaces. You can find it in small, shiny packets emblazoned with neon patterns and cartoon characters, next to the Slim Jims or perhaps the sticks of gum. Commonly known on the street by brand names including “K2,” “Spice,” and “Spike,” it is smoked or ingested much like marijuana. The mix of plant matter looks something like potpourri, with many blends strongly resembling crushed marijuana leaves. The difference is that Spice has no chemical or biological relation whatsoever to the cannabis plant.

In 2014, the governor of New Hampshire declared a state of emergency after a wave of deaths related to Spice. In July 2015, The New York Times chronicled the Spice (or in this case, “Spike”) economy that has been rampant in parts of Syracuse, New York. Although details vary from place to place, the mechanics of the problem are similar across the country. Suburban teenagers and homeless urbanites alike partake in synthetic cannabinoids, some addicts and some not. There, branded baggies of Spice typically sell for ten dollars per 5 grams, which is enough for about 20 joints. Cheaper—and usually more dangerous—options include loose joints or handfuls of the drug, which sell for a dollar or two; and homemade knock-offs sold by local dealers who offer an inexpensive but incredibly volatile alternative. Toxicologists, medics, and emergency room workers who have dealt with Spice overdose patients have said that contrary to the mellow, spacey behavior usually associated with heavy marijuana use, people high or overdosed on Spice act as though they are on amphetamines—elevated heart rate, high blood pressure, and paranoia. Sometimes, it takes multiple people to calm patients enough to keep them in the hospital for the duration of their symptoms. +++ When you smoke marijuana, you are allowing tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, into your system. THC molecules travel through your bloodstream until they attach to a protein receptor called CB1. CB1 receptors are in the parts of your brain that control appetite, short-term

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SCIENCE

memory, and spatial awareness. Normally, your CB1 receptors are triggered by a cannabinoid named anandamide. Anandamide is a neurotransmitter—a chemical that allows the neurons in your brain to communicate with one another—that is made in your body and latches on to the receptors in your brain. But when you smoke, your receptors are overloaded by the addition of THC. You feel happy, and your sense of time warps. This is because THC elevates the levels of dopamine molecules in your body, which are usually released in response to things that elevate mood—food and sex, for example—and are also responsible for regulating your sense of time.

You get hungry, in part because the THC activates the receptors in your brain that regulate appetite. Although not much is known about the long-term effects of marijuana use, THC can have negative bodily effects, at least in the short-term—poor impulse control, a speeding heart rate, short-term memory loss, and mild anxiety or paranoia, among others.

Spice is popular among people looking for a legal high, because it induces physical responses similar to marijuana. But despite Spice users experiencing a similar high to the one they get from weed, the drug’s actual effects on your body are different because Spice doesn’t contain THC. It consists of a mix of chemicals called synthetic cannabinoids that is sprayed onto miscellaneous dried herbs. The herbs act as a vessel for the synthetic cannabinoids, which mimic the behavior of THC you find in marijuana and the cannabinoids naturally found in your body. In essence, Spice is a manufactured synthetic drug meant to imitate the effects of the marijuana plant. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the only thing scientists actually know about how synthetic cannabinoids work is that they bind to the same CB1 receptors as THC, but bind much more strongly. This likely induces more unpredictable effects than marijuana. For the woman on the highway, the effects were overwhelming.

There are a huge number of synthetic cannabinoids that can be used to make Spice, but one of the first was a compound called JWH-018. JWH-018 is an analgesic, or painkilling, chemical that binds to CB1 receptors and produces physiological effects similar to THC. There are other chemicals in the JWH family—as well as completely separate chemical families— which have been used in the production of synthetic cannabis at various times. Any of them can be up to 100 times more potent than the chemicals found in marijuana.

Similarly, synthetic cathinones, the compounds found in the popular drug known as bath salts, mimic the chemical effects of amphetamines and MDMA. They are stimulants, so the high they produce is one of heightened activity: euphoria, increased energy and sex drive, hallucinations, paranoia. Not much is known about how the compounds interact with the brain, but according to the NIDA they seem to release rushes of the neurotransmitters dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. These chemicals already exist in your body, but cathinones prompt extremely high levels, clocking in at ten times more potent than cocaine.

One of the dangerous things about synthetic drugs is that there is no regulation of the production process. In order to stay one step ahead of US substance abuse laws, the labs that manufacture the drugs constantly alter some of the active chemical compounds. When the DEA bans one compound, new (and technically legal) batches of Spice or bath salts can be made with a just a slight tweak to that compound’s chemical structure. The product escapes legal scrutiny, but the buyers typically know nothing about the new compound’s effects or potency, or even that the drug’s composition has changed. Even experienced users will occasionally hit a batch that might send them to the hospital with severe seizures and hallucinations, paranoia, and even heart attacks. +++ The last five years have been peppered with changes to marijuana usage and possession laws in the United States. Virginia, Georgia, Wyoming, and Florida are among a number of states that now allow medical marijuana as a treatment or pain reducer for conditions like severe epilepsy and other seizure disorders, terminal cancer, and Parkinson’s disease. In 2014, Colorado legalized and began regulating the sale of marijuana statewide for recreational and medical use. In Rhode Island, possession of up to one ounce is considered a civil violation and carries a fine of up to $150 but with no jail time and no criminal record. Students on college campuses nationwide smoke with little fear of being caught by campus security. But still, the presence of a legal alternative to marijuana—and the fact that Spice cannot be detected by drug tests—is likely enticing for potential users.

The College Hill Independent

Increasing tolerance of marijuana in public opinion might also have raised acceptance of synthetic variants. According to “Monitoring the Future,” an annual survey of US drug use carried out by the University of Michigan, there is a strong but misguided perception among high-schoolers that synthetic cannabis is relatively safe to use. This feeling is probably bolstered by the fact that the drug is legal to sell and can be easily purchased from websites like Craigslist or spice4fun.com and at places like gas stations and head shops. Typically, the brightly-decorated packages will be advertised as “natural,” or as a household product like incense with a warning of “not fit for human consumption.” These phrases act both as legal loopholes and as a signal to interested buyers. And the use of catchy names and familiar images—one strain, called “Scooby Snax,” shows a happy-looking Scooby Doo surrounded by psychedelic rays of light—certainly lures younger users into a sense of security about the “legal marijuana” they are purchasing.

To many pro-marijuana advocates, the phrase “synthetic cannabis” is a misnomer. The name implies that the drug functions in the same way as marijuana and with the same potential side effects. In reality, there is no way for users to discern its chemical composition or how much to take in order to get the desired high. In a 2014 interview with Golocalprov, Jared Moffat, director of an anti-prohibition coalition called Regulate Rhode Island, remarked that synthetic marijuana is “a bunch of random chemicals sprayed on some random herbs or plants. Calling this ‘synthetic marijuana’ is a bit like calling methamphetamine ‘synthetic coffee.’” +++ Efforts to stop the flow of synthetic drugs into the US have grown since their first entry in 2008 and now often involves law enforcement from other countries. In 2013 the DEA completed Project Synergy, which spanned 35 states and five countries and led to over 200 arrests and the seizure of thousands of kilograms of synthetic drugs. It’s widely known that most of the drugs are being made by underground chemical labs in China and the Czech Republic, before being sold to distributors who pass it along to thriving markets in the US, Europe, and increasingly Asia. The appeal seems to be, at least in part, the availability of a marijuana-like product that allows pot enthusiasts to purchase their high legally.

But the “recipe” for K2 is not confined to shady chemical labs in other parts of the world. In lieu of buying the brightly colored packets from the local corner store, pretty much anyone can craft batches of homemade Spice. It doesn’t require much beyond plant matter—tobacco is popular, but menthol and chamomile are alternatives—acetone or rubbing alcohol, and a choice of synthetic cannabinoid. The recipes are easily found via Google search, and many of the necessary chemical compounds can be ordered online from labs selling “research chemicals.” It’s not clear whether these laboratory websites are entirely legal, but the fact is they are very easy to find.

The practice of private drug production and consumption is not new—meth labs and distribution centers of various sizes have been a part of the drug landscape for years. But a bit of enterprising chemical manipulation has given both curious teenagers and enterprising drug merchants access to a convenient, cheap, and often unpredictable high. Despite constant government efforts to stem imports of the drug and limit its health impacts, Spice and its synthetic cousins don’t seem to be going anywhere.

Pro-marijuana advocates would say that this is a prime reason to legalize marijuana. Increasing support for legalizing marijuana across the country could also be making synthetic cannabinoids seem like a viable alternative despite their differences. But whatever the reasons, it’s clear that synthetic marijuana has opened up a new frontier for drug laws and drug consumption.

CAMERA FORD B’16 is not fit for human consumption.

Sep 25, 2015

SCIENCE

14

CULT OF THE KEMPT Lawns of the Suburban Imaginary Under Threat

by Lance Gloss illustration by Juan Tang Hon We mowed them shaggy at college rentals mid-town; tightened edges on the winding subdivision drives; begged the truck to keep speed on the highway to the exurbs, as it sagged under grass and machine. Each week, the bluegrass grew back, until the sun outpaced it and burnt it crisp. Your correspondent spent this summer maintaining the clean, green carpet that has become a ubiquitous feature of the American landscape. Landscaping crews, like the one that employed me in Fort Collins, CO, are kept busy with supermarket lots and school grounds, as well as on single family yards, golf-courses, and parks. Even the dead are afforded their well-kempt turf, though they must appreciate the throb of the mower from six feet below.

Americans adopted the lawn from English estate gardeners, under the guidance of landscaping gurus like Frederick Law Olmstead in the midnineteenth century. As a key component of the suburban residential model, early lawn schemes were reproduced nationwide as suburbs multiplied. In the century-and-a-half since it arrived in full force, the lawn has grown at a faster rate than any other ecosystem on the continent. It wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that the lawn came under serious reconsideration.

Among the many questions voiced about the idyllic suburbia at that time was the one Michael Pollan delivered in the title of his 1989 New York Times article, “Why Mow?” Pollan himself admitted to mowing as a matter of conformity. He delivers a tale in which his father was tacitly lobbied against, then aggressively confronted, by his neighbors neglecting his lawn. This strong pressure to conform suggests that lawn ownership can be considered a cult. Janja Lalich, an expert in cultic studies, writes that a cult is characterized by “concerted effort at influence and control.” In the case of the lawn, this influence is exerted at two levels: first, by the society on its members, and then by the members on the grass. An individual may be seen as displacing the insecurity of being controlled through the enactment of control—a sequence commonly identified with bullying. Perhaps this accounts for the cultural inertia of the grass habit. +++ Numerous writers have elaborated other causes for this American obsession. Ecologist John Falk proposed a “Savanna Syndrome” established during Homo sapiens’ evolution on Africa’s grasslands to explain our love for the artificial meadow.

There is also cause for a critique of a culture in which mowing falls on a list of male domestic tasks that include flipping one’s meat on a grill and wielding power tools. Philosopher Yi-Fu Tan theorized the lawn as a form of pet, akin to the dog that also populates the classic nuclear household. However, intimate attachment to a pet typically inspires an intimate awareness of its needs—an awareness absent among proprietors who hire out for lawn care. Such absentee ownership is tantamount to keeping the dog always kenneled, with its picture on the fridge.

Could it be that our attraction to lawns is based in a drive beyond a love of the turf itself, beyond the horizon of grass, deep into the psyche: the urge to subdue the unkempt and manifest order. Order certainly describes the nuclear suburban imaginary in which the lawn fits. Professor Philip Zimbardo, famed orchestrator of the Stanford Prison Experiment, pointed to this conclusion when he wrote, in 1969,

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residents, the lawn represents a manacle. An old man without money for proper medical care had us mowing halftime, but couldn’t let the service go. His homeowner’s association had approached him a few years before. +++ Of late, the environmental cost of lawns has been cast in sharp relief. The EPA reports that 100 million pounds of chemicals are deployed in America’s lawns annually. A tremendous amount of gasoline feeds the machinery of mowing crews, who have made lawn-care a multibillion dollar industry. In addition, more than 10,000 gallons of water are required to bring a typical third-acre lawn through the season. Homeowners’ lawn practices have been implicated in California’s ongoing drought, and governments are now reacting with tight sanctions on water use.

The Los Angeles County Water District is now offering rebates to those who will rip up their lawns­—and many have. Others are clinging to their grass: reports have surfaced of lawns being spray painted green, a desperate act likely to kill the organism beneath. In Fort Collins, the suburbs have grown thick that “consistency is a safeguard against chaos” and that it must with California’s wealthy migrants, who have be pursued “for the individual to maintain a conception of come seeking a more tolerant watering regime. Careful disuse himself as a normal member of society.” In the face of a fiery of grass in their private yards has been uniformly sanctioned. tide of “mass hostility, aggression, and inhumanity,” with conBut many active uses of the grass, especially on public temporary youth flooding Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco property, draw a skeptical eye from law enforcement. Comto chase their “high in the sky” and Civil Rights protesters muning for too long with the bluegrass has resulted in violent taking to the streets, Zimbardo prescribed conformity on all clashes; police routinely crack down on groups of homeless fronts. On the sprawling battleground of the suburb, consispeople for staying too long in Fort Collin’s small downtown tency manifests in a uniform, three inch green blade; in its park, resulting in property seizure and injuries. There are right endless repetition, men like Zimbardo saw the sanctity of the ways and wrong ways to relate to the grass—to maintain it is nation. essential; to sit for too long atop it can be criminal. +++

+++

Lawns are not merely benign symbols; they play an active role in establishing order. They are, in effect, a tool for the preservation of residential segregation. It costs roughly $300 dollars a month to maintain a lawn in the US—more if you don’t mow it yourself—and homeowners' associations and even municipalities can freely dole out fines for unkemptness. This means that inability to maintain a lawn can bar residents from homeownership on the basis of their disposable incomes. This represents a real barrier; yet, amidst the crusade against racial segregation in American housing, the mowers drone on under the radar. So the disenfranchising patterns of suburban order, adored by Zimbardo in his time, continue on, omnipresent, across the breadth of our built environment.

Behind the white picket fence, the exclusivity of expense makes the lawn a useful ploy for social status. Lush sod is a conspicuous a display of consumption, exaggerated by its material pointlessness. The pretension reaches full pith in the form of lawns amidst urban density, where sod is reduced to a strip not more than five feet wide and ten feet long, girding the base of a classy apartment building. These, like those enfolding 7-Elevens and prisons, are but token displays of abundance through the language of conformity.

The cult exerts such strong powers of retention that one can scarcely blame the average participant. Many mowers would like to quit, but can’t, for fear of ostricization. People who find themselves living with a lawn they can’t take care of, but to which they are bound, often feel trapped. Maintenance costs quickly become a burden when circumstances change, as with the suddenly unemployed, senior citizens, and the ill.

Our customers included sufferers of strokes and dementia, often living alone in distant ‘burbs voided vibrancy by deadends and speed bumps meant to preserve tranquility. To such

Some Californians will flee to continue their lawn mowing practices. Others will be won over by the growing practice of xeriscaping, with which water-wise homeowners increasingly replace their grass. Xeriscape design takes climate into better account by using drought-tolerant plants—those who replace their turf with xeriscape can expect to reduce their watering by about a third. While this is good news for the hydrologic cycle, and bad news for the ambitions of bluegrass, it does not necessarily offer an escape from the cult of the kempt. If it is order that underlies our allegiance to sod, then might not the cult be better served by switching to a more durable medium?

Patterns of mulch and groundcover placement in xeriscape design are increasingly codified, and there is hope that droughtconscious plantings may yet allow the suburban vision of control to carry on amended, but still whole at the root.

For those who would prefer neither of these options, now is a wise time to act. The drought has caused an upset at the temple, and a ready-made task force of hardened mowers await redirection—they have shown themselves responsive already, with new firms offering to rip up lawns for free in exchange for collecting the LA rebate, and in the form of mobile gardeners who cultivate veggies in backyards for a share of the produce. A quiet battle is being waged, one that the lawn, even sun-baked and thirsty, may yet win. The cult that maintains it has on its side both softness underfoot and familiarity to the eye. For now: Caution—Pesticide Application—Keep Off. LANCE GLOSS B’18 fought the lawn and the lawn won.

The College Hill Independent

TRANSITIONS

In Conversation with Phyllis Randolph Frye The College Hill Independent: You work at the intersection of law and social justice, and have used this position to advocate extensively for trans rights. Where do you think the United States stands on the acceptance of trans people?

Phyllis Randolph Frye: Obviously I am very proud that the decades I spent pushing for transgender rights on a national, legal, and political level yielded such wonderful fruit. I am pleased that in the year 2015, even though people in the community still think very highly of me—and I am pleased that they do—I am no longer necessary in the advancement of transgender rights, because my work has been taken on by so many others.

As to what is going on today, I am pleased that two years ago, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the Holder decision unanimously ruled that transgender was covered under the sex protection of Title VII of the 1964 act. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, we had several cases which ruled that transgender was not covered under Title VII because that prohibition against discrimination was based on sex in the statute. The courts ruled that this was change of sex. And of course when we read that, we realized how ludicrous that was because there also was a prohibition against discrimination based on religion. If someone who worked at the Baptist bookstore was Jewish and lost their job, the courts wouldn’t say that that was discrimination based on change of religion, rather than religion itself. Of course we all see how foolish that is.

were a drag—pardon the pun—on their efforts. The only time they wanted our kind around was when there was money that needed to be raised, and our people would put on some sort of benefit that almost always involved cross-dressing. I really think that that has a lot to do with it. There were people within the gay and lesbian community who didn’t want anything to do with us, didn’t feel that they had anything to do with us, who did not express gender differently. And so they didn’t feel that we had any commonality and made very deliberate efforts to separate themselves from us.

In the late ‘80s and ‘90s, it became clear to me that lesbian and gay folk were fighting for their causes and not being inclusive of our causes, I called them on it and they said: “It’s nice to have you around, but trans is not our issue.” And that was when I started to fight. That is when I started to organize the international conference on transgender law and employment policy and that was when I started to lobby in Washington, DC. We had huge fights with then-Congressman Barney Frank, because he did not want to include us either. It went on for a long time. I think, in the end, transgender people coming out and working with their local and state organizations had a lot to do with the ultimate success of the movement.

The Indy: Gay and lesbian groups, such as the ones you just mentioned, were clearly central to drawing attention to the trans movement and to advancing the trans rights movement to where it is now. You’ve been outspoken over the course of your career about how closely intertwined homophobia and transphobia are. Why do you think these historical divisions between trans and gay communities existed and in some ways continue to exist? What are the roots of these tensions?

PRF: You’ve got to realize that we’re all in the same boat as far as being queer to those people who don’t like us and who choose not to even try to understand us. The Compton Riots on the West Coast and shortly after that the Stonewall Riots on the East Coast—those were both very much led by gender queer people who could easily be identified as transgender.

The reason why they were so misunderstood or picked upon is because they didn’t express gender within the social norm, whatever that is. Once all that got going, it was definitely a then gay and trans effort.

There was a move by the wealthier gay people—and I say gay rather than gay and lesbian because at the time, it was all known as the gay community. They definitely didn’t want to have anything to do with us. They felt that we inhibited their ability to be accepted. I refer to them as the “Gucci shoe wearing” gay people. We started having gay pride parades, and there was always in the local and national media a particular focus on people who expressed gender differently. Again, gay leaders and then later gay and lesbian leaders, thought that we

Sep 25, 2015

PRF: First of all, I don’t watch reality television. I am an old fart. I watch PBS, HBO, Showtime, Encore, stuff like that.

That’s not a slam on Caitlyn, I just don’t watch reality TV. I’m very glad that she came out. From the little bit I’ve seen, she has done a wonderful thing coming out. I am terribly sad that she had to wait so late in her life to come out because I know what a horrible life experience she must have gone through hiding and hiding and hiding. I’m glad she’s out and in the media. I’m glad that other people are learning from her and watching her.

When I was starting to come out, I was dealing with Renee Richards coming out. She was, oh, wonderful back then too to come out. I have her book sitting right here on my bookshelf about four feet away from me in my office. I’ve lived this all my life. Somebody else coming out is kind of an old hat. I’m not overly, personally, excited about her public coming out. Good for Cait. I hope to meet her some day.

The Indy: Not to harp on Cait, but given that it’s been so public, there’s been a lot of focus on the physical aspects of her transition. What importance do you think should be placed on procedures such as gender reassignment surgery? What in your view are the fundamental steps that should be taken when one transitions from one gender identity to another?

PRF: Surgical intervention is a very personal experience.

Coming out is a very personal experience. As a lawyer and as an advocate, when I was coming out and going through law school out, back then, everybody was focused on surgery.

They just had to have surgery. So many people got surgery— I’m talking about male to female, because that’s who mostly everybody was back then.

The Indy: Why do you think these laws were able to be crafted in such obviously flawed ways in the early years of the trans movement? Why was such a clear exclusion of the protection of trans rights so easily glossed over and accepted until very recently?

PRF: I think one of the reasons we had such bad laws back then is because many transgender people were still in the closet. And the general population didn’t really have the experience in knowing who we were other than in sensationalized stereotyping. Since then, the EOC has ruled that protection also goes to restrooms in the workplace, so that if you are a transgender person and you are living full time in the gender identity that you are, that you will not be prohibited from the gender identity in which you are living. Title IX, just a year or two ago, made a similar ruling and went much further in saying that transgender was covered under Title IX, and that schools that are K-12 and other schools that are receiving federal funding can no longer discriminate against transgender [people].

These are huge. So much of this is the result of the work of the National Center for Transgender Equality, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, LAMDA Legal, GLAD and of course the national association of LGBT Bar. To have been the person who got the ball rolling on that is very satisfying.

by Madeleine Matsui illustration by Yuko Okabe

The Indy: Why were they mostly people transitioning from male to female and not the other way around?

The Indy: The recent momentum of movement has been quite astonishing. Your view is that it can be attributed to increasing numbers of trans people coming out. There was recently an Al-Jazeera article “Transition at 12” that talks about trans children who are being treated and helped through their transition through a clinic in Dallas. How do you view this sort of medicalization of trans children and adolescents, and this process of helping those who are just coming out as trans through the administration of drugs such as hormone blockers?

PRF: I think it’s wonderful. And it’s not just in Dallas. There are children transitioning in many major metropolitan areas.

I think the Internet has a lot to do with it. I know that when I was young I knew that I was different but I had nobody to identify with. We were very isolated. But now that’s not the case. Not only are more kids starting to figure out who they are, but more and more, parents are also starting to understand and do what’s best for their children.

Children can always go off hormone blockers. And they can always go back to court to get their legal gender and legal identification changed back. Both of these are reversible.

However, I will say that in my experience of many decades with both adults and children, I have taken—oh golly, I don’t know how many, I know the number exceeds a thousand— and I’ve only had one, one, only one, and it was an adult, who went back.

The general speech that you hear on television, on newscasts, in the media—and this is even before Caitlyn [Jenner] came out—you started seeing and hearing the word transgender more.

The Indy: Caitlyn Jenner has been the most high-profile trans person to come out in recent years. She now has her own reality TV show called I Am Cait that focuses on her transition and life as a woman. Do you think this genre of reality TV shows featuring trans people like Caitlyn helps to reinforce or remove taboos surrounding being trans?

PRF: That was back then. Now people are just coming out like crazy. People I work with in court right now – it’s about 50/50. But back then, people were getting surgery before they even had their electrolysis, the removal of their beard, and before they got their names changed. I thought that was ridiculous because the only person who’s going to see the results of your surgery are you and whoever you’re intimate with. No one else can see that. I became one of the early advocates for getting your legal stuff done first. Because how in the world are you going to be able to get a job if you haven’t gotten your name and your gender ID changed. Your employer isn’t going to check out your surgery. They’re going to look at your face and look at your ID. What’s important is the real life experience in making the transition in your gender expression and getting your legal stuff done. Whatever else you do—that’s private. If that’s the message that’s being pushed nowadays through reality TV, then that is the correct message. What you choose to do is your business. You don’t have sex with the world. You’re not intimate with the world.

You express your gender to the world in your appearance, name and legal documents.

The Indy: In many ways, and as you know from experience, it must be significantly easier to go through gender transition today. Despite all the gains that have been made, what do you think are the obstacles that the trans movement still faces?

PRF: Sure, there’s a lot of people out there who hate us.

So what? There’s people who still hate black people. There’s people who still hate brown people. Racism is not dead in the United States. Neither is homophobia or transphobia. There are a lot of obstacles out there. We just have to be out, be who we are, and just by our own experience educate those close to us. You’ve just got out, be out, that’s all. Look at Black Lives Matter. I think they’re doing wonderful stuff. Just because they’re getting some bad press, or that some ugly people are saying ugly things about them, does that mean that they should quit? No. We’re not going to quit either.

I’m very proud of what’s going on. I just go about my life, everyday. I’m very much out of the closet everywhere I go.

If people don’t like it, they’re just going to have to get over it.

My transition was horrible. But we stayed there and we stuck it out. I think we’re doing just fine.

INTERVIEWS

16

THE PHILOSOPHER'S WIFE

by Sabrina Imbler illustration by Crissy Dreyer

The American psychologist Harry Harlow designed an apparatus called the Pit of Despair, a steely, isolated trough designed to produce, in animals, a deep kind of lonely. He placed young monkeys who had already bonded with their mothers into the pit. After a month, the baby monkeys exhibited the behavior of the “enormously disturbed,” huddling at the bottom of the pit and starving themselves.

After several months, Harlow would reunite the babies with their mothers, who, at best, ignored their offspring. At worst, the mothers crushed their babies’ heads, chewed off their tiny fingers and toes. The point of his experiment was to examine the foundation of a mother-child relationship, to see if love and attachment could overcome extreme isolation. Harlow concluded it could not, proving his hypothesis—otherwise known as a hunch—correct.

Vertical Chamber Apparatus: the technical name for Harlow’s trough. But he insisted on Pit of Despair, after his colleagues rejected “dungeon of despair” and “well of despair” and “well of loneliness.” +++ Harlow’s Pit of Despair is not to be confused with Prince Humperdinck’s Pit of Despair, a secret murder-dungeon in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride. This Pit of Despair contains The Machine, an apparatus that sucks away life the way one might milk a cow, with pairs of suction cups clamped on the ears, nipples, and stomach. As the dial of the machine is turned up to a higher number, one more year is gulped away. To take revenge on the Man in Black, who won the heart of his intended, Prince Humperdinck inflicts the Man’s body with the highest level of the machine. The Man in Black, his body strapped to a knotted table, seizes up; his back arches into a scythe. He screeches.

Goldman calls this screech the Sound of Ultimate Suffering, dwelling somewhere between the thwack of two boards struck together and the moan of an owl. But I know the Man in Black wails this way not from the softrimmed cups clamped to his body, nor the inevitability of his hastened death. Rather, he makes the Sound of Ultimate Suffering because death itself is the undoing of interlocking: a permanent detachment, not from life, but from love.

Many machines claiming to induce in their victims the enigmatic-but-universally-horrifying phenomenon that is Ultimate Suffering deal not in pain, but in loneliness. +++ On Frogstar World B—the second planet in the Frogstar system in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—exists the only device capable, in Adams’ multiverse, of generating Ultimate Suffering. The Total Perspective Vortex, as it’s called, was invented by a philosopher to deal with what he saw as his nuisance of a wife, who always nagged the philosopher for having no sense of perspective.

The philosopher, vengeful, invented a device capable of revealing what perspective entirely meant. He crafted a chamber that, within its walls, allowed a person to, for just a moment, glimpse the whole, unimaginable, and absolute infinity of creation. Somewhere in that astonishing haze one could spot a small speck, so tiny it could barely be seen, which read: You are here.

This shock destroys a person, brain annihilated after discovering how profoundly small and alone she is in the grand scheme of the universe.

The machine destroyed the brain of the philosopher’s wife, when she entered the chamber and saw what she saw.

The philosopher’s grief was diluted by the comforting fact that, despite everything, she had been wrong and he was right. This satisfaction lifted him so much that he barely noticed his wife, slipping away in the smear of stars where he now lives alone, free of nagging, like a pin at the center of the universe.

Varun could hear the books cricketing to him while he walked amongst them, whispering, waking them up with a stroke along each spine. He did this every morning, while the sun climbed into its place above the horizon. He lived alone in a bookshop with only the company of his books, which spoke to him in a dark language. Varun had never been outside, never seen nor felt the sun. He had only read about the dawn, the emptying of light into the sky.

If you want to write the next paragraph of this story, write it.

Then send it to indyliterary@gmail.com and, if we tingle along the spine, we will publish it in the next issue of the Indy.

17

LiTERARY

The College Hill Independent

listtheindy@gmail.com

Saturday 9/26 Feria Artesanal Latino Americana // Latin American Artisans’ Fair AS220 // 12-4PM // Free to go, but support if you can!

Friday 9/25

A place for artisans, food creators, writers, painters, and other artists to sell their

Better World by Design 2015

pieces, shop their wares, etc. Guaranteed to be much to peruse. More information

All Over // All Day

available if you call (401) 481-1787. A cool thing!

Check out the wildest conference in whose name a grandiose claim about their bettering the world has already been made. I’m not sure whether the conference is

Mike Coykendall // Death Vessel // Ben Mason // Field Drums

discussing the ways design makes the world better or whether it is implying that

Machines With Magnets // 8PM

the world is no good and needs to be made better by design as opposed to

Mike Coykendall has been making music for a long, long time. His brand of outré

other means, but I digress. There are some fun speakers in spite of the vague

Americana reads like an emo Captain Beefheart at times. Should be fun.

proclamations, like Alexis Lloyd of R&D Lab at the New York Times. Also a source tells me there are lots of parties, so look out for those I guess?

Pianist Lilya Zilberstein Presents an All-Russian Program

Rock the Block 2015

The Vets, 1 Avenue of the Arts, Providence //

Classical High School // 3:30-6:30PM // Free

8PM // $15

Rock the Block is billed as a collaboration between Providence Public Schools and

Virtuoso Lilya Zilberstein with the Rhode Island Philharmonic presents Tchaikovsky’s

Citywide Community Organizations where you can check out arts and

First Piano Concerto, which is a very popular and well-liked piece. Also featured on the

service-oriented youth organizations and learn about ways to get involved.

bill is Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which is a major work to say the least, and which the

Performances, food, games, general merriment, maybe a moon bounce(?*)

bill mentions caused a riot when it premiered in Paris in 1913. No mention of whether

all to be expected.

the piece caused anymore trouble after 1913, but here’s hoping audiences aren’t so flummoxed this time around.

Sunday 9/27

*Moon bounce entirely speculative. I have no proof that there will be a moon bounce at

Girls Rock! RI Gear Swap/Sale!

this event but it’d be a good move on their part if they had one.

Machines with Magnets // 11AM Tons of gear for the purchasing including amps, guitars, pedals, strange instruments,

Kansas

technology, ephemera, et cetera. Also sell or donate your gear. Very cool!

Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel // 8PM // $40 Wow. The great band Kansas who have given us holy, ear worming singles like “Dust in the Wind” and “Carry On My Wayward Son” appear at Lupo’s to prove to us

Monday 9/28 Guerilla Toss + Birdlady + Dog Hospice

and to themselves that they can still do it, man. When the list writer (LW) was very

Aurora Providence // 8:30PM // Free

young and going through a serious classic rock phase the list writer watched a video

Free show. Guerilla Toss is awesome and mind-bending. Check it out.

documentary on Kansas and fell asleep before it ended; but, then again, that says more about the LW than it does about the great band The Kansas Men, eh? No. No.

Tuesday 9/29

My God. What have I done. I can’t in good conscience recommend you see this

The U.S. Military in a Dangerous World:

show. You will spoil the joy of this great band seeing them wheeze through the hits

How Much is Enough?

for a crowd who paid half-a-hundred bucks to hear two songs. Don’t go to this. Don’t.

Metcalf Research Building, Room 101 // 5:30-7PM This talk includes a question the operative premise of which this list writer totally

Talk by Prof. Aníbal González

disagrees with. The description asks, “What role should America play in a dangerous

of

world?” This question fails to appreciate the degree to which America is among the

Yale University

greatest contributors to this “danger”. To answer this totally backwards question,

84 Prospect St. // 5-7PM // Free

the Taubman Center invites Democratic Senator Carl Levin, who along with John

Dept. of Hispanic Studies presents a talk on how Puerto Rican writers and artists are

McCain put language into the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 in favor of

engaging with the current debt crisis. Hopefully includes some critical dialogue about

indefinite detention without charges of American citizens on suspected terrorist

a thing that all Americans ought to be more aware of, and about which our government

activity, Dr. Paula Thornhill, a retired RAND Corporation strategist and former

should feel ashamed given its exploitative political relationship with the island.

brigadier general, and R. Nicholas Burns, a former member of the U.S. Foreign Service.

Very unbiased and totally not a megaphone for statist hawks!

Violence, Terror, and the Image:

Go and ask the tough questions.

An All Day Symposium Pembroke Hall, Room 305 // Friday, September 25, 2015 9:30 AM - 5:30 PM // Free

Thursday 9/29 ‘Martin Boyce: When Now is Night’

All day long. Learn about the politics of images, the complicity of satirists, the

Opening Reception

aesthetics of terror. Check out Ariella Azoulay’s presentation.

RISD Museum // 6-7:30PM // Free The debut American solo exhibition of Scottish sculptor and winner of the prestigious

List Writer’s Birthday

Turner Prize Martin Boyce. Free, features refreshments and music, and includes some

Everywhere // 12AM-All Day, All Night // $1

very cool work in a modernist idiom..

The list writer was born on this day many years ago and now emerges from his youth rowing the boat of adulthood into a sea of troubles. Thanks be to the parents of this

List Writer’s Mother’s Birthday

person for the birth. Say yes to creeping existential nausea!

The Whole World // 12AM-Early Bedtime Tons of gear for the purchasing including amps, guitars, pedals, strange instruments, technology, ephemera, et cetera. Also sell or donate your gear. Very cool!

Did you know? The writers of the list used to lie about the location of events to make reading about and finding cool stuff in Providence more fun and interactive.