The College Hill Independent: 20 April 2012

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT V O L U M E

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T HE COL L EGE HIL L INDEPEN DEN T NEWS

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FROM THE EDITORS WEEK IN REVIEW

CHRIS COHEN, EMILY GOGOLAK, ERICA SCHWIEGERSHAUSEN

MACHINATIONS

BARRY ELKINTON, ERICA SCHWIEGERSHAUSEN

EARTHLINGS ALEX RONAN

FEATURES

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DIPLOMART

ELIZABETH WOODWARD

GAY PVD HISTORY SARAH YAHM

METRO

1 0 ROMNEYISM 1 2 LIFE CHOICE

DAVID ADLER, GRACE DUNHAM, JONATHAN STORCH

SAM ADLER-BELL, STONI THOMSON

Count Paul Bajnotti built three memorials for his wife Carrie after she died: a fountain in Burnside Park, a second fountain in Roger Williams Park, and a 40foot bell tower on the Waterman Street edge of Brown’s Quiet Green, known as Carrie Tower. “Love is Strong as Death,” reads the engraving above Carrie Tower’s doorway.

Bajnotti met Carrie Mathilde Brown in 1875 on a trip to Providence. He was a wealthy nobleman and diplomat from Turin, Italy. Carrie was a Providence socialite and the granddaughter of Nicholas Brown, Brown University’s original benefactor. Despite Carrie’s old age—she was 34 at the time—Bajnotti fell in love with her. They married in 1876.

For the next 16 years the couple moved around Europe, living in Paris, Rome, Turin, and St. Petersburg, with frequent visits back to Providence to see Carrie’s family. In the fall of 1892, Carrie contracted the flu. The couple went to Palermo, Sicily in hopes that the warm air would cure her. After 11 days of fever and chills—Bajnotti by her bedside the entire time—Carrie died. Bajnotti returned to Providence, heartbroken.

If it wasn’t enough to dedicate three different memorials to his late wife’s honor, Bajnotti made a final gesture in 1919, the year of his death. In his will, he left a large sum of money to the city of Providence. Each year, he requested, the “most virtuous maiden among the common people of Providence” would be awarded the interest of the money as a dowry. “How Will Mayor of Providence Decide on City’s Luckiest Girl?” reads a Boston Globe headline from November of 1919. Despite the hype, the Providence city government declined to award Bajnotti’s bequest.

Bajnotti often said that it was the “the sunshine and openness” in Carrie’s eyes that won him over. It’s been nearly 100 years and a dowry remains to be given.

Maybe that will change this spring. Maybe that will change this weekend. Find sunshine. Be open. Ladies, be virtuous.

-GSD

EPHEMERA

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1 3 INTERNET PAINTINGS 1 4 NEXT BIG THING ANNIKA FINNE

TAYLOR KELLEY, MATT WEISS

SCIENCE

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BOY GENIUS

RAILLAN BROOKS

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STEPHEN CARMODY

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SAIL AWAY ALEX SEOH

LITERARY

1 8 HARLEQUIN JULIETA CÁRDENAS

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ABOUT MANAGING EDITORS Chris Cohen, Belle Cushing, Mimi Dwyer ∙ NEWS Alex Ronan, Erica Schwiegershausen, Caroline Soussloff ∙ METRO Sam Adler-Bell, Grace Dunham, Jonathan Storch ∙ FEATURES David Adler, Emily Gogolak, Ellora Vilkin, Kate Welsh ∙ ARTS Kate Van Brocklin, Jonah Wolf ∙ OPINIONS Tyler Bourgoise, Stephen Carmody ∙ INTERVIEWS Rachel Benoit ∙ SCIENCE Raillan Brooks ∙ FOOD Anna Rotman ∙ SPORTS David Scofield ∙ LITERARY Michael Mount, Scout Willis ∙ X PAGE Becca Levinson ∙ LIST Alexandra Corrigan, Dylan Treleven, Allie Trionfetti ∙ BLOG Christina McCausland, Dan Stump ∙ DESIGN EDITOR Mary-Evelyn Farrior ∙ DESIGN TEAM Andrew Beers, Jess Bendit, Abigail Cain, Olivia Fialkow, Jared Stern ∙ CHIEFS Annika Finne, Robert Sandler ∙ ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Diane Zhou ∙ STAFF WRITERS Barry Elkinton, Taylor Kelley ∙ SENIOR EDITORS Gillian Brassil, Malcolm Burnley, Jordan Carter, Adrian Randall, Emma Whitford MVP: Sam Adler-Bell Cover Art: Annika Finne

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ALEXANDRA CORRIGAN Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The College Hill Independent is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI press in Seekonk, MA. The Independent receives support from Campus Progress/Center for American Progress.

Campus Progress works to help young people–advocates, activists, journalists, artists– make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at CampusProgress.org

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WEEK IN REVIEW Illustration by Cecilia Salama

CHICKEN SELECTS

by Erica Schwiegershausen

A recent study by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine found E. coli in 48 percent of 120 chicken products purchased at grocery stores in 10 major US cities. The Committee advocates a vegetarian diet, among other suggestions, to avoid contamination.

Trend Watch: The Wall Street Journal reported that as of late consumers are “clucking for more dark meat”—touted

by TV cooking shows (and Chipotle) as richer in flavor and softer in texture than its whiter counterpart.

Whole Foods has recently found itself “wrestling with an unsual shortage of thighs.”

Last week, Herman Cain released the latest in a string of bizarre videos, this one entitled “Chicken” and seemingly inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. The one-minute clip shows a man in overalls (“the average American taxpayer,” a creepy child voiceover informs us) who, while feeding his chickens (“feeding big government”) is attacked and pecked to death.

It’s spring, and egg vendors in the Chinese city of Dongyang are cooking up a seasonal snack favored by the locals—urine-soaked eggs.

According to Reuters, buckets of boys’ urine are collected from primary school toilets to prepare the fragrant “virgin boy eggs”—believed to have numerous health benefits.

“If you eat this, you will not get heat stroke,” one resident reported.

KFC Thailand apologized for what many considered an insensitive and opportunistic Facebook post, but not before hundreds of angry users expressed their disdain for the fast food chain.

The commenters were responding to a less than tactful reminder posted by the company in the wake of a huge earthquake in Indonesia: “Let’s hurry home and follow the earthquake news. And don’t forget to order your favorite KFC menu.”

EGGONOMIC GROWTH KICK IN THE ARSENIC

by Chris Cohen

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he state legislature of Maryland acted last week to ban the use of arseniclaced feed in poultry production. This may seem like a foregone conclusion— Canada and the European Union ban the practice, and arsenic is a controlled carcinogen—but if Governor Martin O’Malley signs the bill, Maryland will become the first state to outlaw use of the chemical in chicken feed. The law comes on the heels of multiple studies indicating the presence of arsenic in livestock chickens.

An FDA study found arsenic in half of 100 tested chickens, and two studies by Keeve Nachman, a Johns Hopkins researcher, found arsenic in a poultry byproduct composed of ground up feathers, strongly indicating the presence of arsenic in the chickens themselves. (Nachman also found high levels of banned antibiotics, caffeine, and the active ingredients of Tylenol and Benadryl.)

These results weren’t surprising: additives containing arsenic—including

roxarzone, a compound produced by Pfizer—are added to livestock feed to reduce parasitic infections. They also have the welcome side effect of promoting blood vessel growth, making the meat firmer and pinker. It has been alleged by Maryland’s Attorney General in a Washington Post op-ed that more appetizing meat is the real reason for arsenic-laced chicken feed.

Whatever the motivation, it is unclear whether the presence of arsenic in the concentrations found by the FDA has harmful environmental or public health effects. One Maryland delegate, Charles Otto, isn’t buying the rationale behind the law, telling the Washington Post that it “is a scare tactic,” and that the arsenic-free poultry “doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.”

The bill, however, is expected to become law, and the roughly three percent of US chicken that are raised in Maryland will be produced arsenic-free.

by Emily Gogolak

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n light of recent economic woes, Uzbekistan is cooking up a new policy to boost domestic growth. Starting last month, Radio Free Europe (RFE) reported, the Uzbek government began distributing chickens to public sector workers as part of their salaries after cabinet ministers called for regional governments to amp up production of poultry, eggs, meat, and veggies. Poultry and eggs were given priority, and 20,000 chicks (at 5,500 soms, or $3, a pop) have been already handed out in Uzbekistan’s Vobkent district, and another 40,000 will be partially supplanting paychecks in other districts in the coming months.

The idea is that workers will each receive and tend to ten chicks a month, and in turn Uzbekistan will become more self-sufficient from the fruits (or eggs) of its own labor—a noble goal for a nation whose economic prospects are looking increasingly peckish. A report recently released by the Central Bank of Russia shows that remittances from Russia to Uzbekistan nearly doubled in 2011. On top of that is the country’s gas problem: Uzbekistan, a gas-exporter, has been experiencing serious

gas shortages of its own, igniting protests and general angst among Uzbeks. And there is another key shortage playing a role in the Central Asian country’s current quagmire: individual economic freedom. According to the Heritage Foundation’s annual Index of Economic Freedom, in 2012 Uzbekistan ranked 37 out of 41 countries in the AsiaPacific region, and well below the world national average, with Iran, Burma, and Libya not far behind.

But it turns out that the chicken campaign might in fact represent an increasingly restrictive Uzbekistan. While the government says the program is voluntary, some workers are saying they had to take the birds as part of their paycheck, whether they wanted to or not. Odil, a 32-year-old teacher, told Radio Free Europe’s Uzbek Service, “There is no way to refuse the offer; it was compulsory.” For workers already cooped-up enough in cramped apartment complexes, compulsory poultry would be a nightmare.

The government, however, claims that the campaign is voluntary and is calling to expand it beyond chicks. Next on the agenda: cattle-for-cash.

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US vs THEM Can a Robot do your Job?

by Erica Schwiegershausen Illustration by Katy Windemuth

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or years, people have casually worried, or, in some cases, agonized, about a time when robots will replace humans in the workforce. Recent developments like Watson (the AI computer that beat Jeopardy’s biggest all-time money winner last year), self-driving cars, and Siri have done little to assuage these fears, and today, the threat of being pink-slipped in favor of an automaton looms ever nearer.

In March, Amazon announced the acquisition of Kiva Systems Inc., a maker of warehouse service robots, in a deal intended to bring increased robotic technology to the online retailer’s giant network of warehouses.

While Kiva’s diligent orange robots (which have been often described as “smart forklifts”) won’t make human warehouse work unnecessary, they are intended to reduce the need for humans to perform particularly arduous stockroom tasks. The bots, controlled by a central computer, are designed to bring products to workers, who under bot-less conditions currently walk up to 15 miles a day to retrieve items by hand within the warehouses.

Yet Amazon’s decision to bring service robot technology in-house is motivated less by humanitarian concerns than business sense. According to Kiva, a human packer can fill three to four times as many orders per hour with the help of a warehouse robot, and the technological investment will likely increase the productivity of Amazon’s fulfillment centers and reduce general operating costs. Companies like Staples, Gap, Walgreens, and Gilt Groupe already use Kiva’s robots in their warehouses.

Amazon has yet to discuss whether the adoption of warehouse robots will result in downsizing. But given the substantial financial investment the company is making in the new technology, the eventual replacement of human labor is likely part of the agenda. The online retailer spent $775 million on the acquisition and will likely spend $15 to $20 million to install a system of 1000 robots in each of its warehouses.

The company is rapidly adding distribution centers and has said that it plans to add 17 warehouses this year, making for a total of 69.

With its workforce growing faster than its revenues, Amazon is under pressure from investors to improve profit margins. “They’re only making slightly over a penny on every dollar in revenue,” Colin Gillis, a senior technology analyst for BGC Financial told the New York Times after the company’s disappointing fourth quarter performance.

“That’s pathetic in any industry.”

Similar workforce transformations are already underway in auto and electronics

factories. In November, Foxconn chairman Terry Gou announced plans to manufacture a $223 million “robot kingdom”—an industrial park in the Taiwanese city of Taichung where it plans to produce one million robots over the next three years, replacing around 500,000 of the company’s 1.2 million jobs.

Yet robot takeovers are motivated by more than just rising labor costs. Foxconn’s surge in AI development is in part a response to a recent flood of negative media attention over working conditions and employee suicides—at least 17 workers have killed themselves at Foxconn factories over the past five years. Foxconn’s initial response to the suicides was half-hearted at best; the company put up nets to stop people jumping off buildings, and then reportedly had workers sign pledges not to commit suicide. Now, the company seems to have chosen a different tactic: replacing workers in inhumane conditions with robots.

Amazon’s PR strategy may not be much different. Though the online retailer’s warehouse conditions are far from Foxconn’s notoriously poor ones, the company has had its share of bad press and lawsuits over substandard working conditions. Last fall an exposé in the Allentown, PA Morning Call revealed that warehouse employees were routinely sent to the emergency room after fainting and dehydration due to the suffocating temperature of the warehouses, which sometimes exceed 110 degrees. Citing fears of theft, the company refused to open warehouse doors during daily operations.

According to the Morning Call, workers at the plant had their productivity tracked down to the minute and were constantly getting fired for failing to meet rising picking and packing quotas.

Though some question Amazon’s huge financial investment in Kiva robot technology, TIME’s Keith Wagstaff suggests that “for highly profitable companies who want to avoid bad publicity and lawsuits, the best long-term solution could be just to eat the high installation costs and hope it pays over time.”

Yet there seems something inherently paradoxical about the humanitarian tone of Amazon’s announcement that robots will take on particularly taxing tasks of manual labor. The company appears reluctant to address the fact that this shift will almost certainly lead to a downsizing of their human workforce, and instead has stuck to rhetoric about how robots will work with, not instead of, human workers.

Jonathan Mace, a graduate student

in the Brown University Robotics Group, explained that the Kiva warehouse robots “represent a very specific domain which is not really indicative of robotics as a whole,” explaining that these autonomous manufacturing robots are possible because they work in very strict environments. Mace said that while current robots cannot replace humans in most tasks because they are bad at dealing with uncertainties, they can effectively augment human capabilities— which will likely lead to a widespread shift in the role of robots in the workplace over the next few decades.

“I think a lot of fears are based on the fact that companies will change their human workforce to a robotic one overnight, which is fairly unrealistic,” said Stephen Brawner, a Computer Science PhD candidate at Brown, explaining that the employment of automation technology is a slow and gradual process. Brian Thomas, a graduate student in the Brown Robotics Group, points out that while a video of an autonomous towel folding robot developed at U.C. Berkeley that has circulated over the past few months is impressive, the action has been sped up 50 times, and the robot’s production was a $400,000 process. “Economically and practically, it’s still a far cry from being useful,” Thomas said.

Despite limitations in current robotics technology, many roboticists agree that humans performing repetitive and noncreative tasks will likely be displaced by robots in the not-too-distant future—and the implementation of the Kiva robots seems to support such claims. Brian Christian B’06, author of The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive, explains that the displacement of humans by robots in the workforce is a two step process. “What we’ve seen historically is that before the human jobs are actually taken over by machines or robots there’s an intermediate phase, where we reduce the action required in the jobs to a very limited and restricted scope.” For example, the transition from a more holistic, craft-based production process completed by an individual to an assembly line. “I think an important distinction is not necessarily whether it’s a human or robot performing a task, but whether it is a human or robotic task that’s being performed,” said Christian.

While autonomous factory and warehouse robots are still in preliminary forms, jobs have already been replaced by computers and software programs. W. Brian Arthur, a visiting researcher at the Intelligent Systems Lab at the Palo Alto Research Center, claims that we are entering what he terms “The Second Economy” in an

essay that appeared in McKinsey Quarterly last fall. Arthur contends that a machine-tomachine economy is emerging as business processes become increasingly digitalized and take place in a domain that is largely unseen. “On the surface, this shift doesn’t seem particularly consequential—it’s almost something we take for granted. But I believe it is causing a revolution no less important and dramatic than that of the railroads,” he writes.

Arthur’s concern is that the second economy may be a jobless one. He cites the increasingly digitized experience of going to the airport, explaining that these days, you walk into the airport and interact primarily with machines until you get to security—meaning that fewer people are required behind the desk. “Physical jobs are disappearing into the second economy, and I believe this effect is dwarfing the much more publicized effect of jobs disappearing to places like India and China,” Arthur asserts.

Yet many engineers and researchers respond optimistically to concerns of robots replacing human jobs. “Those who lose jobs to robots will have an incentive to acquire skills that are currently beyond the skills of robots—and there are many human skills that will not be surpassed soon by robots,” Colin Allen, co-author of the book Moral Machines and a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University told the New York Times. Many echo this sentiment, deferring to the theory that creativity will never be replaced by robots.

Or, as Christopher Brown, a robotics research engineer at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory told the Times, we will always “have to have someone who builds the robots.”

Lines like this do not provide much of an answer to what will happen to laid-off factory and warehouse workers at companies like Amazon and Foxconn in the coming years. Though many remain optimistic about humanity’s ability to adapt to structural changes resulting from technological advances, it seems hard to ignore more immediate effects that may further exacerbate class disparities. “We all know that computers and robots can create wealth and leisure time,” said Christian. “Now, how do we decide who gets it—that’s the political question.”

ERICA SCHWIEGERSHAUSEN B’13 is not a robot.

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ZAP ZAP ZAP Domesticate the Drones!

by Barry Elkinton

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ast month, the Internet was abuzz over the launching of TacoCopter, a San Francisco-based tech company offering taco delivery via aerial drone to customers around the Bay Area. The TacoCopter concept was fairly straitforward–after placing an order using the TacoCopter Smartphone application, a customer simply waits in one spot while a small drone flies to deliver tacos to their precise GPS location.

“Our unmanned delivery agents are fast and work tirelessly,” reads the TacoCopter website. “Just tap and let the machines do the rest.”

Sadly, it was too good to be true. Soon after reaching viral notoriety, TacoCopter was revealed to be a hoax created by a MIT robotics graduate Star Simpson, who also made headlines in 2008 for wearing a fake bomb strapped to her chest in Boston’s Logan Airport. When contacted by news outlets, Simpson admitted that the website was comical in nature, but perhaps prophetic of a future where drones occupy a wide variety of non-military roles.

“We basically only hear about quadrotors in scary contexts,” Simpson told Wired.

“I think [TacoCopter] does give that fear and emotional tension a safe and hilarious outlet.”

If you’re wondering why TacoCopter remains in the conceptual stage, blame Uncle Sam. Under current regulations, the use of drones in American airspace is subject to strict regulation. Last year, the Federal Aviation Authority only issued an estimated 300 special permits to government agencies and academic researchers to fly drones under specified conditions. While the government tolerates limited recreational flights of smaller drones below heights of 400 feet, any commercial use of drones is categorically prohibited.

That will soon change. Last February, Congress passed a bill requiring the FAA to begin easing restrictions on domestic drone flights. Under the proposed timetable, law enforcement will have access to drones by June of this year, and commercial drones will be phased in over the next three years.

Although the FAA still plans to implement certain restrictions on drone flights to protect public safety, the agency estimates around 30,000 drones will be flying in American airspace by 2020.

A wide variety of governmental agencies, private citizens and corporations are expected to take advantage the FAA’s eased restrictions. For law enforcement, drones promise to unlock a wide range of strategic capabilities, from suspect tracking to search and rescue assistance. With some drones costing as little as $300, the

commercial opportunities are also endless.

According to National Public Radio, oil companies are likely to use drones for monitoring pipelines, famers might use drones to check on crops, and paparazzi are likely attempt to film celebrity weddings from the air.

Some potential applications of drone technology are even more adventurous. Cy Brown, an electrical engineer in Louisiana, has recently made a name for himself on Youtube by posting videos of his nighttime hunting adventures using a model airplane equipped with a thermal camera to help him locate feral pigs on his brother’s rice farm.

Nicknamed the “Dehoagflier,” Brown finds his drone saves him time and energy. “Now you can know in 15 minutes if it’s worth going out,” Brown told the New York Times.

The rapid improvement of drone technology will likely encourage the use of drones for recreational and commercial purposes. “There are drones that could literally fit in a backpack or the palm of a hand,” John Villasenor, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution told NPR. “There are drones that are basically like balloons that sit up there in the sky in one place and can observe enormous swaths of territory.”

Despite the excitement many expressed over the possibility of aerial taco deliveries, many civil liberties advocates worry that the increased use of drones will lead to widespread privacy violations. The American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Privacy Information Center recently petitioned the FAA to “address the threat to privacy and civil liberties involved in the integration of drones in the national airspace.” According to these groups, there is good reason to be concerned about law enforcement and corporations using drones to monitor individuals without their knowledge or consent. “We need a system of rules to ensure that we can enjoy the benefits of this technology without bringing us a large step closer to a “surveillance society,” reads a December 2011 ACLU report.

Even Simpson believes the government probably has good reason to be wary of letting drones run amok in our skies. “Honestly I think it’s not totally unreasonable to regulate something as potentially dangerous as having flying robots slinging tacos over people’s heads” Simpson told Wired. “On the other hand, it’s a little bit ironic that that’s the case in a country where you can be killed by drone with no judicial review.”

BARRY ELKINTON B’13 can know in 15 minutes if it’s worth going out.

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EARTH DAZE How a Radical Anti-Corporate Movement Got Lost in the Lamest Holiday on the Planet

by Alex Ronan Illustration by Robert Sandler

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here were rumors that NASA had the capacity to take satellite images of the Earth. It was 1966 and Stewart Brand, Merry Prankster and future founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, wanted to see them. He created several hundred of buttons reading, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” and distributed them to NASA officials, members of Congress, UN officials, and students on college campuses.

The campaign gained traction, and in 1968, when a NASA astronaut took the now ubiquitous Earthrise photo, it was released to the public, becoming one of the most famous photographs of the 20th century.

Brand later recounted to TIME, “those riveting Earth photos reframed everything.

For the first time humanity saw itself from outside… Suddenly humans had a planet to tend to.”

According to Tom Jundt, visiting American Studies professor at Brown University, the 1970 Apollo 13 crisis—of “Houston, we have a problem” fame— solidified this notion. “It was this ‘oh my god’ moment,” Jundt explains. “Here are these guys struggling in this little capsule and writ large: that’s what we’re all doing. It brought the existing trope of Spaceship Earth to life.

People realized it wasn’t just a rhetorical device. Suddenly, it became real.” The metaphorical reading of the earth as akin to a spaceship became common in cultural criticism as academics, environmentalists, and politicians expressed concern over the Earth’s limited resources and the necessity of global cooperation in working towards ecological sustainability.

Three days after Apollo 13 returned to Earth, 20 million people turned out in cities and campuses across the country for the nation’s first ever Earth Day, drawing more participants than any rally, march, or protest in the 1960s. Advertisements for Earth Day articulated a postwar existential anxiety about humanity’s capacity for destruction.

“A disease has infected our country,” the ad reads. “It has brought smog to Yosemite, dumped garbage in the Hudson, sprayed DDT in our food, and left cities in decay. Its carrier is man.”

The first Earth Day is often heralded as the dawn of the US environmental

movement, but as Jundt explains, the movement got its start much earlier.

Contemporary environmentalism arose in the shadow of the Atomic Bomb, as pioneering environmental thinkers like William Vogt, Fairfield Osborn, and Aldo Leopold articulated postwar anxieties married to environmental concern. In the introduction to Our Plundered Planet, Osborne writes that the impulse to produce the book came at the end of World War Two, and warned that “if we continue to disregard nature and its principles the days of our civilization are numbered.”

This small but growing movement gained momentum in the fifties and sixties. The air, rivers, and forests of North America were increasingly threatened by massive industrial development. The visibility of pollution—flaming rivers, dense smog, and sickness caused by tap water—provided a constant reminder of pollution’s presence.

“It’s very hard for someone living now to imagine how polluted America was back then,” Adam Rome, environmental historian, history professor at University of Delaware, and author of the forthcoming Earth Day explained. “Scientists didn’t need a sign or a model telling people ‘this is what I think is going on.’ It was visible.” As the decade drew to a close, corporate-sponsored environmental destruction and widespread governmental indifference caused a growing sense of unease.

Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat from Wisconsin, came up with the idea for Earth Day as a way to get environmental legislation passed. He found inspiration in the university teach-ins popular during the sixties. He allowed Earth Day to build a grassroots level of support by ceding power to local organizations. Americans, Nelson suggested, should observe Earth Day “in any way they want,” whether it be an academic discussion, a political rally, a parade, a theatrical performance, or coalition building.

Students put a Chevy on trial for pollution, buried trash-filled caskets, and held teach-ins to challenge corporate power.

A working-class mother in Philadelphia arranged a bus tour to bring neighbors to see the refineries that produced smog in their community and Albuquerque’s United Mexican American Students marched to

a sewage plant that was stinking up their neighborhood.

Despite the variety of action, Rome sees an underlying anxiety about survival. “They weren’t just afraid of losing places that they love; they weren’t just afraid of getting sick, or having their kids get sick. There was also a sense that there were so many problems that were hardly being addressed that they might add up to a catastrophic threat.”

There was an air of impending apocalypse as participants sported gas masks and scientists spoke of global destruction. Speeches were flagrantly anti-war, urging citizens to take on corporations, and warning of forthcoming disaster.

Earth Day was also constructed to more broadly encompass the socioeconomic disparity among Americans. Nelson spoke in Colorado, noting that “Earth Day can—and it must—lend a new urgency and a new support to solving the problems that still threaten to tear the fabric of this society,” he said, citing “the problems of race, of war, of poverty, of modern-day institutions. ” He mentioned “housing not worthy of a name,” “neighborhoods not fit to inhabit,” “a hungry child in the land of affluence”­—in other words, issues not contemporarily linked with environmentalism.

With such a huge turnout, environmentally-minded politicians like Nelson had less trouble convincing fellow politicians that Americans cared about the environment. In the years immediately following the first Earth Day, a slew of protective legislation was passed. The National Environmental Policy Act required environmental impact statements for all federally funded projects. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was founded by none other than Richard Nixon, who would later famously note that environmentalists wanted to “go back and live like a bunch of damned animals.” The Clean Air Act amendments of 1970 required the EPA to set standards for local air quality and is still regarded as the most significant air pollution control bill in national history.

In 1972 the Marine Mammal Protection act passed, followed by the Endangered Species act just one year later. Businesses found ways to circumvent these laws, but they marked an important first step in combatting

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environmental degradation.

Due in part to legislative measures like these, pollution has drastically decreased since the seventies. Twice as many rivers and lakes are safe for swimming. Air pollution is down by a third, even though Americans now drive twice as many cars twice as many miles as we did then. But even though air quality has improved overall, the American Lung Association suggests that some 175 million Americans, almost sixty percent of the population, still live in places where pollution levels cause breathing difficulties. The socioeconomic division of exposure to environmental toxins remains.

According to one Cornell study, though lead concentration in the blood of children (known to cause learning and behavioral disorders) has fallen by more than 80 percent in the past 30 years, lead exposure remains especially prominent among children living in impoverished communities. According to the Centers for Disease Control, children between the ages of one and five who were enrolled in Medicaid made up 60 per cent of cases of children with blood-lead levels that indicated a degree of lead poisoning.

Indeed, despite positive developments in air and water cleanliness, environmental

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issues today are even more pressing because of global warming. However, it’s surprisingly difficult to mobilize individuals beyond changing their personal shopping habits, and even those concerned about the environment don’t take today’s Earth Day very seriously. “A lot of people denigrate it,” Jundt explains, “and rightfully so. Today’s mainstream movement feels less than satisfying.” Once a critical and determinedly anti-corporate movement in which organizers refused corporate sponsorship, Earth Day has become a marketing platform rife with contradictions. It’s not a national holiday, and usually just children and the media celebrate it on a yearly basis, while environmental activists tend to work toward increasingly larger Earth Day spectacles each decade. At the last big Earth Day celebration in 2010, Greenpeace paired up with tech giants Cisco and Google, New York’s recycling campaign was sponsored

by Pepsi Co., and corporate “greenwashing” dominated the media.

The 1970 Earth Day was compelling for so many people namely because the pollution was evident and the effects were immediately tangible on a personal level, as opposed to the indirect threat of climate

change. Because climate change feels so distant, the contemporary environmental movement must rely on a moral invocation: we should worry about climate change because it’s the right thing to do, or out of concern for future generations. What’s more, climate change is a divisive political issue, whereas a communitarian ethos surrounding environmentalism in the late sixties and early seventies offered a respite from the divisive issues and political schisms of the sixties. Getting people to care about the environment again will be a major challenge, but one way to start is by reframing the rhetoric surrounding environmentalism and climate change so that it is less dependent on moralism and more tangible.

Environmentalist ideology offered a solution to postwar anxieties and the existential crisis induced by the Atom Bomb. But today, environmental concerns are even more pressing. It’s just about changing the way people see it.

ALEX RONAN B’13.5 wants to go back and live like a bunch of damned animals.

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FROM RISD TO RABAT Making Art for Embassies

by Elizabeth Woodward

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mages of a geometrical knit Missoni sweater, colored yarn held in cat’s cradle, a Russian Bauhaus carpet design, and earthy Moroccan rugs cover one wall of a RISD studio classroom. Behind two headless dummies sporting Technicolor sweaters, a worktable is covered in plastic 3D reliefs of intricate tile designs and glass castings.

On another wall, a white Styrofoam disc covered in a web of neon pink paint hangs amidst a flurry of sketches and collages. The work in this studio represents the first stage of a multi-year partnership between RISD and Art in Embassies, a State Department program that exhibits American art in US embassies around the world. In this 2012 winter session course, titled Art in Embassies: Morocco, 17 RISD students worked with visiting artist Jim Drain (RISD BFA ‘98/ Sculpture) to conceptualize a large-scale outdoor sculpture for the new US embassy building in Rabat, Morocco, slated for completion in 2015.

Art in Embassies (AIE) seeks to use art to promote discourse that can lead to better understanding and mutual respect between nations with different cultures. Originally conceived as a Museum of Modern Art project to facilitate exhibitions of American art abroad, in 1963 it was adopted by President John F. Kennedy, who saw it as a way to give American embassies a more human face.

America’s culture of literature, visual arts and music is testimony to its value for freedom of expression. When faced with events that may taint the nation’s credibility, reputation, and influence, cultural diplomacy is one of the many ways that the US government attempts to revive the nation’s luster.

Since the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the State Department has expanded American presence abroad by building many new embassies; and, in turn, AIE has grown with it. Now, temporary and permanent AIE exhibitions of over 3,500 works of American art are housed at over 200 US embassy residences, chanceries, annexes, and consulates worldwide. The program encompasses a wide variety of artistic genres, ranging from colonial portraiture to contemporary multi-media installations.

While AIE’s approach to cultural diplomacy may seem like a one-sided transmission of American art, recent developments have sought a more multilateral approach.

In 2002, AIE founded an exchange program that sends participating American artists abroad to engage with people in the artistic communities of host countries. And in 2005,

AIE started featuring work by artists from host nations in their exhibits. The AIE/ RISD course marks the first time AIE has involved students in the commission process; in the past, pieces have either been commissioned or donated by artists or lent by museums or private collectors.

The group of RISD students essentially formed an artistic think tank, working with Drain to come up with ideas for the sculpture’s design. While Drain will now construct the sculpture on his own, the ideas and projects generated in class will inform the final piece. On November 30, the sculpture will debut at a gala celebrating AIE’s 50th anniversary at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, and then will be moved to the new US Embassy in Rabat.

Drain pushed students to avoid the simplistic approach of thinking of the piece as Moroccan art through an American lens.

By inviting speakers to discuss their experiences with Moroccan art and culture, he pushed for a more complex and multifaceted understanding of Moroccan culture. The eclectic group of guest lecturers “became the eyes and ears of a culture we could never visit as a class together,” said Drain. Music ethnographer Brian Shimkovitz, of the blog Awesome Tapes from Africa, presented Moroccan music (the kind you would hear in a Casablanca taxi cab), and a Peace Corps volunteer spoke about her two years of service. The architects of the new embassy in Rabat presented their plans, allowing students to think about the security constraints of an embassy.

Current US Ambassador to Morocco Samuel Kaplan “was especially delighted that these students [worked] with a Moroccan artist, Soukaina Aziz El Idrissi, in order to find the appropriate context for their work.” El Idrissi, who makes vibrant textiles from recycled plastic, visited RISD to participate in the final critique. According to RISD/AIE liaison Allison Roberts, who followed and helped fund the class, El Idrissi afforded students valuable first-hand perspective on the aesthetic of contemporary Moroccan art.

In the studio, students worked to find parallels between Moroccan visual arts— think intricate florals, complex tile mosaics, geometric and calligraphic patterns, and bright, whitewashed colors—and their own work across different mediums. The goal was to find points of contact between North African and American art. “It’s going to be

both an American and Moroccan sculpture and neither at the same time,” explained Drain.

The culture of the Berber people served as another inspiration for the course. A tribe indigenous to the Atlas Mountains, Berbers are best known for their textiles and rugs, which feature intricate geometric imagery, fringe, and beading. “We wanted to have a subtle but obvious tribute to the Berbers in our installation,” said Carmel Dunlap (RISD ‘14/Textile Design). By the end of the course, it was clear that the weaving would be central to the sculpture, both for its cross-cultural appeal and strong presence in the area around Rabat.

While Drain has achieved international renown in the art world, his credentials do not immediately suggest an interest in diplomacy. At RISD, Drain lived in Providence’s famed Fort Thunder building, whose residents formed the arts and music collective Forcefield, which was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Drain’s work has since been exhibited twice in New York’s Greene Naftali Gallery and resides in the collections of both the Museum of Modern Art and the RISD Museum. “Collaboration allows a group of people to get to a new place together—a place one person cannot get to alone. Think the Rolling Stones,” said Drain. “However, the compromise necessary in collaborations can be ego crushing. See also the Rolling Stones.”

There’s also a parallel between Drain’s work and Moroccan art. In Drain’s abstract mixed media sculptures, Technicolor knits hang on steel structures. And Drain’s rainbow-hued textiles feature geometric forms like those in traditional Moroccan fabrics.

According to Allison Roberts, “There’s a link between his work and Moroccan uses of mosaic, textiles, and geometry,” especially with regard to color and light.

By pairing plush texture with strange forms, Drain’s work shocks—a reaction he expects and even hopes for. Last year, Drain’s collection of sweaters for Opening Ceremony—one with a ninja jumping through a hole in a red brick wall, another with rows of pink and purple pixilated hearts—snagged the attention of celebrities like Björk. That shock value is part of Drain’s artistic ethos.

“Having that ‘What the fuck?’ reaction is such a human experience,” he says. “It doesn’t have to with political boundaries.”

By shocking viewers, images like Drain’s can

fuel discussion, creating a meeting place for people of different cultures.

While artists like Drain do have significant input, “The curators of [AIE] are sensitive to political, religious, sexual” matters, said head curator Virginia Shore in a 2009 New York Times article. Ultimately, curators and ambassadors have final say, and art must comply with embassies’ rigorous security requirements. As a result, each embassy has a unique representation of America through art—some more multicultural than others.

In a 2006 AIE exhibit in her Addis Ababa, Ethiopia embassy residence, former US Ambassador to the African Union Cindy L. Courville opted for Frank Day photographs that captured life in Africa through the eyes of an American. Two 45x44 photographs capture the vivid colors and striking textures of an Ethiopian cloth market. Courville says that another Day photo, of a traditional Ghanaian fishing boat with an American flag painted on her side, particularly appealed to the former President of Ghana, John Kufour, when he dined at the mission.

This may seem a more simplistic nod to multiculturalism than Drain’s nuanced approach. But to Courville, “each of the pictures formed a vignette of different aspects of America.” She chose photographs of her native Louisiana and a Sonnie Mason series of portraits of influential jazz musicians to show what an American’s life and home are like. Courville said that in her embassy, art stimulated off-the-record conversation that led to trust between diplomats and effective policies.

But the kind of discourse that Drain and other artists seek is notably different: rather than just displaying one culture to another, Drain seeks creative similarities. For diplomats, the importance of AIE lies in its capacity to build trust between America and foreign nations, by presenting US culture and values through art. For artists like Drain, the value of AIE lies in the bonding potential of people’s reactions to art. “Art is somewhat of a diplomatic gift,” said sophomore student Dunlap, “a literal gift but also a gift of people.”

ELIZABETH WOODWARD B’15 reads culture in snippets.

features 9

the college hill independent

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The Origins of Brown’s Gay Liberation Movement

by Sarah Yahm Illustration by Allison Clark

hen Jack Marcus moved to Providence for grad school in 1967, two years before Stonewall, he wasn’t out yet, but he was paying attention.

For instance, he knew that his alma matter, the University of Pittsburgh, had a Mattachine Society, one of the earliest national homophile movements. He hadn’t gone to any of their meetings, but he knew that they fought for homosexual rights, although he wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. Jack hadn’t officially come out, but he thought maybe when he got to Providence, things might be different. But Providence was even worse than Pittsburgh; there were no gay organizations on campus and no gay bars on the East Side. So for two more years Jack was a good boy: he did his homework, taught his sections, read French and more French, and stayed in the closet.

Although historians mark the official beginning of gay liberation as June 28, 1969, when the fed-up queens and butches at the Stonewall Inn refused to submit to one more arrest from the NYPD vice squad, it took a while for the explosion of anger and revolutionary fervor to wend its way up I-95. Unlike New York City, Providence did not have an outspoken, politicized gay community. George Heymont, a former New Yorker and a gay rights organizer remembers, “Providence kind of existed on the basis that there’s Rhode Island and then there’s the rest of the world…It’s hard to organize,” he explains, “when you have to take your mother grocery shopping right after the gay alliance meeting.”

According to Providence historian Kate Monteiro, New York in the ‘60s and ‘70s was filled with the queers who left, who moved to big cities to be gay, while Providence was filled with the queers who stayed. And these queers lived within networks of pre-existing family relationships. They had to co-exist with their third-grade classmates and their aging Portuguese grandmothers. And so gay radicalism wasn’t necessarily on their agenda.

That isn’t a tragedy of the closet, Monteiro insists, but rather a testament to the value of those kinship networks. For the queers who had stayed, it wasn’t half bad. But for outof-towners moving to Providence for school, it was not an easy place to be gay. There was one outlet and one outlet only the mafiaowned bars downtown.

Jack Marcus wasn’t really the barhopping type, but he was lonely and so on weekends he’d find himself wandering around the city looking for some sort of action. And while College Hill didn’t boast much, it wasn’t hard to find downtown in the ‘70s, on the mostly deserted streets in the post-industrial city. Fred (pseudonym), a local who came out during that same time period, remembers that, “In those days downtown there were two types of people there, gays and derelicts and that was it.

People didn’t shop there anymore. People just didn’t go downtown. So you could go downtown and street cruise basically, just walk around and look at cars and if they

looked back and stopped you had a hook up.”

Jack would spend nights walking the mostly deserted streets, trying to find a way into this underworld that was unfolding around him. He felt like he was supposed to know where to go, like it should be programmed genetically inside his body the way birds navigate by stars. Finally, he stumbled onto Kubla Khan, part Chinese restaurant, part gay bar, and watched what were undeniably gay men spill out onto the sidewalk. He’d thought about going to a gay bar for so many years, agonized about it for so long, that it was strange to him that the mechanics were the same as opening any other door.

He didn’t really know what to expect, of course, when he crossed the threshold.

He was hoping for a lover maybe, a kindred spirit at least. But he certainly wasn’t expecting his French professor right there sitting casually at the bar.

“It’s nice to know that there’s family in the department,” he said simply, while Jack stood frozen. And then the professor turned away and went back to his beer. They never mentioned it again.

GAY LIBERATION In the late ‘60s, the Ivy Leagues were still reeling from a series of earlier homosexual purges. According to historian Douglas Sans-Tucci, in 1960 three Smith professors (all former “Harvard men”) were charged with possession and trafficking of homosexual pornography. Coverage in the New York Times and Boston Globe fueled the flames of panic over homosexuals in education; soon, anxiety gripped Cambridge and rippled out through the Ivy League and down the coast to Brown. The message was clear: stay in the closet and most importantly, stay away from our children.

Jack knew that as a French instructor who taught freshmen students, he had to be especially careful because he would have been an easy target.

But right before Jack finished his PhD, the first official Brown gay organization was chartered by the Cammarian Club, and he was able to take a tiny step out of the closet. In the spring of ‘72, undergrads Thomas Littler and James Moser started a campus chapter of the Gay Liberation Front.

Formed after the Stonewall riots three years before, the GLF was a loose national organization of mostly urban gay men committed to overthrowing patriarchy and heterosexual norms. The GLF was a far more radical group than the Mattachine Society Jack had known back in Pittsburgh, fighting for total sexual liberation alongside issues like militarism, racism, and sexism.

Brown’s chapter, however, concerned itself more with parties than revolution. A few days before Jack graduated, they held a coming out dance at Churchill House on Pembroke campus. Lorraine Hopkins, reporting for the Providence Journal, noted that there were about 100 people and that

they didn’t fill up the large dance hall. “You can sense,” she tells us, “how pleased they were by their own event, having finally the form and sound of the rest of the world—a Saturday night social. The faces were all excited and they kept marveling at being there together. ‘It’s great’ one of them said. ‘It’s a relief after bar life. It’s just kids having a good time.” Years later, Hopkins remembers that she was a bit frightened by this collective gathering. “I did think they were courageous,” she remembers. “But in truth, still a little too odd, too other-world, to seem appealing that night as a mass, rather than the one by one I’d known for some years.”

Jack moved away a few days later.

“The crazy thing,” he tells me, “is that half the people in my department came out after we left graduate school. One of them even wrote a famous book about French homosexualities. But no one was out at the time.” This “normal Saturday night social” arrived too late for Jack—but not for the next generation of gay students, who would, over the next few years, build a fairly visible gay community on campus.

THE SEVENTIES Richard Bump came to Providence from Maine expecting to find a vibrant gay community and plenty of gay sex. But at first he didn’t find much of anything except the cruising area in the Faunce House basement bathrooms. Brown University Gay Liberation (BUGL) existed, but just barely—they were located in a nearly abandoned building on Benevolent Street.

“Gay Lib was the last student group occupying that building at the time,” he remembers. “I was scared shitless!”

After the current leaders graduated, Bump became the de facto face of gay liberation on campus and the target of anti-gay violence. The baseball team chased Bump through Wriston Quad one night with their bats, and someone wrote a threatening message in blood on his dorm room door. After a pro gay rights action, a fraternity plastered campus with a poster advocating “stomping out fags on campus.”

But Bump continued to organize. He convinced the administration to give BUGL a real office in Faunce with a telephone and a bulletin board.

Bump had built an active gay scene on campus by the time Jim Hopkins enrolled in 1975. Jim didn’t come out, even to himself, until after his sophomore year. He describes the larger atmosphere as relatively progressive and accepting, but fag jokes abounded in his all-male freshmen dorm.

So Jim waited. It wasn’t until the summer of ‘77, when the gay community rallied to oppose Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign, that Jim felt safe enough to finally come out to himself.

Anita Bryant, a former Miss Oklahoma and publicist for the Florida Citrus Association, led a battle in Dade County against an anti-discrimination ordinance

AD

including sexual orientation. Joined by Jerry Falwell, she began a national anti-gay campaign. In Providence and nationwide, Bryant’s vitriol galvanized the newly liberated gay community to move out of the bars and bathhouses and into the streets.

Jim remembers seeing a photograph of a gay rights march in the New York Times for the first time that summer. “In the photo you saw a street full of people going as far as you could see and I thought ‘Wow, there are a lot of gay people.’” Although he’d heard rumors of other gay people (the infamous Richard Bump, for instance) this photo made the concept of gay community suddenly very concrete.

When he came back to school in the fall, he noticed that the gay alliance had flyers and posters outside of Faunce House.

Still, he wasn’t quite ready to get himself to a meeting, so instead he proposed writing an article for the Brown Daily Herald on BUGL. He walked up the stairs to their office on the top of Faunce as a reporter and he left as a gay student.

“It was the first time in my life I’d been around a group of gay people my age and I remember thinking how interesting it was that they all seemed ‘normal.’ That was a huge deal for me because suddenly I felt like I wasn’t so unusual.” He never wrote the article. Within a few weeks, he was climbing the stairs to the top of Faunce every day to eat his lunch with the other gay boys. They would watch the human traffic pass by below on Waterman Street and occasionally, when someone good-looking walked by, they would poke their heads out the windows and say, “Hey you! I think you’re cute!”

By 1979, Jim Hopkins recalls, the newly renamed Gay Alliance had arrived. They held their spring party in the biggest hall on campus, and unlike that earlier dance at Churchill House, over 1,000 people showed up. At Brown it was suddenly hip to be gay—or, more specifically, to be a gay white man. Jim remembers there was only one man of color in the Gay Alliance, and they had almost nothing to do with the feminist and lesbian organizations on campus. Although they were technically in solidarity with Brown’s other marginalized groups, mostly they just threw parties and went to the bars.

It was a far cry from the original goals of Gay Liberation—it was glitter, glam rock, and David Bowie.

But, as Richard Bump rightly reminds us, “dancing with another guy at a dorm party was pretty fuck-the-system in 1976!

Sitting at a table in the dining hall with other fags was pretty fuck you. Embracing our own gay identities at the time was radical. Many of us had to come in first before they could come out.”

SARAH YAHM MA‘13 PHD‘16 carries whipped cream pies around just in case.

REVIVAL IN WARWICK Mitt Romney and the Missing Middle Ground b y D av i d A d l e r G r a p h i c b y R o b e r t S a n d l e r a n d D i a n e Z h o u

E

veryone packed into the lobby of Warwick’s Crowne Plaza Hotel last Wednesday knew that Rhode Island is a blue state. Their attendance at Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Town Hall Meeting was a protest; regardless of mixed feelings toward Romney himself, Rhode Island Republicans were taking a stand against the Democratic dominance of the Ocean State. Unfortunately for them, just as Rhode Island begins to flex its Republican muscle, Mitt Romney is scurrying toward the center. The 500 attendees that managed to squeeze into the Town Hall auditorium expected all the rhetorical pyrotechnics of the Republican primaries—slamming of immigration, denouncing of welfare recipients, affirmation of the primacy of the Christian faith.

Instead, with Santorum out of the race, Romney’s Town Hall Meeting was nothing more than a rehearsal of his return to moderate Republicanism.

THE RED SEA Standing in line to enter Romney’s Town Hall Meeting, Peter Buonfigilio surveyed the hotel lobby. “I’m very surprised by this crowd,” he admitted, accepting a Romney sticker from an event coordinator. The line to get inside the auditorium was now so long that it snaked around the hotel lobby and out the front door. According to Buonfigilio, a schoolteacher from Cranston, this crowd dwarfed Republican gatherings of the past—far fewer people had showed up to see McCain back in 2008; even further back, Rhode Island’s red was virtually nonexistent.

Bill Pennoyer, a retired salesman from North Kingstown, echoesd this sentiment.

He’s been involved with the Rhode Island Republican Party since the 1970s, helping to organize Ronald Reagan campaigns in both ’76 and ’80. Back then, Pennoyer was one of only about 25,000 Republican voters in the state. In 1976, he explains, Reagan couldn’t capture a single delegate from Rhode Island. And even the small pool of existing Republicans was pretty close to the center. According to Pennoyer, “there was no conservative interest among the Republican party.” John Chafee, for example, one of only four Republican Rhode Island governors in past 50 years, was himself a liberal. From his pro-choice position on abortion, to his opposition to the death penalty, to his support of homosexuals in the army, to his advocacy for a stronger US health care system, Chafee’s true colors bled blue.

In the last four years, however, Rhode Island—like much of the nation—has experienced a major right wing push. As the state continued to spiral downward in the wake of the Financial Crisis of 2008, many Rhode Islanders turned toward the far right, which promised financial respite with a platform that would cut taxes, balance a state budget, and push out immigrants taking local jobs. Grassroots organizations like the Rhode Island Tea Party sprouted up in 2009 with the movement’s nationwide rise, staging large-scale demonstrations outside the State House to fight against tax hikes.

Travis Rowley B’02, Chairman of the Rhode Island Young Republicans, recently wrote in his column in GoLocalProv, “Hope remains in Rhode Island…This is Rhode Island’s Republican Revolution.”

Most of the attendees are not new to the Republican Party—many trace their political inspiration back to Reagan and

others became involved during the 2000 Bush election—but the record attendance at the Romney event suggests a new wave of right-wing enthusiasm. In fact, most attendees are far to the right of Romney and put off by his softy Republicanism. Their presence is the mark of a commitment to the Republican Party—not Romney himself.

Buonfigilio, the Cranston schoolteacher, was very vocal about his dislike of Romney.

“None of the field enthused me at all,” he admits. “On the social issues, I don’t trust him…I object to the lack of consistency in the message.” Pennoyer, the retired salesman, isn’t exactly a fan either. “I just wish he would liven up a little.”

Karen Siegemund has “been a Newt supporter since day one.” A professor of Mathematics at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and an unapologetic critic of Romney’s moderation, she was “just here to vet the candidates.” But she stands behind the Republican Party—if Romney’s the man, so be it.

Nonetheless, insofar as this radical brand of Republicanism has sprung from America’s failing economy, Romney has his Rhode Island appeal. With the city of Providence moving toward bankruptcy, many Rhode Islanders are attracted to what John, a local businessman, called Romney’s “financial vision.” “He’s got a job, he knows the economy, he’s all about prosperity,” John argued. After all, said John, “he is going to get me out of my underwater mortgage.”

The Meeting was an argument on repeat. From the formal event title (“Small Business Town Hall”) to the Romney banners (“More Jobs. Less Debt. Smaller Government.”), Romney’s pitch to Rhode Island was purely economic, and attendees were eager to point to his fiscal success. As businesswoman Leslie Gerrig put it, “he’s made more jobs than the government.”

This mix of moderate-to-radical Republicanism produced a particularly right-wing intensity at the Town Hall.

Radical Republicans hoped to see Romney solidify a platform that has played to the interests of the Tea Party throughout the primaries; moderate Republicans hoped to prove to the radicals that Romney was not the softball Republican many have claimed him to be.

More than anything, people at the Town Hall were excited to be surrounded by other Republicans. Rhode Island—the smallest and one of the bluest states in the union—does not get much political play from the GOP. Unlike the swing states of the Midwest, Rhode Island has never been a battleground for which Republican candidates campaign and rally. As a result, Rhode Island Republicans have been rehearsing their platform in more of an echo chamber than a parliamentarian one. Town Hall attendees were ready to blow to show Romney that Rhode Island Republicans have arrived.

As Kid Rock’s “I Was Born Free” blasted through the auditorium speakers, the crowd rose to greet Romney with an eager standing ovation. Romney, blushing at the enthusiasm, tried to calm his audience. “Thank you, thank you,” he said, motioning for the audience to sit down. But the standing ovation lingered awkwardly, overextended, as if trying to prove something about Rhode Island Republicanism. Romney responded with gratitude: “This is an absolutely extraordinary welcome from the

people of Rhode Island, and I appreciate it.”

THE IMMIGRANT VOTE In many ways, Romney’s Town Hall speech played the Tea Party tune. Throughout the evening, Romney emphasized cutting back on social services, reducing taxes, and putting more control over federal programs back in the hands of states—policies he has stuck by throughout the primary.

Romney was also eager to show off his American muscle. He decried Obama’s attempt to cut back on military spending, promising to reclaim the seas by increasing production of naval warships to 17 a year.

He attacked China for “cheating” in the international economy by preventing capital flows, threatening to “label China as a currency manipulator” if he weree elected president. And he pledged to follow through with his hard stance on immigration, building a fence along the Mexican border and waging a “war of attrition” against unauthorized immigrants.

These are Romney’s compromises with a Tea Party that has long sought the restoration of American glory.

Yet even with respect to immigration— on which Romney has taken the most radical stance among the Republican candidates—Romney was clearly shying away from the far right. Following the promise to close off the Mexican border was a lengthy portrait of the Republican Party as the “pro-immigration party,” eager to provide for its immigrants as long as they would play by the rules. Romney claimed he would “stick a green card in [the] diploma” of any immigrant with a degree. But Romney’s appeal to the immigrant vote fell flat in a state where large immigrant populations have aroused vast anti-immigrant sentiment among the far right, eliciting only a spattering of terse applause.

THE FEMALE VOTE Before Romney took the stage, Robbie Benjamin, a female business owner from Rhode Island, gave a brief introduction.

Standing nervously before the crowd, Benjamin checked her notecards before describing Romney’s qualities. “He’s honest, ethical, and smart,” she said. “We just had a few minutes with him, had a good time, able to talk to him, and recognize all those qualities.” Behind her, Romney’s campaign staff ushered rows of women into the riser at the back of the auditorium, perfectly in line to be picked up by the camera. “Women who own businesses have a tough time, and it’s time to make a change,” Benjamin said.

“He is clearly the person we should have for our president.”

With recent political controversies over women’s rights issues, Romney made sure to return to the female question early and often in his speech. “This is a president who has some explaining to do to the women of America,” Romney announced. “The Democrats, I think, in anticipation of the anger of the women in America have been saying, ‘Oh, Republicans are waging a war on women.’ Oh no. The real war on women has been waged by this president’s economic policies. They have failed American women.”

Romney went on to claim that “over 92 percent of jobs lost under this president were lost by women.” This is a statistic that Romney has been offering throughout his April campaign. It does little to address the women’s rights issues at hand—Romney

still supports the overturn of Roe v. Wade— and is not the best measure of gender in the economy. The 92 percent claim, while accurate, appears to be the fault of timing rather than policy. In December 2007, male employment plummeted by over three million jobs, beginning to stabilize in the early months of the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, female employment continued to rise until March 2008, only beginning its descent after Obama’s inauguration.

It is generally regarded as a natural phenomenon of economic recessions that the first industries to be hit hardest are generally male-dominated—construction, manufacturing. Only later on are femaledominated professions like retail, teaching, and secretarial work affected by the recession.

Romney’s use and reuse of the statistic highlights again the two-faced campaign strategy, at once far right and dead center.

Trailing 18 percentage points behind Obama with female voters, it is clear why Romney focused so much of his Town Hall speech on women’s issues. Yet Romney’s approach feels less reconciliatory than confused, a wavering balance between moderation and extremism.

THE WELFARE VOTE In the Q&A section following his speech, Romney passed the microphone to an older woman in a turtleneck sitting in the front row. “My concern, and I’d be interested in your reaction, is that America’s become a bunch of people sitting on their couch waiting for the check to come from the government,” she said. “It is a different view of America, and I’d be interested in your take on who’s going to win that battle.”

Romney responded with grace. “There will be people, no question, who will vote for the candidate that promise the most free stuff,” he noted, with growing applause from the audience. “Fortunately, as I go across the country, the great majority of people, in my view, who are on unemployment today— they want a job.” The crowd remained silent.

“We are still a hardworking, patriotic people.

I’m convinced of that.”

Romney had been offered a Tea Party softball with simple instructions: decry the welfare state, glorify the entrepreneur.

Instead, to the surprise of the Rhode Island audience, he offered his moderate Republicanism, refusing to play into the Tea Party welfare myth that persisted through the primaries.

DEEP BLUE OCEAN STATE Even with the exceptional turnout at the Town Hall, Rhode Island remains a lost cause for the presidential election. A recent poll showed Obama leading by 17 percent in the Ocean State. Romney’s Town Hall meeting, as a result, became an experiment testing a centrist platform that he hopes will appeal to swing voters. In doing so, however, Romney managed to alienate the small base of Republicans he has left in the state. At the Small Business Town Hall, at least, the Republican fervor of the Crowne Plaza Hotel lobby had faded into a sort of casual acceptance. Romney, too, appeared exhausted—the Town Hall was the last stop on a long nationwide tour. “I’m gonna get to spend the night in my own bed tonight,” he said with excitement. “I think I’ve done that two or three times since Christmas.”

DAVID ADLER B’14 was born free.

In the nationwide popular vote, Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy scraped by on a 0.2 percent margin over Republican Richard Nixon. But in Rhode Island, the notably Catholic Kennedy won by a handy 27 percent—his most decisive victory anywhere in the country, including his native Massachusetts.

1960

Although Democratic candidate George McGovern came out with 47 percent of the vote, it wasn’t enough to stop Rhode Island from joining 48 other states in support of Richard Nixon.

1972

Center-right independent candidate John Anderson earned a respectable 14 percent, splitting Rhode Island’s conservative bloc and making the state one of only six to go to Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter. “There was no conservative interest among the Republican Party in Rhode Island,” says Bill Pennoyer, an organizer in the state effort to elect Ronald Reagan.

1980

Reagan won Rhode Island in his 49-state sweep—the third time since Eisenhower that a Republican carried the state—but Reagan’s 3.6 percent margin was his secondtightest race in the nation, after his 2.8 percent margin in Massachusetts.

1984

With 47 percent of the vote, Clinton won Rhode island by plurality instead of majority. The same was true for the entire election. Ross Perot, the upstart anti-NAFTA Texas billionaire, challenged the bipartisan status quo by claiming 19 percent of the popular vote. In Rhode Island, he claimed 23 percent.

1992

Rhode Island gave Al Gore his best performance in this controversial election, but Ralph Nader, with 6 percent of the vote, also had one of his best showings here.

2000

Obama beat McCain by a margin of victory of almost 28 percent and carried 38 of Rhode Island’s 39 cities, with Scituate as the exception.

The results came as no surprise: Obama won every pre-election poll and raised over four times as much money as McCain did.

2008

Rhode Presidental Election Results by Party D E M O C RAT I C RE P U B L I C A N I N D E P E N D E N T

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LEGISLATION WARS The Paper Battle Over Rhode Island Reproductive Rights

by Sam Adler-Bell, with reporting by Stoni Thompson Illustration by Diane Zhou

O

n Wednesday April 11, the Rhode Island House Judiciary Committee considered nine separate abortionrelated bills. Although committee hearings were officially scheduled to begin at 4:30 pm, activists on both sides of the debate started filtering into the State House as early as 2 pm. The atmosphere in the cramped hearing room was tense, but cordial. Choice advocates hoisted up pink “I Stand with Planned Parenthood” signs, while antiabortion mothers and their children sported t-shirts that read “pro-woman, pro-children, pro-life.” Members of Rhode Island’s chapter of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization, huddled together holding “I Defend Life” signs at their chests.

A group of serious-looking Brown University Medical Students wore their lab coats.

More than sixty people signed up to testify before the committee, while a room dedicated to overflow—where activists watched the hearings on a live video stream—quickly filled to capacity. The hearing lasted more than four hours, after which the committee voted unanimously to hold the bills for further study.

HIJACKING Among the nine bills up for consideration— seven have support from opponents of abortion and two have pro-choice support—the one that has attracted the most attention among activists and the media is H7205, dubbed the “Ultrasound Informed Consent Bill.” Sponsored by Democratic State Representative Karen L. Macbeth, the bill would require physicians to perform obstetric ultrasounds on every patient considering an abortion and display the ultrasound images “so that the pregnant woman may view them.”

Doctors would also be required to provide a “medical description” of the images, describe the dimensions of the fetus or embryo, and note the presence of “external members and internal organs” if visible. Doctors who fail to abide by these procedures would be liable for up to $100,000 in civil fines.

The bill states that neither the physician nor the woman would be subject to any penalty if the woman simply “refuses to look.”

But as Dr. Sarah Fox, Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Alpert Medical School described, “The patient would have to close her eyes and cover her ears if she [did] not want that information.”

For Dr. Fox and other medical professionals who spoke at the hearing, the law is an unnecessary and potentially destructive state intrusion into decisions that should remain between doctors and patients. Dr. Fox fears that some women would be forced to undergo unnecessary extra ultrasounds because doctors, fearful of liability, would perform the procedure even if patients have already received ultrasound results from other physicians. As one medical student put it, the ultrasound bill would “hijack the doctor-patient relationship to further political goals.”

For Susan Lloyd Yolen, vice president of public affairs and communications for Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, the true aim of the ultrasound bill is transparent. “The sponsors of this bill are well-known opponents of abortion,” she said in her testimony before the Committee.

a pregnancy or terminate a pregnancy prior to fetal viability.” The other, H7754, which received considerable criticism from abortion opponents, would allow minors to “seek authorization for an abortion from either a judge of the family court or a physician or certified counselor” if the pregnant woman’s parents or guardians refuse to consent to her choice or if she elects not to seek the consent of her parents or guardians.

“The intent of this legislation is to dissuade women from choosing abortion.” She added that her organization opposes “any legislation which would allow politicians—with all due respect—not doctors, to make decisions” about their patients’ reproductive health.

But proponents of the ultrasound bill framed their arguments around informed consent. For Becky Miller, the education coordinator for Rhode Island Right to Life, arguments against H7205 are based on “the ultimate paternalism, the ultimate sexism.”

Miller, who testified with her six month old baby in her arms, characterized resistance to the bill as an effort to “censor a woman’s right to full information about her healthcare decisions.” She told the Independent that when her husband received a testicular ultrasound, the technician showed him the screen and explained what he was seeing.

“That’s standard medical care,” she said, “It’s sexist to withhold the same information from female patients.” Dr. Fox noted in an interview that it is already standard practice in all Rhode Island clinics to offer women the opportunity to see their ultrasound.

Forcing them to do so would be “humiliating” and “abusive to a woman in a very vulnerable situation.”

Other supporters of the bill brought printed ultrasound images to the hearing, displaying them to counter claims by opponents that the legislation is intended to humiliate or traumatize women who are considering abortions. Holding aloft a blurry, black and white image of an unborn fetus, one speaker asked the committee, “Does this offend you?”

“NONEXISTENT PROBLEMS” The other bills supported by opponents of abortion included one that would prohibit any woman from being “coerced, pressured, or threatened” into having an abortion

against her will (H7009), and another that would ban abortion as a means of sex-selection (H7114). Dr. Fox told the Independent that these bills legislate against “non-existent problems.” Although women “sometimes regret having an abortion,” Dr. Fox emphasized that Rhode Island’s clinics have extensive pre-procedure counseling programs to ensure that patients make a well-informed and thought-out decision. They are not “being coerced.” And while sex-selectionmotivated abortion may be prevalent in “other parts of the world. It is not happening in Rhode Island.”

Another set of bills, including the “Unborn Victims of Violence Act” (H7006), the “Fetal Protection Act” (H7091), and the “Punish Assault on Pregnant Women Act” (H7110), would increase the criminal penalties for violence against a pregnant woman that harms her unborn child. While all of these bills—some of which have analogues at the federal level and in other states—provide explicit exceptions in the case of legal abortion, anti-abortion groups have historically been their principle proponents. Meanwhile, pro-choice advocates like Planned Parenthood have warned that by defining the term “child in utero” as a “member of the species of homo sapiens, at any stage of development, carried in the womb” and elevating the legal status of a fetus to that of an adult victim of violence, legislation of this kind seeks to secure a legal shortcut to establishing fetal personhood, which could undermine Roe v. Wade.

On the other side, two bills sponsored

by House Judiciary Committee chairwoman Representative Edith Ajello sought to strengthen women’s reproductive rights.

The first, H7041, would outlaw interference on the part of the state, or any of its political subdivisions, in a “woman’s personal decision to prevent, commence, or continue

CHARACTERISTIC CHARADE Despite all of Wednesday’s legal and rhetorical posturing, a statehouse source told the Independent that none of the bills proposed were likely to get very far in the legislature. In Rhode Island, where widespread Democratic Party loyalty consistently conflicts with staunch Catholic social values, there has long been an unspoken détente regarding issues of reproductive freedom.

Every year, a slew of anti-abortion bills are proposed, but most of them never leave committee. In some ways, Wednesday’s hearing was little more than a cathartic charade, unlikely to have any serious legislative consequences.

But considering the 2011 legislative season, in which 26 states enacted 69 different anti-choice measures, the fears of pro-choice activists may be well-founded.

The last few months have seen a surge in legislation regulating pre-abortion ultrasounds, including Virginia’s controversial bill, which would have mandated an invasive vaginal probe. Though outcry against the invasive procedure—which was characterized as “state-sponsored rape” by opponents—led to revisions, the Virginia bill eventually passed in a form similar to the bill proposed in Rhode Island. As of April 1, twenty states have ultrasound mandates on the books, and eleven more are considering them now.

Representative Chris Blazejewski, who sits on the committee that heard the bills, told the Independent he suspected that “the Republication nomination process and the relentless attacks by Romney and Santorum on women’s rights have highlighted the issue for many Rhode Islanders.” For Blazejewski, the huge turnout for Wednesday’s hearing was unsurprising. “We saw more citizens coming out to support choice because they have seen that a woman’s right to her body and health cannot be taken for granted and must be vigorously defended.”

Representative Ajello echoed her colleague’s comments, connecting state-level activism to the national debate. “With Republican Presidential candidates vowing to create a Supreme Court that will repeal Roe v. Wade, I want Rhode Island to codify the guarantee that government will not interfere in personal decisions regarding reproductive health care.”

SAM ADLER-BELL B’12.5 fights the good fight.

the college hill independent

arts

13

RAFAËL ROZENDAAL PAINTS ONSCREEN “Somewhere Between Mondrian and Mickey Mouse” — @newrafael

T

by Annika Finne

o Michelangelo, laptop screens might resemble little glowing paintings in weird frames. A 15” Macbook Pro screen has the same dimensions as: * The Presentation of Christ in the Temple by Giovanni di Paolo, mid 1430s (Metropolitan Museum of Art) *The Wounded Toreador (Le Torero blessé) by Pablo Picasso, 1956 (Museum of Modern Art) *Canto X by Barnett Newman 1963 (Tate Gallery) Even though laptop screens are rectangles that can display all kinds of two dimensional visuals, a Macbook would never be mistaken for a strange painting today. Screen dimensions and luminosity are more strongly associated with visuals that are not paintings at all, our desktops and Word documents and Google searches. This would not be the case if Rafaël Rozendaal had total control over our computer experience.

When you open “OnaHorse.com”, a website designed by Rafaël Rozendaal in 2004, you meet a small white outline of a horse and rider cantering up a red hill against a black sky. They are small, as if a few hundred yards away, a bit smaller than the average avatar in a racing arcade game. In real life, cantering up a hill begins with a gusto that gradually peters off, but Rozendaal’s figure rides perpetually at the moment right before enthusiasm peaks, the most satisfying and productive place, when you both are moving the fastest you can move and feel as if you could go that speed forever. The effect is mesmerizing and strangely stirring.

Rozendaal was born in Amsterdam 32 years ago to a Dutch father and Brazilian mother. His father was a painter raised by fanatic Calvinists. His mother grew up in Rio de Janeiro, the daughter of the former Brazilian president Humberto Castello Branco. When asked to introduce himself, he replies: “Hi, my name is Rafaël Rozendaal, I love the internet and I love the beach.” Today he lives and works “in hotels.”

Rozendaal’s sites ask you to take pictures of your computer screen. He creates visual interest in a single screen, without links, text, or excessive animation.

In the spectrum of internet based art, these qualities situate Rozendaal closer to paintings than epic hypertext novels or conceptual statements. It is a powerful place to make art. Treatment of screens as canvases changes how we perceive our LCD squares. Currently Rozendaal has over thirty

sites online, each a single screen governed by enigmatic internal logic, from the minimally animated horse to a black line that follows your cursor over a background of fuzzy neon clouds, switching colors with every mouse click (WeWillAttack.com).

They feel like little creatures.

Rozendaal is not alone in his painterly use of the Internet. Net art that resembles paintings, characterized by purposefully arranged imagery and presentation in a single frame without a sequence of links, has been made since the earliest encounters of art and the Internet. In 1997, Alexei Shulgin curated “Desktop.is”, a compilation of screenshots taken by artists of their desktops and assembled together as in a gallery show. “Buk Head” features a grainy blue and yellow wallpaper image of a middle-aged white man chugging a green beer framed by flower-like folder icons with yellow titles. “Dr. Slurpee” depicts a moment on the brink of computer disaster, with “fire.jpg” situated directly under an error window surrounded by a furry brown pixelated image presumably in the process of being edited and lost. None of these desktops are particularly striking or aesthetically interesting. Desktop. is prioritizes the legibility of desktops as desktops, and then as works of art, over their visual appearance.

Where Desktop.is draws significance from the act of calling an assemblage of computer desktops art, OnAHorse.com takes advantage of its screen context by using moving images without making such an explicit reference to that context.

Rozendaal’s work is more escapist than self-referential, colourful and playful while still obviously digitally. His is a more subtle intermediary space, hovering somewhere between calling attention to the Internet and calling attention to the sites themselves as constructed visual experiences.

Books, paintings, and screens from silver to plasma are all agreed upon as artistic mediums, but calling the Internet “art” still feels like an “artistic statement.”

By presenting an odd hybrid of digital visuals, neither taking full advantage of the Internet’s flashiness nor remaining a static image, Rozendaal’s web paintings ask why we can’t always look at our screens as paintings. Rozendaal does not attempt to answer the question as much as articulate how unclear that answer would be. As he puts it, “At some point digital media will replace everything. Everything in our brain is electric. We will become waves in an electronic ocean” ANNIKA FINNE B’12 really loves him.

14

20 april 2012

arts

NOTES ON HIP HOP W

hat is a spell? It’s the transmission of a certain vibration. Energy flowing through the spellcaster causes subtle cataclysms that realign the courses of lakes, streams, and reservoirs. Energy is detained and then released. It is sharpened by mirrors in the mind of the spellcaster.

Content exits through the eyes, the face, the hands, and through certain words. The hands of the spellcaster are always activated in the translation of this vibration into the air. A continual transmission causes the neural patterns of those whose hearts can be shaken to snap around an attractor. Perception itself walks down certain corridors. Some sconces are lit and others are not. A window reveals that the corridor had always been a tunnel.

Gold was spurting out from the center of the earth. This is the power, and the butterfly himself deals in white magic. Terror and anxiety are twisted into paradox, and confu-

F

or the first time since T.I.’s Trap Muzik dropped in 2003, there is no obvious top dog in Atlanta rap, a strange phenomenon given the city’s central importance to hip hop. T.I. has been washed up for a while, Gucci Mane can’t stay out of jail, and Young Jeezy never managed to build much buzz around the strangely flat 2011 release Thug Motivation 103. With all due respect to Waka Flocka and the artist formerly known as Tity Boi, the heir to the throne appears to be Future.

Future is as Atlanta as they come. Born in Decatur but repping the Southside, he’s the cousin of Dungeon Family/Organized Noise co-founder Rico Wade and the rumored brother of rapper Rocko (of “Umma Do Me” fame). He even gave himself a name that another rapper already had, a move straight out of the J-Money playbook. His rise to fame was quick: after getting a feature on YC’s hit “Racks” early last year, Future dropped a series of very popular mixtapes, most notably Dirty Sprite, True Story, Streetz Calling, and Astronaut Status. While many of his songs are ubiquitous on Atlanta radio and in clubs, a few have reached nationwide audiences: the repetitive but infectious “Tony Montana” (in which Future amusingly butchers a Cuban accent), the strip club ode “Magic” (after Atlanta’s superstar strip club Magic City), and the panoptical “Watch This” (featuring his probably-notactual brother Rocko). This relatively modest success landed him a spot on XXL’s 2012 Freshman list, as well a bizarre performance on Jimmy Fallon earlier this month in which he rapped the first verse of “Magic” twice,

SHABAZZ AL-RIGHT

by Matt Weiss sion grants a precious moment to the escaping soul. Taunts and remorse are only heard by a dizzy child suspended above the crowd.

This is the spirit of the spellcaster.

The spellcaster has many spells. The plant essences that cause the flowers to open are constantly slipping on their cytoskeletons. The sun and the perfume draw it out.

We convince ourselves we won’t die. There is a monster stomping somewhere who starts to run. He forms a pink firework in the lower atmosphere. We did a lot of things that were terrible in order for the singsings to come back. At the end of the movie, we were sweeping up. We lived at the end of the nineteenth century. We wouldn’t let our-

selves believe how beautiful we had become.

A temple massage is a sex spell. Waves of blindness sear the corners of our conceptual braids to a light golden brown. The slow waggle of an exposed penis heralds ghosts wailing around the avatar sex person while a ray of light shoots through the curtain. The woman turns back into a woman. This is a precarious freedom. A hypnogogic freedom.

The world shudders. A manic freedom. The walls give way. Joy is hopefully distorted and the whole structure admits through the sky.

We accepted ourselves as frightening and hopeful. This was a covenant stronger than we were. The problem scooper destroys all problems in a legitimate way.

FUTURE IS NOW

by Taylor Kelley seemingly by accident.

Pluto (A1/Free Bandz/Epic) is Future’s major-label debut, but unlike many rap studio albums, the sound of his mixtapes is left more or less intact. Future’s trademark style has two principal elements: his raspy, emotional vocal style and the Atlanta trap-rap production, these days a combination of the blaring horns of “Futuristic” rap and the rolling-R high hats and snares pioneered by Lex Lugar. Usually through a fairly strong Auto-Tune filter, Future’s flow is as much singing as rapping, though every fifth song or so tends to be just rap.

His pop sensibilities and melodic delivery often get compared to Atlanta pop-rappers Roscoe Dash and Yung LA, or sometimes even “Lollipop”-style Lil Wayne, but really he is closer to dancehall artists like Vybz Kartel and Mavado. His music exists on a spectrum between introspective melodrama and hard-as-Flocka bangers, usually falling somewhere in the middle. “Permanent Scar,” for example, is about as emotional as rap comes: Future covers well-worn subjects like his friends dying, but adds some complexity with a verse about his uncle’s attempted suicide and lines like “my little cousin caught a body and he still fightin/ and I got killas in the yard, Future all they recitin.” On the other hand, “Same Damn Time” is basically

a clinic on how to go as hard as possible, with Future yelling about all the things he does simultaneously (most of which aren’t that impressive, like selling cocaine as well as mediocre weed or popping bottles while on the sofa). While some may find melodrama and melody ill fitted to trap rap, it’s an established genre in dancehall, and the fact that Future pulls it off outside of Jamaica is a huge part of his appeal.

Pluto still suffers from some studioalbum ambitions: an amateur, Outkast-style introduction fails to set the tone, the fancy production quality makes many the of beats a little smoother and softer than they should be, and gratuitous spacey synths serve as a hollow motif without adding much to the songs. Future seems to have forgotten that his interest in the cosmos and Pluto was originally a reference to how high he was, not some sort of metaphysical condition. Furthermore, the emotional songs on Pluto (“Neva End,” “Permanent Scar”) don’t compete with their equivalents on the mixtapes, particularly “Long Time Coming” or “Feeling I Get” from True Story. In fact, the album’s two best songs, “Magic” and “Same Damn Time,” both originated on mixtapes.

That is not to say the album is not a success, though. Only one legitimately bad song (“Astronaut Chick”) out of fifteen

I saw Shabazz Palaces on the night of April 12th in Northhampton, MA at the Iron Horse Music Hall. The previous night they had been in Montreal. The next night they were in New York City. The crowd was filled with college students. I had one beer. I left my credit card at the bar by accident. That night I and my companion slept in the crew house at Amherst.

On the walls was a V for Vendetta poster. At 8:30 in the morning, I woke up because the sun was shining directly on me. I was sweating and uncomfortable. I sat in a chair across the room for fifteen minutes. Then the sun passed, and I went back to bed.

MATT WEISS B’12 is spurting from the center.

on a major-label rap debut is a remarkable accomplishment. Out-of-place features and questionable experiments frequently derail rap studio albums, but the only song that fits into that category is “Parachute,” which features R. Kelly (never a problem) and is actually one of the better new songs. “You Deserve It” and “Straight Up,” both of the inspirational anthem genre, are very solid efforts and will definitely be regulars in my Future rotation. “Im Trippin,” an otherwise forgettable ditty about doing lots of drugs, is saved by an immensely entertaining verse by Juicy J of Three 6 Mafia.

If you haven’t heard Future before, I’d suggest you download his best mixtape, True Story. For many people though, Pluto will be their first exposure to the rapper, and the album is definitely good enough to expand his fan base. Whether or not it brings him the commercial credibility he needs to ascend to the throne in Atlanta will depend in part on the success of the album, but it will also be crucial that he use the nationwide attention to craft a more compelling public persona.

Up to this point, his success has been much more a product of his music than his charisma—as a fan I still have a hard time describing his personality. To get to the top he’ll have to bring the music and the charm at the #samedamntime.

TAYLOR KELLEY B’12 got on UGG boots and shit.

the college hill independent

science

15

BINS, BARNYARDS, AND BUTTON MUSHROOMS Mycotechnology and the Next Steve Jobs of Fungus

by Raillan Brooks Illustration by Katy Windemuth

A

t one point, Bobby Gaines was deciding whether to become a doctor or a pig farmer. The former was the expected choice; the 17-year-old junior at Wheeler School comes from a family full of them and he does not come from a farming background, or anything close to it. But it seems he has already found his calling in fungus. This past month Bobby was named a semifinalist for both the Smithsonian Young Naturalist Award and the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation Student Agriscience Award for developing a new protocol to test a barn heating and cleaning system for barns built from mushrooms. His experiment, titled “Deep Bedding System Improvements Through Macrofungus Inoculation,” takes a second look at the ecosystems of barns, and how adding—or rather, re-adding—mushrooms might set farmers on the path to environmental sustainability.

Bobby is the sort of self-possessed teenager we all thought we were in high school—the kind of kid who uses SAT words and actually knows what they mean.

He is earnest, polite, and strenuously humble. From our meeting, it was clear that he was fiercely intelligent, but wrapped up in his work as a budding scientist. “My friends kind of kid around with me about being obsessed with fungi,” he says, apparently not in on the joke.

But you would be wrapped up, too, if you’ve been thinking about fungi and farms for as long as Bobby has. Bobby’s interest in farming began around age 10, when he started busying himself with books on agriculture and permaculture, something his parents encouraged both as scientists and as the pullers of the purse strings. “I used to go on Amazon and get every book I could find.” Over time, his interest in sustainable approaches to farming and husbandry evolved into an interest in mycology, a change he attributes to his appreciation of the unsung role of fungi in the cultivation of crops. “Anyone who has ever farmed anything has also been a fungus farmer, but they probably didn’t know it.”

Bobby knows it. Fungi, one of the five biological kingdoms, are often discussed in terms of what they are not. For one thing, they are not plants, which Bobby harps on.

“They are heterotrophic, not autotrophic like plants.” I ask him to define terms. He adds, impatiently, “they don’t make their own food. They eat other things.” And unlike animals, they come in microscopic varieties called microfungi, yeast being a prime

example. Structurally, fungi are not unlike icebergs—what we see peering through topsoil are simply small outcroppings of a vast subterranean root network called the mycelium, which breaks down soil to release its nutrients.

And fungi are everywhere. With the advent of air travel and increased human movement, fungi have been some of the most genetically diverse and physically mobile species on the planet, as many reproduce via airborne spores. Dandruff, Bobby points out, is actually a matrix of skin and a microfungus called Malassezia globosa, which binds the dead skin cells and makes dandruff particulates visible to the naked eye.

I asked him what directions existed for fungal technology. “I came to the conclusion that fungi are the most criminally underrated kingdom of life.” The fervor of his answer startled me, but by the end of our conversation, it had started to rub off. “They are virtually unkillable and unavoidable.”

Bobby’s knowledge of fungi and mycological research is encyclopedic. He only refers to fungi by their scientific names, and when asked for their common names he rattles them off effortlessly. No mean feat, since some species of fungus have as many as 10 unique names.

Bobby said his turn to mycology came two or three years ago, upon reading the work of Paul Stamets. Styled as “the Steve Jobs of Fungus” by fellow fungus enthusiasts, Stamets is a University of Arizona mycologist who has built a career around finding new and innovative uses for fungi.

In a TED talk he gave in 2008 entitled “6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World,” Stamets regales the audience with his theories on potential practical applications for fungi. Peppered with one-liners like “Mycelium is the Earth’s natural Internet,” his speech advocates fungi for uses as varied as improving management of polluted soil, fabricating new medicines, insecticides, and the breaking down chemical warfare agents.

The idea for his project came to Bobby while knee-deep in feces. When he was 14, Bobby began spending his summers on Coggeshall Farm in Bedford, Massachusetts, an alternative to summer camp of his choosing.

At the so-called “living history museum”— where employees don period outfits and perform for visitors the menial labor that once characterized pastoral life—Bobby’s job was to shovel animal excrement in the

barns, dealing with heavy lifting and the foul stench all day. “I thought to myself, how could I make this easier?” He winces slightly recounting the experience. He toyed with the idea of alternate methods of moving it around. He thought about using PVC pipes driven into the ground to aerate the soil and alleviate some of the smell.

Then it dawned on him that he had read about solutions to this kind of problem in one of Stamets’s books. There was historical evidence that mushrooms grew well in barn environments. “Agaricus bisporus, the common Portabella mushroom, was originally found growing in the floors of horse stalls,” he tells me. It was only under the reign of Louis XIV that Portabella mushrooms were removed from barns to be grown and hoarded in the catacombs of Paris. Paired with mushrooms’ capacity to rapidly decompose soil, he thought, “Here could be a system whereby fungi could be used to decompose matter in an environment they are already suited for.”

A variant of such a system has been in practice for centuries. Known as deepbedding, layering litter like hay and mulch over waste helps speed decomposition and reduces odor. Deep-bedding systems in barns are already mandated by law in Sweden, and other jurisdictions—like here in Providence, which, having legalized urban henhouses in 2010, is still hunting for an acceptable way to deal with waste—are considering it.

The benefits of a fungal deep-bedding system seem almost too good to be true.

Fungal growth creates a lot of heat, warming enclosures and reducing energy costs.

Many fungi emit gas, producing scents that might cover up the smell of decaying matter. And according to Bobby, they have the potential to solve one of agriculture’s most urgent concerns: how to deal with contaminated run-off. “Some fungi actually predate pathogenic bacteria in groundwater” he explains excitedly. “The potential for reducing contamination is enormous.”

His hypothesis was simple but ambitious: reintroducing fungi to barnyard floors would more quickly decompose waste, eliminate disease-causing bacteria, and heat the enclosure enough to offset energy costs.

With the help of Nupur Shridhar B’11— one of his science teachers at Wheeler School—his parents, and funding through the AERIE science education endowment at Wheeler, Bobby constructed his own

apparatus to test the many claims made by proponents of deep-bedding systems. He set up 12 32-gallon garbage bins, which he modified with plastic windows and drainage holes for ease of observation, and filled them with alternating layers of hay, manure provided by Rosasharn Farm in Rehoboth, MA, and an inoculate of fungus. He tested five types of fungi—Portabella, Pearl Oyster, Blue Oyster, Lawyer’s Wig, and Garden Giant—against two control bins of manure.

The bins were kept in an insulated tent, at first in Shridhar’s yard and then in his own, to simulate barn conditions.

From November 2011 to March of this year, he recorded any reductions in odor, fruiting of the mushroom (whether the mushroom cap ever broke the surface), and fluctuations in temperature both inside and outside the bins. Over that period, every mushroom fruited in its bin, and the Lawyer’s Wig mushroom grew in 10 of the 12 bins, including the control bins.

He found that the smell produced by the growth, which he described as “woodsy” or “cinnamon-y,” successfully concealed odor.

Temperature changes were not statistically significant.

His results, while inconclusive due to cross-contamination of the Lawyer’s Wig, are promising. Mushrooms, as it turns out, are incredibly difficult to grow in controlled environments. It is why mushroom farms are so few and far between. That they fruited so easily in Bobby’s trial are an indication that barn-like environments are good for the harvesting of edible mushrooms, if nothing else. And the odor-concealing effects impressed the Smithsonian and the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation enough to warrant further funding.

Whether he plans to continue his work into college remains unclear, but Bobby has already planned a follow-up study for senior year, in which he will attempt to determine the effectiveness of fungi at decreasing the load of pathogens in agricultural run-off.

He plans to begin the study in late summer or early fall. “After that, I can’t say what will happen. Mycotechnology is the way of the future; we’re going to keep finding new ways to use it. If I should happen to be struck by inspiration again, I would be happy to undertake a new study. I think it’s going to just keep going.”

RAILLAN BROOKS B’13 is the world’s highest anise seed.

16 occult

20 april 2012

“SO WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?” Gossip Girl at its Apotheosis

by Stephen Carmody Illustration by Becca Levinson

Diana: Well, I didn’t intend for things to get as serious as they did with Nate. And then I thought… if you never find out the truth, what’s the harm?

Chuck: [After a long pause] So what does it all mean? Now that I know?

Diana: That’s for you to decide. [She gets up to go] You know where to find me.

[Chuck stares off pensively. Guitar strum, elevator bell. End scene.]

Dear reader: I never broke it off with Gossip Girl. It’s like a scab of popular culture hanging onto my very heart from a two-year fling at an all-male college, Deep Springs.

Or that’s what I’ve told myself. A group of us students satisfied the craving for romance and intrigue late at night, crowded around a laptop, cackling and groaning. We even read the trashy teen novels that sparked the television show together at a female professor’s house like a book club might.

We delighted to find out that, in the books, Chuck ends up going to our small school.

There it was, his gaudy life, in over-saturated prose, touching our drab deserts.

Out at Deep Springs, we watched Gossip Girl for the same reason anyone watches television drama: it’s an exciting story to fill a void in your slightly boring life. But that time has ended, and I keep watching, still attached to its characters. This show wasn’t made for me. Just look at the things they try to sell me on the cwtv.com stream: designer fashions from Marshall’s, Almay “makeup for sensitive skin,” upcoming episodes of Vampire Diaries, Abby Wambach selling Gatorade, and Skechers shoes. But I finish each scene, each episode, and each season on the edge of a cliff, and only more Gossip Girl can get me through.

Gossip Girl reached its apotheosis this past Monday. To those of you who gave up on Gossip Girl so long ago, I will describe this scene. It’s not the moment when the series “jumped the shark.” That already happened—perhaps when Serena made a snuff film, or when Dan got his arch-nemesis pregnant, or when Chuck died (don’t worry, he was brought back to life by a semi-angelic French woman). This was the mimesis (and emesis), in two minutes and twenty seconds, of all Gossip Girl is, and in some way, of our entire culture. At some time slightly before nine o’clock on Monday, April 16, 2012, Gossip Girl achieved the sublime.

WHO IS CHUCK BASS’S MOM? It happened in a dialogue between Charles “Chuck” Bass, the son of a late hotel magnate, and Diana Payne, the seductive, forty-something publisher with a raspy London accent. As usual, since it’s the end of the episode, some secret is being revealed.

Open on Chuck and Diana, in medias res.

Diana is telling Chuck how she came to be Chuck’s biological mother. Now, understand that Diana just joined the show this season, so this explanation had better be good. She’s going from incidental girlfriend of Chuck’s best friend to Chuck’s mom.

What’s more, this question has hovered over the series for years, informing almost everything about his identity. First, the rebellious son to a distant, single father.

Later, the orphan whose stepmother softens his heart. Then, for a whole season, another one of Chuck’s stepmothers, Elizabeth, pretends to be Chuck’s real mother, faking her own death to con him out of his fortune.

And now, he sits in a room with his real, biological mother. Diana’s egregious cleavage transforms from an object of erotic desire into a nurturing symbol of motherhood.

But Diana has some explaining to do, to Chuck and to us. Affairs are wrong, so why did she have one? “It felt as if he had the whole world at his feet,” she remarks, and that’s about all we need. Power is seductive.

Why then, Chuck wants to know, did she give up her baby? She was “a mess; mixed up in the wrong things with the wrong people.”

We’ve all been there, or at least Chuck has.

Diana now only has to suggest that she still wanted to be with Chuck, but the situation was beyond her control. And let Chuck know she was ashamed. Guilt helps to move on. These things are just true enough to keep the narrative going.

THE SUBLIME, MANHATTAN, USA Meanwhile, as the camera shifts from one close-up to the next, the Transcenders (who? only the founding members of The Black Eyed Peas, of course) fill the dialogue’s pregnant silences with moody electronic music. The music syncs with each change in emotion perfectly. Tension builds as an electronic guitar repeats a single note and Chuck accuses Diana. We’re in a new key with the uplifting spirit to Diana’s remorse.

The Transcenders almost lull us into forgetting that Diana as Chuck’s mother is awkward narrative. As Chuck plaintively asks, “So you stayed away until eight months

ago?” We’re all asking the same damn thing.

And then it happens, the sublime moment, arising from narrative fragility. We watch Chuck’s Big Question, the essence of so many storylines in the show’s five seasons, come to its death. The whole thing almost makes sense. Right as Diana explains her reentry (“But a few years later, when I heard Elizabeth [who hates Diana] had died— although I now know that wasn’t the case—I came back”), Chuck lets out an abrupt sigh.

When someone starts to laugh in a moment of tension, it prompts you to do the same. And during Diana’s parenthetical, a nod to one of the show’s more ridiculous subplots, Chuck’s unfortunately-timed exhale sounded so clearly like the beginning of a chuckle. The sigh brought the show into reflection, almost laughing at itself. And I couldn’t help but join in, not quite sure why, even on the fourth replay. I don’t even think it matters if it was intentional. Gossip Girl, with a laugh that welled up from its subconscious, cast off its last façade of narrative self-containment, trying to tie up a story arc that was just not written with its end in mind. And it knew it.

Having broken the fourth wall with laughter, it’s as if the show now preaches to us. Chuck asks, after too long a pause, “So what does it all mean? Now that I know?”

It dawns on us, clear as day, that every time we wanted to see what happens to these characters, we so desperately sought satisfaction, and through it, something to make this whole absurd saga worth it. In response, Diana looks straight into the camera at us, and offers a little comfort: “That’s for you to decide… You know where to find me.”

CW PRIMETIME FABLE HOUR A history professor recently told me that before she starts researching a historical event, she reads the novels from that era, to get a sense of what people cared about. We find Gossip Girl almost plausible because it plays by our understood rules of character motivations. Greed corrupts. Love fades.

Kinship binds. Desire overwhelms. On display each week is our cultural ethos, pushed to its extreme. The plotlines, even at their most ludicrous, must attend to some depiction of character that we think is believable.

And above our longing for scandal or romance, the show knows, we need resolution. The thirst for narrative

conclusion—really wanting to know the truth, like Chuck—drives everything.

When Freud, in On the Pleasure Principle, depicted life as a string of essentially erotic divergences that eventually succumb to the death drive, this is what he meant. What makes me painfully laugh at this moment is my own desperation. The show has uncovered so many little answers—usually at fancy social gatherings that get crashed— and fed me newer, wilder conflicts. But this moment was one of the Big Answers. Right then, I am Chuck, no longer jilted by the truth.

As fable, Gossip Girl objectifies our popular ethics. They’re the tools that drive its salacious plotline, caricatured to an extreme unrivaled by any show on television. But they are still our ethics. Forgiveness might just be recognizing someone’s genuine expression of guilt and taking a long pause.

An affair, as slimy as it is, can still be understood. And in crystallizing this ethos, we have a touchstone, perhaps, upon which we can reflect and pivot. If we don’t find Chuck convincing, then how can we be different?

I will keep watching as Gossip Girl approaches its occult and syndicated death.

I hope this happens soon. Because there was still a touch of grace in Chuck’s moment: it was never about the Big Answer. The pedestrian explanation for this overinflated drama was apt. I’m fairly certain life isn’t an M. Night Shyamalan movie, where every incidental detail will be infused with metaphysical meaning. Diana’s almost forced parenthetical spoke to that; it was just a rough insertion to help us move on.

The sigh-laugh recognized the simultaneous absurdity, necessity, and sorrow in this moment of inevitable closure.

And there are so many more Big Questions to answer! Will Blair find love in the most unlikely source? How will Dan come to terms with his status as outsider?

Can Serena ever derive internal validation?

Can Nate escape the shadow of his family?

And, of course, who is Gossip Girl, after all?

You’re right, Diana, I know where to find you.

STEPHEN CARMODY B’12 hopes you don’t just say he watches Gossip Girl “ironically.”

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n the world of competitive sailing, winning the America’s Cup signifies the best—the best team of sailors in the best boat in the world. And it’s quite the prize—as the oldest trophy in international sports, the America’s Cup title has switched countries only six times since it was presented by its creators to the New York Yachting Club in 1851. Now, it’s coming to Newport. The cup itself, an ornate sterling silver ewer, is actually named after the first boat to win the race, a schooner named the America, not the country it represents.

After capturing the trophy, the inaugural winners then donated the cup to New York Yachting Club under a deed that dictated the trophy become a “perpetual challenge cup for friendly competition between nations.” Any yacht club that met the requirements stipulated in the trophy’s deed had the right to challenge and gain stewardship of the cup. From the New York Yachting Club’s first defense of the title in 1870 against England, up until 1970, single challengers who had raised enough money to field both a suitable vessel and the team to pilot it raced against the defending champions. Each championship race had new rules, due to technological sailing improvements and disputes over unfair regulations. The first Finals were a simple race around an island, but courses later became more complex, requiring sharper turns and a higher caliber of seamanship.

The earlier years had fleets pitted against each other, but today, competition among ships of the same fleet forced the race into the familiar format that we see to this day: a one on one race to the finish.

In 1970, for the first time in its history, there were multiple challengers for the title.

The multiple challengers had to compete in a separate series of competitions to earn the right to race for the cup outright, as opposed to earlier years, when challengers were so scarce that whoever wished to vie for the cup had right to race for it by default. In 1983, Louis Vuitton began sponsoring the Challenger Selection Series, a pro circuit of races in which teams race against each other in sort of a “regular season” with certain point values given to respective place finishes

in the races. The Louis Vuitton Cup is given to the eventual winner of the circuit, the team that had amassed the most points, and the team which will challenge the defending club for America’s Cup. This final race is now known as the America’s Cup World Series, and the last stop of its 2012 circuit is scheduled in Newport, Rhode Island.

The Cup’s marketers have called it “the hardest trophy to win in sports,” ostensibly because it has only switched hands six times. This monopoly, however, may not be attributed to the difficulty of the competition itself, but the flaws and history of competitive sailing itself. The fact that there have only been 33 challenges in the Cup’s storied 165 year history speaks to immense wealth required to host and finance the Finals. The Finals aren’t just about the races. Like the Olympics, there is much hype and fanfare leading up to the sailing, and the actual event required a lot of space and capital and time, in addition to fielding a noncommercial team of boats and sailors, expensive in its own right. Competitive sailing, in its original formation, was a game of titans. It was where Irish tea baron Sir Thomas Lipton tried unsuccessfully to win the cup for England in five separate challenges, all the while always joking with his American Hosts and earning his reputation as the “lovable loser.” His last gasp in 1930 pitted elite against elite.

Lipton was bested by none other than Harold Vanderbilt, the then appointed defender of America’s honor. While skill and seamanship arguably won the race, the real point of the races became a muscle-flexing contest between magnates and barons, where equipment mattered as much as skill.

Recently, with new class requirements mandating that all ships be of the same make and dimensions, the sport has become more egalitarian. There are now over nine teams in the current circuit, and each has a fair shot to take the cup. The coordinators of America’s Cup have also branched out and, through the race’s internationally syndicated broadcasts, have roused a heightened awareness of environmental the oceans. The

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World Series is intended to take America’s Cup all over the world and promote a sport laden with stigmas of privilege as an event everyone can embrace. Streams of each race are available all over the world through YouTube, enabling viewers to pick a team to follow all the way to the finals.

An April 11 breakfast for the Newport press covering the race began with such a live stream, from a World Series event happening in Naples. To the original winners of the Cup, the footage would have looked completely unfamiliar. The boats themselves are now catamarans, two carbon fiber bullet-shaped hulls strapped together with a 90-foot sail that looks more like a parachute than a sail sticking out of it all.

The course in Naples was little less than an acre wide. It was filled with pylons that the ships had to navigate (think slalom for boats). The phrase “flying on water” is totally applicable. These boats, adorned with Puma and Louis Vuitton stickers, were laser fast, gliding across the waves.

At such an extreme pace, even the strongest sailors have been known to choke.

For example, a boat from the Swedish Artemis Racing team which had led the majority of a race, overshot a pylon and then tried to make up for the lost distance by turning sharper than the boat allowed. The front of the vessel dipped underwater, and the room of reporters collectively groaned.

Realizing their mistake, the crew braced for the inevitable. It only took three seconds, but effect was impressive. The Artemis 2 capsized, its sail flimsily drowning in water like the wings of bee trapped in water.

mansions. The whole world is going to see how beautiful Newport really is.”

Governor Lincoln Chafee and the State of Rhode Island are also getting in on the action, giving Newport $1.2 million in state dollars to cover both restorations on Fort Adams and the largest standing stone fort on the east coast, and the creation of an auxiliary parking lot and accompanying shuttle to accommodate the estimated 60,000 spectators for the June races. An economic-impact analysis by the R.I. Department of Revenue estimated the event will generate nearly $51 million in direct spending on construction, marine trades, hotel rooms, restaurants, transportation and retail. Another $21 million is expected from ancillary services and consumer spending.

The coordinators rode the PR line hard.

“We’re proud to be one of the few New England towns to have its original planning and infrastructure intact. You’re walking on history,” said Keith Stokes, a member of the RI Economic Development Corporation.

“When people come to see the races, they won’t just see good racing, they’ll discover a hidden gem on the New England coastline.”

Coverage from the 1977 America’s Cup in Newport noted that “Newport’s most famous family is The Very Rich; her second is the US Navy; and her third is the normal folk.” But today, as a town that survives mostly on curious tourists meandering through its Gilded Age mansions labeled as cultural heritage, and that has seen its population decline by 50% in the past 40 years, maybe all the excitement stems from a yearning to be relevant again.

The Newport races, scheduled from June 23 to July 1, will take place in the East Passage of Narragansett Bay directly off Fort Adams.

In a tour of the site, Cup Host chairman Brad Read gushed about the infrastructural improvements to the race site and the potential for international exposure to put Newport back on the map.

“Remember those aerial helicopter shots of Naples we saw this morning? Now imagine it here. Sweeping all across the bay, over Fort Adams and ending near the

The only sailing-related question at the breakfast was: “Will there be wind?”

The reply: “Always. From the southwest.” And the discussion moved on.

ALEX SEOH B’14 can’t wait to see those swooping helicopter shots on TV.

18

literary

20 april 2012

NOVEL HARLEQUIN

by Julieta Cárdenas Illustration by Katia Zorich So what, then, could I have done differently on the night when my mother, a prostitute in Hades came to visit me in my bed, a rest I felt I deserved after a day of turning my body into long lines and small knots for the amusement of the small nobles and the drunkards of the market place, but to follow her down and try to win the grace of Pluto My stained clothes- the colored sack, both torn and sweated, turned holy white in the hell fires that shook us dry on the bank by the boat of Charon.

My mother, who spoke to me from my bed asked for her escape, «You, you who are alive, can you take me from the ventricle pits like I was pitted when you-- the seed of your father-- were bit out by the world, can›t you?»

It was not a sense of responsibility or obligation that prompted me to follow but the natural response to a demand by my creator; I am always relieved when someone tells me what to do. I have a philosophy that a statement is an act of its own sort, palpable as a leash around a neck. So, then it follows a demand is a road; I followed it down and slid with my mother into Hades.

Her body was strong and mine was as well, exercise will do that to a person. In fact I think, there is no greater genius than that of the body, the body knows how to make itself strong when there is not much else… that said in that moment there was more to do than in the bed I had left. For Hell is a busy place and unlike the staleness of purgatory people here said hello.

Charon, with a grin across that part of the face that rests in the middle of a jaw, introduced himself as my father--this is his

kind of humor I am told, squirmy and gross, like he is touching just by speaking. My mother whose legs were chained was pulled apart-- a puppet played by the lowliest of the aquatic devils of the River Styx. There were many but one of them was particularly interested in using it as exercise, to pull steadily mimicking the rowing of Charon with his webbed hands on the chains on her dry ankles. Charon held me from helping her, for I squirmed knowing that it hurts to be pulled for the amusement of others.

In an impulse driven by anxiety I stood up on the boat and danced, nervously in body and naseously in memory, with sweaty palms, I tried to remember how to dance This distracted Charon and the beasts long enough so that my mother and her legs were left alone, for a while at least. It must be funny after all to see such a small man dance in such a way that you can’t tell if he choreographed it or if he is just making it up as he goes along, sweaty and sick. Either way its pathetic. But when you have resigned yourself to evil, the pathetic loses its pathos and then is left, like fish bones too small to swallow safely, it’s just the base and grimy humor that I, myself a clown of sorts, could never really understand.

Charon dropped us off in front of Cerberus, and having been raised on the streets with the street dogs I was comforted by his smell and his anger. “I know you dog, all dogs are the same dog, you dig it when I dig into your fur and stroke?”

Pluto, who had been watching us since we came in, was impressed that we had made it this far without suffering anything too grave.

Confusing me for one of his own, he asked me to choose any prize I wanted. “I can make you a deputy-god little harlequin and I

can give you an entire season of dance if you would like. I have a cornucopia and it is deep enough to hold all the wishes of man.”

He hadn’t realized that it was my mother’s freedom that I came for, and having had my mother himself for sometime I knew he would think twice about his offer if I did not take care to ask for her carefully.

But mother why are you in hell anyway, did you not raise me decently enough? I sleep at night, when I can, and sometimes I can›t, just like everyone else. I am even industrious, I work hard all the time and one day maybe I will even have children who work as clowns but at the least they won›t be murderers and at least they won›t be fools.

Of course I couldn›t ask her this, and so I kept it to myself. She had a lot of trouble talking, although she was kind enough to never forget my name, and she even gave me a shape I could trace in the case I needed to sign any bills.

I realized that as a god Pluto would understand me in whichever way I spoke. So, with my body itching I showed him my little harlequin joke; I pulled a coin from behind his ear and placed it on my nose, I did a flip and caught it, in-between my toes. I ended with a flourish, with one knee on the floor, I tipped my hat and reasoned, a reasonable reason. “There is one fact Plato, and I am certain you will agree; that a God is always true, and truth be told all truths must hold, if hell is to stay warm and earth to stay cold.”

He agreed that gods are honest and that his word was both good and real and assured me my request would be granted and that in asking I should have no fear.

I wiped my brow and called my mother’s

name, Cardine.

This upset him greatly. It’s strange to see a stoic cry, it didn’t happen here, but I worried it might. There is a sculpture in my city and one man always says it shows a stoic cry, to me it looks grotesque, the sculptued man’s mouth looks like that of the feral cats who without milk and sometimes without patches of skin sometimes come to you asking for food, the cats who make the face of the stoic in pain when you have to kick them hard in the gut so they go away Gods are mortal and it hurts them not to be loved. He realized that his power did not carry to her mind, that she wanted to leave, that her will was hers somehow still. Sometimes the cats keep coming, until you have to throw them in the river, out of pity, really.

I felt sorry for him, the great god whose anger was a masculine despair, whose feelings, which showed in his face and in his stressed closed fist, were no different than the silent prayers of the sick and sorry of the towns. I tried to make him feel better by telling him he could do with me as he wished in return for my mother›s freedom. He said he would.

He let us go then. Charon was quiet on the way back. To this day, I do not know if Pluto has punished me yet, or if it will come tomorrow, or if he forgot.

My mother now lives with me and we wander through the streets. I dance with little bells on my little feet. She looks at me and smiles and each day prays out loud. She likes the shapes I draw for some mountains, far away. It really calms her down. I hear these are from hell, I want some days to hide there and breathe in clean cold air.

THE LIST april 20–26, 2012 email listtheindy@gmail.com

friday april 20th boredom is counterrevolutionary 6pm // smith buonanno, room 201 (95 cushing st) tom mcdonough teaches history and theory of contemporary art, modern architecture, and urbanism at suny binghamton. he will speak about guy debord and the sociology of boredom. a night of science fiction stories 7–8:30pm // as220 // $5* walker mettling hosts a reading of new shorts with sci-fi karaoke by kolour kult! *benefits to new urban arts’ community library & the providence comics consortium! pat benatar + neil girlado 8pm // $45/$55/$65/$75 // twin river casino door at 7pm. all ages. we belong. ri premiere of ride by eric lane 7:30pm // the artist’s exchange (50 rolfe square, cranston) // $15 eric lane’s poignant and humorous play tells the story of three teenaged girls on a life-changing road trip. through april 29. providence’s annual 420fest 5:15pm // blood drive co-op (745 branch ave) // $8 beer, cupcakes and a wild 13-band set. for set details: blooddriveco-op.blogspot.com.

folk music concert 4pm // the whiskey republic // cover tba stone soup fundraiser with atwater-donnelly, pendragon, bill harley and more. monday april 23rd visualizing the geography of disease 12–1:30pm // 121 South Main Street, room 245 a colloquium on diseases in china. radical or righteous? using gender to shape public perceptions of political violence in el salvador 5–7pm // the watson institute (111 thayer st) death cab for cutie 7pm (doors), show 8pm // the vets (83 park street) // $37.50-65 part of a one-of-a-kind spring tour of intimate venues and historic theaters, accompanied on stage by members of san fancisco’s celebrated magik*magik orchestra. tuesday april 24th bad girls: a public policy and human rights conversation on child sex trafficking in the united states 12–1pm // 67 george street talk by brown u. alum, malika saada saar, ‘92.

saturday april 21st the 99% spring training 9am–4pm // fall river public library (104 north main st, fall river) a day to learn about the history of non-violent resistance and begin to take action to reclaim our democracy. go to www.occupyfallriver.org to register—it’s free! immigrant heart: art exhibition & fundraiser 6–9pm // unite here local 217 (294 w. exchange st) // donation paintings about immigrant identity in america. sunday april 22nd occupy sexism 12pm // west side of city hall park a continuation of the slutwalk cultural action. starts with a rally & march, ends with speakers (at 26 benevolent st) on what we can do re: sexism, reproductive rights, rape culture, and more.

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the revolutionary ideas of karl marx 7–9pm // wilson, room 301 (brown) relevance of marx today re: occupy movement, arab spring, women’s rights, etc. dayglow 8pm // the ryan center (1 lincoln almond plaza, kingston) // $48–83, 18+ “the world’s largest paint party,” featuring djs, aerial acts, stilt-walkers, contortion artists, fire shows, “paint blast cannons,” and more. guests must dress in white, blue jeans acceptable. (oh.)

(brown university) // free with tickets wisconsin senator russ feingold on campaign finance reform. downown boys album release show 9pm // building 16 (olneyville) // donation also featuring crabe, wreck room & leamers.

inquisition, eerie, bog of the infidel , etc.

6pm // prov. social club (71 richmond st) // $10 sounds like (it) sounds. mmmmetal.

nautical knots 5:30–8pm // 40 east farm road, kingston // adults: $20, children (12+): $10 nautical knots will explore the art of tying basic to advanced knots for use around the house and on the water. hands-on activities and games will ensure that you leave confident to handle any situation ever. call ahead to reserve your space.

wednesday april 25th

thursday april 26th

connecting people + places: creative placemaking in downtown providence 5:30–7pm // 200 dyer street brown continuing education presents to all pvd peeps: stephanie fortunato, dept of art, culture + tourism, city of providence.

opening reception of theories in action 6–7pm // alumnae hall (brown) a conference that explores the social relevance of theory. keynote address by prof. remensnyder.

corporate power in politics and the economy: what the citizens united decision means for our democracy 6:45 (doors), 7-8:30pm (talk) // salomon center

dining out for life all day // various locations dine out to support aids care and prevention services. participating restaurants donate part of the proceeds to aids project rhode island. go to http://www.diningoutforlife.com/providence for participating restaurants.