The College Hill Independent —Vol 46 Issue 9

From the Editors

A pair of swans have built their nest in the lee of the rusted bridge on the western bank of the Seekonk. Walking by a few nights ago, I saw one float to the shore and grab a stick, loft it toward the nest, and drop it in the water about a foot away. This happened a couple of times. I often gather the things I like around me, without really meaning to use them; at the center of concentric rings of books I have thieved from various shelves is the desk where I rarely read them. At about 4 p.m. the next day, on the other side of College Hill, a guy was feeding robins crumbs from a loaf of brown bread on the large stone steps that descend to the Providence river. In a fairytale moment, one of the birds landed on his shoulder and leaned forward on its pencil-like stilts to peck morsels out of his hand, while the guy just walked along like some jowly quartermaster. On the other side of the steps, though, sat his green backpack, and, one safe and respectful foot away, a swan. Its silly-straw neck arched over the distance and poked its head into the bag, pulling out a book.

Masthead*

MANAGING EDITORS

Zachary Braner

Lucia Kan-Sperling

Ella Spungen

WEEK IN REVIEW

Karlos Bautista

Morgan Varnado

ARTS

Kian Braulik

Corinne Leong

Charlie Medeiros

EPHEMERA

Ayça Ülgen

Livia Weiner

FEATURES

Madeline Canfield

Jane Wang

LITERARY

Ryan Chuang

Evan Donnachie

Anabelle Johnston

METRO

Jack Doughty

Rose Houglet

Sacha Sloan

SCIENCE + TECH

Eric Guo

Angela Qian

Katherine Xiong

WORLD

Everest Maya-Tudor

Lily Seltz

X

Claire Chasse

DEAR INDY

Annie Stein

BULLETIN BOARD

Mark Buckley

Kayla Morrison

SENIOR EDITORS

Sage Jennings

Anabelle Johnston

Corinne Leong

Isaac McKenna

Sacha Sloan

Jane Wang

STAFF WRITERS

Tanvi Anand

Cecilia Barron

Graciela Batista

Mariana Fajnzylber

Saraphina Forman

Keelin Gaughan

Sarah Goldman

Jonathan Green

Sarah Holloway

Anushka Kataruka

Roza Kavak

Nicole Konecke

Cameron Leo

Abani Neferkara

Justin Scheer

Julia Vaz

Kathy/Siqi Wang

Madeleine Young

COPY CHIEF

Addie Allen

COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS

Qiaoying Chen

Veronica Dickstein

Eleanor Dushin

Aidan Harbison

Doren Hsiao-Wecksler

Jasmine Li

Rebecca Martin-Welp

Kabir Narayanan

Eleanor Peters

Angelina Rios-Galindo

Taleen Sample

Angela Sha

Jean Wanlass

Michelle Yuan

DEVELOPMENT COORDINATOR

Angela Lian

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Jolie Barnard

Kian Braulik

Angela Lian

Natalie Mitchell

WEB MANAGER

Isaac McKenna

WEB EDITORS

Hadley Dalton

Arman Deendar

Ash Ma

GAMEMAKERS

Alyscia Batista

Anna Wang

*Our Beloved Staff

Mission Statement

COVER COORDINATOR

Zora Gamberg

DESIGN EDITORS

Anna Brinkhuis

Sam Stewart

DESIGNERS

Nicole Ban

Ri Choi

Ashley Guo

Kira Held

Xinyu/Sara Hu

Gina Kang

Amy/Youjin Lim

Andrew Liu

Ash Ma

Tanya Qu

Zoe Rudolph-Larrea

Anna Wang

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS

Sophie Foulkes

Izzy Roth-Dishy

ILLUSTRATORS

Sylvie Bartusek

Lucy Carpenter

Bethenie Carriaga

Julia/Shuo Yun Cheng

Avanee Dalmia

Michelle Ding

Nicholas Edwards

Jameson Enriquez

Lillyanne Fisher

Haimeng Ge

Jacob Gong

Ned Kennedy

Elisa Kim

Sarosh Nadeem

Hannah Park

Luca Suarez

Yanning Sun

Anna Wang

Camilla Watson

Iris Wright

Nor Wu

Celine Yeh

Jane Zhou

MVP

Justin

The College Hill Independent is printed by TCI in Seekonk, MA

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

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

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

in YAS

The Plot Chickens

Yas Chicken. Y-A-S Chicken… When my edi tor-in-crime Corinne first told me the name of the new restaurant on Thayer Street where she was getting dinner, I made her repeat herself. “YAS Chicken.” I kept saying the name to myself over and over for the rest of the night. Like some kind of psychic mantra, I felt the power of those three syllables course through me every time I dared to invoke Providence’s newest fried chicken spot. YAS Chicken. I texted my bff studying abroad:

12 hours and eight minutes later, he responded:

Even across the Atlantic Ocean, he could feel the seismic ripples of YAS Chicken, the sheer gravitas of its name leaving him “ .”

The next morning I texted Corinne:

without that long, stretched cheese-pull I had been seeing in the news and the media.

Corinne and I enjoyed our meals on the steps of the now-defunct Blue State Coffee. Sitting pensively over parmesan-covered fries (would recommend), I thought about the volatile ecosystem of Thayer Street, of all of the businesses that have come and gone. While some establishments are bound to stay open far past the end-times (Urban Outfitters, Sneaker Junkies, etc.), many of our local spots disappear just as quickly as they pop up. Allow me to light a metaphorical candle for the fallen stores of Thayer-past… RIP Tealuxe, By Chloe (killed by Beatnic), old Ceremony, that Army/Navy Surplus Store, CBD American Shaman, Pie in the Sky, Subway, and so many others.

Will YAS Chicken be YAS enough to withstand the sands of time? Or will it meet the same tragic fate as many which have come before: an empty storefront, a demolished building, being bought out by Pokeworks? While I may be hopeful for many YAS years ahead of us, I probably shouldn’t count my YAS eggs before they hatch.

–CM

Love Me Tender

Four hours and 46 minutes later, she emphasized my message.

I went to YAS Chicken twice this week. First with my friend/roommate, illustrious Indy designer Sam Stewart :3, and later with Corinne.

When Sam and I went, I asked him to take a picture of me in front of YAS Chicken. I leaned my body against their towering sign. Smile. Click YAS.

Inside, I ordered the Number 9 YAS Meal: three piece chicken tenders, parmesan fries, and a soda of my choice. I got Pepsi . The woman working the counter asked if I wanted YAS sauce (she also said that she liked my hair but let’s not dwell on that). Of course I wanted YAS sauce. “Yes!” I responded confidently, leaving the register to go wait for my food by the trash cans.

The food was…good! The chicken—good; the fries—good; the Pepsi—good. Good job YAS Chicken.

Sam got the Cheesy Chick: a fried chicken sandwich stuffed with “oozing pepper jack cheese,” as described by YAS Chicken’s website. He liked it.

Three days later, I went back to YAS Chicken with Corinne. Round Two. YAS Chicken: All Stars. I knew I had to change it up, give all the Indy-nators at home something different to read about—something fresh.

I ordered the Korean corn dog. Korean corn dogs have definitely been having a cultural moment as the Instagramable street food du jour. In fact, food magazine Bon Appétit even called 2021 “The Year of the Korean Corn Dog.” I first heard of them through infamous Youtuber Trisha Paytas, who has made (according to my rough count) 17 videos reviewing Korean corn dogs from her car.

My corn dog was…devastatingly…just okay The breading was soft, failing to give me that crisp crunch I expected. Inside the corn dog, there just wasn’t enough cheese, leaving me

Because I don’t quite possess the Emojional lexicon necessary to describe my first YAS Meal as Charlie so -ly did, I instead invoke anoth er image: the YAS chicken. In my search for a portrait of reference from which to describe her sublime visage, I find her elusive, fleetingly vis ible only on every 11th @yaschicken Instagram Reels thumbnail, or else painted upon the walls of the YAS Palace itself. Look into her glossy eyes, gazing beyond all we can hope to compre hend. Parse the benign expression on her face. Pure impotence. Wings flung to the wind with cherubic abandon. She seems, to me, to repre sent all of us in the face of Thayer Street’s latest Grand Restaurant Opening (located in the brick fortress that also houses Soban, another chicky relic): helpless, awestruck, alive.

Whispers of the birth of this humbling chicken paradise surfaced with the same inten sity as those about the resident Good-Looking Guy at another Thayer-adjacent grand-opener, which sells cookies. (Stripped of all identify ing features in the hopes that his employer’s competitor Insomnia Cookies will not be able to put out a hit on this man’s poor, “really friendly, so nice, confident in a cocky, appealing way” soul, I can only tell you what I’ve been told by many: He is “really friendly, so nice, confident in a cocky, appealing way.”) I feel that Charlie has adequately covered the kind of pre-verbal, gleefully catatonic state that merely hearing the establishment’s name induces, so I will focus on the surrounding buzz. Friends told me that the line for YAS Chicken wrapped around the block. That, in an experience reminiscent of each College Hill Independent issue launch party, they waited two hours and still couldn’t get in.

I bit into my first Yasville Hot about a month after the restaurant’s Yoors (YAS doors) opened, on a freezing walk back to my dorm. I did this because, within the restaurant, bodies were packed wall to wall. Fighting my way to the register, I felt I had submitted myself to a current that was certain to thrust me from this mortal coil. Tears studded my big brown eyes as the LED menu bobbed in and out of vision, barking item names that registered like

imperatives: “YA HOT N YA COLD,” “MAC ZADDY,” and “THE SUFFERING.” The crowd was populated by people young and old, often shrouded in locks of colorful hair. That first bite in 30-degree weather was everything I had imagined it to be. Sumptuous, complex, demanding replication.

When Charlie and I returned to YAS Chicken for field research outside of peak hours, the place was remarkably empty. Biting into my latest in a series of Yasville Hots outside the carcass of Blue State Coffee, I shared his unfortunate sentiments. Devastatingly…just okay. A GCal notification sprang from my phone. A pressing reminder to “YAS Charlie (4 – 4:30 pm).”

Staring into the restaurant’s empty windows, I found myself yearning for the chaos I’d experienced upon my first encounter with YAS Chicken. All that organic human contact: Meeting the lifeless eyes of ticket number 132 after her sandwich fell with a wet thud, shredded lettuce scattering across the floor like precious pearls. A stranger holding the door open for me. That same stranger immediately letting the door go, allowing it to pop me square in the face.

I thought about something a professor had told me about their time visiting Duke. Near the university, there was a gated housing complex built for Durham’s nascent Google bros. It’s like tech Disneyland, they spat. In addition to the apartments, there were conference rooms, squash courts, wave pools. All to manufacture interaction. When they mentioned that the complex possessed in-building printers, their eyes glazed over a little, like they had finally found the monstrosity’s one unimpeachable element.

Twin pastry flames Zinneken’s Waffles and Feed the Cheeks boasted pristine storefronts just two blocks from where we sat. For a while I had struggled to identify what gave YAS Chick-

A fragrance is a slippery commodity. After somewhere between five minutes and an hour of exposure to the same smell, we stop being able to detect it due to olfactory fatigue, also called olfactory adaptation (apparently scientists disagree on whether to deride the body for getting tired or commend its survival instincts), so wearing a fragrance is for the most part not for the person wearing it but for those they pass throughout the day. It’s sold on a shelf next to other cosmetics, and the store next door probably sells clothes or shoes; it is among a set of adornments that, for the last century, marketing strategists and consumer culture at large have regarded as means of individuation and ‘self expression.’ So-and-so’s shoes and pants tell you something about their inner character, and supposedly so does their fragrance.

The only problem is that fragrance stimulates via smell, a sense that, unlike the others, casts doubt on any claim to self-expression. Smelling something means a number of molecules of that thing has bonded chemically to olfactory receptor proteins, and thus has seeped into the neurons extending from the brain. If you smell something, it is in you and, chemically speaking, almost indistinguishable from ‘you.’ Consequently, smell, unlike the other four basic senses, calls into question the perceptual framework by which we consign certain things to the ‘outside world,’ and other things to the category of ‘self’ or ‘inside.’ To smell something is to detect the presence of that something in the air. The scent stimulus is unable in itself to plot the source of the smell in time or space, and so it fails to orient the smeller with respect to the source and as distinct from the source. (True, smelling repeatedly while moving through space might reveal a source by way of some cognitive effort and other sensory clues, but the smell itself has no direction.) By contrast, sight, sound, and touch all work, in one way or another, toward delimiting objects in the field of perception and, in turn, delimiting the self with respect to those objects. Taste is a bit ambiguous in this regard, but it doesn’t blur boundaries to the extent that smell does. Further still, because something only gives off a smell if it is somehow shedding its molecules into the air, in a very literal sense, to smell something is to deny the invariance and finitude of the smelled object.

I think this might have something to do with the startling power of smell to evoke memory. This sort of memory is not just an image of a past thing pulled into present awareness, but rather has the property of transporting the smeller back to a scene—a memory that insists on a fluid arrangement of environment, body, and space. This hypothesis is probably better left to neuroscience. But as a student of the humanities, the best I can do is a close reading of the madeleine episode from Marcel Proust’s

What Your Fragrance Can’t Say About You

In Search of Lost Time. To be clear, this essay isn’t about Proust (I haven’t read any Proust besides the madeleine excerpt from a Wikipedia page, so take my reading with a grain of salt), but the madeleine episode does a remarkably good job of illustrating a peculiar feature of smell vis-avis memory: its decomposition of forms.

In this passage the narrator sips tea with madeleine crumbs and is overcome with an “exquisite pleasure,” which after some interrogation gives way to a childhood memory. The narrator attributes this flashback to a particular “taste,” which I take to mean a particular value in the full olfactory palette of taste and smell. After all, human taste receptors can detect only five rudimentary tastes—salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. The depth, nuance and complexity of flavor derives from an interaction of taste with smell—a sense capable of detecting between an estimated 80 million to 1 trillion

what is that something? It is an “essence,” and it bears no trace of an origin, no attachment to an external object. It is no more outside than it is inside. It cannot be assigned a source—it is all around and throughout. He is then identical to and, thus, coextensive with the essence.

The second stage of the flashback:

And suddenly the memory revealed itself … Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me [a madeleine]...the sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted [and smelled] it.

The image of the moment is conjured as a consequence of the first stage. But the image is

unique scents. After sipping the tea, the narrator has a sort of two-stage flashback experience. He’s first overcome with sensation and an “essence.” He then recalls not some particular thing or person out of context but a scene; more precisely, the memory is an occupation of the remembered scene (of his aunt giving him a madeleine in her bedroom), a fleeting inhabitation of a past self, in a past environment.

The first stage of the flashback goes like this: “An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached with no suggestion of its origin … filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me,

not a two-dimensional field placed before his mind’s eye, not just a photographic rendering of his aunt, or the tea, or even the complete set of objects in their positions around the room; the account has no particular interest in objects but transports to and immerses in the remembered environment. The narrator recalls this scene in the first person and in the imperfect tense, a voice suggesting that the memory is not entirely stuck in the past and complete, but somehow persisting. He is there, surrounded by the scene; its time is not fixed but mobile, not finished but indefinite.

Smell does not map to objects but pervades

and shades a space along with all of its contents, contesting their boundaries. It makes sense, then, that a smell-induced memory does not set its focus on any particular object, if it can be said to wield focus at all. The memory is of an ambience—as in ambient musician Brian Eno’s definition: “an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint”—and so is deeply committed to space. But it is also of a deeply internal condition, not just surrounding but permeating, inside and out. “My memory is there, which conveys something of the past into the present,” writes philosopher Henri Bergson. The past lives and persists into the present; one’s present mental state “is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates,” where “duration” here is something like lived time— consciousness existing in and through continuous time and not differentiable or reducible to discrete instants. For Bergson, the degree of this swelling depends on the sort of states perceived through time. For instance, one swells more “with states more deeply internal [e.g. emotions, feelings, thoughts] … which do not correspond, like a simple visual perception, to an unvarying external object,” and so the smell-induced memory swells more. It persists more powerfully. But it retains space, a destratified space, and swells with that space.

It is because of these properties of smell and smell-induced memory that self-expression (let alone individuation) seems like an impossible demand to make of fragrance, at least by comparison to all of the other (primarily visual) self-expressing adornments for sale. If expressing myself means externalizing some quality of mine—otherwise stored up and hidden inside—so that others can perceive it as belonging to me, then I would think scent is hardly the appropriate medium. Smell is the least capable among the senses of revealing sources or rendering objects, whereas my self-expression depends critically on others being able to attribute their impressions to me and my ‘inner character’ as a well-defined entity, distinct from themselves and delimited in the world.

someone’s fragrance triggers the memory or is present in the memory triggered by another smell—or, more radically, if we understand memory, as Bergson does, to persist constantly in present perception––the smell-memory melts away forms, and the process of self-expression melts away with them.

seat. “In other words,” Dichter writes, “what impressed the buyer was not only the quality of the car but the dramatic realization of what the car would do for the buyer.” The mirror, itself a sort of screen, shows an ideal prospective reality in which the shopper owns the car. For Dichter, the work of successful advertising, or the mode of partial possession enabled by advertising, in large part lies in the viewer’s identification with an ideal version of themselves in the world offered by the advertisement—a projection into that world. The purchase of the commodity for sale, then, is the supposed entryway to that ideal.

If Proust is at all instructive, then memory makes the task of self-expression via scent even murkier. The smell-memory, according to Proust, begins with a pervasion of the smelling subject by an essence which has no origin and to which the subject becomes identical. This absence of origin and process of identification would, I think, derail the process of expression entirely. The smell-memory then transports, summoning a past environment and ambience which bleed into the present. One loses one’s bearings entirely, consciousness sublimated into multiple spaces and times at once. In a word, the smell-memory is gaseous. Whether

+++

A fragrance is a slippery commodity, and fragrance advertising only loosens our grip. Perfume commercials always face a critical challenge: scent cannot be transmitted through a screen. Many ads contain no reference to the quality of the smell itself, often set entirely in an urban or indoor location with no allusion to the natural source of the scent (no bergamot oranges or sandalwood are shown). They appear to drift so far from the objective of advertising the actual product that they are mocked as absurd, occasionally earning an SNL parody. Such was the case with Richard Avedon’s 1985 Calvin Klein “Obsession” campaign, a narrated series of surreal ballets choreographed around a devastating romance and a game of chess, set in an M. C. Escher-esque heap of white staircases and doorways. Fragrance ads tend to convey themes of sex, luxury, elegance, wealth, sophistication, mystique, fantasy, passion, and desire in some sort of narrative space, waiting until the very end to refer explicitly to the fragrance for sale (e.g. a logo or a shot of a perfume bottle). And so they are what’s left of an advertisement stripped of its object. Ads tend to superimpose all kinds of affects and images onto the product it sells; the fragrance ad retains those affects and images, but often loses the product, and all that’s left over are impossible promises. Maybe they’re so ridiculous precisely because they expose the work of advertising.

The perfume commercial is not alone in the challenge—impossibility, really—of transmitting the thing it ultimately aims to sell. No commercial actually lets you have the thing it’s selling, not simply out of a technological limitation but almost by definition; if the advertisement gave you the thing advertised then you wouldn’t have to buy it. And surely the purpose of advertising is to make the viewer buy the advertised thing; or, rather, make the viewer want to buy the advertised thing. More precisely still, in its signification of the thing advertised, the advertisement teases, enabling a partial possession—a having that remains just beyond arm’s reach.

In his book The Strategy of Desire, Ernest Dichter—a revolutionary in the field of advertising for his application of psychoanalysis to corporate marketing, often referred to as the “the Freud of Madison Avenue”—expands on this partial possession as a self-projection into a prospective reality. He recounts that when Chrysler Corporation contracted his firm to improve car showroom sales strategies, his studies determined that shoppers were more readily willing to buy a car if it was positioned near a large mirror in the showroom such that they could see a reflection of themselves in the driver’s

The ideal world on display in the perfume commercial is clearly one of expression without fragrance. Consider L’invitation au rêve - Le Jardin, a 1982 commercial for Chanel No. 5 directed by Ridley Scott (also the director of Blade Runner, Alien, and the landmark 1984 Macintosh Super Bowl ad). Le Jardin opens with a sequence of images, similar in form but unrelated in content, fading into each other: first an English garden, the lawn transforming into an impossibly stretched-out piano keyboard, keys playing automatically between lines of trees; a symmetrical shot of three train tracks extending to the horizon, a passenger train on the leftmost track speeding past the camera; finally, a low angle shot up the side of an office building, an airplane passing in the window reflections. After this sequence, a scene of a woman walking seductively toward a man, who dissolves into nothing. We see her face in close-up from where the man stood, her demeanor intent and unphased. The ad fades to an aerial shot of a skyscraper as the shadow of an airplane glides up and over its exterior, then back to the closeup of the woman as she closes her eyes and tilts her head back, her mouth slightly open in a countenance of sexual satisfaction, as a narrator tells us to “share the fantasy.” It finally fades to a shot of the No. 5 bottle on a featureless blue-and-white background—that is, an image of the product with no context, outside the ad’s primary diegesis, the latter having nothing to do with the fragrance and which, of course, does not have a smell.

Le Jardin speaks through an amalgam of slow fades, extravagant settings, extreme angles, far-fetched imagery, intense gazes and slight smiles. To me, it speaks of dreaminess and fantasy, of a strange kind of classy lust, of power and dynamism. It could be said to speak, by way of surreal illogic, of spontaneity and free-spiritedness. Le Jardin hardly tries to tether these qualities to the bottle of fragrance it’s selling, and only retroactively at that. It certainly can’t tie them to a smell. The presiding logic, then, resembles the (phenomeno)logic of smell, in that a weave of qualities do not trace back to a source or a core. And it is this resemblance that ultimately betrays the speciousness of the original proposition one might expect a fragrance ad to reaffirm—that one can express these qualities through fragrance.

The fragrance commercial fashions an ideal world in which the ostensible function of the commodity for sale is possible precisely without that commodity. Resembling the scent-induced memory, the ideal world into which the viewer self-projects can never be grasped. The perfume advertisement lays bare the contradiction animating consumer capitalism in general: prospective realities promised to follow—but not actually following—from ‘self-expression’ through commodities. Dichter affectionately calls this the “constructive discontent” of a receding goal. When finally, and paradoxically, the commercial cuts to a shot of the perfume bottle: “buy X,” it seems to say, “and the ideal world where X doesn’t need to exist will materialize around you.”

JUSTIN SCHEER B’23 signing off.

Self-portrait with eyes turned

Notes on My Strange Addiction

I had tested the immune response theory and failed. The affliction was lodged somewhere between food poisoning (it’s not food if it’s from the floor! my aunt had teased) and a stomach bug, broadly defined. Whatever the cause, I was left alternating between the austere bathroom tiling and the couch, which, at five years my senior, molded around my fetal position. Time pooled between trips to the toilet. All the while, TLC1 raged on.

Hardly able to concentrate on the lights flashing on the television before me, I almost missed it when, around hour three, my Say Yes To The Dress marathon gave way to a series of staged confessionals and interventions, with a soundtrack reminiscent of NCIS: New Orleans or Law and Order: SVU. The brainchild of Jason Bolicki,2 My Strange Addiction (MSA) exhibits masochists as they encase themselves in casts, sniff gasoline, chew dirty diapers. Undergo plastic surgery, suck their thumb, self tan. Ingest cleanser, ingest detergent, ingest cushions, ingest glass, ingest laxatives.3 Although few of the subjects endure medically diagnosable addiction,4 many struggle with a host of other disorders. (An incomplete index: Alzheimer’s disease, body dysmorphic disorder, dermatillomania, exercise bulimia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, paraphilia, pica, psychosis, schizophrenia, trichotillomania. And, of course, pure unadulterated fetish.) This catalog of unconventional afflictions extended from 2010 to 2015, though in my dehydration-induced reverie, I only viewed eight episodes, drifting between sleep and 16 sadistic stories.5 I couldn’t look away.

I was obsessed with obsession.

Each story follows roughly the same format: TITLE CARD EXPLAINING THE ‘ADDICTION’ AT HAND, talking head (stoic), close shots of our masochist in action, AD BREAK, talking head (still stoic), more action shots, AD BREAK, talking head (tearful), jarring transition music likely lifted from Dateline, talking head (professional), more jarring transition music, more action shots—this time demonstrating an intimate knowledge of the object of obsession, AD BREAK, staged intervention, TITLE CARD: WHERE ARE THEY NOW? This plot is cut and spliced against a complementary story so the entire episode rounds out to a solid 22 minutes, plus ads.6

An advantage for those inclined toward repetition: the series promises no surprises. In the 11-minute segment devoted to each antihero, the addict is introduced and re-introduced upon appearance, such that any bystander can wander into the episode without reaching for backstory. Inadvertently, perhaps, this is the most honest depiction of addiction that the show offers; addiction as an ongoing process, chronic and ever present. Applying Barthes’ hermeneutic code,7 we return nothing: MSA promises no resolution, no catharsis, no sublimation of disease. Much of the attention is devoted to cataloging the struggles of the participants, who are overwhelmingly lower-income Middle Americans. In a telling 2020 interview with Variety, TLC president Howard Lee boasted that on other networks, “a lot of people are really very West Coast/East Coast. More glamorous. And we don’t have to do that here.” Like much of the channel’s programming, the show caricatures American life. Strangeness demands an us that looks at them from a perch and attempts comprehension. Socioeconomic distance between the participants and their viewers is then essential to our complacency.8 And so, although we devour Selling Sunset (or the entirety of the Real Housewives franchise) hoping to see a glimmer of our own distress, or a confirmation that no amount of affluence could smooth the creases of life until it billows beautifully as a linen sheet hung to dry in late spring, our interest in MSA takes on a different texture. By and large, the

‘stars’ are underpaid and overexploited, remembered only (if ever)9 for their addictions.

Here, abject suffering is the point.

Of course, sadistic voyeurism is the backbone of TLC, a network, at least according to Lee, that preys on the misunderstood. “‘Please understand me’ or ‘please understand my family’: That comes across in our programming.” This plea is met not with compassion but disdain. With harsh lighting, quick cuts, and that insipid score, the program regards its participants with a combination of pity and disgust that, in my sleep-addled state, swept me in. Just as 90-Day Fiancé (melodrama), Dr. Pimple Popper (body horror), and Milf Manor (pornography) lay bare the genres of excess10 to entertain through dismay, MSA plays no pretense about our interests as viewers: we want to watch others struggle against what they want. We recall our own vices. We compare our own private shame. How vindicated we feel watching another endure that familiar trial so publicly, so ridiculously, how smug we sit assured that we know better than to sleep with a blow dryer or digest toilet paper. Watching the same sequences ad nauseum, we intrude upon another’s private obsessions without the obligation to understand. The show fixates on intimate settings, rendering the bedroom and bathroom as sites of intrigue. These behaviors are so often relegated to the private realm that they amass fear and shame, even when we understand the source. Looking (or perhaps more accurately, peering in) itself is then emphasized as the source of pleasure. Our onscreen counterparts simultaneously suffer as we suffer and suffer as we never will.

A quick detour to the realm of high art: a visit to my favorite room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the glass-lined space that housed the Egyptian Temple of Dendur.

The room in question belonged to the since-renamed Sackler Wing, and was one of the many11 artistic and educational institutions emblazoned with the disgraced family’s name. While the moguls have long operated in the pharmaceutical advertising business, they rose to infamy during heavily-publicized trials in 2007 and 2020, which resulted in an (up to) six billion dollar national settlement for their role in the opioid crisis.

1. Formerly known as The Learning Channel. While the proper name fell away as the network overprogrammed reality television, TLC maintains that it provides “insightful programming that transports viewers into the authentic lives of real-life extraordinary characters you can learn from.”

2. Also responsible for the hit 2004 film, Twenty Gay Stereotypes Confirmed

3. Across the five years on air, My Strange Addiction remained preoccupied with consumption to no end. This proved difficult for my already compromised digestive tract.

4. Here, I suppose I’ll perform the obligatory etymological breakdown. Addiction, from the Latin addictionem: an awarding, a delivering up. In the Early Modern Period, simply, to attach. Morphs, in 17th century English, into tendency, inclination, penchant. What distinguishes the MSA afflictions from medical addiction then lies somewhere other than language.

5. In the age of binge-watching, TLC has perfected the formula, by stacking episodes of a single series back to back.

6. An entire ethnography could be devoted to the advertising potential of the concentrated audience. An unverified Comcast marketing one-sheet characterizes TLC’s viewers as 1) overwhelmingly female, 2) largely over the age of 35, 3) relatively economically well off, 4) 66 percent homeowners, and 5) often living in a household with children.

7. The major structuring principle that drives suspense in a narrative. In fact I’ve never read S/Z but once Ira Glass mentioned it as a staple in his semiotics education.

8. Vague studies produced by The Addiction Center report that addiction rates are twice as high among unemployed Americans. Careful to describe correlation, not causation, the Center notes that substance abuse often coincides with troubles performing at work and drives job loss, which compounds the cumulative cost of maintaining the habit over time. Increased insurance rates, legal bills, and medical bills are sprinkled as salt in the wound. Combined with the outstanding cost of rehabilitation and other treatments, the fiscal cocktail may be fatal.

9. Save for Trisha Paytas, Youtube celebrity and former self-tanning ‘addict’ (S1E1), who has since described her daily sunbed sitting as a choice, thank you very much.

10. Theorized by critic Linda Williams as “the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion.”

The current opioid epidemic began in the mid-1990s, when FDA-approved OxyContin was promoted by Purdue Pharma and massively overprescribed by medical practitioners across the country, courtesy of an intense and influential “pain advocacy campaign” that encouraged “increased pain management” and misrepresented the risk of addiction. Purdue deployed a fleet of sales representatives to physicians across the country, suggesting OxyContin be prescribed not only for severe short-term pain but also for long-term conditions. The Sacklers successfully generated a widespread user base: hundreds of thousands addicted to legally-prescribed pain medication. Around 2010, the second wave of the crisis swelled as regulations made prescriptions more difficult to obtain, yet addiction treatment remained largely inaccessible. In place of institutional support, heroin increased in popularity as a cheaper, widely available, and potent alternative. The third wave followed a sharp uptick in the number of drug-related deaths resulting from fentanyl-lacing in drugs around 2013, a crisis that continues to this day. Of course, each iteration does not belong to its own temporal compartment. The strains bleed into each other, beget one another. OxyContin is the foundation of the contemporary opioid crisis in the United States, which, over every formulation, has taken approximately one million lives since 1999.12 Many victims, like my Nana or Nan Goldin, begin with a simple prescription.

11. The Sackler Educational Laboratory (American Museum of Natural History), The Sackler Center for Arts Education (Guggenheim), The Sackler Museum (Harvard), The Sackler Wing (the Louvre), The Sackler Keeper of Antiquities (Oxford—props to the name on this one),The Sackler Gallery (Washington)... Alternatively: the Sackler Institute (Columbia, Cornell, King’s College London, NYU, Tufts, Yale…)

12. Also the year that Queen Elizabeth presented Mortimer Sackler with an honorary knighthood for his contribution to the arts.

In Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, love and death share a bed. I fell in love with Goldin’s work as a catalog of exchanges. It was not just her attunement to the everyday but the vibrancy of it that won “Heart-Shaped Bruise” a pin on the corkboard above my desk in high school. In the background of suburbia, where life appeared anything but extreme, I was fascinated with the masochistic entanglement of pain and joy Goldin espoused. (Never mind her struggle with heroin addiction or the extreme poverty she photographed. Beneath her flash, the extreme was beautiful.) Her work descended into my world as an affirmation of the intensity with which I experienced every day. Every embrace mapped out a blueprint on how to live. Like any young person with too much time and not enough direction,13 I wallowed in my own vices, desires I fell at the mercy of rather than controlled.14 The object of my attention rotated but the intensity remained. Smoking, running, psychedelics, calorie counts, some girl, some guy. I worshiped each with equal fervor, assuming the position of hackneyed devotee that amateur

turned inward, Providence

psychologists (friends with a shared affinity for Meyers-Briggs and psychoanalysis) diagnosed as an addictive personality.15 I grew solipsistic in my own afflictions, convinced that no one else survived feeling this way.

In what I would later declare as my hedonistic years,16 I relentlessly pursued transcendence. I wanted feelings to puddle in a manner antithetical to language. This want bordered on need, pulled me outside of my skin, which was exactly the intention. Although the substances rarely proved chemically addictive,17 I spent months on the cusp of revelation. Vertiginous, extraordinary. For the first time, everything was an epiphany. The jangle of keys in my hand suddenly felt as precious as the plastic gems my younger sister hoarded as a child. Meaning was made in the act. One bump and I realized I had never known what my knees felt like—not the sensation on skin but the act of inhabitance. Suddenly I wondered if I had merely subsisted on my body for so many years because it rarely demanded acknowledgement. The first time I dropped acid, I blabbed endlessly about the cycles While others touted psychedelics as tools for dismantling the boundaries erected between thoughts, mine circled the same themes like pennies down the drain. Even a simple cigarette became a cause for meditation.

Over the course of 700 photographs, The Ballad chronicles intimate scenes of love and loss, ecstasy and pain. From the relative comfort of the university, I admired the fervor with which Goldin lived and documented her life. Like MSA’s primetime audience, I was drawn to the spectacle of self-destruction. Beside me, friends descended into their own intense embodiment, yet we could not bridge the gap between our sensations. The ecosystem cannibalized itself. We were reckless, but within the bounds of acceptable delusion. Publicly, compassion was afforded to us as a function of our standing in a status system we claimed to reject but, ultimately, always benefited from. Running laps around the university track, we could grow tired of turning corners but rarely fully deviated. Those were benders, not lifestyles. This was, after all, what it meant to be young.

13. In the 1960s, Arthur Sackler made a fortune marketing the tranquilizers Librium and Valium to physicians. One targeted ad: an image of a young woman carrying textbooks, suggesting Librium “to help free her of excessive anxiety.”

14. Of the condition, Marco Roth writes, “addictions are also attitudes; at first a fact of the body, they become a perspective on the world.”

15. American Addiction Centers rejects the notion of a generic addictive personality, for those inquiring.

16. Recognizing, of course, the improbability that at 21 I set myself permanently on the straight and narrow.

17. In the kitchen, my roommates discussed the drug scheduling, on which my habits ran the range from Schedule I to Schedule V.

Concerned by my laissez-faire attitude toward my body, and thus my life, my dad sat me down with a warning. We sat side-by-side on my twin bed, facing the newly barren wall on the far end of my childhood bedroom. He wore the same faded quarter zip he did every day, with torn hemming my mom hates. I was convinced of my own intelligence in the way only newly minted young adults are. He spoke in platitudes—his family struggled with addiction to a myriad of substances, and he didn’t want to see me wander down the same path. I shrugged him off. I was in control of the situation. I rejected the notion there even was a Situation. Mostly, I liked leaving parties but didn’t like going home.

My dad turned toward pathos. A couple years after I was born, my grandmother recovered from knee surgery, alone, in a townhouse across the country. As I took my first steps, she remained largely immobile from the pain. Her doctor prescribed her OxyContin.

I never knew my Nana before her surgery. I do know that in her Western Pennsylvania high school, she was the swim team secretary. That she moved with my father’s father to Dallas, Texas, where he was stationed, and then to Los Angeles the following year in the wake of their divorce. Once, after my father disappeared for a day with a band of older boys, she chased him through the streets of El Monte with a wooden

spoon. When he was young, she cleaned their apartment complex to make rent and after finishing her associate degree, always organized the holiday office party. Later, when she moved to Monterey, she ornamented her desk with bobble-head Dodgers players. She smoked Marlboro Golds and drank Diet Coke, enjoyed true crime and mildly-true gossip. She never raised her voice and kept the fridge stocked with egg salad and laughed like the fry of a boombox out the window—the sound simply escaped her. I know that OxyContin stole her time, body, and confidence, and even as she thumbed through People magazine in the daylight or snuck us chocolate frosted Entenmann's donuts at night, she was mourning, always, for herself.

Losing her was gradual, my dad cautioned. It wasn’t her fault but it happened a little bit every day. I nodded and blew smoke out my window as soon as he left.

+++

Having lost loved ones to AIDS and years of her life to opiods, Goldin published “Crushing Oxy on My Bed, Berlin, 2015.” A blurry pill box, with its faded lettering, holds small white tablets. Behind it sits a circular slab, dusted in OxyContin. Nan Goldin’s photograph, like her seminal works of 1980s bohemia, indulges few charades. Laid bare is the truth of addiction. Sullen afternoons sacrificed to the twin anvils of agony and numbness. I behold Goldin’s photographs and flinch. “Dope on My Rug, New York, 2016” presents an overhead menagerie of lighters, pill bottles, cigarettes,18 and that purplecapped Sharpie that no matter the lighting, always produces a line much closer to brown. The collection is damning and devoid of subject. Somehow both entirely of Goldin and completely beyond. I was struck by how intensely she presents objects as action. Spelled out on the floor, the doing is implied.

Goldin started taking OxyContin in 2014 to help alleviate wrist pain. “I was originally prescribed for surgery. Though I took it as directed I got addicted overnight,” she writes for ArtForum. After maxing out on her prescription,

Goldin turned to heroin, and, in 2017, nearly overdosed from a mixture of heroin and fentanyl. She went to rehab. She published her personal photographs. She recognized her struggle as a part of a larger legacy of overprescription. On March 10, 2018, Nan Goldin forced the Met to acknowledge its inheritance. With her newly formed Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.),19 Goldin staged a die-in, launching hundreds of pill bottles into the reflecting pool beneath the temple. The water was freckled with labels that read “Prescribed to you by the Sackler Family.” One protestor bore a sign with the ACT UP logo, SILENCE = DEATH. The art world, previously content with the public distinction between Purdue Pharma and its board, was forced into acknowledgement. In December 2021, the Met dropped the Sackler name and refused further donation. Of the decision they wrote, “The Museum and the families of Dr. Mortimer Sackler and Dr. Raymond Sackler have mutually agreed to take this action to allow The Met to further its core mission.”

In Laura Poitras’ 2022 documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Goldin draws a parallel between the AIDS and opioid epidemics. Both are instances of government oversight and social stigma further isolating those who are suffering. In both instances, Goldin leveraged her own life not to shock but to move. Aware of our scopophilic tendencies, Goldin portrays suffering against want. Look at this, she demands. Watch me bare my pain for you. At a loss for words, I borrow Sontag’s, regarding the pain of others. “No moral charge attaches to the representation of these cruelties. Just the provocation: can you look at this? There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.”

18.

19.

narrowly escaped. I went from the darkness and ran full speed into The World. I was isolated, but I realized I wasn’t alone.”

There is little to say about my Nana’s recovery. It was painful, and harrowing, and entirely incomplete. Her body transformed beyond her comprehension and she retreated from it until her skin, too, was as foreign as her needs. Sat before the television, I spent many afternoons combing her hair, thin and soft in my palms. We watched cop dramas abound with terrible things happening to young women. She scratched my back as I drifted off and I still sleep best with someone tracing figure eights around my spine. Addiction is not spectacular or disgusting or shameful or romantic. It just is, over and over and over again.

+++

These days, I am studying the pursuit of pleasure and routine deviations from the course.20 Case study: “Eats Toilet Paper/Blow Dryer.”

“I’m absolutely addicted to sleeping with my blow dryer,” Lori confesses at the start of the episode. If not dire, her situation is bleak. Cleanly packaged in a 40-second montage: Lori tucked in with her blow dryer before bed, Lori cuddling her daughter below the heat, Lori blowing hot air at her toes. The experts are called in, a therapist delivers the radical wisdom that “people often try to soothe themselves.” Her friends worry about the burns on her arms. Her ex-husband admits the blow dryer is in part responsible for their divorce. Her three-year-old curls up beside the hot air before bed, and a halfhearted gesture is made toward the dangers of impressionable youth. In turn, Lori wanders the aisles of a dimly lit beauty store to demonstrate expertise. She points to various boxed blow dryers under the auspice of purchase, but money never changes hands.21 All this backstory is established in four minutes. The remaining seven will repeat these scenes, gloating over her suffering.

Cut to: Kesha, who began eating toilet paper when she moved in with her grandmother and auntie in sixth grade. Here, the psychiatrist notes that girls at this age need to be nurtured through

the process of self-development. If nothing else, the statement establishes the caliber of the medical advice Kesha will receive. After a commercial break, she sits through a staged confrontation. “I’m going to meet Jennifer. She’s trying to convince me to stop eating toilet paper so I’ll see how it goes,” Kesha explains outside the diner. Inside, the pleasantries are elided. The pair sits at a grisly booth, a mountain of breakfast food between them. “Did you know you’ve been eating toilet tissue for 23 years? You never thought about it?” demands her sister. In between bits of corned beef hash, Kesha tears herself a square of toilet paper.

TLC uploaded the episode to YouTube in full, as a part of a series of clickbait titles: “What Happens When You Eat 8 Beds?,” “Addicted To Ventriloquism/Cats,” “Sex with a Car,”22 “Glow In The Dark Boobs,” “Addicted to Being Together,” “Hairless Rat Love”… The virtual museum of curiosities posits human beings as specimens, and I move from exhibit to exhibit in a haze. Each scene assuages my fear of addiction-as-concept: look at this freakshow, the program demands. How unserious this dependency beyond chemical. In every story, suspense is developed through increasingly heavy percussion and erratic editing. Scenes are so obviously choreographed yet leave elliptic plot holes.23 There is no gesture toward treatment. On-screen family members express concern, in the hollowest sense of the term. Everyone is fixated on identification, as if patterns once named suddenly grow afraid of their semantic shadow. As if the apathetic rhythms of MSA fall out of time when we understand the origin. Our sadistic impulses become a study in our own indifference. After all, what distinguishes one form of compulsive self harm from another? Perhaps it is only social reinforcement that stands between me and the funhouse of obsession depicted in MSA. The distinction lies not in the action but the gaze. I watch Kesha’s nearly tearful admission, “She doesn’t understand that I’ve tried and I can’t stop,” and recall the rhetoric of addiction. With its intent on blame, the language often obfuscates the fundamental battle, that internal wrestling with yourself. You are the aggressor and the victim, take the knockout shot and fall bloody in the ring. There is predisposition: genetic inheritance, socioeconomic conditions. There is inevitability: chemical processes, daily desires. And then, there is you.

20. Apropos of Barthes, “No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure (Lacan, apropos of Sade).”

21. At least, this is the only rationale I can offer for this scene. Lori’s insider knowledge is in fact largely intuitive, even for those of us who neglect to sleep beneath a constant stream of hot air—I, myself, keep my window open in all seasons—but for those unfamiliar: it is best to sleep with a blow dryer with multiple heat and power settings, so claims the expert.

22. On the subject of obsession and the myopic worldbuilding of David Cronenberg’s Crash, a girl in my film class lamented that such fidelity to any object is inherently isolating. I tried to counteroffer evangelical church or at least a sweaty mosh pit but the conversation was quickly derailed by a personal anecdote about the first time our classmate viewed porn. (“I just kept thinking, this couldn’t be right.”)

23. "With the help of meditation, Lori has overcome her addiction. She still craves her blow dryer and admits to using it sometimes during the day,” proclaims a title card at the end of the episode. Meanwhile, Kesha is “fighting her addiction.”

End scene.

It boils down to control, having and losing, living with and without. Nowadays, I fear most drugs because they return me to my body and remind me that I’m the only one in there. I am in the process of unraveling myself from my obsessions. In the most fundamental sense, I remain the same. I retain the frightening immediacy of addiction, inhabiting each moment with the plea: let this be the last and only thing that matters to me. But the days pass different. When I wake up the sun is still fixed along the horizon and I am no longer a liability to love. Television bores instead of assuages. My Strange Addiction returns to my life as a one-off in a Maggie Millner poem. “There was no joy depicted—just decrepitude, abjection, musty rooms.” I mop my floor. I let my hair air-dry, except in February. I take up poetry and have less to apologize for. While on the phone with my dad, I watch the mechanical arm of a forest-green garbage truck extend into the street to lift waste into its impossible stomach. He updates me on our dog’s digestive health and the most recent episodes of This American Life; I describe the collection route. The truck lingers at every house on my block to take the trash in heaps without complaint. It stops. It starts. It is dirty and it is cleaning and it keeps driving.

ANABELLE JOHNSTON B’23 just is.

Like Joni Mitchell, it seems Goldin smokes Yellow Spirits.

Announcing her group, Goldin writes, “I survived the opioid crisis. I

“FIFTEEN BUCKS IS NOT ENOUGH”

Interviews from the RISD picket line

These interviews were edited for length and clarity. Colorful posters adorn the bricks of the Providence Washington Building, better known as Prov-Wash. It’s a hub for RISD students, but more importantly, it houses the office of RISD President Crystal Williams. That’s why, this afternoon, more than 100 RISD community members are picketing outside.

“Fifteen bucks is not enough” and “honk your horns for worker’s rights” echo from a megaphone. Students bang on improvised instruments, beating empty buckets and milk crates with sticks. Musicians have armed themselves with cymbals, drums, and beat-up amplifiers, while sculpture majors bang sheets of scrap metal. Thankfully, a jar of earplugs sits among shared supplies, along with water bottles, energy bars, and an impromptu button-making station. Strikers are proudly adorned with pins reading “UNION STRONG” and “SUPPORT 251 LOCAL.”

The RISD Teamsters (short for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters) stand tall with signs hanging off their shoulders. Across the street, students are printing more graphics to add to the collage. Perhaps the most arresting object—a two-story-tall inflatable pig—stares into the offices of school administrators from its perch on a large flatbed truck.

After drawing the support of students, faculty, and local politicians, the union reached an agreement with RISD on April 18, ending the strike. The following interviews, conducted with picketers on April 7, illustrate the feelings of frustration and solidarity that brought a community together. +++

Interview with anonymous picketing RISD student

The College Hill Independent: What made you decide to join the picket line?

Student: These people are working their asses off every single day, they love their jobs too, just wonderful human beings. I was talking to this one guy, he’s been working here for 20 years, and he gets paid like $19.50 [an hour]. It’s ridiculous that Crystal Williams is being paid $600k [a year]. That’s fucking disgraceful. I don’t know. I’m pissed off!

Indy: What do you see for the future of the strike?

Student: A ton of work. Because we’re going to fuck their shit up. We’re going to make their pockets hurt. We are organizing, we’re getting better at organizing.

Indy: Do you have a message for the RISD administration?

Student: Yeah, fuck you!

Indy: Do you have a message for the custodial and dining staff?

Student: We love you so much. You are supporting us every single day, and you get treated like shit, and it’s bullshit. We are on your side.

+++

The union of RISD’s custodians, movers, and groundskeepers started negotiating a contract with the school’s administration on June 13, 2022. Organizers sought to boost salaries, which were as low as $15.25 an hour, to at least $20. According to Teamster leadership, the union was ready to strike last year, but were advised to wait until February’s negotiations. After months of talks, though, RISD had barely budged. When the administration remained obdurate even with a federal mediator present, the union planned a strike. It started slowly: students received vague email updates from the school, while workers stood in front of buildings with flyers and signs. Once negotiations continued to stall and the strike shifted to “indefinite,” students sprang into action. Most departments took it upon themselves to handle their own cleaning. The architecture department, though, took the trash produced by student projects and filled their lobby with it, in a show of solidarity.

+++

Interview with anonymous striking RISD worker

Indy: What made you decide to strike?

Worker: The school, they never give a cent. No offers, anything. We try, you know—yesterday, we met with the school, the union, and it was the same thing.

Indy: What do you see for the future of the strike?

Worker: I think the guys did a very good job, the students did a very good job. But yesterday, when we [were] at the table, talking about all this, the one speaking for the school said, “The students [are] not good. The only thing they do is printing and photography. Nothing else.” I was getting so mad. The guy was sitting next to me. I was just so mad, I want[ed] to yell. When they talk about the students like that, I get mad.

Indy: Do you have a message for the administration?

Worker: Just give us a raise. That’s it. We just need a raise. Give us a raise, we come back to work tomorrow.

Indy: Do you have a message for your fellow workers? And your staff?

Worker: Well, I keep telling them, don’t give up. Be strong. We’re going to win this. We are family. Together, nobody stops us. We have to be strong. To the end. +++

On April 6, amid mounting fervor, RISD and the Teamsters met once more to negotiate, but RISD sent just one person—Director of Labor Relations Michael Fitzpatrick Jr.—to the table. Fitzpatrick Jr. dismissed student efforts and continued to deny the union’s requests, according to Teamsters present.

The news got out. Frustration snowballed into action, including a faculty walk-out, departmental statements of support, and an April 10 letter from the Providence City Council expressing solidarity with the union. +++

Indy: What made you decide to join the picket line?

Student: It was the emails that the administration kept sending, saying that the union was being unfair and unreasonable, which was a lie. Just talking to the workers and seeing the general environment, it just didn’t make sense.

Indy: And the fact that they haven’t been negotiating with the union.

Student: No, they haven’t. They’re basically just lying. At first I just kind of chalked it up to corporate talk, but after talking with the Teamster people, and just talking to more people, it’s like no, they’re just fucking lying.

Indy: Do you have a message for the administration?

Student: Go fuck yourself.

Indy: Do you have a message for the workers?

Student: You guys are doing great, you guys are heroes, you guys can do this. The student body stands behind you. You have our full support.

+++

RISD students organized a rally on April 14, with hundreds of RISD community members in attendance. Students marched around campus hanging up posters and blaring every kind of noise-maker an art student could imagine, wearing red and white to show support.

On Monday, April 17, RISD met for the last time with union leadership. Organizers said that the administration was eager to end the strike, and had a lawyer on the phone during the meeting. The next day, union members met at the Teamsters’ hall in East Providence to vote on the contract. Organizers went through the new contract proposal point by point, translating in Spanish and Portuguese. Custodians, movers, and groundskeepers would make at least $20 if they’d worked at RISD for more than one year. Their vote to support the new contract was unanimous, and the strike was over.

+++

Interview with anonymous professor making posters with their class outside Prov-Wash

Indy: What made you decide to strike? Or be involved with the strike?

Professor: Well, technically we’re having class. This is the silkscreen workshop in graphic design. This is our third week out of four. This is our class—a very regular class.

Indy: You have no obligation to answer this question, but I heard RISD professors are banned from striking, is that correct?

Professor: In the part-time faculty union contract, we are banned from sympathy striking, so we are teaching class today.

Indy: What do you see for the future of the strike?

Professor: I have no idea. I just hope it gets resolved, and I hope they come back to negotiate.

Indy: Do you have a message for the workers?

Professor: I graduated [from RISD] in 2010, and just remember everyone being so nice and taking care of us, so I really want to be out here showing support, and trying to take care of them.

LI DING R’26 will continue to scrutinize RISD’s financial priorities.

SARAH MANN MID’26 will continue facilitating difficult conversations.

SINKING TOO DEEP INTO THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST-PERFORMER Everyone look at me. I am doing something beautiful.

Joshua Koolik B’24

Ballet Recital (flipbook) Stills from video documentation of my performance: ‘Ballet Recital’ [15:38]

eighty-inch TV astrology books

swampy couch security cameras

’80s computers exposed wiring

A Small House in

Items from my grandfather’s house

My dad tells my older brother and me that if we get hit, we hit back harder. We practice punching the palm of his hand in the kitchen after dinner. Jab jab, cross. Jab jab, cross. He says nice one every time I punch with my left fist. I tell everyone at school I punch harder with my left.

On Sunday mornings, we iron our clothes while my dad finishes writing his sermon. He has a way with words, and maybe a way with God. After service, people line up at the altar to talk to him. Sometimes they tell him he changed their life. Sometimes they tell him he’s a genius. I wait patiently in the front pew, flipping through old hymnals. Sometimes they tell me how lucky I am, that my father is such a godly man. I agree; I feel lucky.

my fourth-grade hands fashion a rope for delicate sprout

corduroy recliner

canned vegetables

gas fireplace

After church, my dad races eighty miles an hour through the backroads on our way home. My brother and I laugh with adrenaline. My dad puts on “Wake Up” by Arcade Fire, turns the volume up so much my ears start to sting, tells us to listen to the words and look out the window. I watch the telephone cable ripple between poles, the sun flash behind the trees. I like how it feels, to feel things I can’t name.

how can light start to bloom in sanctuaries where shadows angle so violently on children’s bare, pink skin

wood paneling

diet root beer

Nick’s pizza

When it’s unbearably hot, my dad takes my brother and me to Adventure Highway, an abandoned road on the side of Neversink Mountain. The asphalt is cracked all the way down the middle, the pavement glowing with graffiti cuss words and dicks. We walk for hours along the road as my dad tells us lurid stories from his childhood. I find the stories hard to believe, but they’re too tempting not to.

words come out green and flutter in my stomach, leaves me with a dull nausea or else a sharp pain I drown out in motion sickness

landscape paintings

fluorescent kitchen light

dark dining room table

On winter holidays we go to my great aunt’s house. My dad and his brothers sit in a circle of folding chairs in the dimly lit living room, playing guitar and banjo and singing about God and Appalachian coal. They harmonize from their chests effortlessly, with the same vocal cords, the same body, till they’re all red and sweaty. I stand by the kitchen doorway and watch. My dad asks me to sing with him, but I’m too shy.

pieces of lyrics you sang to me hang in trees by my bedroom window, limp in the night wind translucent and blue as I sleep, cradling myself behind glass

creaky stairs

old American smell photos of you on your motorcycle

My dad tells my brother to be careful around theater boys. My brother auditions for the middle school play without telling anyone and gets the big part. My dad doesn’t say anything. He shows us a video of a man playing the same part, how feminine he’s acting. My dad asks my brother if this is who he wants to be. My brother says no and runs upstairs. I laugh at the video.

I wake up with stones in my hands, my window freshly stained. I embrace the glass figures and they shatter in every color

dead grass

half a dozen brokendown cars

rotted treehouse

My dad has always loved the idea of going to an Ivy League school. He likes Princeton the best. He would take me and tell me to pretend I was a student as I wandered the campus, to see what it felt like. He loved telling me about the time he was there while they were shooting A Beautiful Mind, and Jennifer Connelly checked him out. Now he loves telling people he’s an Ivy League Dad.

the shards gather to an omen, a headstone, a memory I can’t properly trace my steps back to

box fan on the patio

red tinted glasses

button-up shirt and jeans

My dad started working out a lot since I left. His stomach contracts, his arms grow. My brother jokes he’s going through his midlife crisis. When I call him, he asks me if I’ve been working out. I don’t say much but tell him he looks younger. When I hang up, I suddenly feel out of place in my own dorm room. I take out a book and do class readings at my desk until the feeling goes away.

empty cigarette tins

Holy Bible

leather belt

Every other week or so, a book about Jesus comes in the mail. I keep them in a drawer I feel guilty everytime I open. One night, alone in my dorm room, I can’t take it; I pick one out at random and read half a chapter, my eyes dry as a breeze blows in. For a moment, some pointed hunger in my body feels quiet. I watch a tree quiver in the wind and close the book. I feel beautiful and inadequate. I turn off the lights and sleep by the open window.

I run my hand through your hair one more time, thick and greasy, before we duck our heads trains run past us in gray; I dip my hand in the mud, held in the noise, smear my chest and cast it across

EVAN DONNACHIE B’24 really likes the stromboli from Nick’s Pizza.

60 FEET, 6,000

Imperialism at the World

into the ‘future’ by encouraging the uptake of Western influences, also drove the adoption of this U.S.-born sport.

by a crack of

The world sits on edge as Michael Nelson Trout, the 31-year-old center fielder from Vineland, New Jersey, walks slowly to the batter’s box. He swings his bat once, twice, feeling its weight in his hands. He nods to himself, smacks his gum, and takes a deep breath. Having settled into the moment, as he’s done thousands of times before, Trout looks forward—60 feet and six inches forward—into the eyes of his transitory foe. On the pitcher’s mound stands Shohei Ohtani, the 28-year-old do-it-all unicorn from Ōshū, Japan. This inning, Ohtani had walked the first batter before forcing the next into a double play, bringing up Mike Trout with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning of the final game of the 2023 World Baseball Classic. This at bat will have a near-deciding impact on the outcome of this premier global sporting event. If Ohtani wins this matchup, then Japan takes home the trophy. But if Trout reigns victorious, the USA has a fighting chance against its longtime rival. From the press box high above loanDepot Park in Miami, Florida, sportscaster Joe Davis speaks to the six million tuned in around the world: “And now… theater. Impossible theater.”

The World Baseball Classic is an international baseball tournament, held every four years since 2006 (baseball was removed as an Olympic sport in 2005). The tournament was the brainchild of Major League Baseball (MLB) and the MLB players’ union, and was modeled after soccer’s World Cup. The tournament has garnered international adoration over its four previous installments. Representing one’s nation often elicits intense emotions of honor and allegiance—both for players and their devoted fans. In many East Asian and Central and South American countries, this tournament is considered the nation’s most popular sporting event, akin to Canadian ice hockey or Brazilian soccer.

Of course, it wasn’t solely homeland pride that drew eyes to this matchup: many simply wanted to witness two of the greatest baseball players of all time face off. Trout is one of the most feared hitters in baseball history, and has been near or at the top of almost every statistical ranking since entering the league in 2011, winning American League MVP three times. Meanwhile, Ohtani can pitch and hit with the best of them—a Babe Ruth analog who might just do everything better than The Babe.

These two gods of the sport have also, incredibly, found themselves on the same MLB team. When this tournament is over, they will return to sunny Los Angeles, California, to play for the somehow perpetually middling LA Angels. For now, though, they stand confidently on opposite sides of the infield, adorned with the colors of their countries. Behind Trout’s shoulder, someone in the crowd lifts the stars and stripes; on his left, a group boasts the Hinomaru, the Rising Sun Flag. Both players, in this heavy-weighted moment, seem remarkably poised.

But a complex history floats over the moment, weaves its way through the crowd, follows the path of the five ounce red-striped ball as it zips back and forth between pitcher

this awe-inspiring showdown between two of the greatest to ever play the game. Ohtani nods at his catcher, lifts his left leg to his chest, reaches his right arm way, way back, and fires.

+++

The telling of baseball’s origin story has its own contested history. Many theories as to the timing, location, and credit for the game’s invention have circled the U.S., the most famous being the Abner Doubleday theory. In 1905, the famed baseball player and executive Albert Spalding brought seven of baseball’s earliest officials together to establish the Mills Commission, tasked with investigating the origins of the sport. The group eventually determined that Doubleday, later a Union general in the Civil War, wrote the rules of the game in Cooperstown, New York in 1839.

Here’s the catch: the general was likely not in Cooperstown this year, if he ever visited this town at all. There is, in fact, a preponderance of evidence directly refuting the Doubleday theory; critics began publishing rebuttals as soon as a year after the claim was made. But the damage had been done, and the theory’s intensely patriotic undertones carried it to prominence (the Baseball Hall of Fame has been the main draw of Cooperstown since its founding there in 1936).

On the Mills Commission sat seven men, two of whom were U.S. senators, all of whom had reason to desire baseball to be an all-American ballgame, invented in a small rural town by the man who fired the first shot of the Civil War. In all likelihood, the sport is a derivative of European historical ball games related to rounders and cricket (much to the dismay of the blue-blooded patriots of the time; at the aforementioned dinner, clinks of forks and knives were often drowned out by chants of “No rounders! No rounders!”).

Regardless of the specifics of its invention, baseball was undeniably one of the most important sports in the early United States. Baseball clubs formed across the 1840s, and it was in the following decade, even before the creation of professional teams, that baseball earned the moniker of “national pastime.” The nation’s devotion to this sport, however, was soon to be matched, if not overtaken, by a peer country across the globe.

The rise of baseball in Japan has a much clearer history than in the sport’s home country. Baseball was introduced by Horace Wilson, a professor of English at Kaisei Gakko (now Tokyo University) in 1872. American missionaries and teachers were responsible for its growth in popularity over the next few years, aided in large part by the boom in global mail and telegraph communication capacity. The Meiji-era Westernization movement, in which the Japanese government sought to steer the country

Even as the Meiji regime attempted to ‘Westernize’ the nation, it still placed importance on the maintenance of Japanese identity. Baseball was thus intentionally linked to the idea of Bushido, the code of ethics of the samurai. Bushido takes influence from Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shinto, and is imbued with a deep nationalist pride.

Unlike in America, baseball was popularized in Japan primarily through youth leagues. Throughout the early 20th century, high school, college, and university games drew enormous crowds and continue to today; the annual Summer Koshien high-school tournament draws teams from each of Japan’s prefectures and is nationally televised. Baseball training is considered an integral part of a Japanese high-schooler’s education: it is at once a physical, emotional, and spiritual exercise. High schools across the country are revered for their strong baseball teams and player commitment decisions are considered with the same vigilance as college decisions in the U.S.

In 1936, the Japanese Baseball League, the first professional league in the country, was established. The Tokyo Kyojin (now Yomiuri Giants) and The Osaka Tigers, the two oldest professional teams in Japan, were dominant in this early league. These two teams had split 11 straight championships (7–4 respectfully) until the league was forced to shut down for the 1945 season as the country turned its focus toward war.

Over the previous several decades, the nationalist pride so strongly connected with baseball’s rise in Japan had been marshaled toward the nation’s own violent, imperial project—culminating in its eventual alliance with Nazi forces during World War II.

+++

The first pitch of the at bat, an 88-mph slider, swings just low of the strike zone for a ball. As each player gets reset in body and mind, Joe Davis comments on the tournament’s global appeal: no matter the outcome of this at bat, “Baseball’s already won.”

Pitch two is an attack, a try-me pitch, 100-mph fastball down the heart of the plate. Trout can’t get the bat around in time, and the count is tied 1–1. Ohtani tries it again, another 100-mph fastball, this one missing the outside of the plate by a couple of centimeters for a ball. It’s a fantastic pitch, and would elicit a swing from many a great batter. But Mike Trout is Mike Trout and, in half the time it might take him to blink, he decides to look the pitch off.

Pitch four is yet another 100-mph fastball, this one back down the middle. Trout swings out of his shoes, but not fast enough—the count is now 2–2. The next pitch is a ball, because of course it is, because this moment needed to be that much more dramatic, and brings the count full, 3–2. This one registers at an astounding 102 mph. No one in the stadium is in their seat as Ohtani and Trout get set. American and Japanese players hang on the fence of their dugouts, each anticipating the moment they will jump over it in celebration. One pitch later, half of them would.

+++

Just before 8 a.m. on December 7, 1941, the Japanese military launched a surprise bombing of the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

6,000 MILES

World Baseball Classic

The attack catalyzed the United States’ entrance into the Second World War. As U.S. soldiers left their homes to fight in Europe and East Asia, they brought elements of their culture with them, including their love of baseball. First brought to the military bases as a means of entertainment, baseball became an integral part of the American war effort, primarily as a means of maintaining morale.

About 75 percent of U.S. military members participated in baseball activities during their time overseas, either as players or spectators. Alongside Hollywood actors and world-famous musicians, star professional players traveled to interact with weary fighters, many of whom had grown up playing baseball. Many also participated in exhibition games for soldiers’ entertainment; some of the greatest baseball teams of all time didn’t play in the U.S. at all, but existed ephemerally as Army or Navy all-star teams.

In addition to affording soldiers the excitement of meeting their favorite ballplayers, the prominence of overseas baseball was an exclamation of American patriotism; the games served as a reminder to the men of the American lifestyle that they were fighting for back home. Since the fabrication of the Doubleday myth, baseball’s image had been carefully curated such that it was not merely a component of Americanism but a direct manifestation of it. Captain H. A. McClure, the commander of the Norfolk Naval Training Station, said after the war: “Nothing typifie[d] the American spirit more than a baseball game.” Baseball, as it existed in the U.S. military throughout the war, was “pointblank proof to our enemies that they cannot succeed in overhauling our way of life.”

In total, over 90 percent of MLB players joined the military during WWII (compared to about 23 percent of American men). With so many of their players overseas, the quality of MLB baseball decreased dramatically. Support from civilians, however, had never been higher. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the “Green Light Letter’’ on January 15, 1942, encouraging the MLB, at the time the only nationally contested sports league in the country, to continue their regularly scheduled season. Teams from the league, in turn, cumulatively donated over $1 million ($17 million today) to the war effort to fund stadium builds and gear for the players.

Military commanders came to view the sport not merely as a morale booster but as a tactical tool. Regular baseball games were “not a supplement to [the Army’s training] program; they are a basic part of it,” stated Colonel Theodore Bank, who ran the military’s athletic programs. He even went so far as to claim that games introduced players to the “rigors of combat conditions.” In 1944, the Office of Strategic Services developed a grenade with the exact size and weight of a baseball, with the expectation that any American soldier would be able to throw it with relatively high speed and accuracy.

Baseball’s use as an arm of U.S. imperialism was not unique to World War II or to Japan. Baseball was similarly popularized in Cuba during the 19th century U.S. occupation of the island, where, once again, military leaders saw tactical advantages embedded in the sport. Albert Spalding, who sat on the Mills Commission, observed: “Wherever our soldiers and sailors go [baseball] is immediately introduced, the natives acquiring it with avidity.” Empire seeks not only to control land but to control a people. Where baseball was introduced it was often used as a tool of “Americanization” and forced assimilation.

Meanwhile, as Japan’s military moved through the Pacific with its own expan sionist intentions, it brought baseball with it. Taiwan and Korea are both modern-day baseball powerhouses in large part due to their subjection to Japanese rule.

+++

But while baseball was often used as a weapon, it existed also as a form of resistance to similar violence. Back in the U.S., baseball held Japanese-American communities together through attempted annihilation and existed as a beacon of peoplehood and pride.

Japanese immigrants to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought baseball with them back to its homeland. The sport was large enough among these growing communities that segregated leagues began to form across the Pacific coast and neighboring islands. The first Japanese-American baseball team was established in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1899, soon followed by a San Francisco club in 1903. By the 1920’s and 30’s, these teams flourished, and competed against other teams similarly barred by the “color line” from the MLB: Portuguese-, Korean-, and Chinese-American teams across the Pacific, as well as Negro League teams in the continental U.S. The sport served as a tether both to Japan and to other communities that faced many of the same challenges that being an immigrant to the U.S. brings. These leagues were forced out of commission in the early years of World War II as over 100,000 JapaneseAmericans were forced into concentration camps.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for the internment of anyone of Japanese descent residing on U.S. land. Resistance to this inhumane subjugation was abundant, especially through the maintenance of cultural practices such as traditional music and dance. And, though it didn’t originate in Japan, baseball was a mainstay of the camps. The same sport that had been so integral to the subjugation of Japanese overseas was wielded now as a direct refutation of discrimination at home. At the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona, for example, a 32-team, year-round league was established, playing in front of a backstop made of stolen lumber from the barbed wire fence enclosing the camp. George Omachi, who was interned at this camp and would go on to become an MLB scout, said: “It was demeaning and humiliating to be incarcerated in your own country. Without baseball, camp life would have been miserable.”

+++

The U.S. military occupied Japan for seven years following the end of the war. As part of their imperial project, officials invested in the rapid growth of organized baseball, hoping that the “Americanization” of the Japanese population would stop them from retaliating. General Douglas MacArthur, in his role as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, used baseball as a primary tool for the ‘civilization’ of the Japanese public. General MacArthur banned traditional Japanese sports such as archery and kendo and worked alongside Japan’s government officials to reestablish baseball as an indispensable facet of Japanese culture. This campaign was ultimately successful in reviving the sport, as baseball continues to be the most popular team sport in Japan today.

More questionable, however, is the efficacy

campaign as a means of forced assimilation. Japanese baseball grew into its own identity apart from American imperial influence and is infused with its own national pride. Where U.S. baseball has ties to militarism, Japanese baseball is connected to Bushido and seen as an ethical force. Through conflict and defiance, the two forms of the sport have diverged, each molded and coerced into embodying the culture of its people.

+++

With a pop of the glove, the game is over. The 3–2 pitch is a sweeper, 87 mph, and looks like a pitch-to-hit right up until the moment it veers far off the plate, leaving Mike Trout, as he swings at air, looking silly. Members of Samurai Japan immediately swarm the field, elated in their victory. “He struck him out! Ohtani strikes out Trout, and Japan’s back on top of the baseball world!” Joe Davis exclaims. As Mike Trout sulks back to the dugout, Ohtani and his teammates jump between each other, embracing in relief and giddy jubilance. After a 14-year absence from the World Baseball Classic final, Japan were champions once again.

It is likely that for many watching the postgame celebrations, the tangled history of the two represented nations was not apparent. Many were simply watching 10 of the world’s premier athletes display the wonder of human ability. But sport has never simply been spectacle. Over the past millennia it has been used both as a non-violent (though ever-potent) means of political aggression and a catalyst of peace and reconciliation. International competitions such as the Olympics have existed both as proxy and as treaty during wartime, embodying both aggressive nationalism and optimistic humanism.

In peacetime, these threads are tantalizingly obscured. The World Baseball Classic, on the one hand, has brought together two nations who, to all appearances, are just playing a ballgame—one that over decades they have each made their own. But behind the ecstasy of the winning team and the despondence of today’s losers, there’s a passion that has never been entirely benign. In this final showdown, Japan claims its equal ownership of a sport that, for so long, was used against them in violence. But to own baseball is not just to own the peanuts and the Cracker Jacks; it is to hold a vessel and a tool of tribalism and war.

As the members of the Japanese National team receive their commemorative caps and shirts, the camera pans over to the U.S. dugout, where players sit despondent. Some pack their belongings, others stare longingly out at the field. All will soon head home to their families, a warm bed and a hot meal. The stands will empty, the lights will dim, and the doors will close; but still, two flags will flutter and snap in the wind.

CALEB STUTMAN-SHAW B’25 wants to be taken out to the ballgame.

“Let the Beat Fuck You”

An interview with McKenzie Wark on trans techno dissociation and the rave continuum

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

McKenzie Wark is everywhere. That might be easy for me to say as a transsexual DJ theory girl with an active social media presence, but her latest book Raving, written as part of Duke University Press’ Practices series, is flying off the shelves. With an ongoing international book tour and highlights everywhere from EDM magazine Resident Advisor to the New Yorker, Wark is bringing the Brooklyn queer/trans rave scene out of Twitter circles and Instagram fliers and into the mainstream.

I first came across media theorist and writer McKenzie Wark through 2004’s A Hacker Manifesto and her provocatively titled 2019 book Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, in which she moves beyond a classical Marxist understanding of industry and defines a new type of production entirely. While historically, capitalists profited by owning the means of production and claiming surplus labor, Wark argues that a new “vectoralist” class extracts value through the control and commodification of surplus information, unequally collected and held. This is the economy of Uber, social media influence, contract labor, and consumer polling. This dense theoretical text was another milestone in a career filled with rigorous refreshes of Marxism for the digital age. In 2020’s Reverse Cowgirl, Wark steered away from academic monographs—if not theoretical rigor—toward memoir. Rejecting the traditional linearity and legibility of autobiography, the book is what she calls an “auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self” that could begin to account for the

complexity of (trans) life.

Raving continues this autofictive method, weaving tales from the “rave continuum”—the seamless haze of late nights and early mornings that bleed into each other, buoyed by side-chained kick drums and pounding bass— together with theoretical scaffolding to contextualize the trans rave experience. The specific locations and characters of these Bushwick nights are made anonymous, in order to at least temper what Wark calls style-extraction, a vectoralist commodification of the most hip raving and ravers. These are usually creatures of the liminal night acceptable only under cover of high BPMs and inhibition-lowering substances—slender dolls, Black queer people, and alien fashion.

Currently, raves disconnected from techno and house’s queer and Black roots proliferate across college campuses and crypto-fascist fundraisers, extracting wealth and cultural capital all the way. I suspect Wark would caution against any simplistic, puritanical hand-wringing. For her, raves are not political salvation or queer utopia, but, at best, a way to survive, a place where people can disassociate from a world that’s never included them in its future, let alone its utopias. I spoke to Wark over email about techno, de-centering the self, survival in the wake of a decimated Left, trans temporality, and more.

Kolya Shields: I saw that the first printing of Raving is selling like crazy, and you’re doing a bunch of press. Congratulations! Why do you think this work is resonating with people so

much right now?

McKenzie Wark: Techno music-centered dance culture has become a quietly popular thing, but if you look in the music section of your local bookstore, there’s not all that many books about it. Publishing has not quite caught up with popular taste. That’s the broader readership the book appeals to. The more specific [readership]... are those I wrote this book as a love letter to, the Brooklyn queer and trans raver community that welcomed me several years ago. It’s made me happy to see my little pink book in the hands of people I see on the dance floor. Nightlife culture, queer culture, especially trans culture can seem so ephemeral, and indeed some things don’t need to be documented or made public, but at the same time, I think, or at least hope, that some people appreciate that the book tries to find a language for the special moments that we’ve made together.

KS: Raving is primarily about those “for whom raving is a collaborative practice that makes it possible to endure this life.” Much of this need is “reassociation”—a trans body escaping for a moment, finding respite from the friction between body and self and body and world in a techno sound so alien that “no human body is more welcome than any other.” What differentiates this “reassociation” from painful dysphoria?

MW: “Reassociation” is an idea I got from Benjamin I. J. Mintzer in a casual conversation we had at the Berlin launch of the book of my correspondence with Kathy Acker [I’m Very Into

You: Correspondence 1995–1996]. I’m interested in breaking out of pathologizing language. I’m interested in breaking out of the genre of trauma porn as the only way to write about trans experience. I’m interested in writing about things we’re good at. About the ways our disabilities can also be abilities. And I also think our experiences aren’t always so unique to us and it’s good to find shared affect. So a lot of Raving is about dissociation not as psychiatry sees it but as an aesthetic practice that works, that re-associates the body in fruitful ways. Dissociation seems to me a prevalent aesthetic category for the times. Historical time is a disaster and we can only endure it sometimes by being out of it. Hence the figure of sideways time, k-time, as what a good rave can enable.

KS: Because of how this ‘alien,’ inhuman sound becomes a way to find pleasure in othered bodies, I’m reminded of theories of anti- or counter-humanism, particularly those forwarded by thinkers like Frank Wilderson and Sylvia Wynter, which posit the concept of ‘Man’ itself as exclusionary and colonial.

MW: We would have to start by acknowledging that techno is Black music, that much of the learned culture of how to participate in the rave comes from Black, particularly Black and queer nightlife cultures. That someone like me is an uninvited guest in it. That’s where the book begins and ends. There’s a passage near the end where I write about an Underground Resistance [pioneering anti-capitalist Detroit collective started in 1990] track and basically show how it too is already, conceptually, Afropessimist. I’m wary of claiming that anything is ever ‘new,’ but I think there’s a practice, an already conceptually rich practice, that can’t be reconciled to the figure of ‘Man’ to be found in the rave, when it’s close to this resonance.

KS: You differentiate multiple types of ravers: punishers with bad rave habits, coworkers, who are just there to “talk about it around the office on Monday,” and those who need it. Those who need it let themselves get “fucked by the music,” something cishet men most often refuse to do, mired in a “horror of being penetrable, of being fuckable.” Can you talk more about the politics of (techno)penetration?

MW: Why does everything have to be a “politics?” If everything is political then nothing is. It’s such an over-inflated term. There’s power in culture, there’s power in aesthetics. They’re different kinds of power, irreducible to “the political,” a category we got, let’s not forget, from [prominent Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt], one of the most reactionary thinkers of the 20th century. So let’s bracket off these received ideas and try to understand, through experiment and observation, what happens when we dance, when those around us dance. What creates the inability to give up centering one’s self? What creates the inability to become a part of the dance? To put it simply, you have to let the beat fuck you. You can guess who has the hardest time with that, lol. Like my other book, Reverse Cowgirl, maybe Raving is “bottom theory.” The subtle dance of the agency of giving up a little agency. In a world in which technics becomes an enclosing control society, it might matter that there’s a few pockets where our lack of agency actually serves our pleasures and needs.

KS: I’m so glad you brought up Reverse Cowgirl, it’s one of my favorites! I’m curious, does giving up the centering of oneself lead to different interpersonal relationships? Have you experienced the rave as a space for particular types of interaction?

MW: The thing one has to shake off is the self as owner and protector of the body as private property. It can take a while, on the dance floor,

to do that. The first hour of dancing for me has a lot of antagonism in it. Everyone around me seems so annoying. It’s a common experience. Getting out of that takes practice. I’m interested in the ways we can have a paradoxical agency over our penetrability. How we let sensations in. Fucking and dancing are two practices where that’s important, but there’s other practices for temporarily overcoming the split in subjectivity [between consciousness and unconsciousness, self and body].

KS: Thinking of the way that sound literally enters, reverberates, through the body, turning flesh into speaker, does raving represent a different relation to technology, perhaps a way to embody what Fred Moten calls the ‘scream of the commodity’?

MW: It doesn’t represent anything. Representation is dampened at a good rave. Literally dampened by great clouds of fog. It’s an expressive form, not a representational one. Sonically, it’s light on the representational. At least the techno I like has that quality. Minimal reference to musical history. Techno turns machines out.

KS: Thinking about the shortcomings of representational politics, is there something freeing for us trans folks in this dampening of representation?

MW: The hardest thing for us is to be ordinary. We’re treated as garbage, as things, as objects for the aggression of others, or as the plaything of the Other. Or, we’re treated as special, as magical beings. That might be preferable sometimes, but it’s exhausting. And it cuts us off from being ordinary. I don’t want to have to put a whole look together just to go to the grocery store. The thing about the ordinary is it has nothing to do with normativity. You don’t have to attempt to approximate a norm to be ordinary. You don’t have to do anything at all. To be ordinary is just to be a variation on the human that attracts no special attention, of either the good or bad kind. That can be a hard thing for us to find. Maybe one path to the ordinary is to downplay the game of representation. To not be coming up all the time with tactics for appearing within the cis gaze. There’s dance floors in New York where I can feel ordinary. Nobody cares either way that some of the dancers around them are trans. I don’t care either. It’s just ordinary. Oddly enough, being ordinary can be a special experience for us, still. +++

KS: You write that “history is no longer our savior.” In the face of bleak non-futures, the rave is “world historical dissociation,” a moment to step out of a repressive, exclusionary world. What differentiates this from political apathy?

MW: This chain of association is a common one, but aren’t we bored with this? Those who need to hope that victory is just over the horizon are the most unreliable comrades. The most reliable comrades know that we have lost and are in retreat, that we are looking for the situations we can hold onto. Political hope is the route to political apathy. I’ve lived long enough to see that, over and over. This is not a book about futures at all. It’s a book about ongoingness. How do we keep going? From moment to moment? That’s what one learns from trans people. Most of whom never expected to have a future. We try to keep each other alive day to day. It’s ‘Man’ who has, or had, a future.

KS: I don’t think I’ve yet read another book that puts into words so well that trans temporality—not futurity, but frantic ongoingness, community survival, punctured by moments of k-time, euphoric dissociation from such historical disposability, which can in fact “allow the body

to be a body.” What have been some of the most interesting or impactful responses to Raving you’ve heard?

MW: We all know, on some level, that this world is dying. In a way, everyone is now experiencing the kind of relation to temporality that a lot of transsexuals have always felt. We struggle to have some ongoingness in our lives, adding this present to the last present, like one beat after the next, with no reference to futurity. What I gather is that the book is resonating with a lot of people, whether trans or not, in that I tried to find a form for addressing this sensibility that isn’t melancholic.

KS: Style is why trans girls often get into raves for free—they provide an aura of non-normativity and counterculture the nine-to-five coworkers get to brag about experiencing (and escaping) come Monday morning. Do you ever worry about being style-extracted yourself?

MW: Well, of course. Raving will end up informing some marketing strategy at some point. We should all at least try to get paid for our work rather than let the fuckers take it for free. All avant-gardes are, among other things, media strategies. Usually designed to trigger free exposure. But I think the media strategy now is more one of hiding as long as possible. And when it gets found, extracted, try to claim some of the value and/or move on.

KS: Thinking about the profitability of style, I’m reminded of what you term “expressive politics” in A Hacker Manifesto, a struggle against the commodification of information, which might be able to escape through its shareability. Is this liberation of “information from its objectification” another future sliced off by history?

MW: There was a struggle over whether information could be free or if it would be constrained, technically and by law, to an elaboration of the private property form. The movement for free information pushed the ruling class to develop new forms of capture and extraction. I wrote Capital is Dead as an update to A Hacker Manifesto, to take account of some defeats in the movement for free information. And also, ironically enough, because the concepts in A Hacker Manifesto were getting plagiarized. By the time we get to Raving, the tactical question is more: where can we hide from having information extracted from our subjectivity and our bodies? Rave, a temporary situation which minimizes that [extraction].

KS: Lastly, any recommendations for DJs we should know about?

MW: The DJ you might enjoy most is someone nobody has heard of yet, playing in your town somewhere this week, maybe to 20 people.

KOLYA SHIELDS B’24 is happy to tell you where that DJ might be next fall, if you’ll let the beat fuck you.

THE GHOST IN THE RECORD(ING)

LISTENING TO GLENN GOULD’S HUM

For a long time in middle school, I went to bed listening to a particular recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The delicate opening aria would calm me before the first variation interrupted with its jocular movement. At times, I had the impression that I could hear a singing voice, hushed against the backdrop of the piano, slipping into the tranquility of the aria. It never bothered me; it cradled the music just as the music cradled me. By the first variation, the voice would disappear, drowned out by the sounds of the piano. And by the second variation, I was already fast asleep. Only years later did I realize that the voice was not supposed to be there. +++

It was his 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations that launched Glenn Gould into fame. The jacket cover of the LP consists of 30 contact sheet images of a boyish dark-haired man, each capturing him in a different pose—graceful, daring, ecstatic, musing—representing the various beauties of the 30 variations. No matter

how many times you listen to the recording, it retains something of the excitement, shock, and exuberance that enchanted record-buyers who listened to it for the first time. As Sony wrote in 2017, “[the recording] broke all records and made Gould famous overnight. The critics were ecstatic and the release is still considered one of the 10 most significant and successful classical recordings of all time.” Who was this young Canadian pianist, and how did he become one of the most distinguished pianists of the 20th century?

From the start, Gould’s idiosyncratic approach to his music set him apart. His playing was distinctly recognizable in the way he deviated from conventional interpretations—if there’s any agreement among his supporters and detractors, it’s that Gould’s Bach sounded not like Bach but Gould himself. He favored canonical composers like Bach and Beethoven, but also devoted endless attention to obscure figures like Paul Hindemith and Orlando Gibbons (“I have always felt that the whole centre core of the piano recital repertoire is a colossal waste of time,” he

once said in an interview). He notably detested Mozart, at one point airing a segment on public television on the topic “How Mozart Became a Bad Composer” that shocked even sympathetic listeners. And he thoroughly explicated his unorthodox ideas on recording, performance, and music in numerous writings, including a piece titled “Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould on Glenn Gould” in which he parodies his interviewers. He was, in short, a maverick.

His eccentricities didn’t end with his attitudes toward music and performance. He refused to sit on any piano bench other than the small folding chair his father gifted him as a child— which toward the end of his life was unstable and prone to falling apart at any moment—and sat at the piano in an awkwardly low posture. He was known for wearing heavy coats throughout the summer. Before recording sessions, he would soak his hands in hot water for 20 minutes, claiming that it helped alleviate stiffness in his fingers.

But, most notable of all, an indelible part of his playing and a point of contention for many

critics: his uncontrollable humming and singing. In many of his recordings, one can hear the faint trace of a human voice which, while often corresponding to the piano melodies, might distract the listener. One critic of Gould’s later 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations writes, “many readers will find the groans and coos intolerable.” More recently, a post on Reddit’s r/ classicalmusic declares that Gould’s humming “ruined” his recordings. But a quick Google search reveals the discussion surrounding the humming is not entirely negative. Listeners have commented that the humming adds a “humanity” to the recording, and another commenter even admits that “back in high school I also used to put it on specifically because of the humming when I was home alone because it would make me feel less lonely.”

It’s curious, then, that Gould rarely elaborated upon what has become an integral part of his image. I searched through Gould’s writings and interviews for the word “hum” or “sing” in hopes of finding some sort of explanation for his humming. In one interview with the music critic Tim Page, he confesses that he plays “less well without [the hum].” In another audio, part of the unreleased studio sessions of the 1955 Goldberg Variations, the sound engineer singles out his humming—Gould then attempts to play a passage without humming but stops shortly after realizing that his playing deteriorated.

But Gould shared the same view as his detractors; he admitted that the humming was a distraction. In conversation with Gould, the writer Jonathan Cott asks: “If you could… would you try to eliminate this ‘additional’ poltergeist on your recordings?” Gould responds: “Oh yes, and if I could find an equalization system that would get rid of it… I would cue it out in a second: to me it’s not a valuable asset, it’s just an inevitable thing that has always been with me.” +++

In 1964, much to the dismay of concert-going crowds, Gould retired from live performances. He was 32, at the height of his career, and worked in an industry in which most rely on performances to make a living. The decision was all the more significant because of his harrowing prediction that “the public concert” would be completely replaced by “electronic media.” Exhibiting a tendency toward exploring new technologies and expanding artistic potential, he hoped that his decision would pioneer an exodus from the concert hall to the recording studio. In his view, it was only in the studio—under the confines of new audio techniques, recording equipment, and professional sound engineers— that creative possibility could be forged.

True to his word, Gould would never again return to the concert stage. His insistence on the mechanical act of recording rather than the formidable, unpredictable act of performance was a way of transcending what is physically possible on stage. Gould admits in a 1975 article that “the very nature of the live concert does not allow you to say, ‘Take two. I don’t think I like what I did up to now.’ You know you can’t do it over and yet, in my concerts, I always wanted to do exactly that.” In his essay “The Prospects of Recording,” Gould relates an experience while recording a Bach fugue. He attempted eight takes of the piece, two of which were satisfactory. But after isolating these two takes and listening to them side by side, it became apparent that both recordings had their own flaws, and both flaws would be fixed by combining the takes. Gould concludes: “By taking advantage of the post-taping afterthought, however, one can very often transcend the limitations that performance imposes upon the imagination.”

But even with the tape splices, the humming was never fully erasable. Recording engineers did their best to remove the humming—in the 1955 Goldberg Variations, for instance, it is faint and rarely audible. For an artist of his caliber who spent his entire life polishing and pursuing the perfect recording, the ultimate irony was that Gould had no choice but to accept his intrusive humming into his recordings.

Gould, to be clear, is not the only musician who vocalizes during his performances.

Jazz pianist Keith Jarrett is also known for his loud vocalizations that are the subject of much critique. But for most critics, the humming is disquieting, intruding upon their enjoyment of the music. As musicologist Jairo Moreno points out in his article “Body’n’Soul?: Voice and Movement in Keith Jarrett’s Pianism,” critics seem to have a fundamental concern with “timbral purity.” They unabashedly reject any sort of “noise” accompanying the music and treat it as an imperfection rather than an inherent part of the music. Critics, and even Glenn Gould himself, seem to assume that perfect pianism consist solely of pure acoustic sound from the piano. There is a strict boundary between ‘noise’ and ‘music’ that must not be crossed in the context of instrumental music. No doubt, advances in electronic music only further encourage this distinction. Perhaps Gould succeeded in the end in his pursuit for perfection, after all. A re-release of the 1955 Goldberg recordings by Sony in 2007 uses new technology to enhance the clarity of the sound, but it erases one thing: the humming. There is no trace left.

+++

But what are we to make of Gould’s humming, which is never random but instead corresponds to the musical lines played by the piano?

Much of Bach’s music is based on the musical concept of counterpoint. Traditional counterpoint relies on simultaneous melodic lines expanding horizontally through time. Each line is independent, with a different rhythm and melodic structure, but together they create harmony. The complexity of counterpoint poses several challenges for both the performer and the listener. Because so many voices are unfolding at the same time, the listener can only choose to focus on one at a time. Similarly, the pianist faces the choice of emphasizing a particular line, a way of drawing out connections in the music that the listener was never aware of. In order for the pianist to emphasize a certain voice, he must therefore imagine the voice before he even begins to play. An interpretation of a piece of music is a particular way of listening—knowing how to listen and knowing what to listen for. The difficulty of playing music is that the musician must know what he wants the music to sound like; then, he can strive to reproduce it with the body.

While Gould draws attention to certain musical lines with his playing, his humming signals them in a clearer way. It is a literal voice that is added to the existing voices. In his 1981 Goldberg recording, for example, we can hear the humming transition between different lines. Gould begins the opening aria by humming the melody in his right hand two octaves lower. But a few measures later, his humming switches to the voice in the left hand. As the hum jumps between the different melodic lines, it creates its own melodic line, a line which signifies his own mental process (albeit an unconscious one). Gould’s vocalization at any moment is a manifestation of the sound he imagines in his mind.

What’s striking about Glenn Gould’s voice is a conclusion Moreno makes about Keith Jarrett: “What [the critics] fail to realize, however, is that Jarrett’s vocalization constitutes an ontological facet of musical creation. That is to say, the sound will not come into being unless it is imagined.” What Moreno suggests is that Jarrett’s vocalization, like Gould’s, is a physical expression of his thinking process. We should not think of the humming as separate from the music being produced, but rather the same—both the vocalization and the piano playing are the mental process, just expressed in two different ways. The critics’ distinction between the ‘noise’ and the ‘music’ is no longer tenable—both the vocalization and the pure acoustics of the piano are a result of the same musical process. One cannot exist without the other. When Gould mentions that he simply cannot play as well without his humming, he is right. If his humming is a result of the same thought process as the piano playing, then any attempt to stifle it would restrict his playing.

Sometimes, counterpoint feels like a debate, a tennis match, a tit-for-tat, strange and solemn.

Sometimes, the humming interrupts what appears to be a serious procession of musical voices. It resembles the other voices, but it skirts around them, messes around with the rhythm, and never conforms. I imagine that the other voices are exasperated, much like Gould’s detractors, yet incapable of doing anything about it. As we listen to Gould’s humming, what could we be listening to except his own listening? The hum goes beyond his pianistic voice and reveals the particular melodic line he is thinking about and listening for. As Gould plays, he sings.

Gould, in his pursuit of the perfect recording, desired to make invisible the labor that produced it and always strove toward something flawless, unachievable through live performances. The voice intrudes into the anonymity of a recording. A comment on YouTube phrases this nicely: “I know the sound engineers did their very best to remove it, but hearing him hum and sing the music as he plays makes me feel as if I’m in that room with him.”

Perhaps Gould was unable to see what we can—that the only way for every listener to be in the same room as him is by listening to his humming. The hum introduces a humanity that is otherwise lost in recordings. We hear the humming, and we are reminded of a body behind the recording. The body and its corporeality make the invisible visible again. A shift from performance to performer, music to musician, art to artist. He is like the artist who writes his name at the bottom right corner of his painting: the artist is absent, but the signature remains. +++

Gould’s career begins and ends with his recordings of the Goldberg Variations—the first in 1955, the last in 1981. I like to dwell on this circularity as a metaphor for his life, woven together by mysterious threads of wonder and serenity, invigorated by a relentless search for the possible. He describes this beautifully in the liner notes to his 1955 recording: “It is, in short, music which observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution, music which, like Baudelaire’s lovers, ‘rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.’” The piece begins and ends with the same aria, with 30 variations sandwiched between that lead to no clear resolution. Twenty-seven of the variations are in G Major, a joyful key hammered to the point of banality, neither telling an overarching story nor purporting to do so.

A few months after his 1981 recording, and shortly after his 50th birthday, Gould passed away. It is not his final recording, but it feels, in a rather poetic way, like his final gift to the world. In contrast to the 1955 recording, the tempo he chooses is slow and deliberate—it no longer has the same electric virtuosity but instead possesses something mature and introspective. His voice is more audible. In the slow hum that carefully makes its way through the lower registers of the music, I hear a hint of mourning. It has a tinge of melancholy—even though the key of G Major is often too bright for that—and it carefully guides the music from beginning to end.

I pick up a DVD of the 1981 recording and begin to watch. His fingers, 10 individual fingers knowing exactly where to go, strike the keys. Gould was intent on excising his singing from the recordings, but I hear the traces of his voice against the backdrop of the piano; I see his mouth fluttering, gesturing at a singing far more intense than we can hear. Then there is the chair, discolored, its paint peeling off to expose the wood, supporting him until the very end. It ends with the aria—he is hunched over and looking down, probing the mysteries of the world. Against his control, I hear his voice one more time, and finding something pure in this imperfection, I hang on to the final notes of the aria, wishing that he didn’t have to depart so soon. On the last note, I see his hands suddenly jerk upwards then descend together, slowly, as if in prayer. Then everything fades, and he’s gone.

ERIC GUO B’23 strongly recommends you watch the video of Glenn Gould singing to elephants.

“Rooms” is a series of four illustrations that posit an alternate relationship between humans and the environment, bringing the outside inside. This piece is ultimately also about memory, abandonment and longing. Each illustration depicts a room of the apartment I grew up in, in the process of being reclaimed by nature. The trees, plants and magical creatures that now inhabit this space are a way for me to envision the home that I have left behind. To see it not as barren and lifeless, not inhabited by strangers, but being consumed by a natural force, frozen in the moment of transformation.

Camilla Watson B’23 Rooms Gouache

Dear Indie,

Dear Business Partner,

I’m no consultant—I actually just googled “what does a consultant do” to double check—but I think I can provide you with some expertise to help maximize the odds of a successful outcome in your situation. Thankfully, I’ve been exposed to a variety of case studies that qualify me to answer your question. As exemplified in the 1998 film You’ve Got Mail starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, a little bit of business rivalry is often conducive to a steamy relationship buildup; however, career aspirations can also be the downfall of a relationship, as exemplified in the 2016 film La La Land starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.

In order to optimize your performance in this scenario, you’ll need to find the ideal balance between maintaining boundaries and offering support. It’s really just a systematic consulting process of strategic planning (two important-sounding terms in the “S” section of a glossary of consulting terms that I also googled).

Dear Brand Identity Crisis,

Did you know that Steve Aoki majored in feminist studies? This isn’t even a clever way to answer your question. I legitimately just found out that Steve Aoki majored in feminist studies and I am surprised!*

Just kidding, it was totally a clever way to answer your question. If you’re worried about the future, you shouldn’t be. First of all, you now get to use the phrase “transferable skills” in a job interview, which is awesome. Second of all, lots of super successful people, such as Steve Aoki, go on to do super cool things, such as be a DJ, that have nothing to do with what they studied in school, such as feminist studies. But it seems like you’re a little less worried about moving into the future and a little more concerned with looking back on the past. Have you wasted your college career? “Wasted” is a strong word. (Incidentally, that’s exactly what I told security at Spring Weekend last year when they tried to bar me from entry.) Maybe you didn’t spend time doing the thing that you want to do with the rest of your life, but you have the rest of your life to do that thing!

According to something I think Dean Rashid Zia once said, college is about fucking things up really bad so you can learn about yourself. Maybe it takes four years of intramural softball to learn that what you really want is to be in a musical, or four years of a cappella to learn that what you really want is to be a neurosurgeon, or four years of CS to learn that what you really want is to take a shower on a regular basis. Plus, you can carry the knowledge and passion you gain from those things for the rest of your life, even if they don’t end up being your profession—and, along the way, you’ll have formed relationships, made memories, and learned surprising information about high-profile DJs.

Have a question for Dear Indy? Submit it here! VOLUME 46 ISSUE 09

My significant other and I are both pursuing careers in the same industry. We’ve always been a little bit competitive, but it feels like the tension has been growing, especially since we’ve been applying to summer internships. What’s the best way to manage this dynamic?

Love,Business Partner

*Not,like,super whatsurprised.It’sjustnot Iexpected.

wasted my college career?

Love, Brand Identity Crisis

BULL -ETIN

Upcoming Actions & Community Events

Sign the George Wiley Center’s Petition to Make Utilities More Affordable

The George Wiley Center is lobbying for the passage of the Percentage Income Payment Plan (PIPP), which seeks to make Rhode Island utility bills a fixed percentage of household income. Sign the peti tion to pledge support for this bill and to tell elected officials that the gouging of RI families by utility companies will not stand.

Sign the petition @ passpipp.org

Every Tuesday @6-8PM: Tenant and Homeowner Association

Meetings

The Tenant and Homeowner Association (THA), a campaign organized by Direct Action for Rights & Equality (DARE), is advocating for an ambitious series of bills which seek to empower tenants and make housing more affordable in Rhode Island. Attend their weekly meeting to find out how you can contribute and get to know the community of DARE. Dinner is provided. Call ahead for assistance with childcare. Location: 340 Lockwood St, Providence RI, 02907 Learn more at dare-rs.org or by following “Rent Control for Providence” on Facebook

Monday 5/1 @5:30PM: PSL March May Day Rally & March

The Providence chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation is hosting an event to commemorate May Day and to show solidarity in the struggle for justice in all its forms. The event will begin as a rally, followed by a march to downtown Providence.

Starting Location: Kennedy Plaza, 1 Exchange Terrace, Providence RI, 02903

For more information, email rhodeisland@pslweb.org

Wednesday 5/3 @4:30-5:30PM: Stop Torture RI Coalition Meeting

Stop Torture RI has been pushing for the passage of the Reform Solitary Confinement Act since the bill’s introduction in March. The act seeks to restrict the usage of solitary confinement in Rhode Island prisons, protecting individuals from abuses by carceral institutions. Join Stop Torture RI to support this campaign and to learn about how you can contribute.

Location: 340 Lockwood St, Providence RI, 02907

For updates, follow @stoptortureri on Instagram.

Arts

Sunday 4/30 @12PM-6PM: May Day Festival

Join the Red Ink Community Library in observing May Day, a holiday which celebrates all workers and forms of labor. Come enjoy musical performances, food trucks, and to meet local organizers. Festivities will take place along Cypress St and inside the library.

Location: 130 Cypress St, Providence, RI 02906

More information can be found at Red Ink Community Library’s website: www.redinkri.org

Thursday 5/4 @7-11PM: ProvSlam Open Mic featuring Alison

Attend this open-mic event hosted by The Providence Poetry Slam, where anyone is welcome to share their stories, poems, songs, prose, and other art forms from all genres. Doors open and the sign-up sheet is posted at 7p.m. Admission costs $5 or pay what you can. The event will also feature Alison Rollins, whose writing work “explores the fragile line between ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ beings, encouraging a social justice-focused art practice that seeks to collaborate with plants, animals, and robots.”

Location: 115 Empire Street, Providence, RI, 02903

More information can be found at ProvSlam’s website: www.provslam.org

Mutual Aid* & Community Fundraisers

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

Railroad’s

Fundraising

for

Stability

After Incarceration Donate through Venmo @theorytakespraxis with the caption

www.gofundme.com/f/fundraising-for-stability

Railroad is a Providence organization that supports incarcerated individuals and fights to abolish the prison-industrial complex. Railroad is raising funds for their soon-to-be released friend, a community advocate challenging injustices of the carceral state. DM their Instagram @railroadpvd, if you need an alterna-

https://hausofcodec.square.site

Since 2021, Haus of Codec has provided housing to 18-24 year olds experiencing homelessness in Providence. This organization seeks to provide safe and accessible housing, care, and services for displaced youth. Haus of Codec hosts monthly LGBTQ+ vendor and resource fairs in Providence. hausofcodec.org

BULLETIN SPOTLIGHT:

In late February, Brown’s chapter of the national Sunrise organization, a youth-driven movement to fight climate change, launched the DIRE (Divest, Invest, Reinvest, Engage) campaign to demand the university’s divestment from fossil fuels. Sunrise Brown released the Dissociate Now: A Fossil Free Brown report along with a petition, which received over 1,300 signatures.

In honor of Earth Day last week, Sunrise Brown hosted a “DIRE week” to build on their momentum and demand Brown take action. The club organized a “Fossil Free Brown” banner drop on the Main Green, blindfolded statues around campus to symbolize Brown’s blind acceptance of oil money, hosted a screen printing event, fundraised through a bake sale, and postered all over campus to demonstrate the need to dissociate from fossil fuel companies. On Friday, the club participated in a rally with various advocacy groups to support two House bills that would tax Brown’s and other universities’ endowments in order to fund public schools in Rhode Island.

However, the week’s events did not go entirely as planned. The group faced pushback from President Christina Paxson, who called campus police on five Sunrise members for hanging up posters. Campus police ended up taking down more than 600 posters. Regardless of the challenges, Sunrise Brown member Caitlyn Carpenter described the week as a “resounding success” in generating publicity.

Through its community task force, Sunrise Brown is also committed to supporting the work already underway in Providence by community members aimed at promoting environmental sustainability. This semester, the community task force’s priorities have been to build relationships with Providence organizations and convey their intent to provide help and resources where welcomed.

“We strive to be conscious of our position as students who are predominantly from outside of Providence and cannot fully understand the issues people experience here, and also our role as students attending a very wealthy, private institution that has a history of causing harm to local communities and fails to contribute sufficient resources to the Providence area,” said Annabel Williams, an organizer with the task force.

The task force has attended protests to protect local greenspaces, advocated for the Percentage Income Payment Plan to help low-income Rhode Islanders pay their utility bills, and additional events they have been invited to by Providence-based organizations. The force is also discussing ways to hold Brown accountable to share more of its resources with the broader community.

To stay up to date with Sunrise Brown, access the Linktree in their Instagram bio (@sunrisebrownu) to sign up to be on “Daybreak”, their email newsletter.