The College Hill Independent Vol. 38 Issue 10

11 PVD’s of the Vietnam War

03 INDY EXCLUSIVE: An investigation into how court fees and fines trap low-income Rhode Islanders in poverty

Volume 38 • Issue 10

April 19, 2019

the College Hill

Independent

09 soaps and a sob story

the Indy

a Brown * RISD Weekly

R n* A B row

D IS

ly Week

The Indy Contents

From The Editors

Cover Untitled Tiger Dingsun

My Indy,

News 02 Week in Video Giants Alan Dean, Ricardo Gomez, Peder Schaefer, Bilal Memon 13 Towards a New Collective History Wen Zhuang and Dana Kurniawan Court Debt — Special Investigation 03 Caught in Rhode Island Sydney Anderson, Sophie Khomtchenko, Alina Kulman, Nick Roblee-Strauss, Harry August, Julia Rock, Lucas Smolcic Larson, Olivia Kan-Sperling and Matt Ishimaru X 08 Mugshots Jorge Palacios and Alex Westfall

It’s not you, it’s us—the ones that are leaving, the ones with no more pages to fill. To be honest, when you cut that comma, it felt like the last straw. We are moving on, but this sure won’t be easy—we will be scanning the masthead online, hoping that you haven’t found someone better, but also knowing that you deserve the best.

It’s unfair, we know, you’ll see reminders of our time together throughout PVD— our visit to the sex dungeon, that time we bowled our first strike, even our Sunday morning walks along Keene Street. We’ve been holding you back, and we know you’ll find other people to write about DARE, gentrification, or the perils of big data.

We think you deserve to know: we just couldn’t take not being read anymore, and we cheated with The Journal. It was just one page, we swear.

Over the past four years, we’ve simply grown so far apart that long distance could never work—not even Slack could keep our connection alive, and we knew you always liked Will more than us anyway. I hope we can still be friends, maybe we could freelance something?

Eternally yours, -KN + HA

Features 09 Days of our Lives Will Weatherly 11 Long Shadows, Smoking Guns Tabitha Payne Arts 15 Creative Strategem Liby Hays

Mission Statement

Literary 16 4 Poems Shuchi and Justine Nguyen-Nguyen

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed

by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/ or classism.

Ephemera 17 Toe Tags The Indy Staff

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

Week in Review Sarah Clapp Maria Gerdyman News Jacob Alabab-Moser Jessica Bram Murphy Giacomo Sartorelli Metro Julia Rock Lucas Smolcic Larson Sara Van Horn Arts Ben Bienstock Alexis Gordon Liby Hays Features Tara Sharma Cate Turner

Shannon Kingsley Lily Meyersohn Literary Shuchi Agrawal Justin Han Isabelle Rea Ephemera Nicole Cochary Claire Schlaikjer X Jorge Palacios Alex Westfall List Ella Rosenblatt Signe Swanson Will Weatherly

Science & Tech Miles Guggenheim

Special Projects Harry August Lucas Smolcic Larson Eve Zelickson

19 APRIL 2019

VOL 38 ISSUE 10

Staff Writers Jesse Barber Brionne Frazier Eduardo Gutierrez-Peña Mohannad Jabrah Nickolas Roblee-Strauss Gemma Sack Sophie Khomtchenko Emma Kofman Alina Kulman Dana Kurniawan Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Peder Schaefer Star Su Copy Editors Grace Berg Seamus Flynn Sarah Goldman Matt Ishimaru Sojeong Lim Yelena Nicolle Salvador Caroline Sprague

Design Editors Lulian Ahn Bethany Hung Designers Amos Jackson Cecile Kim Ella Rosenblatt Katherine Sang Christie Zhong Illustration Editors Pia Mileaf-Patel Eve O’Shea Ilustrators Alana Baer Sam Berenfield Natasha Brennan Natasha Boyko Bella Carlos Julia Illana Angie Kang Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll

Signe Swanson Will Weatherly

Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Claribel Wu Stephanie Wu

Managing Editors Ella Comberg Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang

Business Maria Gonzalez

MVP Claire Schlaikjer

Web Ashley Kim Social Media Ben Bienstock Pia Mileaf-Patel

*** The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Alumni+Fundraising Katrina Northrop Senior Editors Olivia Kan-Sperling Katrina Northrop Chris Packs

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WEEK IN VIDEO GIANTS

BY Alan Dean, Ricardo Gomez, Bilal Memon, and Peder Schaefer ILLUSTRATION Eve O'Shea DESIGN Amos Jackson

STUCK IN THE TAPE DECK If the mediocre 2013 Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick The Last Stand had been released in 2004, the DVD would have been available for rent in over 9,000 Blockbuster Video franchises across the world. In 2013, that number would have been closer to 1,400. Today, in April 2019, Blockbuster itself is making its proverbial last stand, with its once-continent-spanning empire shrunk down to a single outpost, following the folding of its last Australian location in March. The company once accused of killing the movie theater now finds itself on its own last legs, with one small, final torch held high in a Bend, Oregon strip mall.

This last, lonely Blockbuster has clung to life through a renegotiated licensing agreement with the DISH Network, which bought all the remaining Blockbuster locations after the company declared bankruptcy in 2010. While corporate support is no longer provided, DISH has let franchised locations attempt to go it alone, trying their luck in the dicey, but ever-growing nostalgia market. For a time, these fringe franchises held on: In 2013 Alaska still boasted 13 Blockbuster locations. By 2016, however, that number had shrunk to nine, and by August 2018 the frozen north, too, had lost all of their franchised locations.

Even celebrity intervention, the great American deus ex machina, couldn’t save the Alaskan Blockbusters, when in a deeply confusing but surely well-intentioned move, John Oliver purchased Russell Crowe’s leather jockstrap worn on set in Cinderella Man (2005) from the actor’s “divorce auction” and donated it to the last Anchorage location. While the jockstrap was allegedly worth nearly $7,000, its intended use as an in-store showcase seems more fit for padding trivia questions than saving a dying business. Nonetheless, it’s always good to know someone cares.

Following the fall of the Alaska location, the penultimate Blockbuster, next to shut its doors, was also far flung across the Pacific, renting out videos at the ends of the earth. At the end of March, sales stopped at the last Blockbuster in the suburbs of Perth, Australia, and the final Blockbuster down under, went down under.

Perhaps at this point it would be appropriate to clarify, puns notwithstanding, that the Indy finds Blockbuster’s slow death deeply saddening, and not merely as a gasp of sentimentality. As noted by Lyn Borszeky, owner of the last Australian store, Blockbuster played a genuinely important role for “film lovers who had no or poor internet connections, and seniors who found the new technology too complicated.” Even for those of us who didn’t rely on Blockbuster for such concrete needs, there is something important we lose by the death of physical video stores, and the discoveries and memories they created.

There is, however, a glimmer of hope. Despite the rapid rise and fall of the mother company, the Bend location shows no signs of closing anytime soon. Due both to the ethos of “pure stubbornness” espoused by general manager Sandi Harding and the booming cultural market for Y2K nostalgia, the floppy disk– wielding strip mall spot has proven that it has life in it yet, turning its supposed obsolescence to its advantage. This embrace of its role as a lost slice of the early 2000s, from the popcorn ceilings and yellow/blue coloration, to rows and rows of un-updated shelves stocked with titles like I Am Legend and Galaxy Quest, reveals not only fierce loyalty to the memory of what Blockbuster once was, but a highly tactical awareness of the marketing power that same memory holds. A variety of merchandise branded with the slogan “The Last Blockbuster on the Planet,” including Sandi’s hand-knit beanies, have regularly sold out as tourists from all over the country, and the world, come to Bend to snap selfies and pay respect. Regardless of where the Blockbuster saga leads, those working the Bend location intend to keep their tape reel business records spinning on as long as they can—we may have some

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

time yet before the last Blockbuster goes round the bend.

-AD

CAN THE WALRUS SPEAK?

other effects of climate change that just aren’t as sexy.

But even if we’ve commodified the walrus, maybe that’s not entirely bad. The walrus clip has engaged millions of people—likely in disgust and horror—but still perhaps prompting some to realize the precarious plight of the walrus. That brings up another question: Is the only way to engage the public with an issue to find a clip so overpowering and abrasive that it has the ability to worm its way into our social consciousness? If not for the walruses and their deaths, would anyone be speaking about the sea ice at all?

And now think of us, your humble writers. Perhaps the only reason we felt this was worth making into a Week in Review was because a friend of a friend shared a two minute YouTube video. As we write our two-cents cultural critique, we fall prey to what we speak against: sensationally commodifying the death of the environment.

(The Indy writers look to each other uncomfortably.)

We are the Indy and we speak for the walruses.

Have you seen it?

Flippered mammalian behemoths, flailing as their bodies pound against jagged rocks. The creatures make a taxing journey up a precarious cliff, only to fall in a tragic miscalculation. There are hundreds of walruses, and while not all of them fall, the bodies of the ones that do—750, according to the director— pile up at the base of the cliff, bloodied and bloated.

After months of feeding on clams on the seafloor the walruses need to find a place to rest. Lack of sea ice due to warming oceans forces them to travel hundreds of miles until they’ve reach the fated cliffs.

This incident aired on Netflix’s original nature show, Our Planet. While the show is narrated and filmed in the same style as the popular docu-series Planet Earth, Our Planet sets out to highlight the destructive effects of climate change rather than just -PS, BM, RG showing polar bears cuddling. The show’s website argues that “if we act quickly, we have the knowledge and the solutions to make our planet thrive again.”

The scene has gone viral.

Inserted between shots of walruses plunging to their deaths are cuts to the scientists and film crew expressing their shock at the carnage. Dramatic music plays while the walruses fall in slow-motion. The sight of the walruses hanging on the edge of a cliff recalls an action-adventure blockbuster, complete with quick edits between the faces of bereft humans and the flailing of hopeless pinnipeds. It’s a perfect soundbite—another nugget of slickly produced climate porn. But is this twisted eco-erotica a necessary tool to bring climate justice into the public discourse? Or do we need soundbites to inspire action?

Netflix, as an entertainment company, is primarily motivated by generating profit from distributing and creating engaging media, and in doing so the multi-billion dollar streaming giant has radically changed the way people consume media. Their content targets the individuals’ specific preferences, promoting binge-worthy and easily digestible material.

So then what does it mean for Netflix to produce an environmentally conscious educational series as commercial media content?

Netflix’s commercial motivations necessarily conflict with any altruistic desire to spread the word about our warming planet.

Insofar as capitalism reduces all experiences into commodities, our empathy and will to act upon our deteriorating environment is conditioned by the prerequisite economic transaction necessary in order to watch Netflix. In other words, in order to maximize profits, Netflix sensationalizes our climate crisis, dulling our sensitivity to the

FOR KEVIN

BY Aayushi Khowala

NEWS

02

CAUGHT IN RHODE ISLAND

ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN Bethany Hung

An investigation into how court fees and fines trap low-income Rhode Islanders in poverty A "SPECIAL PROJECT" BY Sydney Anderson, Sophie Khomtchenko, Alina Kulman, and Nick Roblee-Strauss EDITED BY Harry August, Julia Rock, and Lucas Smolcic Larson DATA BY Olivia Kan-Sperling and Matt Ishimaru

When Roberto Torres appeared in District Court on February 14, 2019, and plead no contest to a reckless driving charge, he was unemployed, on food stamps, and already $1,417.32 in debt to the Rhode Island Judiciary for a litany of past violations.

This legally qualifies Torres, 27, as an indigent defendant: someone with a severely restricted ability to pay his fines and court fees. This also qualified the judge, Joseph T. Houlihan Jr., to remit—eliminate— some or all the court costs. Instead, in an arraignment that lasted only a few minutes, Houlihan Jr. sentenced Torres the maximum fine: $500. And beyond that, Torres found out after the arraignment that this sentence included an additional $142.75 in court costs and fees—bringing his current outstanding debt to $2,144.

Each month, Torres and the other 48,026 individuals in debt to the Rhode Island District Court, must submit a minimum payment to the court of $10, or as much as they can afford. On April 2, Torres paid $6.07.

At that rate, with no further convictions, Torres will still be in debt until at least 2038. And Torres knows the stakes are high: “If I can’t afford the payment, they issue a court warrant,” he told the College Hill Independent last week.

If a defendant misses a monthly payment, the court will automatically issue an arrest warrant, dragging him back before a judge, and, if that judge finds “willful nonpayment,” to jail. What’s more, the costs of this arrest warrant—$125—could be tacked on to Torres’s debt, a process he has already undergone twice in the past five years. (District Court Administrator Stephen Waluk wrote in an email to the Indy that this only occurs “after multiple incidences of appearing and being unable to pay.”)

Torres is now part of what many call a “two-tiered justice system.” In Rhode Island and across the country, the well-off easily pay court costs, dodging prison and further involvement with the legal system, while low-income defendants, disproportionately people of color, are cast headlong into a cycle of debt. Often, these individuals must choose between meeting basic expenses, like rent, and paying the courts to avoid being locked up. Within a criminal justice system that time and time again produces punitive outcomes for low-income communities, subjecting them to harsh policing and incarceration, fees and fines are a quiet but far-reaching burden.

“If we are forcing someone to choose between feeding their kid or paying their court fine and not Rhode Island’s system of court fees and fines creates going back to prison … that is a what many call a “two-tiered justice system,” where the violent choice that we have forced well-off easily pay court costs while low-income defensomeone to make,” said Jordan dants are cast into a cycle of debt, coerced by the threat of Seaberry, director of public policy incarceration. and advocacy for the Providencebased Nonviolence Institute and Rhode Island’s District and Superior Court judges are a long-time advocate for a more supposed to determine a defendant's ability to pay fees and humane justice system. fines—and can waive many courts costs at their discreIt’s a decision enforced tion—but rarely choose to do either. by coercion, he said. Studies published in 2008 and 2016 The state led the nation with a fees and fines reform bill in showed nonpayment (technically, 2008, but 10 years later, the courts struggle to recover even half of the $50 million in court costs still outstanding from more than 48,000 defendants, five percent of Rhode Island.

KEY FINDINGS

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COURT DEBT

a failure to appear at a payment date) is a leading cause of incarceration in Rhode Island, accounting for 15.5 percent of all commitments in 2015. Officially, debtor’s prison was abolished by the federal government in 1833, and the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution protects against excessive monetary sanctions. But for people who pass through Rhode Island’s state courts, debt can be all-consuming, deepening poverty, damaging employment prospects, and threatening the ability to hold a driver’s license.

Taking stock of this system, the Indy decided to document what is happening every day in our state’s courts. Our nine-person investigative team spent many hours in the courtroom, interviewed lawyers, advocates, and defendants, and compiled a year’s worth of the Judiciary’s online court payment records.

Over three months, we observed over 100 arraignments and 11 sentencings involving the imposition of fees and fines at the Sixth District courthouse in Providence. We documented little to no efforts by judges to assess low-income defendants’ ability to pay these sums, as is required by state law. (In a handful of cases, judges waived court costs, imposed on top of a fine, at the request of a public defender.) And remittances must happen from the bench: Clerks, who actually handle the money, said they could easily put someone on an installment plan of just a few dollars a month but couldn’t waive costs themselves.

Data we obtained by public records request from the Rhode Island Judiciary show that just over half of all court fees and fines imposed in criminal cases in Superior Court and nearly 20 percent imposed in District Court—some $50 million in total—are outstanding, as of last year. In Fiscal Year 2018, Superior Court collected only eight percent of court costs assessed that year in criminal cases, while the District Court’s first-year collection rate was just 24 percent. This indicates that defendants are overwhelmingly unable to pay their court costs.

Furthermore, judges are ignoring state laws on the books that empower them to end the cycle of debt.

According to our analysis of online payment data for over 28,000 separate cases in 2018 (85.8 percent of criminal cases filed in District and Superior Court that year), when people are brought before a judge for an “ability-to-pay hearing," costs are remitted just 0.35 percent of the time—only 25 of 7,160 hearings in 2018 resulted in debts being lowered.

These numbers paint a picture of a court system hell-bent on trying to “squeeze blood from a stone, to wring these costs out of people who simply cannot pay them,” in the words of Natalia Friedlander, a staff attorney at the Rhode Island Center for Justice. How did we get to this point? And what needs to change? We asked these questions of everyone we talked to, from defendants to defense lawyers. Their answers indicate that Rhode Island’s situation is far from inevitable and definitely not irreversible. It’s the story of squandered reform, where an undergraduate thesis from 2016 stands as one of the only thorough accounts of how fees and fines excessively punish the poor in Rhode Island. Three years later, our investigation shows this is still a reality.

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CAUGHT IN RHODE ISLAND

Dollar amount

Average amount assessed Average outstanding debt Average median payment $134.61 assessed on average

$102.13 outstanding debt on average

$23.50 median payment on average

Misdemeanor 12,432 cases

Felony

Civil Violation

8,961 cases

6,589 cases

Case type

When people are brought before a judge for an “ability-to-pay hearing,” costs are remitted just 0.35% of the time—only 25 of 7,160 hearings in 2018 resulted in debts being lowered.

Total amount outstanding from criminal cases in District and Superior Court

$50,616,042

Fiscal Year 2018 collection rate for costs assessed during that period District Court

(Source: RI Judiciary's online court records)

23.84% 8.07%

Superior Court Data Explanation We used several sources of data to report this story. Breakdowns on ability-to-pay hearings, transaction amounts, where cases were filed, and types of charges for 2018 were extracted from the Rhode Island Judiciary Public Portal using a web-scraping program built for this project. This program used the web-browser automation tool Selenium to input case numbers taken from a list of all criminal cases filed at the District and Superior court level. (This list was obtained by public records request from the Judiciary by Megan Smith and shared with us; it is linked in the online version of this article). Our program then retrieved the corresponding case file publicly available through the portal and downloaded relevant information to a local database. Of the 32,756 individual case numbers for 2018, we were able to retrieve 28,088 records (85.8 percent).

Somes cases were missing from the portal, though an unknown percentage of failures were due to requests being blocked by the server—likely because of the high volume of requests being made.

We attempted to minimize this latter case by running our program on the failure IDs until the process no longer yielded significant returns. We used this database to create the above data visualization for 2018.

We also obtained data describing how much money is owed, or currently outstanding, for fees and fines related to criminal cases for each branch of the courts, broken down by fiscal year. This information came from a public information request made by the national Fees and Fines Justice Center to the Rhode Island Judiciary.

You can access all our data and the web-scraping script via the online page for this article, available at www.theindy.org.

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(Source: RI Judiciary)

48,027

Individuals currently with balances owed to District Court

4.5%

of RI's population COURT DEBT

04

CAUGHT IN RHODE ISLAND

order in the courtroom. Each case, from the description of the alleged crime to the plea Each weekday morning, the same scene repeats itself and sentencing, takes only a few minutes. inside the Garrahy Judicial Complex, the imposing red-brick home of the Sixth District Court in down+++ town Providence. After shedding belts and watches to pass through the metal detectors at the door (a pile Rhode Island law instructs judges to consider of contraband pocket knives tends to develop under a a defendant's finances. Section 12-21-20 shrub outside the main doors), people mill about the reads, “In district court, the judge shall fourth floor, outside Courtroom 4C. There are lawyers make a preliminary assessment of the defenin dark suits, police officers in uniform, and friends and dant’s ability to pay [fees and fines] immedifamily of defendants in street clothes. Arraignments ately after sentencing or nearly thereafter….” are scheduled to start at 9 AM, although the hearings Whether this happens in practice seems to are often delayed for half an hour or more. be entirely at the whim of whichever judge is When the doors are unlocked, a small crowd presiding that day. files into the rows in the back half of the room. A low Angela Lawless, a former public defender wooden barrier cuts the room in half, separating in district courtrooms in Providence and observers from the bench. Defendants who have been Newport, has represented many people with held overnight in Rhode Island’s Adult Correctional histories of repeated legal involvement—and Institute (ACI) are then brought in through a side door years of accumulated debt. “There’s a decent by police officers, walking slowly to the jury box, as number of judges on the District Court bench they are handcuffed and chained to each other in pairs. who are amenable to listening to what your Other people charged with minor offenses, like driving client’s circumstances are and potentially on a suspended license, sit in the rows, waiting for their remitting or waiving court costs,” she said. names to be called.

Based on our observation, some judges Before long, one of the police officers in the court- are more willing to negotiate than others. room rolls out an enormous cathode-ray television set The same day Judge Houlihan gave Roberto that plays a grainy VHS tape narrated by District Court Torres the maximum fine, he waived the Judge Robert Pirraglia, who retired 15 years ago. As court fees for a defendant charged with ’90s-style animations show the scales of justice and driving with a suspended license, on the wooden gavels, Pirraglia begins to explain: “Anyone basis that he found the defendant's car model, charged with an offense has certain legal rights. Here a Toyota Corolla, “so sad.” (The Judiciary they are....” He outlines the different types of offenses did not respond to a request for comment in defendants may be charged with, the different types of response to his statement.) Cases likes these bail, and, most importantly, their constitutional rights show the arbitrary nature of waving court in the courtroom. Then, the video repeats in Spanish— fees and fines, which often seems to be as not that the courtroom’s occupants are necessarily reliant on the judge’s whim, or the presence of a public in full at the time of sentencing (which District Court paying attention to the tape. Defendants are still filing defender, as it is on the defendant’s actual ability to pay. Clerk Jim Plante estimated to be the reality for about in, and many are not even present at this point, missing But time and again, we observed defendants half of all defendants), they are put on a payment the opportunity to hear a clear, albeit dated, explana- accept fines with no inquiry into their ability to pay plan. Month after month, they have to make small tion of their legal rights. them, no elaboration of what fees would be attached payments towards their debt, at the court, or online if The video outlines defendants’ right to legal to the fine, and no discussion of the possible conse- the case is in District Court (plus a 3.25 percent credit counsel. Nationally, 80 percent of criminal defen- quences of nonpayment (notably, incarceration). card surcharge). A defendant who repeatedly misses dants can’t afford a lawyer. But many days, there are Lawless said that costs are “really only discussed if the a payment date has a bench warrant put out for their no public defenders at arraignments in District Court, defense attorney brings [them] up and asks for [them] arrest for “failure to appear.” They aren’t notified when as they often have to prioritize cases that are going to to be waived” during sentencing. this happens, but once a bench warrant is issued, any trial. They are, like public defenders everywhere in the After a defendant pleads guilty or nolo contendere police encounter, even without an offense, can result country, incredibly overworked. A 2017 study of work- at the initial hearing, they go to the clerk’s desk, where in an arrest and commitment to the Intake Service loads in the Rhode Island Public Defender’s Office they are assigned a fee, which is a user cost the courts Center at Rhode Island’s ACI. found that it would need approximately 85 additional charge defendants on top of any fines they receive for Ronnie Walker, 53, has been on a payment plan full-time attorneys to fully attend to its nearly 300,000 breaking the law. Ideally, a public defender should be of $10 per month for the past year. When we spoke to hours of work per year. So if defendants plead guilty or present to help them understand what the fees mean him in the Sixth District Court clerk’s office, he said he nolo contendere, meaning they agree not to contest and how payment will work, but this depends on the had six or seven months remaining to pay off his debt. their charge, judges guide the whole arraignment, and availability of the Public Defender's Office on any “[You] just gotta pay to keep warrants and police out of defendants are forced to navigate negotiations over given day. your hair, because if they pick you up on a Friday [for their court fines and fees on their own.

Court fees are minor compared to a large fine or nonpayment], you’re locked up for the weekend,” he And so they do. All morning, judges call out the long probation, but they are frequently a huge hidden said (2008 reforms mandated a 48 hour cap on imprisaccused by name and birthdate, summoning them to cost—sometimes adding hundreds of dollars in extra onment before defendants are brought before a judge, the bench. There, the judge reads out charges. Rhode debt. Take driving under the influence, for example. with exceptions for weekends and holidays).

Island is one of about 14 states in the nation that let The fine for a first violation is set at $100 or greater. But For others, small debts compound into insurpolice officers serve as prosecutors in district court. on top of that fine, a $500 “Highway Assessment Fee” mountable obligations. “It’s a fear that lives inside (Two local legal experts, Roger Williams law profes- is added, which goes into the state’s general fund, just you,” said Tarah Dorsey, a senior streetworker at the sors Andy Horwitz and John Grasso, maintain that like a fine, as well as an $86 court fee. Thus, the total Nonviolence Institute who has been in debt to the this is illegal since cops are not licensed to practice law. sum owed is more than six times as much as minimum Rhode Island Judiciary since her first court appearThey wrote in a 2006 article in the Rhode Island Bar the fine alone. In addition, defendants have to pay ance in 1996. For 23 years, court debt has been another Journal that police prosecutors practically make Rhode hundreds of dollars more on a driver's education class anxiety on top of “the problems of not being able to get Island an “unsupervised police state.”) and license reinstatement costs. Over the course of our a job because of my [criminal] record, problems of not Cops cycle in and out of the courtroom, reading time in court, the Indy observed two first-time DUI being able to keep the lights on, or pay my rent,” she from police reports: domestic disputes, traffic stops, pre-trial hearings, and on both occasions the judge, said. assaults. Defendants are instructed to listen quietly, Associate Judge Christopher Smith, only mentioned While jail is one of the most serious consequences as the police prosecutors outline the alleged crimes. the $100 fine during the hearing—leaving the defen- of nonpayment, it isn’t the only one. Rhode Islanders Then the judge asks how they choose to plea. If a defen- dant to discover the additional hundreds of dollars in can lose their driver’s license if their court costs go dant chooses guilty or nolo contendere—and many do, costs after pleading guilty or no contest. unpaid. As of April 15, 2019, the Rhode Island Division forfeiting their right to a trial in favor of a plea deal and of Motor Vehicles (DMV) reported a total of 28,528 quicker resolution of their charges—fines are assessed +++ drivers (3.7 percent of the state’s licensed and permitted according to statute. The process is a finely-tuned drivers) with unresolved license suspensions as a machine, with a handful of bailiffs channeling defen- Fees and fines together comprise the debt an indi- result of failure to pay or appear in court. Licenses are dants to the bench and disciplining those who disrupt vidual owes to the court, and if they are unable to pay suspended for a failure to make court payments in the

A Day in Court

05

COURT DEBT

19 APRIL 2019

CAUGHT IN RHODE ISLAND

cases heard by the Rhode Island Traffic Tribunal and for a variety of driving-related offenses, like DUIs, in District and Superior Court. If a defendant continues to use their car—a daily necessity for many—charges of driving with a suspended license bring a whole new round of fees, fines, and court obligations they must meet in order to get their license reinstated.

Marcy Coleman, assistant administrator for safety and regulations at the Rhode Island Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV), advocates for a move away from using suspensions as a punitive measure in non-driving related offenses, like nonpayment. She observes a “downward spiral” of suspensions in cases where people are unable to pay court costs. “We have horrible public transportation,” she said, “a person needs their license here in Rhode Island to get to and from work.”

Each court-ordered suspension incurs an additional $151.50 fee to the DMV, on top of the requirement of paying off outstanding court debt or going on a payment plan, to reinstate a license.

Legislation passed in 2016 reduced penalties on the first two offenses for driving without a license, categorizing them as civil offenses rather than misdemeanors, lowering fines, and eliminating criminal charges. After the first two charges, the offense becomes a misdemeanor, with higher fines and the added potential of jail time in addition to further license suspension (we observed many defendants with six or more driving on a suspended license charges). Coleman reports this shift meant a significant reduction in suspensions. In 2018, out of 7,097 people convicted of driving with a suspended license, only 16 received an additional suspension as a result of these new charges, she said.

These changes came too late for Tarah Dorsey. She was unable to hold a valid license for most of her life, buried under her debt to the courts. But two years ago, at age 39, she finally got one. The total costs involved, to the courts and the DMV: $1,800.

How We Got Here The Rhode Island legislature has been increasing the use of fees and fines as a punitive measure since toughon-crime rhetoric became popular in the ’80s and ’90s. “As mass incarceration grew and criminal justice agency budgets exploded, state and local politicians were either unable or unwilling to fund those agencies through public revenue, so fees being regressive taxes [were] sort of a politically easier imposition,” Jonathan Ben-Menachem, policy and communications associate at the national Fines and Fees Justice Center, told the Indy. A combination of anti-crime and anti-tax rhetoric encouraged politicians to pass what were essentially taxes on the poor to raise revenue.

Since then, court fees and fines have become a broader means of funding state governments. In her 2015 Brown University undergraduate thesis—the most recent comprehensive report on fees and fines in Rhode Island—Rachel Black tracked the way legislation was amended to redirect specific fees into the state’s general fund, while maintaining their original names. (A $100 “lab maintenance fee,” still tacked onto drug possession charges, no longer goes directly to any lab.)

Court costs add up. In 2007, Ricardo Graham spent 40 days in prison as a result of his inability to pay court debts amounting to $745, at an estimated cost

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

to the state of $4,000 for his time at the ACI. Graham found himself subject to Rhode Island’s debt collection system: warrants and imprisonment for those who miss payment dates, even when the cost to the state far outweighs the debt it is owed. He lost his job while behind bars.

Advocacy by OpenDoors RI (then the Family Life Center) and other organizations brought public attention to the problem of court debt collection. In 2008, the Family Life Center published a lengthy report revealing that failure to pay court debt (or appear at a payment date) was the most common reason for imprisonment in Rhode Island, accounting for 17 percent of all jailings. In 15 percent of all cases, the amount the state spent incarcerating people was more than the amount they owed to the court.

Judges, who were supposed to consider ability to pay in assessing court costs, typically did not, as a result of merely suggestive statutes and large caseloads that limited time they could dedicate to individual defendants. (Indy reporters witnessed a judge in the Sixth District court with 65 arraignments on his docket on one day in April.) It’s not exactly clear why judges weren’t prioritizing an ability-to-pay determination in assessing these fines, but Rachel Black, in an interview with the Indy, said “at the time [in 2008], at least, the Judiciary didn’t seem to think it was their problem.”

The lack of financial assessment tools for judges and statutory protections for indigent defendants made it difficult to get out of a courtroom without being sentenced to some amount of court costs—a minimum of $93.50 in fees for misdemeanor charges and $270 for felonies, a statute that still stands. Based on decades of experience with court debt, Dorsey said that she learned early on to expect being penalized with fees in any interaction with the courts, even just setting foot in the courtroom (she plead out most of her charges).

The under-resourced state, dependent on funds raised through the courts, began to act as a collection agency. By issuing warrants for “failure to appear” at a payment date, rather than “failure to pay,” Rhode Island was able to skirt a 1971 Supreme Court ruling that prohibited states from incarcerating those unable to pay court debts, and requiring that judges must inquire about a person’s ability to pay and consider alternatives before incarceration.

2008: A First Attempt at Reform In response to attention generated from the Family Life Center report, the Rhode Island legislature passed a bill in 2008 that, at the time, led the nation in court fee and fine reform. The legislation aimed to protect low-income debtors from punitive debt collection systems managed by the state and reduce the number of people in jail for court debt. Seven years later, however, Rachel Black published her thesis, in which she found that the law, Senate Bill 2234, yielded only moderate results due to weak implementation.

The bill restricted the amount of time debtors spent in prison, limiting debtor incarceration to a maximum of 48 hours before seeing a judge for an ability-to-pay assessment. It also required that debtors arrested during court hours be taken to court immediately. This stipulation was the strictest and most measurable part

of the bill, and Black found in her 2016 research that these stipulations were being enforced. But, according to her thesis, debtors still represent a large portion of the incarcerated population.

The rest of the bill required judges to consider “ability to pay” when assessing court debts, but did not require them to remit any costs if they found a defendant indigent. Despite its weaknesses, the bill marked the first time that Rhode Island judges were explicitly empowered to waive an indigent defendant’s court costs. The bill stipulated that judges use a “financial assessment instrument,” specifying what counts as evidence of indigency, including receiving many forms of public assistance.

Apparently, encouragement to assess indigency was not enough. Black found in 2016 that, in practice, ability-to-pay assessments happened sporadically at best, and only around three percent of jailed debtors had all costs waived—a tiny fraction of the debtor inmates who were unemployed and likely should have qualified for cost abatement.

Still, the reforms set the stage for incremental change. A coordinating law, passed simultaneously, incentivized the Judiciary to reduce jail time for debtors by crediting $150 towards court debts for each night they spent in jail, later reduced in 2012 to $50 per night. Research by OpenDoors RI found that the credit system immediately reduced the amount of time people were spending in jail on court debt-related charges. Despite its success, the measure essentially amounted to massive spending by the state to alleviate small debts it was never likely to collect.

In an interview, Jordan Seaberry of the Nonviolence Institute highlighted the “need for the law to state clearly and directly that our courts must meaningfully assess a defendant’s ability to pay in a standardized, comprehensive, and good-faith way.”

“The tools are there,” he told the Indy, “but the responsibility is ours.”

2019: Court Costs Return to the State House Much of the national conversation around court costs can be exemplified by an exchange in the Rhode Island State House this past February. On a busy day before the House Judiciary Committee, Nick Horton, who also worked on the 2008 legislation, testified in support of a new law, House Bill 5196, which brings the failed 2008 reforms back into focus. He said that the legislation would “maximize [both] the cost effectiveness of the [criminal justice] system and the rights of the indigent defendants.”

The new bill seeks to enforce the requirement that judges routinely take ability to pay into account and makes qualifying for the services of a public defender— being unable to afford a private lawyer—legal evidence of indigency. Significantly, it provides that “no costs shall be ordered unless procedures for determining ability to pay are followed.” House Bill 5196 has found supporters in Rhode Island who have long championed the poor and worked with the legislature on various criminal justice reforms, from community organizers to the Public Defender’s Office.

At the February hearing, proponents testified to the inefficacy of the 2008 reforms, demonstrating that stronger steps must be taken if the courts' cost assessment system is going to change. Before the Committee, Director of Legislative Initiatives for the Public Defender’s Office Michael DiLauro said that of the 150 lawyers that he reached out to, only one reported ever seeing a judge use the ability-to-pay instrument. (The instrument exists as a one-page form on the Judiciary’s website, but we never saw it in the courtroom. The defendants we talked to didn’t recognize it when we showed it to them.)

Jordan Seaberry, a driving force behind the new bill, implored the legislature and the Judiciary to take a human-centered approach to debt. “When we are talking about this bill we are not just talking about the experience of the Judiciary or the process of being in the courtroom, we’re talking about actual lives. We’re talking about human beings, who impact their families and their communities,” he said.

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CAUGHT IN RHODE ISLAND

The Judiciary’s lobbyist, Elizabeth Suever, responded to Seaberry’s call to humanize debtors with her own call for criminalization, telling the committee, “we’re not talking about innocent until proven guilty, these people are proven guilty.” She added, “We’re now talking about these people paying restitution to people that were harmed, paying for the costs, paying for all these other things … we’re not talking about innocent people anymore.” (Others who testified emphasized that the bill would not affect victims' restitution).

Suever claimed that the bill would exempt far too many people from having to pay fees and fines to the court, pointing out the necessity of these payments in generating the state’s general revenue. “We do want to make sure that if they have any capability whatsoever that they do pay … that’s important to the maintenance of the system, that’s important to keeping taxes low, so everyone doesn’t have to pay for the system,” she said, gesturing towards anti-tax rhetoric reminiscent of the tough on crime moment of the ’90s.

When a committee member asked Suever if she would be able to provide statistical evidence that ability-to-pay assessments are being conducted on a regular basis, she responded, “Maybe? I’ll look into it. I can’t make any promises.” A spokesperson for the Judiciary did not respond to the Indy’s questions about whether financial assessments are conducted on a regular basis.

Ultimately, the hearing spoke to an uncommunicative system that has evolved out of years of piecemeal legislation in which numbers, figures, and spending are poorly tracked—a system held accountable only by watchdogs on the outside.

While there is hope that the bill will reduce the burden on low-income people sentenced to onerous court debt, Ben-Menachem from the Fees and Fines Center told the Indy that “reforms tend to last longer or be implemented more robustly if they happen through litigation because that’s the courts recognizing their obligation.”

It’s one thing for the legislature to make laws instituting fees and fines in a courtroom—a power exerted on defendants—but it’s fundamentally more difficult for the legislature to tell judges what to do on the bench.

In Rhode Island, judges and clerks conduct business as they always have, in a system separate from and parallel to the legislature. According to Rachel Black, “[judges and clerks] weren’t surprised nor did they have any problem telling me what’s happening right now because they didn’t see it as being illegal or problematic.”

A Nation of Cash Register Justice

Judicial action on court debt may not be far away. A recent Harvard Law Review article argued that Rhode Island’s ban on debtor’s prison covers incarceration for nonpayment of fines for regulatory offenses, costs, and civil debts because the state constitution does not distinguish between private debts and those owed to the state.

This February, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the Supreme Court’s decision in Timbs v. Indiana, which

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mandated the application of the constitutional prohibition on excessive fees and fines to the states, tracing the issue back eight centuries. The Magna Carta, Ginsberg wrote, required that “economic sanctions ‘be proportioned to the wrong’ and ‘not be so large as to deprive [an offender] of his livelihood.’” These protections were enshrined in English law, adopted in the American colonies, and finally written into the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution, which states: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

But Ginsburg also recognized a centuries-long practice of casting these lofty legal protections aside.

The 17th century Stuart kings used “large fines to raise revenue, harass their political foes, and indefinitely detain those unable to pay,” she wrote. After the US Civil War, states in the South weaponized fines against newly freed slaves. The “Black Codes” employed broadly-defined crimes (“vagrancy,” for example) and draconian fines to force African Americans back into involuntary labor when they could not pay these penalties.

Today, advocates refer to a system of “cash register justice” that “target[s] poor citizens and communities of color for fines and fees,” according to a 2017 report by the US Commission on Civil Rights. As Megan Smith, a longtime caseworker for homeless people in Rhode Island said about court costs: “Fines and fees are definitely one of those things that are implicitly, if not explicitly, classed. They just fundamentally don’t affect rich and poor people the same way.” To her, “it definitely feels like one more way that the system has its thumb on certain people that it doesn’t like and that it wishes would disappear.”

Where We Go From Here

The debate around court debt extends beyond Rhode Island, and national conversations about reform have ramped up over the past few years. The National Task Force on Fines, Fees and Bail Practices, for example, released a set of principles with which each state should assess their own judicial systems. Among these are key recommendations: provide court funding in its entirety through state government funds, standardize statewide ability-to-pay processes, and abolish interest on court-related debts. But many of these reforms place an emphasis on altering the particulars of court debt rather than changing the underlying reality that fees and fines act as a hidden tax on the poor.

One such reform is alternative payment. In April 2018, a criminal justice reform bill, signed by Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, implemented community service as one such alternative to court costs. The bill also ups the amount people are credited towards their debt for time in prison to $90 a day.

However, the legislation still relies on judges determining “substantial financial hardship” for alternative payments to even be considered. And mandatory community service still limits the poor from working, attending school, and caring for children.

While Governor Baker portrayed the law as relief for court debtors, it doesn't gaurantee that judges will assess their ability to pay, or that alternative payment methods will be implemented more

widely.

San Francisco, heralded as a leader in court debt reform, has attacked the issue more directly. In 2016, the city launched the Financial Justice Project, a branch of the city treasurer’s office aimed at auditing local fees and fines’ effect on the poor. Its first success came in May 2018 with the abolition of all locally-controlled criminal justice administration fees, including a monthly probation fee that had had a collection rate of just nine percent. Getting rid of this fee eliminated $32.7 million of outstanding debt overnight.

Additionally, the project created a lower fee for towed and booted cars for those with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty line. The project created a database of low-income residents, so court officials could assess their incomes without the need for paperwork and documentation filed by the arraigned. The project eases court debt for many defendants, yet it fails to standardize ability-to-pay hearings. If judges’ discretion does not act in service of the poor and in conjunction with these programs, the poorest residents will still end up in debt to the court, even for reduced (often halved) fines. For many arraigned San Franciscans— and Rhode Islanders—any fine at all is enough to disrupt their ability to meet basic needs and place them on the precipice of destitution.

Outside the US, Germany offers an even more innovative approach to equalizing criminal justice.

Rather than assigning a flat fine for a misdemeanor, like in the US, courts scale fines in proportion to one’s daily income. In Germany, the cost of a misdemeanor is not measured by the ‘cost to society,’ but rather by whatever is considered an appropriate inhibitive penalty on a specific person. After all, traffic violations are committed across class lines.

In the United States, a justice system without punitive fees and fines is, at this point, still beyond reach.

The fees—intended to cover administrative processes— could be replaced with funding from states’ revenue.

Fines, however, are meant to serve a separate function: inhibiting future crimes through fiscal punishment.

But, in practice, these penalties fail to deter criminal behavior and, in doing so, define poverty in criminal terms. +++ On Monday, the same scene will repeat itself again at the Garrahy Judicial Complex: People mill about waiting for court to open, bailiffs prowl the aisles as the VHS tape rolls, judges call names, clerks hand off stacks of papers, and the defendant approaches the bench.

Plea agreements are taken. Fines are levied. Fees are assessed. And more Rhode Islanders enter payment plans, adding to the millions in statewide court debt.

To Jordan Seaberry, this debt can be an unspoken life sentence. “We never hear a judge sentence someone ... to a lifetime of economic servitude, but that's the reality.”

SYDNEY ANDERSON B’19, HARRY AUGUST B’19, MATT ISHIMARU B’20, OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING B’20, SOPHIE KHOMTCHENKO B’21, ALINA KULMAN B’21, NICK ROBLEE-STRAUSS B’22, JULIA ROCK B’19, AND LUCAS SMOLCIC LARSON B’19 hid their pocket knives in the shrub outside the courthouse.

19 APRIL 2019

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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DAYS OF OUR LIVES

BY Will Weatherly ILLUSTRATION Nicole Cochary DESIGN Amos Jackson

On soap operas and suffering

Like the plot of any good melodrama, my relationship to The Bold and the Beautiful was a matter of fate, and a part of my life before I was even born. A little over 30 years ago, my mother was working alongside my grandmother at a gift shop in Illinois, when my mother realized that my grandmother kept disappearing from work every day at the same time and without a word of explanation. After a few such absences, my mother confronted her. My grandmother admitted, a little sheepishly, that she had been sucked into the soap opera on one of her lunch breaks and couldn’t stop watching.

Years later, when my mother was put on bedrest during her high-risk pregnancy with me and my brother, she and my grandmother would call each other after the end of each episode, ostensibly to hash out the plot, but really to provide each other with a bit of company. She tells me that, after I was born, my head would swivel towards the screen whenever I heard the show’s theme song, a cascade of schmaltzy saxophones and strings. There, I became the third generation enraptured by the B&B’s sexy escapades every weekday afternoon.

This couldn’t have been good for my pliable baby brain. The premise of the B&B is, essentially, a few families in the Los Angeles fashion scene doing terrible things to each other and to themselves. For 18 years I watched its characters fake their deaths, steal each others’ spouses, sleep together, sleep together on desert islands due to tropical aphrodisiacs, throw EDM masquerade parties where they sleep with their children’s partners, stab each other with cocktail swords, and kill each other with snakes and poisonous lemon bars.

I watched the show with my mother, jeering at it next to her on the couch for 18 years. We would often eat dinner with the TV on, offering each other more commentary on the show than on whatever had happened in our days. Our phone calls with my grandmother after the final credits had rolled sometimes lasted hours into the evening. “Do you think Brooke and Ridge are ever going to get out of that bed?” my mother would laugh into the phone. “You’d think they’d need to reapply makeup by now,” I could hear my grandmother respond via the tinny sound from the phone’s speaker. For the three of us, the show was a bit of shared excitement, and something easier to laugh at than the tiring banalities of our lives.

I kept watching with my mom until I left home and lost my cable access. Subtract two days from the seven in a week, multiply that by 22 minutes a day, multiply that by 52 weeks in a year, multiply that by 18 years, you get 102,960 minutes, or 1,716 hours, or a little over 1 percent of my life. If the trend continued and I lived to be 100 years old, I would have spent a year watching bronzed television stars make out.

As I got older, I started to wonder whether the show wasn’t just bad, but bad for us. I went off to college and learned all sorts of ways to criticize TV shows, which isn’t hard for a show that comes apart in your hands.

The B&B trades in the most egregious sexist stereotypes, the most vapid displays of LA wealth, and the most obvious sidelining of any character who isn’t white. Growing into my own queerness, I became more sensitive, too, to how relentlessly heterosexual the B&B is; in a show that’s all about romance, the only queer characters I can remember are a pair of chiding lesbian aunts. Devoting so much of my consciousness

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to straight people in heat began to feel less like a guilty pleasure and more like self-annihilation.

And yet, for every part of me that wants to rip apart the B&B—and thinks that would be a worthwhile political project, for myself and others—there’s a part of me that doesn’t. My mother is no dupe; she can see these problems too. After I came out to her, she started to invite the possibility of picking apart the B&B as secretly sort of queer, for my sake. We laughed at the way that kisses between some couples resembled what happens when a small child smashes Barbie’s and Ken’s faces together, or how the show’s male star tells women sweet nothings like a high school production of Romeo and Juliet, batting his pretty eyelashes to sell the line.

But for my mother, the B&B has also been a lifeline: a way to keep in touch with family thousands of miles away, and, when thinking about her life becomes too stressful or painful, a way to spend 22 minutes every day with something that doesn’t require much thought at all. That these 22 minutes might be filled with patriarchal/capitalist/moronic ideology is one thing, but their importance to me and my mom, if only in terms of the sheer amount of our lives spent watching, is quite another. What we might need, then, is not a critique, but a reckoning: what has become of our lives, eked out at the pace of daytime television? +++ Within the massive body of scholarship loosely called media studies, it is strangely difficult to find one vocabulary that could define the effects of regularly watching awful TV. Our dependence on the B&B might be a case of what the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” or “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object.” She doesn’t mean “problematic” in the millennial, politically-aware vernacular—though the B&B is certainly that—but rather a kind of object that actively works against your better interests, whether you know it or not. Cruel optimism can be anything from an unhealthy investment in a shitty job to dreams of ‘the good life’ that may never materialize. Here it might be an attachment to the reliable pleasure afforded by a TV show that fills your life with images of the most reprehensible people in Los Angeles. (There is, in fact, one ‘therapist’ on the show, but it seems far-fetched that she could offer any of the characters advice on how to live less dramatic lives, seeing that her storyline leads her to cryogenically freeze herself after running someone over with her car.)

Since the ’70s, some feminist film critics have led a long and storied campaign against such pleasure, analyzing how media objects are formally constructed to mark women as spectacles to be looked at and manipulated, and to make you implicitly identify with male characters who take pleasure in looking and manipulating. One such polemic, from Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” is held dear by film students across the country (including myself). “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article,” Mulvey writes, aiming for “a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film.”

That essay coined the now-ubiquitous term “male gaze,” arguing that traditional narrative film, through techniques such as camera placement, editing between

shots, and out-of-nowhere dancing routines, construct women as passive and “to-be-looked-at,” and men as both the the audience and directors of this female spectacle. Essential to Mulvey’s point was that these films elicited this objectifying gaze from both women and men; this is certainly true of soap operas, which, ever since their inception as serial radio broadcasts, have almost always been marketed and addressed to women.

Much of the B&B centers around women being fawned over; a few years ago, it tried out a storyline about women’s empowerment, which led to one of the on-show fashion companies starting a lingerie line called “Hope for the Future.” But as much as soaps fixate on sexy spectacles, they also work to construct feminized gazes, not just male ones. The first radio serials, first broadcast in the ’20s, were in part advertisements for literal soap; the implication was that their audiences were largely housewives, looking for products to lighten their load. For decades after, soap operas were broadcast at a timeslot designed specifically for women living domestic lives—the middle of the afternoon, when everyone else was off at work.

You could thus reasonably attack women’s media for characterizing women as at home in the home, laboring and spending to uphold post-war family values for a country that simultaneousy excluded them from the political sphere. But there were some critics who wondered if women, going to the movies to watch narratives that spoke to their lives, were only passive recipients of patriarchal ideology. Figures such as Berlant and Linda Williams proposed a sort of recuperative reading of genres such as melodrama films and soap operas, positing their viewers not as unthinking victims of political manipulation, but as women looking to media to find ways to make sense of the pain of being a (mostly white and middle-class) woman in the mid-to-late 20th century. Was there a way that women’s media represented women’s social labor and exclusion, not to promote this state of affairs, but to critique it?

One of the places critics found this form of subversion was in the work of Douglas Sirk, a German émigré who came to America during the rise of the Third Reich and began making some of the most famous American films of the ’50s, with wonderfully flowery titles like Imitation of Life and Written on the Wind. Sirk was well versed in the avant garde techniques used by German Expressionist dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, who presented life as farcical and strange in order to rouse their audiences for political action. Adapting his approach for the genre of melodrama popular among mid-century American women, Sirk translated Brechtian absurdity into a wry sense of camp, suffusing his films with an emotional intensity that verges on the obscene. His female characters wander their claustrophobic (but beautiful) homes as if in a dream; each piece of décor looms with untold emotional significance, as if a curtain blowing in the wind could speak the depths of their despair. These women are trapped, not only in their homes, but with their thoughts. There they wait, usually for terrible things to happen to them: miscarriages, murder, abandonment. “The world is closed, and the characters are acted on,” film historian Thomas Elsaesser writes of melodramas like Sirk’s.

“The progressive self-immolation and disillusionment generally ends in resignation: they emerge as lesser human beings for having become wise and acquiescent

19 APRIL 2019

to the world.” Somehow, after living through disasters that are achingly sentimental, Sirk’s women discover something that isn’t sentimental at all: their inability to escape conditions over which they have no control.

This hopeless conclusion means that these melodramatic women are, by definition, passive. But by analyzing how directors like Sirk staged female characters in forms of extreme abjection (victims not only of terrible circumstances, but also of their own powerlessness to stop them), critics pursued the glimmer of hope that the women watching them could begin to critique their own station as abject too. Melodrama’s entire raison d’être was to, by the saddest means available, practically force you to cry. But in doing so, the genre also took the most painful aspects of its female audiences’ lives—their relegation to the home, their lack of political and social agency—and displayed them in living color. +++ I am drawn to this sympathetic reading of the melodramatic, if only because my mom often feels powerless too. Over 30 years after working alongside my grandmother, she still works at a gift shop, now at a small children’s museum. The job, which often entails hours of standing on a bad ankle punctuated by occasional eruptions of the kids’ bodily fluids, can be grueling.

The B&B, once only available to those who were home during the middle of the afternoon, now sits waiting on her DVR for when she gets back from work. Large swaths of my childhood were spent with the TV as the only noise in the house. After a day filled with screaming children, my mother was often too tired to talk much. She called the duration of the show “her moment of peace.”

There is, however, one important difference between earlier melodramas and the B&B. Sirk’s movies, as much as they were kitschy, were also impeccably made; their sheer stylishness was what allowed critics to read sorrow in its lavish settings. The B&B, however, is nothing of the sort. The acting isn’t just wooden, it’s fossilized, as if the casting crew discovered a few vaguely attractive people buried deep in the La Brea Tar Pit and put them in front of a camera.

The plot, too, moves at the pace of geological time.

Characters have sex for weeks. The rest of the time, they sit around talking, rehashing the same verklempt conversations over and over until someone dies or there’s a Christmas party.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

More than merely being terrible, this is the formal quality of soap operas which sets them apart from melodramas, or any other genre for that matter: they never end. Just as generations of my family have grown up with the B&B, my mother and I have watched the rise and demise of multiple generations of its characters, a cycle of cycle of births and deaths, marriages and bitter divorces, affairs and heartbreak. Any other show is measured by episodes and seasons, but I can only think of the B&B in terms of years and decades.

The show was there before I was born and—if CBS never pulls the plug—the plot could hypothetically march on after I die. The timescale of a soap opera is, in this respect, also the timescale of a life.

Because of this, soap operas allow you to pattern your life by their rhythm. (To this day, my grandmother will not leave the house until after the B&B’s 1:30 time slot.) The show is more reliable than a pet or a day job: there’s always a cliffhanger on Friday and a development on Monday, a constant stream of events that in fact never changes. I think my mother likes this rote novelty. She is lulled by the idea that, on any given day, she could turn on the show and feel like something new is happening. And after the next shitty day at the museum, exactly the same as the last, the excitement will be there just like the day before.

There is more than a touch of the melodramatic in the notion that soap operas are about, quite literally, endless suffering. No sooner is a child born than it’s killed in a horrific jacuzzi accident; no sooner does a character make amends with his mother than she goes and shoots somebody again. Disaster strikes, and yet none of the characters get any wiser, life never gets better, and the next episode always has more pain in store. This is ridiculous, of course, a sustained sense of drama to keep you perpetually hooked. But I think of my mom tuning in every weekday as a reprieve from a job that feels just as endless, and wonder if there might be some truth to it too. +++

When you look at the field of TV shows that will remain after soaps operas are gone, it can be startling just how peculiar soaps’ infinite narratives really are. Following the age of high-profile bad guys—think Tony Soprano or Walter White—a whole slew of shows cropped up in which characters gradually learn how to become wiser, kinder, more meaningful people.

The TV critic Aisha Harris, in a recent New York Times editorial entitled “Breaking Good,” diagnosed the trend. “In the mold of educational children’s shows, human decency is the premise,” Harris writes. “Unlike in other series that explore the dark depths of human nature, the characters in these shows actively try to suppress their selfish and harmful impulses in ways both minor and profound.” Shows like The Good Place and Russian Doll take this at its word; both place their flawed protagonists in cartoonish versions of eternal damnation, where turning from antihero to hero is the only way out. Along the way these characters overcome adversity and give dignity to suffering. By the grand finale, they have adjusted from their mistakes and learned how to lead less painful lives.

I’m sure somebody has gleaned a moral from these shows. I prefer the soaps. The B&B may not tell you how to live—and if it did, you certainly would not want to listen—but for my grandmother, my mother, and me, it has helped us live nevertheless. The TV scholar Ien Ang, in her book Watching Dallas, describes this purpose of soaps well: “There are no words for the ordinary pain of living of ordinary people,” she writes.

“By making that ordinariness something special and meaningful in the imagination, that sense of loss can— at least for a time—be removed.” There is something more honest, I think, in recognizing this ordinary pain than in a television show that teaches you how to be a hero. For those of us trapped in jobs we hate, living in conditions that don’t sustain us, sometimes there are no heroic choices, only hard ones. Isn’t thinking otherwise the cruellest optimism there is?

I am, of course, being melodramatic. My mother would be the first to tell you that things aren’t all bad.

If a soap opera is as long as our lives, both can be sometimes sweet, and sometimes tragic. Away from home, I still relish when she calls to tell me about the plot, and she loves to keep me updated. In this way the show continues: three generations finding a way of getting through together. Survival might not always be bold, but I would like to think it can still be beautiful.

To say that soap operas are endless might be, in one sense, an overstatement. In reality, their ratings have declined dramatically since their heyday in the ’70s, and the B&B is one of only four American soap operas that are still on the air. There will be a day, maybe soon, when my mom will have to stop watching. I can’t imagine how the show might end—perhaps a cliffhanger would be true to form.

WILL WEATHERLY B’19 loves a bit of schmaltz.

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10

BY Tabitha Payne ILLUSTRATION Zev Izenberg DESIGN Lulian Ahn

LONG SHADOWS SMOKING GUNS Legacies of the Vietnam War in Providence

I think many people who live in Downtown Providence and on the East Side would be surprised to discover that a Fortune 500 weapons manufacturer is headquartered just off of Kennedy Plaza. Textron, which raked in $2.738 billion in profits last year for selling things like aircraft to the Israel Defense Forces, operates out of the nearest high-rise in the skyline. The corporation made a name for itself as a major weapons manufacturer during the Vietnam War—and massive profits. With a staff of 35,000 in 25 countries, making hundreds of different products for warfare, Textron is a mammoth operation. And it lives close by: It stands just across the street from the RISD library, a five minute walk from the Brown Public Health building.

You would recognize Textron Tower immediately. It is that browning, blockish building—designed by the same architects as the Empire State Building—sleepily reminiscent of an old-moneyed America whose time has come and passed. You might be looking at it every day as you walk westward on George Street or catch a salvific glance at the sun setting behind the city. +++ In 1965, a decade into the war in Vietnam, the US set off a secret bombing campaign in neighboring Cambodia and Laos. The goal was to target North Vietnamese forces feared to be traveling down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and spreading communism in the region. The result was mass casualties and displacements that spiraled into further tragedies.

Some 150,000 to 500,000 Cambodians died under the carpet bombings. American B-52s dropped more munitions on Cambodia than had fallen in all of World War II. The Khmer Rouge communist guerilla group grew in time with people’s outrage over American aggression. Fearing it would lose Cambodia to communism, the US helped overthrow the Cambodian Prime Minister in 1970. A civil war ensued.

When the Khmer Rouge stormed the capital as victors in 1975, they pointed to the sky and warned the city that the Americans were now going to bomb them too.

Forced to become laborers under agrarian extremist communist rule, a fourth of the population—approximately two million people—died. The regime lasted 4 years, before Vietnamese forces pushed them out in 1979. This displaced millions. 260,000 Cambodians were resettled from Thai refugee camps overseas.

Laos too suffered a terrible fate. The US showered the nation with 2 million tons of ordnance—that is, a plane full of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years—making Laos the most bombed country per capita in history. Eighty million tons of ordnance remain. At least 20,000 Laotians have died from stepping on unexploded cluster munitions since. In what was described by the CIA as the largest paramilitary operation it has ever undertaken, the US capitalized on longstanding ethnic tensions in Laos by recruiting the Hmong to fight against the communist-aligned Lao.

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FEATURES

When Saigon fell, Hmong people became targets of extreme violence and continue to face marginalization in Laos to this day. 200,000 Hmong have fled Laos as refugees since 1975.

These are the forgotten offshoots of the Vietnam War. Even this incomplete titling of the conflict, “the Vietnam War,” reinforces the forgetting of these devastating proxy conflicts by framing the war as if it only took place in Vietnam. (Some academics say “Indochina War,” which uses a little-known, colonial term.) American political discourse has reified such obfuscation. Eric Tang, author of Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto, names the US government’s talk around their ensuing Southeast Asian resettlement program as “state-sanctioned amnesia and selective memory.” Without dismissing the reality of the Carter Administration’s concern regarding the humanitarian crisis, Tang is mindful of the opportunism of America’s intake of refugees. Particularly, he critiques this move’s attempt at “political vindication, justifying the much-maligned US intervention in Southeast Asia”—which looks all the less authentic when one considers the widespread urban poverty, unemployment, racism, criminalization, deportations, gangs, and housing crises asylumseekers would come to know. Tang connects the militarization in Southeast Asia to the militarization of urban neighborhoods in the US, delineating refugees’

experiences of an unbroken, continuing state of war and capture. His ethnography is a testament to the remarkable resilience of Cambodian refugees in the face of state neglect and violence. Today, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, and Laotian Americans remain among the poorest ethnic groups in the US. The Carter administration’s 1980 Refugee Act ushered in the largest refugee resettlement program in US history. Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong and Laotian émigrés spread across the nation. Many put down roots in Rhode Island, in places like Providence, Cranston, and Woonsocket. Those in Providence concentrated in poor neighborhoods like Upper and Lower South Providence, Elmwood, West End, and Olneyville. With some 12,000 residents tracing their histories back to these legacies (the majority of whom are Cambodian Americans, the next biggest group being Hmong Americans), Rhode Island is home to an especially high concentration of Vietnam War refugees. +++ Without a doubt, Textron owes its wealth to the Vietnam War. Originally a small Massachusetts textile company founded in 1923, “Special Yarns” expanded into a major manufacturer of parachutes and other textiles for the US government during World War

19 APRIL 2019

II. Once those contracts fizzled, the corporation rebranded itself “Textron” (“tex” meaning “textile”) and began to absorb other types of companies.

Textron's 1960 purchase of Bell Helicopter launched it into the war industry and into Vietnam. Its Bell UH-1 Iroquois Helicopter, affectionately nicknamed the Huey, was met with legendary success. The Huey was favored for its lightweight design, ability to navigate difficult, montane terrain, and efficiency for medical evacuation and close firing, and 7,000 flew in Vietnam.

This was larger than the helicopter fleet of other any country in the world. Remembered as one of the few American successes of the war, the Huey has indelibly marked popular memory of the conflict. Perhaps no other aircraft has been so celebrated by Hollywood.

You’ve seen it before: the Huey is the green, agile helicopter of Forrest Gump, Call of Duty, and Apocalypse Now (remember: “Ride of the Valkyries?”). There is even, in fact, a name for this trope: “Every Helicopter is a Huey.” The vehicle’s versatility and low cost make it the movie standard. Even when other helicopters are used, they might be dubbed over by the sound of a Huey. The Huey is so embedded in the popular imagination that it is probably what you’re hearing when you imagine the sound of a helicopter.

In 1972, Textron Tower completed construction in Providence. (This timing makes me wonder if the Tower was built on Vietnam War profits.) In the years since, the $14 billion company has branched out into an aerospace, automotive, and defense conglomerate whose myriad products range from specialized armored tanks to advanced information systems for intelligence agencies. Textron expands more by the year. So, too, does the American weapons manufacturing industry as a whole. With U.S. defense spending rising consistently from the Bush administration through to the present, the lucrative business of warfare is not going anywhere anytime soon.

with a journalist of the weapons industry, anxiously scribbling notes as it dawned on me how tiny I was beneath this whole thing. I fell into anti–Southeast Asian American deportation activism after attending a community event at the Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM). I even visited Textron, though I never got past the lobby. (The security guard didn’t really know what to do with me. A suit laughed and shook his head, as if to say, “She’s never gonna get in.”

I felt a little ridiculous. In hindsight, I should have also worn a suit.)

The irony of it all captured me: how war’s spiraling processes could make its profiteers and refugees unlikely neighbors, what war makes invisible (black and brown people) and hypervisible (helicopters!?), how war lurks in the terribleness beneath everyday life.

In particular, how close war is, as much as mainstream America would like to forget it, to deem war as something that happens to other people, to a time that is not now, to a place that is not here. When I moved from Cambodia to the US for college, I thought I left the legacies of that war behind. And then I found that war is still proximate. It is a ten minute walk from the Main Green. It is 40 years ago, and it is right now, selling drones to the US air force in Afghanistan. Textron executives sit on the Brown Advisory Committee and Corporation. As urgent campaigns like Brown Divest have brilliantly laid out, Brown is invested in war. As a student there, where does this place me?

So what irony my bewilderment is loaded with: living on a hill of knowledge production that is deeply intertwined in a system of knowledge erasure, my surprise is an inevitable product of where I am standing. Indeed, for those here for whom this war is a daily reality, this story—of systems of power displacing them and their stories from public view—is wholly unsurprising.

Of course, I could not find the smoking gun. But I think this is the genius of the “defense” company +++ (better, as many are now calling them, the “war” company): that there never is a smoking gun. There is I fell down this rabbit hole many months ago. I heard just the gun. And without the smoke, apparently, the offhand from a professor that the last American gun is no longer a “political instrument.” company to stop producing cluster munitions bombs was headquartered in Providence. Textron was +++ selling them for use by the Saudis in Yemen. Thanks to a marriage of Quaker-led local action and interna- Today, Southeast Asian Americans are facing increased tional pressure, Textron ceased production of cluster deportations under the Trump Administration. munitions in 2016. I immediately wondered if Textron Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has had anything to do with the cluster munitions bombs put some 16,000 people who were granted asylum as that rained on Southeast Asia in the Vietnam War. Of Vietnam War refugees and have since acquired crimcourse, I knew my logic was reductive. But I wanted to inal records at risk of exile to countries they may not find the smoking gun; I wanted to draw a straight line even remember. Thirteen thousand of these mandates from Textron, which enriched itself on the Vietnam are for sentences already served. But the problem War, to the refugees in Providence of that conflict living here is not one of individual “criminality,” but of the in the long, long shadow of Textron's own building. bizarre logic of a state deporting back asylum seekers— I began a research project on all this for class. I many of whom fought for U.S. in the Vietnam War. For scoured through weapons contracts from the 1960s. Vietnamese Americans, this represents the reversal of I started a book club on Tang’s Unsettled. I connected the state’s promise in 2008 that those who had arrived

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

before 1995 were legally un-deportable.

The deportation crisis has hit the community in Rhode Island hard. In January, Sophorn Sun, who was the youngest of deportees last December, died in a traffic accident in Phnom Penh. This was devastating news to his family and the Cambodian American community in Rhode Island. PrYSM is now pushing forward a campaign to lobby for amnesty for those who have found themselves on ICE deportation lists in Rhode Island, leading community meetings, protests at ICE check-ins, and free legal clinics for those affected.

The treatment of Southeast Asian Americans in Rhode Island is egregious, particularly considering how much Rhode Island has taken from and owes this community. For one, the remarkable, dynamic activism of Southeast Asian American-founded and -led groups like PrYSM and the Alliance of Rhode Island Southeast Asians for Education (ARISE) has shaped the social landscape of the city. PrYSM, for example, played an integral role in the writing and passage of the Community Safety Act in Rhode Island in 2017, which restricts the police’s ability to racially profile and harm residents—an invaluable contribution, to say the least.

After thinking through all these histories of war, it’s critical to ask: who gets to stay here, and who goes?

The state invests in Textron’s growth, as it expels those it took in as refugees: people for whom the legacies of war are more than just capital, or realizations I can write about in an essay, but are lived realities and traumas that move intergenerationally. Even 40 years later, the war has never really ended.

TABITHA PAYNE ’20 is organizing a teach-in on Southeast Asian American Deportations with Brown, RIC, and RISD students at 5:30 PM, May 4th, at the Providence Youth Student Movement, 669 Elmwood Avenue, Suite B13.

FEATURES

12

COLLECTIVE Sri-Lankan youth confront inherited narratives of the Civil War

BY Wen Zhuang and Dana Kurniawan DESIGN Wen Zhuang

On October 31 of last year, the campus of South Asia University (SAU) in New Delhi, India, glowed pink and blue. A field of students posed silently in the center of the courtyard, each behind a sign written in either English, Tamil, Sinhala, or Hindi. Some messages read as specific commands—“Restore the Democracy in Sri Lanka”—others less so—“No More Violence.”

Thavarasi Anukuvi, one of only eight students of Sri Lankan descent studying at SAU, organized the demonstration. Anukuvi spoke with the College Hill Independent about the long tradition of political protests against the Sri Lankan government. He discussed the place that students, many of whom grew up during Sri Lanka’s nearly 30-year civil war, hold in the national conversation of a post-war country. “All we demand is a government that is fundamentally built on democracy. And the acts by our president are steps away from that.”

However, the path to democracy, and the goal of this democratic desire, do not exist within a monolith.

For students of Anukuvi’s generation, contending with a war-torn upbringing can often only happen through distance from the country's history—a distance that grants a double-edged comfort. One that allows students like him to process a collective trauma, yet precludes him from organizing a political reaction that aligns with the material and ideological realities of those still in Sri Lanka. Students organizing outside of Sri Lanka, then, must grapple with the challenge of mobilizing from afar, while also rejecting narratives of communal violence that have emerged from their homeland and from their families.

The October demonstration at SAU came a day after the sacking of Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and the subsequent appointment of ex-president Mahinda Rajapaksa in his place. For Sri Lankan people of both Sinhalese and Tamil descent, this move was not only unconstitutional—by law, a politician can only be appointed if they hold a majority in the parliament—but also a chilling reminder of a government that has repeatedly acted without due process. This is not the first time that Wickremesinghe and Rajapaksa found themselves in contentious opposition: Rajapaksa ran against Wickremesinghe in the 2005 presidential elections and won by a slim margin of 50.3% of the vote. At the time, Rajapaksa represented the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, a group known for having a democratic socialist economic agenda, and Wickremesinghe the United National Party, a rightleaning, pro-capitalist political faction.

By the time of Rajapaksa’s appointment, the country had been in a Civil War for 22 years, with armed conflict beginning in 1983, when an intermittent insurgency was brought forth by the minority Tamils (known as the LTTE) against the majority Sinhalese.

This insurgency followed a series of discriminatory acts of displacement and erasure of Tamil identity by an increasingly nationalist government­—namely,

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the 1944 recognition of Sinhala as Sri Lanka’s official language, diminishing the widely spoken Tamil, and the 1948 Ceylon Citizenship Act, which made it virtually impossible for the ethnic Indian Tamil minority to obtain citizenship in the country.

In 2002, due to a rising fear among LTTE that the US would support the Sri Lankan government as part of the ‘war on terror,’ the liberation army began exploring peace talks and signed a permanent ceasefire soonafter. However, Sri Lankan leaders’ corruption and violation of the ceasefire agreements culminated in a 2005 election framed by threats from both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government to reopen combat.

Initially, Rajapaksa styled himself as a man of peace and portrayed his campaign platform as one based on negotiation. However, unlike Wickremasinghe, Rajapaksa called for a tougher line against the LTTE and decided, in an ongoing refusal to continue peace talks between the two groups, against the division of the country into federal states. A year following his appointment, a series of orchestrated mine blasts killed a number of off-duty servicemen and civilians of Tamil descent, an attack the Sri Lankan government later blamed on the LTTE. In response, the LTTE “renewed their struggle” and pushed the country into the last phase of the war—a period that would become infamous for its war crimes.

From 2006 to the LTTE’s eventual defeat in 2009, the war saw heightened human rights violations and mass civilian casualties: in early January of 2006, five innocent Tamil students were killed by the Sri Lankan army.

Furthermore, the last phase of the war saw a refusal of foreign aid intervention and signaled a start to the state-sanctioned media suppression that prevails today—14 media workers have been killed in the country since 2006. The UN and several human rights groups still cannot determine a clear casualty count, with many groups estimating up to 40,000 civilian deaths just in the last four months of the war. +++ Anukuvi’s family grew up in Batticaloa, a city in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka with a largely Tamil population. Though the war had been 10 years in power when he was born, it wasn’t until this fourth phase—when armed conflict moved further east—that war atrocities became synonymous with everyday life. “Growing up as Tamil in Batticaloa, I did not yet have the maturity to understand what was happening, even though I witnessed bombings every day and the LTTE’s were visible on the streets. They speak our languages; some are even relatives of civilians.” It's likely that civilians like Anukuvi have close ties to members of the liberation army. At the time of the insurgency, many youth joined the LTTE to pursue a desire for Tamil self-determination. This is also why the university space, which although unfortunately

remains inaccessible both geographically and financially to most Sri Lankans, presents the potential for a nationwide political movement. By building solidarity with Sinhalese and Tamil students who share his vision for a more democratic Sri Lanka, Anukuvi and his peers attempt to navigate histories they’ve been forced to inherit.

As a result of his family’s displacement from their home in Batticaloa near the end of the war, Anukuvi’s parents sent him to live and receive supplementary education in St. John’s Mission, a boys’ orphanage run by the Church of the American Ceylon. Under the direction of Darshan Albamavar, who previously worked as a settlement worker in Toronto, the boys’ home has made long-term connections with several US and global universities (RISD included) and allocates funding through donors each year for several boys, like Anukuvi, to receive a college-level education. Distance away from Sri Lanka has afforded Anukuvi the opportunity to re-evaluate “who were the victims and who were the beneficiaries of the war,” while recognizing an ultimately unresolved reality: “Ordinary people lost a lot from the war—they did not participate in the war, but the war participated in their lives,” Anu tells the Indy, “and some people, even Tamil people, still believe in violence as a need to regain their rights.”

How can education deepen the recognition of human costs from the civil war while accounting for its susceptibility to rely on incomplete narratives?

17 APRIL 2019

+++ Nethmi, a student of Sinhalese ethnicity who grew up in the city of Matara, a town south of Colombo, and now attends Macalester College in Minnesota, is of this same generation. Speaking to the Indy, she said she can still clearly recount waking to the sound of firecrackers signalling the reclamation of Tamilcontrolled territory by the Sri Lankan army. Although she was brought up amid deep-seated Sinhalese nationalist sentiments, moving to Colombo around the age of 11 exposed Nethmi to much greater political diversity, where she began delving into the history of the civil war and reading widely on the topic. Although she recognizes the privileges she derives from being an ethnic majority, she cites systemic and unlawful violence against minorities as one of the reasons why she, like Anukuvi, was fervently against the appointment of Rajapaksa to PM last October. Nethmi’s higher education was funded by a donor of Tamil ethnicity who has ancestral roots in Sri Lanka, a gesture that took her by surprise and helped to transcend the ethnic divides clearly defined in her upbringing. Higher education has pushed Nethmi and Anukuvi to reconsider the differing politics of their identities. While spatially further away from Sri Lanka, they’re conceptually closer to confronting their shared trauma and history of violence. +++

Similarly, Nethmi is working on additional scholarship in relation to the Sri Lankan landscape and similarly plans to return home post-graduation.

Nethmi’s predominantly Western education, howwever, has sowed frustrations that extend beyond her Sri Lankan roots and toward a fear of global amnesia. For as much as we want to acknowledge that the youth of today were too young to understand the war’s implications, the lack of public history gives way to a more serious concern of political apathy: the danger of not examining the legacy of civil war with sufficient reflexivity and self-critique. +++ Even after a Civil War that spanned over three decades, the trials are far from over for the Tamil population.

While recognizing that both Tamils and Sinhalese were persecuted during the war, Nethmi laments that the Sinhalese majority “still don’t understand how many Tamils were persecuted during the entire war.”

The Tamil diaspora around the world has repeatedly called for the Sri Lankan government to be brought before the International Criminal Court for its war crimes and delayed justice for human rights violations. In response, politicians have instead instilled fear through the invocation of nationalism. This past March, Rajapaksa warned that external adjudication with international judges could potentially signal a diminishment of Sri Lankan sovereignty by the UN, urging the country to move forward while ignoring active discrimination against Tamils: “We have all been affected—let’s forget the past and move forward.”

Anukuvi and Nethmi are two young Sri Lankans who have matured in the diaspora. The factors of time and space have offered them a way out of the histories of ethnic conflict and government repression that have shaped the identity of modern-day Sri Lankans.

This distance has also tasked them with a different burden, one of spiritual and idealogical awakening, the processing of self-identity in relation to intergenerational traumas of war. Though for Anukuvi and Nethmi, these awakenings took place outside of Sri Lanka—by virtue of their having benefited from institutions of higher education—but they have the desire to return home and reshape deeply entrenched narratives of ethnic conflict. However, in order for student organizers to galvanize political change in Sri Lanka at large, the burden of redefining historical memory must extend beyond diasporic youth.

In writing this article, we are asking what it means to inherit a legacy of a Civil War in this generation as a student and as a citizen. How can education deepen the recognition of human costs from the war while accounting for its susceptibility to rely on incomplete narratives? Moving from his undergraduate studies at Eastern University in Sri Lanka to graduate studies at SAU, Anukuvi expressed that “one cannot critically think about the situation [the Civil War] through a state-sanctioned education, which always romanticizes the history,” pointing to the syllabi in Sri Lankan public schools as lacking. “We need to look at this as an education issue. In Sri Lanka, everything is to establish a state-sanctioned ideal—the people who are making these syllabi and all, they are part of the state or government and are attempting to establish this vision.” Although reading beyond assignments has offered Anukuvi more clairty, both he and Nethmi have lamented the rift their scholarship often creates when returning to their home in Sri Lanka. But both have begun to imagine ways in which they might further conversations with Sri Lankan natives. In WEN ZHUANG R'19 AND DANA KURNIAWAN B'22 Batticaloa, Anu has started and facilitated a number believe democracy doesn't have to be a dirty word. of progressive groups that regularly meet, read books, and host discussions. He plans to return to Batticaloa after his studies and bridge conversations of the war’s history with the young boys at St John’s Mission.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The conditions of exile, activism, trauma, and political corruption that plague post-war Sri Lankans have consistently been absent in the political and global news discourse of the U.S. The circumstances of a country’s geography should not determine the level of urgency and necessity for global attention and response. “Towards a New Collective Memory” caps off a brief series in which contributors, editors, and staff at the Independent have examined the role of historical trauma, war narratives, and generational memory in contemporary South Asia.

It is an attempt to investigate, analyze, and report on political events that have consistently been sidelined by the narrow scope of mainstream Western media and to see them through the momentum of political protests, before and after, in history and in real time.

The breadth of narratives highlighted in News at large this semester—from Sudan to Kashmir, France to Guatemala—is an appeal for a radical shift in global news coverage stateside. In order to move past a Eurocentric discourse that pushes an isolationist and nationalist agenda, we must work towards a wellinformed and better connected populace—one that critiques the places of privilege from which we think, write, and observe.

Nevermind Thomas More, utopia is not an island.

NEWS

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CREATIVE STRATAGEM Upping the maker’s pace Detailed below are a host of creative strategies I picked up over the course of my RISD education. I came upon them through the process of making things, collaborating with others, or reverse-engineering the things others have made.

The approach to artmaking detailed here requires little technical prowess. Many of the examples revolve around scraps, secretions, memes, or other transient artifacts which take no skill to produce. These techniques will not afford the lushest or most ‘resolved’ artworks. It would be more accurate to say that these are practical, conceptual and/or managerial strategies by which artistic labor can be circumvented, and time conserved.

I know that overwork can be enobilizing, as RISD’s hyper-competitive work culture attests. But perhaps with a bit of cleverness, we can reach a judicious medium between laziness and grueling labor. We can produce great art, with plenty of time left for other hobbies and self-preservative functions.

1. Icon Mods Entities derive authority by implementing a consistent design language, but who sets the standard?

Lately I have been intrigued by the lack of standardization in the way the sickle handle is drawn in different iterations of the Communist Party’s hammer and sickle logo.

In this case, the icon maintains its power and legibility despite these inconsistencies.

Graffitoes and burgeoning pop artists often modify an existing logo, to subversive ends. (Admittedly, this move feels far from fresh, and often amounts to unsolicited publicity for the brand in question.)

I have defaulted to this technique on multiple occasions, in the interest of time. Once in design class, we had an in-class assignment to produce a piece of conceptual art in under an hour. I went around taping a lozenge-shaped piece of paper to the decal on the back of everyone’s laptops, so as to revoke the bitemark of original sin (and its epistemological, sexual, and consumerist ramifications).

Instantly created, instantly metabolized. I had ~50 minutes to spare for a walk around campus.

2. Commissions Commissions and work-tradeoffs are a great time conservation strategy, as untold hours of trial and error are folded into another person’s technical expertise. It’s just important to maintain transparency throughout every step of the process.

For example: I have a working relationship with a once-classmate who produces high-quality, custom-embroidered plush keychains.

The first plush I commissioned from her was a wounded rabbit’s foot, based on an online ‘Judy Hopps Foot Surgery’ game.

I was more than satisfied with the final product, which she got to me, bizarrely, in under two days and for under ten dollars.

I ordered another commission from her in the fall of the next year. I wanted a keychain based on the ‘Non-Player Character’ (NPC) meme popular at the time.

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ARTS

BY Liby Hays ILLUSTRATION + DESIGN

Liby Hays

chief advantage of modernist furnishings: fewer decorative facets allow for speedier dusting…)

The infinite coastline problem applies to finishing artworks as well. Like the meticulous cartographer, one can always continue adding detail. Slavish processes of surface refinement can continue on indefinitely until you hit a deadline…And this lack of finality She asked me if it was okay if she used a pre-extant can produce jarring psychological effects. template and I said it was fine, without looking over her For instance: in the encroachment of the deadline design. The result was this neotenic plush: hour, the work may appear in the creator’s eyes (now finely attuned to correcting minute flaws) as a collection of tangencies, scritchinesses, cliched stylizations, compositional oversights, muddied colors, and disproportionate forms. Best to accept this as a transient perception, and wait until later to reflect on the piece.

In this instance, I wished I had screened every step of the process. I felt the ‘Chibi-fication’ and addition of ears made it too difficult to recognize this as the Non-player Character… perhaps this is the NPC in a flashback episode, or his infant son…

3. Vampirism The previous example portrays collaboration in a (mostly) positive light, from the perspective of the initiator, but the dynamic can easily become warped.

For example: people often portray the relationship between artists and their assistants as feudal in character. The exploitative artist or studio will supposedly reap not only labor but ideas from its trainees without attributing proper credit. It’s said that older animators benefit ‘vampiristically’ from the ‘youthful vigor’ of the new animators they employ to draw their intermediate frames (The older animator draws out key parts of an action, and the younger animator fills in the extra drawings in between them).

I haven’t witnessed this type of vampirism firsthand, but I did once see a group project in which two freshmen collaborated with a grad student in her late-thirties on a performance piece. The piece dealt with the sanctions of their Christian upbringing and involved elaborately staged baptismal rites and hundreds of laser-cut crosses suspended from the cross-beams and groveling on the floor and enacting a host of other repentant actions, spanning almost half an hour.

The grad student stood to the side. Her contribution was bringing in these Fig Newtons:

We associate bibles with vampire-slayers, not vampires—yet this woman, in her unassuming way, was also contributing to the vampirism issue. She had not put herself on the line in the same way the freshmen had, yet everyone in the group received the same grade.

5. Loss-2-Gain When making something, in my experience, the main things you’re subject to lose are time, money, heat, frames, and resolution. But if you take these factors into account initially, the loss can be reconfigured as a positive, and negative feedback can be re-incorporated into the work. For example, in a class on projection-mapping video, a classmate created this setup in which a time-lapse video of rotting apples was digitally projected onto a pile of vanilla ice cream scoops, which were themselves melting from the heat of the light beam.

The piece was at once taking advantage of the loss of heat by the projector beam (by utilizing it to melt the ice cream) the loss of intermediary frames (within the time-lapse movie) and the loss of resolution in downloading the video (insomuch as detail is rendered illegible when projected onto milkfat).

6.Bonus Pun One of the nicest things about 3-D models it that the geometry/basic form of the model is separate from its surface texture, allowing for ‘reskinning.’ (For instance, a fly-by-night game developer might repurpose a desert racing level as a candy world, by attaching a different set of painted textures to the same 3-D primitives.) I asked a boy I knew in high school to send me the file of a 3-D scene he made of worms in dirt, so I could borrow the same shader (the combination of algorithms used to calculate how light behaves on a surface, simulating shininess, matteness, transparency etc.) on a model of internal organs. A few years later I used the worms themselves in a paper bag charm I designed to 3-D print.

I guess you could say I was, uhm... ‘taking the bait...’ (nooooooo….)

7. Demarcations In my glass-blowing class we learned a fun, folksy trick to determine the focal length of a lens you’ve ground and polished by hand. You wet the lens thoroughly and prop it against a wall. Then you close one eye and hold a lit candle next to the other, and back up slowly until you hit the point at which the reflection of the candle in the slick lens flips upside-down. At this point, you spit directly onto the floor. The distance between your spit puddle and the lens is its approximate focal length (at which it produces the sharpest image).

It reminded me of the charm of spit-gluing, or licking your finger and holding it up to figure out which direction the wind is blowing from.

4. Surface Treatment This strategy relates to finishing work, which can be more of an emotional issue than anything else.

You might be familiar with the paradox about the contours of a map—because you can always draw a coastline at a higher resolution (using a longer and longer line to weave about coves and inlets) every coastline is technically infinite in length. Surface area increases with convolution and resolution…one thinks also of the bumps on the walls of intestines, waffle-cut french fries, and the ruffled collars of the 16th-17th century Northern European well-to-do. (Or one of the LIBY HAYS B/RISD ‘19 fosters artistic sympathies.

19 APRIL 2019

4 POEMS

DESIGN Justin Han & Isabelle Rea

pantoum Justine Nguyen-Nguyen

if an email falls into a pine box—if a tree falls in love—does anyone hear it?

twenty years from today , i still love you

Dovetail’s shirts are wool-windowed, soft, like fuzzing out to the tv (are you still watching?) each night windowed, the shutter blinkblinkblinks (are you still watching?) each night with hands clasped the shutter blinkblinkblinks too slow to catch with hands clasped behind the back too slow to catch a fever dream behind the back yard of your head is still a fever dream -ail unsent, the yard of your head is still , in my hands, familiar grass

Shuchi

with

intent

,i

limb

my swollen gesture in your ventilator dreams, spill white coffee till you metronome

falling fatalities from the cool whip suite

in this room-like container you trace bright outlines, i trace thin skin moving under hand [kaɽak]

L’s husband’s havingneverdonethelaundry spills into a third room but not his conference call1 & when2

the dress returns

with button

-holes wrenched open, I find it

forehead zits rashscab your facets, bones

Justine Nguyen-Nguyen

too empty to mannequin

the only answers to this are familiar: this is my only outlet you say inward

grotesque3 will they suspect the translator

of foul play4 we have a way family of callously forgetting looking straight at a sun too bright, crowning from a murder of branches and no matter how much our eyes perch, sensation is always a threshold sidling

if this today was your last, unspool

?

1

the overabundant underoccurrence toes the party line, apparently

2

would you

behind steering wheels and almirahs

?

L’s boy-next-door spills into a third

degree burglary 3

forgivable I can remove myself from my room, but not his

tom’s from the sinkside 4

& when

untitled Maya Bjornson

[Written on the wall, upon entering the House]: A different time, sitting at a sticky bar counter, not knowing which hour it is, remembering the disillusionment of a black and mild, thinking how I too was drawn to the ocean but how I will not see the ocean tonight. I don’t know what it would’ve been like to be a sailor, but I have been on a boat. I heard a story about a sailor who had every inch of his entire body tattooed, and everyone always immediately thinks about his dick, and what he must’ve gotten tattooed there, but I never think about that, I never think about his dick, no I just wonder what he has between his buttcheeks, and what it would’ve been like to be the guy who had to hold the buttcheeks firmly apart so that the guy with the needle didn’t get messed up by the involuntary clenching that would necessarily have happened, because let’s be honest, that whole affair’s a three-person job, at least.

Ever used a hairbrush to scratch the back of your calves? it’s great, it’s great, my grandfather couldn’t get enough of it, had me scratch the back of his calves till they were bright red n raw, and then he’d turn over and make me do his shins.

Truly, we like to forget the thinness of membrane. We like to believe that substances hold consistent boundaries, that I know what shape this knife is—but truly, even concrete isn’t objective, and the heat from my fingertips is enough to swell the glass of a mirror.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LITERARY

16

TOE TAGS LH

BY Indy Staff ILLUSTRATION BY Julia Illana DESIGN BY Nicole Cochary & Claire Schlaikjer

To my favorite artist, and also my muse Though it’s hard to believe that there was a time before Liby knew how to use Blender, she used to be just like you and me: twiddling her thumbs, waiting for death, too unskilled to 3-D print. That all changed when she encountered System 2.79’s encyclopedia of command terminology: “Child: An Object that is affected by its Parent.” Since then, Liby has become the Earth’s premier psychoanalyst of kitsch objects and renderer of aesthetic materials with tormented relationships to themselves. Her art is perfect, even though the philistines (haters) at crit say otherwise.

In 2056, once her tenure as poet-laureate of The Container Store is up, Liby will retire to her cave automatic virtual environment, surfacing only briefly each afternoon for a nice, relaxing jog. Unfortunately, like all true geniuses, she will still have haters, who’ll be like, “How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?” Liby won’t budge: “I don’t chase after anyone. If you wanna walk out of my life, then I’ll hold the fucking door open for you.”

JR There is the act of taking classes at Brown, and then there is the act of taking classes with JR at Brown: sitting quietly beside her as she fights Calabresi (and then gets asked to TA!), fighting Nabers on the greatest love story of all time, fighting (or, in his words, “knocking out”) Gould for making a strained argument, fighting Butterball on his spelling. Pollack’s anecdoty, that kid’s TV voice, “slippery slopes” — to sit next to JR is to experience how to do Brown right.

But beneath this truculence JR is a loyalist — the first to cook you some cauliflower, or fetch you a bottle of Gatorade, to reaffirm your grievances, and, one friend says, apparently, “to complement your ass.” Beyond just fighting professors, JR fights for her friends, for the seals, for the kids she won’t have, for a better Twitter discourse.

Now that these classes are ending, find JR dreaming of moving to the Vermilion Range, Denvir, Colorado, and the Boundary Waters, scouring job boards for boiler room attendants and, considering even staying in Prov, an A+ player rising to the top of a B+ state.

CW Claribel makes us imagine, as we never might have otherwise, what it might be like to delicately pull open the door of a miniature washing machine, or pull the soft (if buttery) blanket of a giant pancake around our shoulders. Her stickers will stick in our memories the way they never could on newsprint, and her illustrations made the Indy a little sweeter.

SC

JM

Dearest SC,

JM will probably save the world, but she’s too woke to be a white savior. Sure, she is intelligent, diligent, and discerning and can be found in the early mornings, hours before you even have woken up typing away about some fascinating phenomenon taking place in Sudan or Israel or Cuba or somewhere that Al Jazeera still hasn’t picked up. But she also makes eye contact and actually cares, which is odd. She listens with utmost care, but will never agree with you just for the sake of inflating your big ass head. She always comes through with tea, but it’s steeping, coming on slow, but getting stronger by the moment. This speaks to her magnificent poise—she lets the world offer up its crock of shit and then she’ll fire back with grace. It’s hard to find a word that captures her acumen—she’s a paragon? Influencer? No—maverick.

Subscribers keen on hard-hitting and side-splitting Reviews of the previous Week must now despair: you are ditching the Indy for something called ‘graduation.’ From eco-Legos to TéléGarfields, the wacky world of weekly wonders is your uncontested domain. With the sharpest eyes, the fullest heart, and the world record for most vanilla lattés expropriated, you bring joy and biting satire to this paper like no one else. Before you wiped the bowling alley floor with the entire staff, you dubbed yourself “WiR LADY,” but you’re more than just that. You’re the Time Corner maven, a caring editor, and an endlessly warm and loving friend. You light up Conmag with your smile and your impossibly soft and impossibly yellow sweatshirt.

You’ll be missed by everyone here, especially by me.

Happy retirement, SC! LM

HA

Where is home for Nicole? It’s a question that’s been on her mind ever since she was born in the Grand Canyon and christened by a big ol’ smooch from saxophonist and adulterer Bill Clinton. Growing up, Nicole made a life for herself wherever the National Park Service sent her: the wilds of Maine, the Bae Area, and most recently, right at the crest of the Grand Tetons. Each has held its own promise: a cavalcade of identical, smelly boys (never “the one”), high-class waitressing gigs, the entire North American garage rock scene… but she’s always hungry for more. Lately, she’s been seeking out shag carpets, the loving embrace of the sun, lava lamps, those weird frosted glass showers, the peculiar green glow of a pool table at closing time. Coming upon her in Scotland, she seemed equally at home out on the heath as she was with a pint at Nice N’ Sleazys. In a little black dress she stole from her mom, Nicole crooned Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much” at a karaoke bar off the Vegas strip. It was the sexiest performance we’ve ever seen, and the sentiment rang true: nothing’s too good for Nicole.

So, then, where is the place she calls home? Maybe, just maybe, she’s finding it along the way.

The sex symbol of the Indy, the man in the hat, the tall one, the patron saint of metro, the climate-wokest, the nokia devotee, the roommate who you forced to write eons ago, only to discover that he can really, I mean, really, write.

He taught us that the Indy, and life, are supposed to be fun! Biking to banquet – fun! Making dinner with the full contents of the fridge – fun! “Being cool” – fun! Making us laugh in front of the whole lecture hall – very, very fun.

HA, you have everything it takes: curiosity, kindness, childish glee. Now go do it! We can’t wait to watch you #ChooseRI and get that discount at Seven Stars (but only on Mondays).

Sometimes, in highly skilled and individualistic sports, it is common practice for athletes to perform one season in college before they go on to execute business on a professional level. The Indy is not a sport. Its is much further from anything real like that. But the sure-footed, organizational grace Lily brought to Volume 38 could be considered as an athletic feat in its own right. For her editing, her leadership, and her writing, she will missed. Indeed sometimes fleeting things leave the greatest impression.

She was here and then she was gone. Like a face in the golden frame of a train window.

SS

NC

SA Please, SA, will you edit my life? Read me like you read a prose poem, suggest a few line breaks. What’s working? What isn’t? We want your input—we also want that large drink you are holding, its green? Pink? Not tall like starbucks but tall like maybe I could have some?

SA smiles. Actually, she was already smiling, and now I am too, and also we are laughing a little and I still am as she walks away (floats?) up the street. Floater in the perfect sense: that’s someone who has the grace of the floating movement but nothing empty or airy: pure substance, honest words, very pretty words!! You can see when someone wears their heart on their sleeve, because you can see their heart on their sleeve, similar to the way one feels like they can watch SA’s mind at work while talking to her. You like the lit section? Well what about a walking poem?? A poet, nonetheless…

Don’t you see her? Here she comes, passing you the maypole at the peak of midsommar, flowers in her hair. She is too fast for this world, reeling past its edges; catch her if you can. There she goes, off to the club in St. Petersburg— she’s not worried about getting back before dawn. You thought you glimpsed her in a Cadillac SUV passing over the Verazzano Bridge, but the windows were tinted and you could only tell by the Erasure blasting from the stereo. During a trip upstate,you hear the echo of a distant trombone, a sign that at last she has infiltrated the nerds’ clan. You’re following her now to a cursed party, but it’s alright, you’ll steal a beer and a boy and dip. On a rooftop in Vegas, was that her with the promoter? Whoever it was, she handed you a card for a good time. One time the sky opened up on the plains and you thought of her dancing on the beach in Newport; people were watching, but she didn’t care. All these sights you never imagined! Sometimes, it feels like there is only a thin film holding back all of the darkness in the world, a shimmering bubble, precious because it is fragile. Our friendship with Signe feels like this: that rare thing that has taught us how to make sorrow light as air. In case she calls this corny, we’ll phrase it like this: her laugh is the surest proof in the world that it’s all going to be OK. Can you hear it now?

BH B altimore is calling and E verything good must come to an end T hough Providence weather is not one to miss, H opkins, I’ve heard, is hardly better A Lime will drive by and we hope she’ll think of us (they’re in B’more, I checked) N atty Light / on the stair / my heart is full Y es, her attention to detail was reassuring. She caught all our missing indents and looked good doing it. It isn’t often that you come across someone with such an enthusiasm for snack food. Catch her in ten years slicing into our souls. Not much will have changed.

MB

LSL

What I would give to have her vision, to see myself through Maya’s eyes. Once, I came upon a box she had made; It has peephole on the side, and I think it was smooth. When you looked inside, there was a whole world with details I strangely don’t remember; it lets me imagine the world is that box, a macrocosm of her creation. Sometimes, when I’m at a convenience store, I cross my eyes and picture the shelved goods like she described them once in a story—gelatinous, glistening, products of a consciousness attuned to different frequencies. Our writing professor called her writing trippy; she didn’t get that this world could be real if you were with her. The closest I ever got was when we were together, journeying together through Providence until dawn found us. We shot a film, she made me silently dance; we watched a telecast of an opera in a diner as the sun rose. I’ll divulge one of her secrets: when she writes a story, she always includes a character who is named, but never appears. This is an apt description of what she’s given me: the possibility of greater wonder, just out of sight.

LSL keeps me on my toes. When I said this, standing on my chair at Apsara a few months ago, I meant it as a way of saying that, in a world where it feels like Granoff Dinners are closing in on us from all sides, few honest, hardworkers like LSL remain.

And of course, no one knows how to do a last minute phone interview in conmag while the rest of us whisper and gesticulate wildly, how to how to make a public records request, how to use a cordless mouse, how to make everything about Brazil, how to eat 6 almonds from a Tupperware quite like LSL. (These feats of course, are made all the more impressive by the fact that LSL has humble roots in central Pennsylvania’s longstanding Amish community.) But I don’t want to harp on all LSL can do, but instead focus on who he is: if you can get LSL to crack a smile, theres a whole world of silliness—terrible march madness pairings notwithstanding— below the surface. In 10 years, when LSL is sitting in his corner office at The Nation HQ, I’ll swing by and make a crack about PA Governor Larry Krasner, and if I’m lucky, LSL will smile then too.

JB

EZ

Oh, JB? The boy who spawned from the hills of Berkeley? Who was originally handcrafted from collectively-owned artisan cheese (plus great granola)? The quiet bowling champ (you should see his two-hand spin)? Who broke the Internet with his total takedown of Brown’s elitism and complete administrative complicity in a nepotistic system that only serves to perpetuate and exacerbate the class-based inequities already present on our campus??? Who’s one half of a narrative POWER (MOVING) HOUSE of a couple? Who desperately tried to entice everyone within Portland’s city limits to visit the renowned, one of a kind International Cryptozoology Museum, just to learn more about Bigfoot? The Twitter-economics expert? Who’s shopped, but never taken, Feathery Things 12 times? The incredibly indirect descendent of Roger Williams himself? Who contacted every officer of this university to track down the unseen force responsible for lowering our Main Green flag? Who we have every confidence will leave us only to go on to do great things? From killing it on pickup courts across our nation’s cities to telling untold stories, our young Dormouse will go far.

The thing about EZ is that she seems a lot cooler than anyone you’ve ever met. She can dance like everyone wishes they could dance (the only reason she isn’t dancing at Coachella right now is because she isn’t thicc enough), she can write (about voodoo/affective labor/her grandma), she can even code! She does everything with flare, and sometimes it feels like you can’t keep up.

Why, what’s up?

WZ WZ (Weezy) is a vision in a dream—and only dreams could do her justice.

She is so charming, she gets free drinks at Bolt Coffee. For those who’ve been lucky enough to have a ~meeting~ with her there, you know how she walks through those glass doors in her crisp linen outfits and her wispy cropped hair, and finds the large booth table no one else could. By the way, if she could wear one outfit for the rest of her life, it would be a cream Cavalli two piece set with silver Ferragamo heels (and no, the world is not, and never will be, ready for her in this look). She has a courage no one can imitate, reprimanding drunk, white-ass, boisterous diners when they disturb her meal: “Hi, there are people trying to eat here.” This is a woman who could ruin your life in two seconds if you crossed her. But make it past her Virgo shell and you’ll discover the softest Cancer heart, generous with her laughter and her words and her time, but only to those who deserve them. If you visit her home, she will brew you fresh coffee and will thaw dumplings in a steel pot for you. When the clock strikes midnight, you’ll both abandon your work (yours, untouched and hers, finished with time to spare, of course) and she’ll partake in every drop of tea there is to pour. She will give you just as much love as you give her, and that is all you will ever need. Precious reciprocity.

KN I try endlessly to get KN to identify a tendency of mine that has rubbed off on her. I plead, please KN, please, there must be something, one faculty I’ve added to your repertoire.

She pauses, nibbles on a nail, untangles her headphone nest… let me think about it. I should have known; thoughtful, deliberate, reflective. OK. She just needs time, give her time.

I imagine what the answer could be. I taught KN to use the microwave (ppl in Brooklyn are afraid of electromagnetic waves). She put a slice of refrigerated apple pie in for five minutes and pulled out a mushy pile of pudding. Yummm.

KN ushered in—what do you call it—a paradigm shift in my life; I got up early, I bought produce, I phoned my mom, I even went for a run to East Side Marketplace. Perhaps I am just malleable to her ways, susceptible to her character, but I’ve racked up a number of her penchants, from the piddling to the paramount. I don’t know under what witchcraft she did it, but she teased out a brighter me.

If only I had a few more years, months even, maybe I’d start studying a fringe ethnonational movement, publish in the Times, or stop wearing athleisure.

As I wait eagerly for her response I question, why, why do I care she adopts my proclivities. Of course, I know the answer: I fear KN has given me much more than I could ever return her. And so, as I sit down at this wooden table, for this last copy, I fold my hands and give thanks to KN and her wondrous predilections.

WW

But what you realize about EZ, if you drive around Providence in her volvo or let her feed you bacon-wrapped water chestnuts on a Tuesday night, is that she isn’t cool at all. She hung an Elizabeth Holmes poster in her high school bedroom, she brought a difficult-to-carry volume on surveillance capitalism to the beach, she puts truffle salt on everything, and she can’t go anywhere without her teddy bear. Once you crack her code, you wonder how she makes uncool look so cool, and you love her all the more.

When you google maps search “Olney Pond,” the first image that shows up is a picture of an unidentifiable figure looking away from the camera, walking barefoot into the water in a teal dinosaur suit. There is a certain melancholia to this image—the droopy brontosaurus looks pretty bummed out—but the whimsical costumery lends the photo a certain joie de vivre. Will, this digital artifact contains your spirit.

Not, like, to suggest that we think you’re going to walk headfirst into a pond eight miles north of PVD to get away from your problems; rather, we love how you naturally affect silliness, solemnity, and care for the people and principles you hold dear—all in the same breath.

The license plates in New Hampshire may read “Live Free or Die,” but WW has a visceral aversion to both of these concepts. Things certainly move very fast for WW, with a frantic, day-to-day absurdity that is impossible to describe, but so familiar to all of us (as illustrated by the dinosaur). Still, despite his facade of antics (some say WW’s not gay, he’s attracted to drama), when I locate a memory of Will, it’s remarkably calming.

I think of a Providence late-Spring evening; we’re holed up in a stuffy apartment with lead paint peeling down the walls—a Gansett in hand after another damn day. Or riding on I-95 Southbound from Providence towards the Bay, 70s euro disco blasting and Will giving his best Cher impersonation. The camera pans out and fades to black on WW’s storied time at Brown, just as Blossom Dearie’s rendition of Rhode Island Is Famous for You comes on. It’s no coincidence you used this song to audition for your 5th grade play, Will. It is famous for you. You’re our best friend, and wherever you are, from NH to RI, we’re all a little freer for it.

JI From the roller rink to the computer screen, there’s nowhere Julia’s powers of illustration cannot take us. Her versatility of style and deft visual interpretations are indicative of her skill and experience, and we can rely on her to send us all out with a cheerful “See ya.”

One time, under a stairwell in a shadowed corner of campus, we came upon a creation of hers, a little lizard called Crusty. We’d like to think we became friends.

MG Movement ten of Camille Saint-Saëns fourteen part musical suite Le carnaval des animaux plays softly in the background as a newt stirs in newt-town. Newt awakens, sits up beneath their 250-dirt-count sheet, and stretches their gooey newt-arms. “It is a beautiful day for a frolic or a gambol,” Newt thinks, strapping on their trusty satchel made from a pen cap and a piece of floss, while slipping their moist toes into aluminum foil-tipped barbie shoes. Newt struts their stuff across Newt-town, collecting human fingernail clippings and humming the intro theme to human children’s show Caillou.

Amidst the rubble, amidst the rabble, Newt’s plastic heels—deformed long ago by a teething child—slap the ground decisively as they skip past the dehydrated carcasses of other, long-gone newts. The sun rises, a slug yawns, and Newt squints up into the predawn of this new eternity with the brave and singular thought: there has never been a better time to play.

Friday 4.19

Tuesday 4.23

Starting Friday, Providence will become the first US state capital to incorporate state-of-the-art marina trash skimmer technology into its waterways. Though we’ll miss watching used condoms and dead fish float down the canal, we can’t help but look forward to trying the specialty cocktail Hot Club is serving up in honor of ecotechnology. Osmosis-filtered martinis, anyone?

The full title of this podcast is “How to Survive the End of the World,” but the premise is really that the end is already here, and we are already surviving. Hosts Autumn Brown, a queer activist and founder of a radical health exchange in NYC, and adrienne marie brown, a writer and activist, draw on a wealth of social justice experience to guide you through all of the world’s apocalypses, from climate change to colonialism.

The Hot Club Marina Trash Skimmer Launch Event Hot Club (25 Bridge Street) 1-5PM

Migos, 21 Savage, & Flipp Dinero Dunkin Donuts Convention Center (1 La Salle Square) 7PM-until the band rolls outta town... $89-$375

Ok, like… this concert is a. probably sold out and b. prohibitively expensive. Mostly just including it here so that everyone knows 21 Savage has *not* been deported, and will actually be right here in RI this Friday. Shoutout to anyone who finds the afterparty.

Reimagining the Future: A Live Podcast Taping of How to Survive 154 Angell Street 6-7:30PM

The End of Policing: A Conversation with Alex Vitale South Providence Library (441 Prairie Avenue) 5:30-8:30PM

Join the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee in conversation with Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and author of The End of Policing, a book which indicts “the dramatic and unprecedented expansion and intensity of policing in the last forty years, a fundamental shift in the role of police in society.”

Saturday 4.20

Square Foot Gardening Cranston Public Library (140 Sockanossett Cross Road, Cranston, RI) 2-3PM

This 4/20, storm your local library’s gardening teach-in and demand that its underpaid staff teach you how to grow! that! loud! (Alternatively, show up high out of your mind and use their desktops to browse /v/ on 4chan, like a proper cretin.)

Wrestle Party: The Four-Twenty Saturday Extravaganza!

Black Box Theater @ AS220 (95 Empire Street) 8-11PM

By 8PM, your 4:20 high might be dying down. You’ve used up all your Visine, eaten an entire pizza, and proven to yourself that you are, in fact, disgusting. Be who you are, and stop by this super fun wrestling-themed party featuring a live (pseudo) match between returning champion “Reel Catch” Ashley Vox and the formidable D.L. Hurst. Bleeding strongly discouraged!

Sunday 4.21

Spring Break (Open for Two Weeks) Six Flags New England (1623 Main St, Agawam, MA) 10:30AM-8PM

This is the last event description I’ll (Signe) ever write for the List, and also the last issue of the Indy I’ll be around to read before graduating from college. With tears in my eyes and a hole in my heart, I leave you, reader, with this advice: this Easter Sunday, ditch your morals and ride a roller coaster instead.

Monday 4.22

Easter Monday Celebration & Petting Zoo The Duck & Bunny (312 Wickenden Street) 3-5:30PM

This is the last List I (Will) will ever write, so maybe it’s time to make amends: Duck & Bunny, I fear I’ve been unkind. It’s easy, perhaps too easy, to mock a “snuggery.” You know that feeling that passes over you when you see something cute? That feeling of wanting to squeeze it until it dies? Anyways, props to living up to your name with actual ducks and bunnies. Perhaps I’ll bring a dove.

Wednesday 4.24

Whistleblowing in American Empire Smith-Buonanano Hall (95 Cushing Street) 5:30-6:30PM

Chelsea Manning is still incarcerated, an appalling indicator of just how far our country will go to crush any citizen who speaks truth to power. This panel, with Naoko Shibusawa from Brown University, Lida Maxwell from Boston University, and Sonali Chakravarti from Wesleyan University, is in solidarity with her, reckoning with the costs of speaking out.

Healing Circle (Past Life) Ascension NXT (176 Main Street, East Greenwich) 7-9PM

This is not an exploration of reincarnation in the Buddhist tradition, but it is an opportunity for a hypnotherapist in East Greenwich to fix disruptions in your “energy field.” This event asks: “Ever wonder why you are attracted to certain time periods, places in the world you have never stepped foot in physically, or have certain fears or phobias that do not resonate with any experiences in this lifetime?” I have a feeling that if you go to this… you were probably at Woodstock.

Thursday 4.25

Providence Movement Festival AS220 Black Box Theatre (95 Empire Street) 8PM // $15

The start of a three-day showcase of over 20 dance acts from throughout New England. As this is the final List item for the final Indy, it’s time for me to quote the immemorial words of Peggy Lee: “Is that all there is? If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing!”