The College Hill Independent Vol. 35 Issue 6

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THE

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY OCT 27 2017

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COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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COVER

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No Tip Gabriel Matesanz

NEWS

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 35 / ISSUE 06 OCT 27 2017

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Week in Review Paige Parsons, Isabelle Rea, Nora Gosselin

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Rights Over Rites Marly Toledano

METRO 07

Make RI Lunchable Katrina Northrop

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Master Debaters Jack Brook

FROM THE EDITORS It’s Halloween, and our landlords are ghosting us. Our texts/emails about cracks/leaks are heading straight into the ether. We can’t help thinking it’s our fault for signing a lease on some real cosmic baggage. Everyone’s talking about haunted houses these days (see page nine), but what about our creaky threebedrooms, haunted by the three-year-old tahini a previous tenant decided to inter in the pantry? Here are some ghost stories to give you goosebumps before you turn on the heat in November: 1. One of us is still sleeping on the mattress of our roommate’s ex. We know, we know, convoluted. A week ago, a strong wind blew the bathroom window into the toilet. The spooky symbolism of windows and commodes indicates that we need to reflect, cleanse, and let go of some stuff. Sorry spirits!

2. One day over the summer, the man living in the room above one of us pushed his dresser just a little too hard against an exposed pipe by the wall. The pipe burst, unleashing the Niagara Falls from the corner between ceiling and wall and directly onto our bed. We then had recurring dreams about a strange woman appearing in the room and insisting we leave the house for our safety.

3. The person who used to own our building was a plastic surgeon. We assume his practice was a little sloppy because he left a surgeon’s chair in the closet.

Last week, when our hot roommate was washing his soft, pristine hands, the ceiling caved in. We feel bad for the botched surgery ghosts, and promise to get uglier roommates.

— JWR

ARTS 09

Monster Mash Liby Hays

FEATURES 03

Last Call Will Weatherly, Maya Björnson, Sophie Kasakove, Nora Gosselin

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Living in the Wake MCAS

TECH

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Ancient Aliens!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Zak Ziebell

SCIENCE 13

MISSION STATEMENT

Anti-Eggipus Shannon Kingsley

LITERARY

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.

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EPHEMERA

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.

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Baby's Got the Bends Ashley Dun

How Are You Doing?

Open Hands™

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So Young, So Full Lee Pivnik

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.

Fall 2017 MANAGING EDITORS

ARTS

Jane Argodale Will Weatherly Robin Manley

Maya Brauer Ruby Gerber Erin West

NEWS

FEATURES

Isabel DeBre Chris Packs WEEK IN REVIEW

Eve Zelickson METRO

Jack Brook Saanya Jain Katrina Northrop

Zack Kligler Gabriela Naigeborin Julia Tompkins METABOLICS

TECH

Jonah Max OCCULT

Sheena Raza Faisal Signe Swanson LITERARY

Fadwa Ahmed Isabelle Doyle

Dominique Pariso Neidin Hernandez

EPHEMERA

SCIENCE

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Liz Cory Paige Parsons

The Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

Maya Bjornson Liby Hays

LIST

Sophie Kasakove Fadwa Ahmed STAFF WRITERS

Mara Dolan Soraya Ferdman Nora Gosselin Anna Hundert Mariela Pichardo Paula Pacheco Soto Marly Toledano Kion You

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

COPY EDITOR

Gabriel Matesanz

Miles Taylor

Fadwa Ahmed

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS

DESIGN EDITOR

SENIOR EDITORS

Anzia Anderson Julie Benbassat Alexandra Hanesworth Frans van Hoek Kela Johnson Teri Minogue Pia Mileaf-Patel Isabelle Rea Ivan Ríos-Fetchko Claire Schlaikjer Kelly Wang Dorothy Windham Sophia Meng

Eliza Chen

DESIGNERS

Amos Jackson Ashley Min WEB MANAGER

Alyssa McGillvery BUSINESS MANAGER

Maria Gonzalez

SOCIAL MEDIA

Lisa Borst Kelton Ellis Sophie Kasakove Will Tavlin MVP

Kelton Ellis THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN PURGATORY

BY Paige Parsons, Isabelle Rea, & Nora Gosselin ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

LAST BOARDING CALL TO HELL The airline industry seems sinister in its everyday workings, occupying our heavenly realm with 6000 fuelburning, rapid-traveling metal canisters at any given time.

Ordinary people are growing increasingly suspicious of who and what is behind those trails in the sky. Onboard a United Airlines flight in April, one unlucky passenger was stung by a scorpion that inexplicably landed on his head mid-flight.

However, the devil is in the details. For satanists looking for a flight across the Baltic this month, Flight 666 to HEL (Helsinki’s airport code) was just sinister enough: the 13 year-old plane departed from Copenhagen at the 13th hour on Friday, October 13.

Once the flying purgatory took off, however, passengers report that things appeared to be business as usual. Apparently the crew did nothing to demarcate the event. Pilot Juha-Pekka Keidasto told the press, “I’m not a superstitious man. It’s only a coincidence for me.”

Meanwhile, industry authorities and air travel enthusiasts alike took to Twitter to make the most of the cosmic alignment of codes. Mike Robertsson, a Swedish man and an employee of flight tracking site FlightRadar24, bought seat 13F on the flight just to miss it, tweeting “Oh, no! I won’t make it in time for flight 666 to HEL.” Despite these reports, nobody really knows what happened on that plane—Ouija boards and other ghoul-summoning devices are not banned on TSA’s carry-on restrictions list. Some passengers may have been enthused to take the flight because a deal is a deal, and demand tends to drop on Friday the 13th, given that paraskavedekatriaphobia (fear of Friday the 13th) still has its hold on the general population, for the superstitious and self-professed non-superstitious alike. Equally formidable is hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia (fear of the numbers 666).

The publicity stunt was not lost on the Helsinki airport either. Instead of pushing the Biblical angle as one would expect, given that 666 denotes the “Mark of the Beast” in the Book of Revelations, airport authorities gave a nod to their Scandinavian black-metal heritage, sending passengers a bus emblazoned with “Hard rockin’ Hel” in a gothic font on its side.

Finnair brags that despite superstition, the daily flight has landed safely on Friday the 13th twenty-one times over the past eleven years (as if a smooth take-off and landing are the only metrics in which the demonic could possibly manifest). Still, this was its last Friday the 13th voyage. The airline has discontinued the flight, claiming on Twitter that the cut is due to the carrier’s growth and resulting need to reorganize flight numbers.

The airline was quick to reassure concerned passengers over Twitter that the flight from SIN to HEL is still available.

BUFFALO SPICE LATTE Canadian road trips reveal the critical importance, or perhaps even the necessity, the coffee-donut chain Tim Horton’s. Splattered across rest stops between the wide empty roads of northern North America, the chain provides tired and hungry drivers and residents with a quick coffee, egg sandwich, and perhaps a 25-piece-box of Timbits for the open road. Now that Tim Horton’s sugary serum has seeped down into the US, it must compete with larger brands such as Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks. However, Tim Horton’s donuts remain a staple item; a deep-fried delight from our neighbors to the North.

While Horton’s stale, sometimes two-day old donuts are a big draw, the company must expand its range of products to compete with these larger companies.

Instead of creating your typical pumpkin-spice latte, Tim Hortons has gone rogue. The enterprise recently introduced a Buffalo Latte in two stores in Buffalo, NY. This drink is composed of the usual espresso and steamed milk combo plus mocha and buffalo sauce flavoring. An unbelievable flavor-blast to early morning coffee drinkers, buffalo sauce flavoring is questionable at best. Is it an attempt to coin the new pumpkin spice latte? The drink was released with other fall espresso flavors. Maybe it is an appeal to those who strive to mask the taste of the coffee bean. The Independent is unsure, and so is Regional President Stephen Goldstein, who slipped and admitted that he, too, was not an original advocate of the concept, calling the beverage an “unexpectedly delicious sweet and spicy treat.”

Besides providing an alternative to the fall favorites we easily tire of, Tim Horton’s claims the product celebrates the introduction of lattes to their stores and the shared birthdate of the original Buffalo sauce and Tim Horton’s incorporation. The Indy thinks this is a weak justification for such a concoction.

Take it hot or cold, but be warned; if you drink it icy, you will miss out on whipped cream and Buffalo seasoned sprinkles. The public’s response has been just as tangy as the latte. Melissa Ryle tweeted, “US Tim Hortons buffalo latte can only be explained as Trump’s strategy to convince us NAFTA is evil.”

DITCH THE CANOE, TRY THE HOGWARTS EXPRESS It turns out that the Hogwarts Express is still chugging along through the Scottish Highlands. The red Jacobite steam engine—which many kids dreamed would roll by their middle school, promising something a bit more magical than algebra—recently made a rescue mission.

Jon Cluett recently took his wife and four children on a vacation near Loch Eilt, featured as the spooky site of Dumbledore’s grave in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The family parked a few miles from their cabin, and traveled the rest of the way by canoe. They awoke one morning, midway through their stay, to discover that the boat was missing. Faced with the prospect of an unpleasant trip by foot across miles of boggy swampland, Cluett gave the local police a call.

The police delivered the magical news; the next train passing through the area was none other than the Hogwarts Express. Having wrapped up its illustrious movie career, the red and gold steamer now runs the lonely route through the Highlands, and was able to stop for the Cluetts.

Cluett, who works as a pastor in the central Scottish city of Stirling, shared in an interview with the Associated Press that his kids, all Harry Potter fans, freaked out upon the train’s arrival. “They know that [the Harry Potter movies]... are filmed in the Highlands,” he said. “But they hadn’t put all of that together in their heads until they saw the train.”

The Hogwarts Express was originally conceived of by the Minister of Magic, Ottaline Gambol, as a solution to all the chaos that ensued when thousands of budding wizards descended by various means upon Hogwarts.

According to JK Rowling, the Express required “one hundred and sixty-seven Memory Charms and the largest ever mass Concealment Charm performed in Britain.” The result: the well-known steamer, throngs of new wizards whizzing safety through England, and a bunch of Muggles left scratching their heads over where they had misplaced their train.

Today, here in our Muggle world, the train runs an 84 mile route, boarding in Fort William and Mallaig, and then chugging by Loch Morar, Loch Nevis, and Glen Coe (featured in several Harry Potter movies as the set of Hagrid’s home). It serves largely tourist purposes, with tickets sold at £29.00—a small price to pay for a die-hard wizarding fan.

The recent Cluett family rescue is just one more thing the Hogwarts Express can add to its accolades.

But the Indy suspects that Dumbledore would turn in his grave if he knew his school’s beloved train now spends its days rescuing Muggles foolish enough to lose their canoes.

–PP

–IR

–NG

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

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THE LIGHTS COMING DOWN An oral history of Aurora

BY Will Weatherly, Sophie Kasakove, Maya Björnson, and Nora Gosselin DESIGN BY Gabriel Matesanz

If you live in Providence, it is likely that you have attended an event at Aurora at some point during its three-year run. The space, located in the Whit Building at 276 Westminster Street, has hosted an immense constellation of events and projects, catering to countless communities and interests. Queer dance parties, all-ages rap battles, noise performances, design conferences, nonprofit fundraisers, and punk shows all found a home there, and its managers always strove to provide surprising intersections between every niche of its broad fanbase.

On August 4, Aurora announced that it would be closing after the building’s owner and manager, Arnold ‘Buff’ Chace of Cornish Associates, slated the property for redevelopment. Aurora will be holding its last party on November 3. The Independent asked community members who have managed, staffed, and performed at Aurora what they wanted to honor about the space.

Jenny Young, booking manager at Aurora: We are very much an open canvas for artists to work with.

I think that people have really been able to make their own [kind of space] because there aren’t a lot of spatial restrictions and we like to encourage that. So to be able to come here and have that sense of ownership over the space allows for a lot of creativity. There have been a lot of artists who have worked with us for the entirety [of our time running Aurora], and they have definitely grown in terms of how they build upon an initial idea and have the space and time to grow.

People are really, really bummed out that we’re closing, and I’m really bummed that we’re closing, but I’m definitely really hopeful and optimistic that there’s so many creative people here that something else will open up. Maybe it’ll be a while, and people will be trying new things, but definitely something else will happen.

Now [organizers] have a resume under their belt and they know more about selling an event, so they can go to another venue with a lot of experience.

There are definitely a lot of stories, and one doesn’t stick out more than any others, but for me personally Tuesdays have always been a difficult day to program.

Finally, this summer we were able to produce some really great Tuesday night programming, which were game shows that we conceived of having here and asking people who we know to host it. This bingo game that’s happening tonight started because one of our bartenders has issues with insomnia. Sometimes we get out of here at four or five in the morning, and instead of going home, she would go to Foxwoods to play bingo, because the games start at 8AM on Sundays. It was her idea that we should have bingo! It was such a successful night, we decided that we’d also have Family Feud. Finally, just as we’re closing, we’ve finally figured out Tuesdays.

We also recently had a drag contest here. It’s something that happens all the time at the Dark Lady, but it was able to be a really special event here, with a cash prize, and so many people had talked to me that night saying, “We couldn’t have had this at our normal bar, because it’s our normal bar, and it wouldn’t have been special.” Being able to have this stage really made it come alive.

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FEATURES

Buff Chace, developer and owner of the Whit Building at 276 Westminster Street: We purchased the building Aurora was in three-and-ahalf years ago from the owners of the Roots Café. They wanted to close their business and needed to sell the building. We are part of Cornish Associates, which is a downtown property developer—we’ve taken 12 buildings and revitalized them over the past 15 or 20 years— so we took on the Whit Building and we put together a wonderful team of individuals to open Aurora and run it with the idea that at some point we would work with the city and the state to try to revitalize and upgrade not only that building but also three buildings adjacent to it. The Whit was built in the early 1900s, and it just needs to be revitalized so we can get another century out of its use.

So we have gone through a process with the Commerce Department, competing for Rebuild Rhode Island tax credits as well as working with the city to get support from them for the Federal Historic tax cut. We anticipated completing that process around the first part of November. We were working with Krissy and the people who ran the property and decided that somewhere around the end of October was the date that made sense to close the business in an orderly fashion and to celebrate their successes and to give the people who were regular users of the state plenty of time to find other venues.

The Indy asked Chace to explain his comment published in the Providence Journal in August that a music venue does not fit into his plans for Westminster Street: I don’t recall if that was an accurate quote. I said that I think that if there was music in that space that it probably wouldn’t be something that was closing at two o’clock in the morning given that there’s a housing component to the new development. So it’s the fine point of what the hours would be rather than a question of music or no music.

I’ve also been working with AS220 on possibly opening a different music venue. Right across from where Trinity Rep is, there’s a smaller venue that’s currently closed.

AS220 bought it from the strip club that was there. The reason that would work as a music venue and Aurora wouldn’t is that the location means that they can exist and do their things without disrupting other activities. If I’m going to be responsible for people living above there I need to take that into consideration.

I intend to have a use of the Aurora space that contributes to the mixture of uses on Westminster street. The strongest demands right now are for food and beverage on that street, which can have a music component, too.

So when we get to 12–18 months down the road we’ll see what ideas people bring. We will be interviewing lots of people to see what ideas they have for the space and we’ll go with the best one.

Chrissy Wolpert, general manager at Aurora: On the possibility of a new music venue in the building: I’m not really sure what’s going on with that, I’m not involved with that. I think that what has happened here has been a really magical thing. I definitely feel like we were just starting, over the last six months, to hit the potential and feel like the web was coming together in terms of where we were moving towards. Different communities need something like this. If that does reincarnate two years from now somewhere else, then let’s do that and support that…

As far as something new coming along, if that happens, then I think that, y’know, do I think that it’s going to be

this? No. Because this is what this is, just like the legacy before us. We were never going to be the Black Rep, and we were never going to be the Roots Café, and we didn’t want to be, but we wanted to honor what existed in this building. Things are what they are just like moments are what they are—it’s a moment.

I got to Aurora roughly around a year after it opened; I was not part of the original crew that evolved the space.

I think that both of the spaces that existed here before us were wonderful because of what they offered to different communities downtown. That’s what we tried to do— to create an environment where people could come in, whatever you looked like or dressed like, and feel like they could be in the sense of who they [already] were without any bologne. It’s not always easy! But it had so much to do with the staff, who are all people who have either performed here, made the wallpaper, painted the back bathroom, made all the drinks—the people who work here cared about what was here.

A lot of performers cared about making sure people felt taken care of and respected, and hopefully we earned a little bit of change to put in their pocket when they go home, and gave them an environment that was taken care of. The Black Rep and the Roots Café definitely did those things—the beauty was that everyone did it in their own way, and it was made by the communities who came through the doors. It’s been so nice, especially over the last year, when we’ve had more people who have come and told us, “I was here when it was the Black Rep!” You can see it on their face: this fond memory of being in the building when it was that space.

We are a multi-use space that does programming seven days a week—it’s our greatest benefit and our greatest challenge, because it’s not like, “Every Tuesday we have this, and every Friday we have this.” Just like anything, it grew organically. [Strict scheduling] rebelled against us—it didn’t work!

It wasn’t always about curating. We didn’t curate for genre—we curated based on whether events were good for the community and whether they aligned with our mission, and from there, if there was respect and love coming into the space from these people.

One thing that’s been really cool here has been to see so many groups of people interacting all the time. The hope is that sometimes we can cross some of those lines, so that people can continue to interact and see new things.

This place has taught me a lot about care, and what it means to care and nurture for something. [Providence organizers] should continue to give people an opportunity—give people a chance. Because it changes you too.

I’ve definitely been somebody who comes to work and says, “Oh god, what do we have to do today?

Somebody broke off the stall door in the men’s room again?” (because it has happened—twice), but these last few weeks have brought wonderful moments of reflection. I’ve been looking at my staff and thinking that these people are so awesome, and seeing the greater good that has come from this place—and it’s also coming from a state of total denial that I have to say goodbye to everything and everyone. But that’s fine. I’ll deal with it when I have to.

It’s changed me too. I’ve been somebody who’s played music in Providence for a long time. But to be connected to something from this place… I feel incredibly lucky that I got to do that.

OCTOBER 27, 2017

Norlan Olivo, organizer of ‘Running through the 401’ dance parties at Aurora: As a lot of the mill [DIY spaces] began to close down, first Building 16, then Capitol Records and Spark City, which was a space Joey [DeFrancesco] and Victoria [Ruiz] and I did events in Olneyville. Spark City was one of the most inclusive spaces in Providence in terms of programming that had bands with people of color playing there. But as those spaces fell, Aurora took a big lead to host the people who didn’t have a space anymore—especially local youth of color who came from New Urban Arts and AS220. A lot of those people came to Aurora, as well as the noise community.

Last year, we started doing dance parties here once every two or three nights. Last Halloween we had a dance party, and it was super packed—there’s definitely an audience for these dance nights. Ever since then, we’ve been doing our parties once a month, called “Running through the 401.”

At this point, when you talk about different audiences who use Aurora, I feel like a lot of people of color were doing great things out of this space and culminate their own projects just from having monthlies at Aurora.

Things like that won’t exist in the city until we find a space that is just as flexible. When you can have Luv You Better and Running Through the 401, and then a Salsa Night and a Gay Goth Night—no other venue catered to making each community in Providence heard, at least once a month, in their space.

I think a lot of downtown is being developed into things like condos, hotels, and parking lots, but in eliminating spaces like Aurora, people forget that you need something to do. You’ll have people living downtown with no entertainment at all. It boggles my mind to have all of these developments happening without keeping the local community, local artists, and entertainment in mind.

No other city that I know functions that way. I still don’t know what the vision for this city is. [Pointing out the window] I mean, that Superman building is empty! The building across the street is empty! [How development works] is just a game—you get people really excited and invested in a space, and when it’s about to reach its peak, you take it away and take that momentum and build something else. I don’t think it’ll work—we’re not New York, there’s not the same type of industry here, and the community’s too strong. Nothing will ever work without the community.

Lady J, MC at Aurora’s Bingo Night: I’ve got a long history here. Ten years ago, [my friends and I] were walking down Washington Street and we saw a line of people outside. It was the Black Rep, and we saw people drumming, there was a giant piano in the window, and everybody was dancing. This was the spot we knew you could come to on Friday and Saturday nights. When that closed down, I was happy because it got taken over by the Cabral brothers [the original owners of the Roots Café], and they brought me in after grad school and I was a bartender here. I got to work on a lot of the decor that was here, so I was very involved with that. It was good to see their community come back up, because they’ve had the same group since the ’60s—that was the kind of theater group that was hanging out at the Roots Café.

And then having Aurora—it’s been such a great home for artists of any type, no matter your skill level. If you want to book a night, you book a night here. It’s so experimental and welcoming. For me, this has been [important] to my growth as an artist—coming out and hosting the game night, and being able to play a character and get a following—so this is just the beginning of what [my work] is going to be.

The diversity of the people here is great. I’ve had two 15-year-old boys who have asked their dad to bring them, so they kept coming back. I’ve had first dates, all-girls dates, bachelorette parties, older people who love

bingo and don’t want to talk to anybody, and my friends who come out to support me. It’s family style, so people are meeting each other, talking, and working so hard to win a box of Kleenex!

I’m going to miss having a go-to creative space. I’m in a band and work for a company, and any time I need a place to go to, this is the first place I go. I’m going to miss having that home base. This is like our community center, this is like our club house. I feel like we’re going to lose that—a little bit of the heart of the city. We just have to figure out where to find that next.

From the Aurora Family Feud survey question “What will you miss most about Aurora?”: THE FAM COOL PEOPLE STAY SILENT EVENTS STAFF “THE FINE ASS PEOPLE WHO WORK HERE” GOOD VIBES/ AMBIANCE FROZEN DRINKS COMMUNITY EVENTS QUEER FRIENDLY DANCING EVERYTHING

Mori Granot-Sanchez, Owner/Founder of RI Latin Dance and organizer of Aurora’s Salsa Con Soul event series: We’ve been involved with Aurora for a little over three years and it’s unfortunate it’s closing because it was such a beautiful thing we created in the community—just collaborating and bringing the community together. All of our network basically had a place to go and interact with one another right downtown, it was very convenient for students to come out from all the different schools. It was an awesome place to interact and see and feel the different instructors, you know, because we were a team.

Everybody got the opportunity to teach and we had a chance to have different DJs, different instructors from different places, different performers, to kind of expose the community to that aspect as well.

And the birthdays! The birthday celebrations were awesome, [they were for] people in the community or if it was one of us, we always made a big deal out of it and would recognize the people at a beautiful birthday circle, we had a table with some balloons and snacks. We’d have them come to the middle of the circle so everybody gets the chance to dance with them, to have a little moment for them. That’s memorable.

I really feel that this was a hub. People knew that every first of the month, and some Saturdays, they had a place to go and interact and dance, and had a place to put in action what they learned in classes. There are other events, but they’re hosted by one company or one school, it’s not collaborative. It’s not one person or company that goes [to Aurora], it belonged to everybody. And it feels like they belong there.

I think also for the gay community, that they felt they had a place they could actually go where it was just okay—it was never a question—of two females to lead and follow in the dance or two males to lead and follow, like it was just a gender neutral environment and everyone was just accepted.

I wish there would be something to replace it like that—that would be so convenient for people and that everybody could just go to. I hope something will come up.

Next week (we haven’t announced it yet) but we’re doing a master class and we’re bringing in a Cuban instructor from Montreal to do a lecture and workshop at the club right before we go to Aurora for the last night; on Wednesday it’s going to be the last Salsa Con Soul

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

at Aurora. Next Wednesday, from 6-8 at Alumnae Hall (194 Meeting St.), there will be a lecture on salsa history and Cuban history, and the workshop, and then we’ll move over to Aurora where the social starts at 10.

Chris Cordon, a member of The Broken Few who held his wedding at Aurora: I wanted to have my wedding [at Aurora] because not only was it cheap—like they were going to give us the whole venue for $300, maybe $400—but also because I wanted to show [Aurora] to a lot of my friends who are not in the Providence music scene, or are outside of the city, and to all my friends and family—this is where I spent the last four years of my life... It’s like me presenting this treasure that I’ve kind of like… not kept to myself, but I feel like it’s been so important in my development as someone in the city, as a local, and it’s helped me grow as a musician, just watching all these cool people come and play at Aurora, and they fucking kill it. I’m constantly inspired to kill it like they are.

Once we got past all the ceremonial stuff, my pastor Andrew jumped into the sound booth and DJed the whole night. I have photos of him just chugging vodka, as he’s playing the playlist we gave him. Even [the puppet performance group] Big Nazo showed up. We emailed them like two weeks before the wedding, and they got back to us the night before.

Burbage Theater Company, from the playbill for their last performance in the space: “It was like a dream. The live performances were unlike anything we’d encountered. An exacting mix of in-the-know, ultracool live music and genuinely strange, rough-around-the-edges obscura. People came from every concievable walk of life and they had a great time. Aurora also had one of the most competitive cocktail programs in the state as far as we’re concerned. They squeezed fresh juice daily.

People don’t do that. But they did because they cared about their drinks. Whether behind the bar or on the floor, Aurora’s staff kicked ass every single night. We are eternally indebted to them…

Aurora allowed us to pursue more daring, provocative, and compelling work that beat to the tune of downtown Providence’s infinitely varied and incredibly welcoming arts community. Aurora gave us our first taste of being a truly autonomous, year-round theater. They gave us the freedom to be ourselves, they gave us their stinky basement.

Aurora gave us our first glimpse at what we can do and who we could be as an organization. And while the Burbage story is pretty specific, we’re willing to bet that other creative people had defining, formative moments on that stage because of them.

We are eternally grateful to Aurora’s staff and management for providing us with such an incomparable workshop. They are permanently in our bones.”

THE INDY recommends that you dance under the Aurora lights one last time at its Puerto Rico benefit show and dance party on November 3 at 7 PM. A donation of $10 is encouraged, but not required.

FEATURES

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BREAKING BONDS

Countering legislative violence against women in the Middle East and North Africa

BY Marly Toledano ILLUSTRATION BY Alexandra Westfall content warning: abuse, rape, suicide

DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

Last April, on Beirut’s seaside promenade, wedding dresses billowed in the wind. The dresses were torn, stained, and wrinkled. Artist and activist Mireille Honein had hung each dress from a noose. Nearby, billboards showed similar gowns—tattered and bloodied, reading, “A white dress does not cover rape.”

Abaad, a women’s advocacy group based in Lebanon, has been using these installations to protest laws across the region that provide a way out of conviction for men accused of rape: perpetrators marrying their victim.

Before the repeal of one such code in Lebanon this past August, the law stated that in the event of any “offense against honor,” (which included rape, kidnapping and seduction), the perpetrator evaded all legal consequences if he married the victim. In the case of a divorce ruling in favor of the woman within the first three to five years, he would face punishment.

“If a woman is raped or has sex before marriage, the future is tough,” Fadi Zaghmout, a Jordanian author, told the New York Times. “Few men here have the mentality of marrying a woman who is not a virgin,” she added.

Proponents of these laws frame the post-rape marriage as a mode of protecting the victim’s honor against the stigma of sexual relations out of wedlock. Women feel pressure from their families to follow through with these marriages, facing the possibility of losing their communities.

way,” he added. According to the New York Times, Latifa agreed to marry her rapist and did not file charges. When she decided to divorce him as a result of continued physical abuse, she revoked his legal liberty. He retaliated by murdering her at age 22. Many proponents of rape laws would consider this an honor crime, reported the New Arab.

Wynne cited Tunisia, which recently introduced 43 articles of legislation that specifically address violence against women and girls, as having made strides for women’s rights in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet, just last year, in accordance with Article 227, a man in his 20s legally married his 13-year-old step-sister after he forcibly impregnated her. Tunisia has a law against sex with minors under 18—but, because of the exception, the girl was deemed capable of consenting to sex with her step-brother, as reported by the UK Independent.

Following national controversy spurred by the event, the child protection office in the country ended the marriage.

Tunisia removed the provisions that allowed men to avoid conviction by marrying their victim in July. Article 277 now lays out harsher convictions for rapists including a 20-year sentence or life in prison if the assault involved a weapon. The amendments also raised the legal age of consent from 13 to 16.

Morocco addressed its own similar law, Article 475, only after the death of 16-year-old Amina Filali, according to HuffPost. Filali had been raped on the streets of Larache, and her family urged her to comply with the suggestion of marriage with her assailant following the attack. Her rapist continued to abuse her, driving her to commit suicide. A Facebook page called “We are all Amina Filali” aided in raising awareness and the official amendment of the law in January. Activists across the country pressured the government to repeal the law that, as Fouzia Assouli, President of the Democratic League for Women’s rights, told the BBC, “is an embarrassment to Morocco’s international image of modernity and democracy.”

Jordan repealed its similar law, Article 308, in April.

The Ministry of Justice reported 159 rapists who used this law to their advantage. Tunisia and Egypt have repealed their similar laws in the past decade. This indicates an increased focus on women’s rights in the Middle East, wrote Wynne. “It’s the first step to changing the mindset and traditions,” said Ghida Anani, founder and director of Abaad. “For us it’s the start. Now the awareness and behavioral campaign will start to make women aware that it’s no longer an option: [rapists] cannot escape punishment.”

In spite of recent repeals and amendments, conversation around the issue has not ceased. “We hope [the repeals] continue but as we often see you cannot take anything for granted and backtracking can and does also occur,” Wynne wrote. Last November in Turkey, people organized massive protests against introducing a “marry your rapist” law. “It is about giving normality to young women who have been married underage due to cultural norms,” a female member of Turkey’s parliament who supported the bill told the BBC. While the bill did not pass, the fact that Turkey had this conversation so recently shows the extent to which a longstanding history of sexist legislation, with its roots in colonialism, persists in the Middle East and North Africa.

In many countries, including Kuwait, Libya, and Syria, similar laws remain. France, the country primarily responsible for introducing this legislation to the Middle

+++ “Lebanese laws are mainly inspired by French law and article 522 is not exception. Article 522 dates back to January 1943, during the last months of the French mandate, just before [Lebanese] independence,” Mardam Bey of Abaad wrote in an email to Middle East Eye. Many oppressive laws found in the Middle East and North Africa, including those forbidding homosexuality, have their roots in European colonialism. Laws like Article 522 became globally accepted as a result of their presence in Article 357 of the French Napoleonic Code of 1810: “In case the seducer shall have married the girl whom he has stolen, he can only be prosecuted, upon the complaint of those persons who, by the Code Napoleon, have the right of requiring such marriage to be declared void; and he can only be condemned when the marriage has been declared void.” The Ottoman Empire adopted a similar law, based on the French code, and the British enforced these laws during its own colonial rule in the region.

These laws have remained in the penal codes of countries across the Middle East and North Africa as they gained independence, fueled by the remnants of colonialist misogyny that suggest that these matrimonies somehow protect the victim, made unmarriageable by her abuser. A poll distributed by Abaad reported that only one percent of the population knew the law existed.

This might explain how a law “from the stone age” might remain in place, as Jean Oghassabian, Lebanon’s minister for women’s affairs, told Agence France Presse.

81 percent of those polled agreed the law was unjust to the victim, demonstrating that rape laws do not reflect the attitudes of most people in Lebanon.

In spite of this, women like Basma Mohamed Latifa, who lived in a small town in southern Lebanon, faced Article 522’s harsh consequences. “Women and girls do not have the choice of marrying or not marrying their rapist in most cases,” wrote Wynne from Donor Direct Action to the Independent. Women face the pressures of society or “[they] are kidnapped or forced into it in some

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East and North Africa, maintained its own similar law until 1994. Italy’s Article 544 encouraged marriage in cases of sexual violence to release the man from penalty and restore the woman’s honor. Franca Viola famously refused to marry her abuser in the 1960s, evoking national debate. It was not until 1981 that Italy finally repealed the law.

In 2017, laws developed by colonialist men in the 1940s, from the French in Lebanon to the British in Palestine, still decide the future of women and girls in the Middle East. Rape itself often deals emotional repercussions and trauma—and across the Middle East and North Africa, this trauma has legal repercussions for the daily lives of victims. +++ Due to political and religious influences, women in the Middle East and North Africa remain vulnerable to the type of abuse enabled by rape laws. “You can have the most beautiful laws, but if you don’t change the culture, then nothing will change,” Khadija Moalla, a Tunisian human rights lawyer, told the New York Times. Abaad continues to make efforts to continue to change attitudes about sex and gender across Lebanon, through initiatives that range from peer counseling, to safe spaces for women, to events that raise awareness about gender issues, including child marriage. Other organization, like the United Nations and the Human Rights Watch, have called for action across the region.

In spite of changes in legislation, women often do not have access to sex education, or even opportunities to talk about sex, according to the New York Times. In Lebanon, for example, sex education was briefly introduced to school curriculums but, due to concern on the part of religious groups, was removed in 1995. “The youth in Lebanon are growing up in a society where religion and taboo dominate, and where their family will dismiss discussions about sex, or sex education, or even feelings,” Ayman Assi, president of Marsa, a sexual health clinic in Lebanon, told the Daily Star. “Even if you go to the doctor you can’t talk about your sexual life unless you are married.”

“We have to continue the fight,” Wynne wrote. He suggests that in order to take action, advocates need to focus on getting funds to women’s advocacy groups in the Middle East. Today, rape victims in Lebanon and throughout the region may not face a lifetime of abuse— however, stigmatization and shame around sex remains.

Addressing the global attitudes that enabled this legislature requires more than a parliamentary vote.

MARLY TOLEDANO B’20 encourages you to visit the advocacy website of Abaad at http://www.abaadmena.org/.

OCTOBER 27, 2017

NO CLASHES

BY MCAS ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer and Isabelle Rea DESIGN BY Robin Manley

One genealogy of state violence

content warning: sexual violence, suicide “To my daughter I will say, when men come, set yourself on fire.”

–Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth “You have to be a murderous bastard to get that high up in the military.”

My father speaks, the crater scar on his left hand pulsing against the steering wheel. Seventeen years had to pass in our life together for him to fill the gaps of our family’s silence. We speak safely removed from our past realities, refuged in the dizzying buzz of nature in Western Pennsylvania. It is good place to forget, and to only hear of deaths on the kitchen phone.

I owe my existence to this murderous bastard.

General Jose Maria A. He is my grandfather. He created my world as he fought for the end of many worlds. In the conflict that has raged in Colombia for the last 50 years, the US-backed Colombian army has fought against leftist guerrilla groups that were birthed by a long and painful history of fratricidal violence, corruption, repression, and instability. Other armed groups such as narco-traffickers, paramilitaries, and police forces have contributed to the pool of blood that has painted our rivers red. Farmers and indigenous peoples have been especially wounded by this war due to its dimension of land struggle. No armed group has shied away from corruption, rape, and brutal violations of human rights; the conflict shows a complete breakdown of our humanity that appears to have bound us in a cyclical state of hatred.

“They played soccer with a decapitated head,” my dad once told me. Who? It doesn’t matter anymore. At this moment there are no clashes.

How can reparations be given to the dead?

If there is something I have seen from this war it is the irreversible and deep mistrust it ingrains in our hearts.

It is bad for our health. Some of my loved ones have been on the receiving side of violence. Others, like my grandfather, have been employed to commit it. They all heavily alarm and lock their doors like fortresses. They twitch, they ache, their blood flows as if escaping. My maternal grandmother is often visited by ghosts.

Grandfather, you are a myth. I have always known this. You wore crocodiles on your shirt and were saluted by everyone with palpable fear. You were trained in the art of violence by the school of the Americas. Your father died from complications of depression after his forced displacement; that’s when you became the Man. I should have known then, that our family would end up as a surplus in your life, washed ashore by the benefits of your bellicosity. I should have known then how this war has also destroyed you. I should have known then I was destined to become one of the leftists you hate. The cycle must go on.

All my grandfather has now to hold on to is the praise for his position. The brutality he became intimate with is honored. The gory nightmares are drowned down with a full belly and lulled to sleep in a nice apartment, government benefits, grandchildren in the US, and skin cancer from waging war under the sun.

In the theater of state brutality, both the victim and

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

the perpetrator must be dehumanized. Without a doubt, the recipients of state brutality suffer in the cruelest and most prolonged manner. However, there is a secondary nightmare that falls upon the perpetrator. My grandfather released stresses of the war through keeping volent control over his household. He doesn’t speak of what he went through, or what he did.

I think of executioners coming home at night to their wives. I think of them at the moment they approve the execution, under the cross and the American flag. I think of gas chambers, electrocution, and firing squads, all still legal alongside the lethal injection in certain states.

There were times as a child when I liked to hold my grandfather’s dagger.

The Chicago Police Department released a video recently on its Facebook page titled “You Are Not Alone,” spreading awareness for the high rate of suicide amongst police officers. The video explains how police officers suffer higher suicide rates than the US national average. It shows clips of different sources of suffering from police officers, from dissatisfied partners and landlords to protesters calling them pigs. The most violent and striking image of this video is a Black woman weeping at the death of her child presumably by the hands of police or an incident involving policing. The rhetoric in this video was violently anti-Black, misleading and manipulative. Framing this woman’s devastation as something that contributed to the suicide of a police officer inverts and trivializes the effects of her trauma and the structural nature of police violence. Her suffering is exploited.

Such a tactic is harmful propaganda especially in a city with one of the best funded police departments and high rates of police violence.

Ironically, in denouncing this distortion of the community’s trauma in order to boost the morale of police officers, it is evident that this video does not truly address the damages that this violent occupation causes upon the officers and their ways of life and families. For instance it does not address the fact that the rate of domestic violence in law enforcement families is four times the national average in the US. It is not trying to find the root. This is why I am reaching into the suppressed sufferings of my own grandfather, who has caused so much harm in the name of the state and of his honor. I recognize a similar phenomenon. I also recognize his pain.

In July, I came back to Colombia after almost a decade. I finally got to see my beloved maternal grandfather Jaime again. In the central plaza of Bogota, he took me by the arm and showed me how the city broke into riots of April 9, 1948, the events that unleashed the civil war that General Jose Maria fought in. Walking on the old backbones of the city, his memory somehow stained every old building, and it moaned in their cracks. The dome of the church was a broken egg. “Half of it was just gone,” he said.

Many years after the riots, my grandfather Jaime’s home was broken into by robbers in collaboration with the police. He and his wife, who was suffering from severe arthritis at the time, were tied up and placed against the floor with guns, as well as their sons and

daughters and their little grandchildren. It is funny, how if the war didn’t kill them, maybe the aftermath could have. This event was not shocking to them, but rather a confirmation that in violent circumstances, these events are expected, as there are no standards, as everything is degraded, as anyone could be your next attacker. Their small shoe factory was eventually extorted to its end.

They live in constant paranoia. I’ve left them behind while they were in this state.

When my father told me about my grandfather I felt a cold, bitter resentment. I feel it everyday in the black coffee my father drinks at four in the morning.

The riots which erupted in 1948 were Jose Maria’s blood inauguration. A young soldier’s first battle kill.

He was around the age I was a few years after my first period. He was to guard a Catholic school in the central plaza called Colegio Mayor de San Bartolome from the liberals, the rioters, the rebels who were destroying the Bogota after the murder of presidential candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. The nuns cleaned the soldier’s spears with their white curtains. White curtains turned pink.

There were times when the Orinoco River flowed pink from all the bodies dumped into it.

He abused and beat his kids when he’d get home from his missions. He’d turn on his wife too. Made everyone turn on each other, ready and lined up at the door to turn each other in for their sins before this fearful master. He softened up at the birth of his first granddaughter, born of the son he almost beat to death. Her cheeks glowed pink.

Yet he could not protect her from future violence that would come her way, histories of sexual violence which are hushed and not mentioned in our families. He, at 75 years old, screamed at my tiny mother over trivial issues during his visit to the US. Those screams were not about the way she was raising me at all. They were a learned, primal growl from the bellows of his discontent.

After the bloodshed he got to go to Egypt. To Europe. To diplomatic meetings. To the stupidly patriotic Western PA airshow, in his full regalia. After the bloodshed he wrote poetry about pear trees. He says he has sent the poems to me but I guess my dad never delivers them.

New York Times, June 30, 1983, one day after my dad’s 19th birthday: “BOGOTA, Colombia, June 29—The acting commander of the Colombian Army, Gen. Jose Maria Arbelaez C____, said today that security forces had neutralized leftist guerrillas in the southwest of the country.

Speaking to journalists, General Arbelaez said troops were in control in the jungle department of Caqueta where the largest guerrilla force, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, had been most active.

‘At this moment there are no clashes,’ he said.”

That is all he has ever said. His saddest poem.

MCAS has killed many flies.

FEATURES

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BY Katrina Northrop ILLUSTRATION BY Kelly Wang DESIGN BY Will Weatherly

At least 40 percent of children in Pawtucket schools do not have a lunch to bring to school everyday. More than 3,500 students enter the cafeteria empty-handed and hungry. After finishing their morning classes, countless students watch their more fortunate classmates eat, before returning to class with a grumbling stomach and a wandering mind.

Starting this September, the Pawtucket School District has moved to ensure that financial constraints do not preclude any student from accessing breakfast or lunch in their school cafeteria. Starting with a pilot program in the Elizabeth Baldwin and Virginia Cunningham Schools, the district hopes to eventually expand to every Pawtucket school.

“Because of this new program, our students have full bellies. Students are learning, and they are happy,” Barbara Savella, Vice Principal of the Cunningham School, told the Independent.

Beyond the obvious nutritional consequences of depriving students of meals, there is a direct link between provision of school lunch and increase in academic success.

According to a study done at the University of California, Berkeley, students with access to healthy lunch show a fourth-percentile improvement in test scores. While standardized test performance is an imperfect and unequal indicator of student improvement, it is clear that access to food leads to higher levels of academic success. In schools with economically disadvantaged populations, the lack of free lunch can exacerbate already existing problems of low student achievement. While overhauling the education system to address the embedded issues of socioeconomic inequity is a long and complicated process, the provision of free lunch is a relatively simple step with significant results.

Pawtucket schools provide food to all students

+++ The new Pawtucket lunch policy is made financially possible by a national program titled Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) of the National School Lunch Program. Under the policy, passed in 2010, all students in the public school system are provided a free lunch, so long as their schools meet certain conditions. Schools are eligible if more than 40 percent of the student body uses a food stamp program or a similar social program.

In Pawtucket, where 20 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, every school is eligible for the program’s benefits.

Before the implementation of the CEP program, some individual students were eligible for free or reduced price lunch, but the CEP program makes entire school populations eligible for meals. School districts collected data from parents in order to determine which students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. This put the burden on the parents to fill out surveys, and required that parents be aware of the program. Even if they were eligible, many students were not able to access these lunches due to misinformation, language barriers, and failure to complete surveys. The CEP program allows districts to streamline the process, and eliminates the individual eligibility process.

The amount of federal assistance that schools receive under CEP depends on the student population. If more than 62.5 percent of students meet the CEP guidelines of using a food stamp program, the school is reimbursed at the full rate of $3.25 per meal. If less than 62.5 percent of students comply with the guidelines, the school is only

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reimbursed $0.33 for every student that does not comply.

In the case of Pawtucket’s Baldwin School, the district has to pay an additional $8,000 because of their participation in the CEP program. In Providence, where the city’s school district implemented a pilot CEP program last year, the city saves $10,000 due to the different socioeconomic makeup of the student population.

For schools that are eligible for the full reimbursement rate, the CEP program seems to be an ideal solution.

However, for schools with student populations below the 62.5 percent guideline, the CEP program puts increased financial pressure on school districts. Some administrators say that this trade off is necessary and worthwhile.

But some say that the CEP program represents a bait and switch—the federal government promises funding to support free lunch, but only provides full assistance to select districts.

Although CEP has been available to underprivileged school districts nationwide for seven years, Rhode Island schools have been slow to take advantage of the policy due to a specific funding mechanism in the Rhode Island school system. In the absence of the financial assistance of CEP, Rhode Island school districts collect data from families in order to determine if specific students are eligible for free or reduced price lunch. When CEP is implemented, there is no need to collect this data because free lunch is available to all the students within a given school. In Rhode Island, however, the funding formula to allot money to economically disadvantaged schools with extra money is based on the data collected in the lunch survey. Thus, schools that participate in the CEP program are at risk of losing the state economic assistance that is a necessary supplement to their budgets.

Rhode Island schools have circumvented this problem by implementing a new income survey, allowing schools to still receive state money. Cunningham and Baldwin Schools, for example, implemented the new survey this September, at the same time that the CEP program was initiated. The survey is distributed to parents and completely optional, but school administrators hope that parents will be compelled to complete the form. While this survey is necessary to sidestep the funding obstacle, it does work against the CEP’s goal of eliminating paperwork and reducing the burden on parents. This survey is not necessary for CEP eligibility, but it is nonetheless another form that school officials are requesting parents to fill out.

Why it has taken seven years to finally resolve this funding restriction remains unclear. Either the national government should have foreseen this issue and better accommodated Rhode Island’s funding structure, or the state government should have moved more quickly to find a method to circumvent the funding problem.

Rhode Island was one of many states that encountered

similar problems resulting from the lack of data collection when schools eliminated the free or reduced-price lunch survey. Given the fact that many states encountered these problems, it is surprising that it took Rhode Island so long to finally reach a solution.

Melissa Devine, the Chief Financial Officer for the Pawtucket School District, is happy with how the new income survey and the general CEP program is working so far.

She is very confident that the pilot program will be successful and that the district will be able to expand free lunch into other schools.

However, “We are only 35 days into the school year. It’s still too new to make any conclusions” she told the Independent. +++

Another important benefit of free lunch provision stems from the shame that students feel when they are unable to afford lunch in the cafeteria. Many students, unwilling to speak out about their hunger, hide the problem from their friends and teachers. This physiological damage can have long lasting impacts on students, and creates an unhealthy learning environment for all students. As Karin Wetherill, the president of the Rhode Island Healthy Schools Coalition, told the Independent, “Wellness affects students in every possible way.”

Adding to the humiliation that many students feel as a result of their inability to pay for lunch, many school districts employ informal lunch-shaming policies. This practice allows school administrators to provide lunches of cheese sandwiches to the students who have not paid their dues for cafeteria lunch, thus obviously identifying and separating these students from their classmates. As of May 2017, Pawtucket has eliminated this policy. Actively punishing students for their inability to pay lunch bills is not specific to Rhode Island: more than half of all school districts nationwide employed shaming policies in 2016.

While these policies would be detrimental enough on their own, they also play into and enforce already existing socioeconomic hierarchies within schools. Hierarchies built on class status do not only have social implications; these structures stymie learning and damage self confidence at a critical developmental period.

Schools certainly face real debt problems as a result of the failure to pay lunch bills, but blaming children for their parents’ income level is both counterproductive and unfair. Even families who are eligible for free or reducedprice lunch through other national programs outside of the CEP program are not necessarily aware of their eligibility. The CEP program eliminates this obstacle, as it is not necessary to opt in to the program, thus ensuring that every student accesses benefits.

By implementing the CEP program, Rhode Island school districts join the ranks of school districts in New York, Dallas, and Detroit. Regardless of the extra cost that some schools face by initiating the program, the school district will seek to help students achieve both better wellness and academic results. While critical issues of teacher quality, equal access, and underfunding continue to plague schools with underprivileged student populations, at least no child will be forced to enter the cafeteria unsure if they will able to afford lunch that day.

KATRINA NORTHROP B’19 believes that a full stomach can go a long way.

OCTOBER 27, 2017

REVOLUTION NAVIGATORS

BY Jack Brook ILLUSTRATION BY Dorothy Windham DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

Empowerment and critical thought in the Rhode Island Urban Debate League Inside an auditorium in Brown University on Saturday afternoon, October 21st, the Joker, Darth Vader, and Rosie the Riveter listen to a critique of capitalism and food inequity in the American school system.

It’s the final round of the first official tournament of the year for the Rhode Island Urban Debate League (RIUDL)—Halloween-themed—and 41 costumed students from seven schools across the state have assembled to debate whether the US government should invest more money in its education system.

“Healthier adolescents will be able to focus more on school and can get better grades which will help them leave poverty,” says Lalli Rosa, a junior from E-Cubed High School in Providence. Rosa and her partner are attempting to defend the affirmative position on the grounds that the government ought to expand a program designed to provide healthier food to impoverished school districts.

“But,” shoots back Kahlyl Robertson, a senior from Woonsocket, “before you can resolve food inequity you have to focus on the underlying structural issues that cause it.”

“Capitalist class governs in its own interests—it’s not simply because they don’t get good food at school, it’s because they can’t get food in schools,” Robertson explains when his turn presenting the ‘negative’ case comes up. “Unless you dismantle the capitalist nature of schools you can’t address food inequity.”

The final round continues—back-and-forth—for well over an hour, full of cross examinations and counter-arguments. Yet while the stated purpose of the tournament is to provide a space for students like Robertson and Rosa to argue over policy, RIUDL really aims for something deeper and more transformational in its work.

“We see academic debate as a strategy for social justice,” says Ashley Belanger, the executive director of RIUDL who has worked there for over ten years (her official job title is “Executive Revolutionary”). “Debate for the students serves as a vehicle for expanding their own perceptions of themselves in the world.” +++ Debate has been proven to have a profound effect on students who participate in it, particularly those students in underperforming school districts. According to a study conducted by the Chicago Urban Debate League, students who debate are 42 percent more likely to graduate from high school than those do not. The number jumps up to 70 percent for African-American men, who are also three times less likely to drop out compared to their non-debate peers. All debate participants see vast improvements in their critical reading and writing abilities.

Currently, RIUDL partners with seven different schools—from Woonsocket High School to Central High School in Providence—and hosts six tournaments over the course of the school year. They also host what is known as the “community debate,” in which community members pair up with urban debaters in a series of speed debates. Last year, the issue was whether Providence should become a sanctuary city.

In four of Rhode Island’s major cities —Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, and Woonsocket—there exists a striking amount of educational segregation, as 20 percent of students in the public school system are white, compared with nearly 80 percent in the remainder of the state. Each of these school districts has double-digit drop out rates (around 20 percent for Woonsocket and Central Falls), with 80 percent of the student body coming from a low income family. The results of last year’s Partnership

for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, a statewide test, reveal that less than a quarter of Black and Latinx students scored proficient in English, well under the state average. It’s clear that the Rhode Island public education system is, to a large degree, failing its urban students, especially those of color.

“The zip code you are born into shouldn’t determine your life trajectory—here it does,” Belanger says. “We’re trying to introduce a pedagogy and a series of activities that’s more about shifting the way that teachers see themselves and operate.”

Inevitably, focusing only on students who join debate means that RIUDL only reaches a small percentage of the total number of students in each school. That’s why RIUDL has been trying to integrate what’s known as “Evidence Based Argument” learning into Rhode Island schools, which applies the principles of debate—organizing evidence to produce a well-supported claim—in classrooms.

“The basic premise of EBA is that the ideas that students have matter,” says Aaron Woodward, the debate coach for Paul Cuffee High School. “This is a program that by nature puts the content of students’ minds in an elevated position in the classroom and listens to them. This is especially for those who might have felt that their school is not a supportive institution for them.”

A typical English lesson based on EBA principles, Woodward explains, might start with introducing a key concept for the day and raising a question related to it.

Students are given time to debate their own personal answers with a partner before the concept is introduced more formally. Students are then given a text, divided into groups, and asked to find specific examples that support the central claim of the concept. Finally, the groups present their evidence and attempt to articulate why it is important.

At the moment, RIUDL has been working with two schools—Paul Cuffee and Central High—to integrate the EBA model, and which is expected to soon be the guiding model in every class for Central’s 1,140 students.

Rhode Island is not alone in seeking to integrate EBA— the National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA) has also undertaken a major initiative, originating in the Massachusetts school system. Preliminary studies by the NSDA have shown massive improvement in student ability to organize and construct writing skills and essaybased argumentation.

“This is something that has been a hugely positive experience,” Woodward says. “Both kids and teachers see the benefits to this program, which makes them want to come in in the morning.” +++ A typical RIUDL practice takes around two hours, twice a week, where students play verbal games, review evidence to build their cases, meet with partners, and practice their speaking skills.

With all the work that debate requires, retaining students in the debate program can be an issue—one that RIUDL is actively working to counteract, and part of the reason why so much emphasis is placed on having fun and building communities.

“In athletic teams, there is an ingrained sense of commitment—if you miss a practice or quit that’s an issue,” says Jeremy Bourget, a history teacher and debate coach at Paul Cuffee Charter School. “Sometimes our novice younger debaters haven’t developed that yet.”

A few years ago, Bourget says that Cuffee’s debate program had upwards of 25 students, this year, however, they are struggling to maintain a group of ten students.

Every aspect of RIUDL is intended to facilitate student engagement—especially the tournaments. Over the summer, in the “Revolution Navigators” program, a team of students, in addition to developing recruiting and retention strategies for RIUDL, worked to plan out the themes, food, and events of the year’s six tournaments.

The Halloween classic included gourd painting, dance music, and community-building games to introduce each team to one another. And for students, the process of getting to take a leadership role in developing the tournaments can be just as important as the debating itself “I used to be a follower, I would just listen to people,” says Diana Izaguirr, 17, a junior at Mount Pleasant who participated in the summer program. “Now, I have such a different view of what’s going, I’m able to articulate problem-solving and how to use my voice and speak with people.”

Another essential component of RIUDL comes from returning alumni and coaching assistants from Brown University, who provide debaters with positive relationships and guidance from successful college students. Coaching assistants attend practices, judge tournaments, and help keep things fun for students.

“I value this work because I know that they were just like me, living in communities just like mine,” says Bunmi Olatjunji, a former RIUDL member who now works for the organization. “I know they have potential just like I did and have the ability to express it just like I did.” +++ Following the conclusion of the final, a coaching assistant with his face painted as the Joker leaps up to podium.

“Hello everybody!” he shouts. “You ready for awards?” The first to be honored are the novices, each receiving a certificate with their name printed on it.

“You all took a huge risk by going to your first tournament,” Phyllis Wade, RIUDL’s program manager, tells the debaters as they bounded forward.

Other awards, besides the standard ones for Best Speakers and Teams, include the ‘Revolutionary Thinking’ award (for an outside the box argument that referenced the tournament’s breakfast), the ‘Best Costume,’ which goes to a girl with a spectacular dripping red gore face, and lastly, the ‘Weird Gourd Award’ for gourd decoration, presented to a boy named Esteban (“He let the gourd speak to him”).

The winners of the novice section—a pair of girls both named Rachel—appear particularly excited with their awards; they walk back to their seats, trophies in hand, high-fiving with the type of smiles that one might not expect to see after twelve rigorous hours of policy debating.

“Oh we’re gonna be bragging on Monday,” says 11th grader Rachel Victoria.

Her partner, Rachel Gambles, a ninth grader dressed as Darth Vader, swishes her cape and can’t stop shaking her head.

“When he said ‘Rachel and Rachel’ won I almost cried, it was so dramatic,” she exclaims.

They debrief the day’s rounds, dissecting the blow by blows and difficult moments—pausing to hug or wave goodbye to new friends from different schools who are now heading back home. The younger Rachel says she joined debate to improve her speaking skills, and the older Rachel nods knowingly.

“Her voice does cower a bit on rebuttal,” the older Rachel notes. “But once she gets that down, we’re gonna be untouchable!”

JACK BROOK B’19 still cowers on rebuttals.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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A GHOULISH PASSAGE FROM LESSER TO GREATER PERFECTION An illustrated account of how I attended the TransWorld Halloween and Attractions Show and left perfected in every aspect of my being After attending TransWorld Halloween & Attractions Show in St. Louis Missouri, my life’s project was completed and I attained perfection. There is nothing left for me to strive for. I am perfect/complete.

If you remember me in a less than perfect state, that is an old memory, because attending this industry-only trade show for haunted house-related products so ennobled my faculties of reason and enlarged my powers of apprehension, so satisfied my libidinal hankerings and smoothed out my psychic knots that I left the convention hall utterly whole, perfect, and complete.

And so now—clear-headed, mind, body, and soul freed from the yoke of the ruling passions—I will proceed to recount, with ghoulish aplomb, details of the event which is at last seasonally appropriate to write about.

I am impressed by the monumental scale of the dark chateaus, Bates Motels and accursed lumber mills various companies have erected in the hangar for short-term display.

+++ It’s difficult to convey the first impression of walking through the doors of TransWorld Halloween & Attractions Show. “Assault on the senses” and “feast for the senses” both fall short as descriptors. Perhaps senses are caught somewhere between the assaultive hunt and celebratory feast, and in this lacuna so much hissing of hydraulics, clanging of animatronically-rigged pots and pans, and popping out of sofa-sized zombie-horse puppet heads from behind a veil of fog-impregnated bubbles.

+++ Does “RISD HAUNTS”—the “atmospheric dance club/ conceptual art platform, where installation artists repurpose state-of-the-art Halloween animatronics,” sound familiar?

In terms of spatial navigation, the haunted house is an innately micromanaged format. Everyone goes through the same door and out the next in a one-way vector so that emotional responses can be carefully modulated and jumpscares correctly timed. Corridors are narrow to allow for the maximum number of twists and turns per square foot of floor space.

The convention hall, on the other hand, is designed to be as open and unpartitioned as possible, encouraging aimless drifting and free-associative modes of consumption.

Jonah and I disband quickly after entering the gates, lost in the morass of stilt-mounted swamp-wraiths and hell-clowns.

The first thing I videotape are these rapturous figures, each hooked up to a motor, vibrating agreeably. These types of figures replace a haunted house employee and probably pay for themselves in the long term. “Beauty will be convulsive or not be at all,” said some fucking asshole.

If you’ve RSVP’d to one or more of their warehouse raves, take a long walk in the spooky forest and bury your molly in an unmarked grave because “RISD HAUNTS” never existed. The enterprise is entirely fictional, devised by (special guest star) Jonah Max and I in order to negotiate around TransWorld’s strict pro-haunted-houseowners-only attendance policy. With the the invention of “RISD HAUNTS” and subsequent branding efforts, (as well as my legitimate receipt for a $769 clown autopsy prop, long story) we were able to qualify as “buyers” in the online ticket application, gaining full access to the TransWorld bargaining floor.

At the admissions booth, along with our Froggy Fog-branded lanyards, we were given ribbons stating “RISD HAUNTS”’s specialized subcategory:

There are also live actors in a number of booths, wearing top hats and staging campy acts of dismemberment.

The distribution of booths does seem to conform to a general pattern, with the most technically accomplished props clustered by the door and more coagulated hot-glue blood sludge as you journey further out. A heavily fortified VIP lounge occupies the dead center of the hall. (Only those who sprung for the $310 VIP pass have access to the the inkjet printer and jar of cheese balls enshrouded therein.)

BY Liby Hays IMAGES ALSO BY Liby Hays DESIGN BY Eliza Chen, unwitting victim

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And the thriving subgenre of cannibalistic carnival food.

Beyond the lounge is a more spaced-out zombie paintball, VR app demo, and escape-room heavy area, tapering off into a Christmas inflatable no man’s land by the far perimeter.

But perhaps the most compelling area in TransWorld is the adjacent animatronics show room, the source of much of the clamor. The diverse array of automata are organized in a ring around a 50-foot-tall Diabolus with floodlight eyes. The effect is strikingly baroque, with the cabinet-popping banshees, demonic warthogs and hillbillies dunked in toxic waste all firing at various intervals, interweaving into some polyphonic suite of deranged robo-aggression. It works like a clock, basically—a clock that makes manifest all the pathological, violent kitsch our normal clock just barely conceals under its smooth white edifice. It’s all of the things Halloween is supposed to be about: the cycling of the seasons, the reaping, et cetera, and a rare triumph of death over the image of death.

+++ Unlike Providence’s Terror Con, at TransWorld horror franchise villains are few and far between. But nevertheless, the prop-makers seem to be working under creative constraints. There are a limited number of horror themed variables (or ‘gorephemes’) which TransWorld artists combine in various permutations. There seems to be no genre of monster (i.e. Frankenstein, Krampus, Slenderman), type of prop (loose limbs, weaponized fire hydrants) or surface treatment (glistening blood, soiled burlap) that isn’t echoed in the wares of least three separate vendors. And the mash-ups between these clichés prove just as exhaustive/exhausted. No limit to the number of creepy conventions prop and mask makers will layer into a single item in the desperate pursuit of novelty.

For example, the killer clown aesthetic is slapped on like just another coat of paint, leading to such contrivances as..

+++ The Don’t Be A Monster Anti-Bullying Campaign Silent Auction is the haunted house industry’s attempt at community outreach.

I was actually hoping more vendors would try to embody real, contemporary threats... perhaps some ancient bacteria resuscitated from their frozen state due to global warming, or something.

The stand that came the closest to addressing topical fears was, unsurprisingly, Ghost Ride Production House.

Ghost Ride is a company I’ve patronized on numerous occasions in the past, although I’ve grown to regret it. I was first drawn to their products’ incredibly convincing realism, with hand-punched hairs and hundred-layer airbrush paintjobs. But this same attention to detail can lead into very problematic terrain—elements like hair, clothing, and adornment situate Ghost Ride’s characters historically and socioeconomically, invoking real individuals in a deeply insensitive manner.

For example, today they’ve brought along a zombie Trump, a SWAT officer, a clown killed during a hostage situation, a chained woman with a tribal armband tattoo, a nuclear technician with plasmolyzed head and a twenty-something skater frozen to death in the snow among several hundred other products. Of the figures listed, the skater is the most personally upsetting to behold— his sneakers seem like they could’ve belonged to a friend.

I am reminded of how attending a haunted house is often a very heteronormative date-night practice, in which scares facilitate physical contact between damsel in distress and male companion.

Another adventure with Jonah involves getting “Electric Chair” scent oil all over our hands, arms and clothes. I feel very guilty because I had insisted we smell the oils. I had no idea we would end up being anointed, but it is very unpleasant indeed. +++

I could spin this log into a declamation of how pervasive commercial interests strangulate good old-fashioned Halloween fun, but my critique would get fed right back into the economic machine like last year’s candy.

A pure Halloween is as impossible to conceive of as a pure death. Criticizing TransWorld along Marxist lines would be similar to criticizing the Scooby Doo live action movies for blaspheming the source material, when they were just following in the Hanna-Barbera bargain-basement animation tradition. My critique would be the Che Guevara tee to end all Che Guevara tees. So ultimately my final verdict on TransWorld is this: that it was fantastic, I had fun, and left perfected. +++

The Gorilla-clown..

I can no longer take refuge in the abstraction of the gorepheme vernacular. A genuine cruelty has been shorn up here and I can’t stop looking at those Vans. +++

Star nip’d barbarian zombie clown…

Now Jonah and I reconvene and have a few adventures in tandem. One adventure is sneaking into various seminars which give attendees insider tips and credits towards a Certified Haunted Attraction Operator Safety (CHAOS) certification. We go to one seminar on Pricing Rain Insurance for Haunted Houses. (Jonah really perks up for this one.)

This next seminar also proves immensely helpful:

After our final day at TransWorld, Jonah and I head to the St. Louis Zoo. I remember thinking the animals’ fur wasn’t realistic enough, and that their personalities were too tropological and quaint. It reminds me of how I quit drugs because they made me see my life as too clean-cut of an allegory, and I prefer the frayed edge of a wraith.

LIBY HAYS B/RISD’19 is a droplet of glistening lymph.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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PRINCESSES IN A MAGIC CASTLE The Florida Project's recasting of representation

BY Kelton Ellis ILLUSTRATION AND DESIGN BY Gabriel Matesanz

A quick survey of United States media discourse from the past two years makes it look like one crucial demographic holds cultural and electoral sway right now. They don’t have college degrees; they have been ravaged by an opioid epidemic as well as the decline of good, unionized manufacturing jobs; they are born with our nation’s most foundational privilege (if not always the circumstances that allow them to effectively capitalize on it). They are the white working class, and they are, according to most accounts, misunderstood. Until it started to seem consequential throughout the perpetual shock of 2016’s election cycle, academics, journalists, and politicians did not seem to give due attention to that class’s particular struggles. As the story goes, their neglect bred an unexpectedly impactful sort of public resentment trained on aloof Democrats, “identity liberalism,” and immigrants.

For much of the last year, those power brokers—especially journalists and policy types in Washington—have convened in their echo-chambers, attempting to outdo each other on who can pin down the many mysteries of what low-income white folks want. JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy, an introspective examination of downtrodden white Appalachians, is now in its 64th week on the New York Times’ bestseller list. The Democratic Party now finds itself in a dilemma, unsure whether to downplay a racial justice platform to get more white votes in the Upper Midwest. Just the list of op-eds I’ve seen that promote this exact view makes for a daunting number of words.

To my mind, the new focus on the white underclass has mostly been a dangerous turn. It’s had the effect of putting a very specific group of people at the forefront of political consciousness even though rising economic inequality is both a general affliction and a more particular injury to people of color; it centers whiteness to the detriment of continuing conversations about the persistence of white power, which could leave most people to conclude that mere economics is today’s only

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lever of privilege. Nevertheless, even as a Black American with interests different from theirs, it would be false to say I don’t feel some degree of empathy for those hollowed cities and the citizens lost to their despair. The socioeconomic dynamics I worry about in the lives of my folks aren’t wholly separate from their own. +++ I was thinking of these grievances a couple of weeks ago, when I watched Sean Baker’s The Florida Project at Brown’s Granoff Center. The enigma in the film’s title intrigued me, putting me in mind of an ethnographic documentary about one of the more contradictory states in the union. What followed uncannily mirrored my intuitions, then exceeded them.

In the movie, a smart six-year-old girl named Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) lives with her mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) in Magic Castle, one of the many pastel-colored extended stay motels in Orlando, Florida.

It’s this premise that gives the film’s title another valence.

The motel’s un- and underemployed guests flout the management’s rules, using the space as a sort of substitute for the public housing they might otherwise live in.

Though I’m hesitant to map onto the film a racial politics that it doesn’t really advance on its own, I did find the recasting of “project” interesting; usually, “the projects” connote low-income Black people stacked on top of one another in indistinguishable government housing units, and the unconventional family Moonee and Halley form is very much a white one.

What’s more, “the Florida Project” was the name given to Walt Disney World, the theme park that looms over Magic Castle, in its development stages. Here is where the film’s youthful optimism crosses poignantly

with its cynicism about what corporations like Disney represent: the central implied drama of the film is how theme parks concentrate opulence in Orlando by promising child-friendly fun, only to exclude many of the children left at their mercy just for being born and raised in a tourist trap where the economy operates for the moneyed visitor (a one-day pass for Moonee to go to Magic Kingdom would cost about $100, three times the amount Halley pays for their room each night).

Baker masterfully depicts what happens to the child in this situation without resorting to tired clichés about the insults of poverty. Halley is young, single, and out of work, preferring to spend time listlessly smoking blunts.

Sometimes she hangs out with a waitress who lives in the motel, and whose son Scooty (Christopher Rivera) is Moonee’s partner in crime. Valeria Cotto plays Jancey, another accomplice who lives in the Futureland Inn next door. No real plot governs the kids’ days; mostly the film progresses in long expanses where they eat ice cream, play pranks, and make the most of their vacation in that way unique to children who don’t get to go summer camps. The closest thing they have to supervision is motel manager Bobby, played by Willem Dafoe in a complex performance that constantly shifts between kindness and frustration. There is actually great joy and humor in the characters’ life on the margins, and we get a sense for it as much for Baker’s direction and cinematography as for the sharp acting. The elliptical, slow storytelling can be off-putting to viewers used to action-filled cinema, but I thought it was a pitch-perfect evocation of muggy, pointless, unattended summers, which I often had growing up in neighboring Georgia. +++

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Given the media’s current obsession with people like Halley, it’s not surprising that The Florida Project has mostly attracted critical acclaim with undertones of commentary about the state of American politics. “As economic inequality plagues the United States and shapes its politics, there has never been a better time for The Florida Project,” Adam Epstein introduces a review of Prince’s performance in Quartz. A more critical assessment in the New Yorker is nonetheless quick to name “the indignities of class.” The consensus blurb on Rotten Tomatoes—a site whose effect on cinema I’m, Scorceselike, normally skeptical of—reads: “a colorfully empathetic look at an underrepresented part of the population that proves absorbing even as it raises sobering questions about modern America.” Dafoe, Prince, and Vinaite are all being floated as potential Oscar contenders.

It’s that crucial buzzword, “underrepresented,” that’s peculiar to the moment. The past few years of film and television have seen a renaissance in the media of the “underrepresented,” as well as continual, fraught dialogues about when directors and producers fall short of adequate representation. Representation in this context essentially always means race and ethnicity on screens large and small; given that race is the most visually-oriented of American hierarchies, that visual culture is preoccupied with it only follows. With somewhat lesser frequency, the gender and sexual identities of actors and their characters are cited as “representation.” Platforms like YouTube and Vimeo gave filmmakers from those underrepresented groups a chance to prove their talents outside of an industry that, unless it becomes profitable, is hostile to people of color and queer people.

In some really abstract ways, my watching and thinking about The Florida Project reminded me of last year’s Moonlight—though the latter film is both a greater

aesthetic victory and more radical in its portrayal of unseen lives. Both works are visually stunning, making up for their sparse dialogue with moody shots of the decrepit Florida settings they share. I watched Moonlight with a group of Black friends the day after the 2016 presidential election, brought to tears as much by the movie as by the unexpected circumstances in which I saw it, and my anxieties about what they’d mean for our most vulnerable. I cried near the end of The Florida Project, too, having seen the result of so much resentment, and having understood that the class of disadvantaged people who voted with it would never get the payday they expected. That’s the only sense in which I consider racism a pitiable worldview—people who take a privilege they never deserved for granted and revolt when it’s threatened.

What’s unusual in this sense of underrepresentation is the fact of Halley and Moonee’s whiteness; Halley, with her blue hair and tattoos, is someone I almost expect to allege that she’s also discriminated against for looking different and listening to trap music. The casting choice doesn’t feel like an accident considering Sean Baker’s ambition to tell those stories that don’t get told—he made his name with 2015’s Tangerine, which recounts a day in the life of two Black transgender sex workers. Strictly speaking, poverty and homelessness in America are still much more likely to be a fact of Black or brown lives. It wouldn’t be fair to Baker to expect a list of identity boxes to be checked off—he only sets out to depict our problem of economic stratification, and does that much quite well.

But what is the actual utility of works like The Florida Project right now? In American cinema, white protagonists have always had an easier time arousing the sympathies of viewers, for obvious reasons. The same phenomenon has played out more generally in media narratives of the white working class. The opioid

epidemic afflicting disadvantaged white Americans has been medicalized where crack cocaine, an epidemic in Reagan-era Black neighborhoods, was criminalized; unemployed white people are the victims of globalization’s whims where Black and Latinx Americans in a similar spot are assigned blame for their lots. Most concerning is where a writer seems to excuse a voter’s prejudices because of the ancient cruelties they’ve only become acquainted with recently.

As Richard Brody says in the New Yorker review, Baker never passes much judgment on Halley’s dysfunctional behavior, and neither can the audience; it’s frequently just cute, the way she acts like a fun big sister to her daughter. Even in the movie’s upsetting conclusion, bureaucracy is made the villain after all of Halley’s transgressions and refusal of assistance. Perhaps Baker deserves some criticism for playing, however unknowingly, into this narrative of a white woman’s victimhood, and for not giving the characters enough space to be more than symbols.

In some other senses, I couldn’t help but think about the many lacking representations, especially as American class structures—which aren’t unrelated—begin to oppress even white people with new vigor. Many of my own frustrations with media come down to race, some to class. More of it, still, has to do with the ways that millennials in New York and Los Angeles, some of whom are people of color, depict some version of their lives in ways that seem more and more centralized, leaving little room on the screen for the more humdrum lives Americans lead elsewhere. Under those criteria, I did think of The Florida Project as a movie we hadn’t seen, and it’s made me consider more broadly how art and cinema could address increasing inequality. I’d only hope, however, that the complexities of the task are kept in mind.

KELTON ELLIS B’18 actually just cries at every movie, no joke.

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BROODINESS, BODIES, AND BECOMINGS A meditative exploration of the egg words of the philosophers, the hen and the egg’s relationship, neither influenced by filiation nor identification, produces a “block of becoming, a block of alliance.”

IV. A (Nest) Box of Becomings

I. Positionality She sits hunched in the small wooden crate, feathers plumed, motionless. I slip my fingers underneath her feathers to feel the hotness of her crop, and immediately she shifts her body, adjusting to my intrusion. Clucking softly, she settles her body over my human hand, this foreign form that she perceives as an egg. I am overwhelmed by her intimacy.

Occurring across species in the avian world, as well as among amphibian and reptile species, broodiness represents a state in which chickens demonstrate overprotectiveness toward eggs they lay—and even eggs laid by other chickens. This condition, characterized by hens spending extended periods of time sitting in the nest, forgoing food and water, raising their body temperature, and sacrificing everyday activities in order to protect and incubate the eggs. Broodiness affects some breeds of chicken more than others and arises whether the eggs are fertile or unfertilized. Perhaps most perplexing, however, is the fact that the hen remains unaware of the difference between a fertilized and unfertilized egg, and of whether the egg belongs to her or another hen. The broody hen positions herself over the egg, as we attempt to situate the hen in relation to the egg. Some positions are always shifting.

II. Breaking Binaries Tease apart notions of binary and separateness and we discover the liminal, in-between spaces that bodies, intimacy, and becomings occupy. Challenge the forces that serve to limit connectivity in inter- and intraspecies relationships, and we develop a more inclusive context in which to define bodies. The condition of broodiness is paramount to investigating the relationship between hens and eggs, and the way humans consider the egg in relation to the hen proves crucial to the way in which we evaluate the intimacy of the hen-egg relationship, the egg as a bodily form, and the integrity of the egg.

III. Bodies Emphasizing rhizomatic connections and notions of entangled chronologies, philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari consider becoming to be a complex change that does not concern itself with progress, but occurs due to both internal and external forces that act on bodies to ultimately become. Casting aside ideas of filiation and concrete progress, a becoming only “concerns alliance” and ultimately “produces nothing other than itself.”

Rejecting biological or familial relations as connections through which bodies become, they instead use alliance to evoke a sense of association that occurs through involvement with a body different from one’s own. The egg is a body, a form through which the outside world can form alliances and involvements. Unable to distinguish her own eggs from other hens’ eggs, a broody hen will sit on an egg in the nest, forming an alliance with the egg through physical contact and sacrifice—sitting, warming, constantly repositioning, defending it from other hens, sacrificing her own health for the sake of the egg. In the

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In viewing life in the nest box, we can apply involution, evolution’s inverse, which exists as a creative process that causes forms to constantly dissolve and is not concerned with differentiation. There are obvious relationships between the hen and the egg: the broody hen produces the egg and then broods over it. Or, the broody hen did not produce the egg, but recognizes it as an egg—something the hen knows her body produces—and therefore broods over it. Yet, these assignable relations fail to explain the seemingly inexplicable nature of broodiness, and so they remain nothing more than filaments of reason, as fragile as the cobwebs strewn like ghostly netted sacks in the rafters of the henhouse. Referencing Deleuze and Guattari’s theories on becomings, literary scholar Mark Hansen points out that creative involution allows for an “unnatural participation” that ultimately highlights “the only way Nature operates—against itself.” The hen sitting on an unfertilized egg epitomizes “unnatural participation” and seems to align with the idea of Nature operating in a non-logical manner. When a hen broods over an unfertilized egg she did not even lay, nature acts against itself, dissolving barriers of rationality and filiation. This remarkable phenomenon allows the hen and egg to involve with each other, to become in the same nest box as she toils with the intimacy of tactile contact, warmth, and positionality.

V. Enfolding Intimacies Intimacy, an expression of care created through tactile contact and familiarity between bodies, represents one of the driving forces involved in the becoming of the hen and unfertilized egg. In her work with cup corals and her explorations of interspecies relations, Swedish researcher Eva Hayward challenges the physical barrier that separates species in order to highlight humans’ relationality to other species, exploring the way texture and touch allow us to enfold “elements of each other within ourselves.”

This emphasizes how bodies are affected and ultimately changed by intimate interactions, ultimately producing a becoming for the actors involved. The physical nature of this intimacy highlights how tactile communication affects the interiors of bodies as they communicate, activate, and impress upon each other. For the hen, the egg’s existence as an entity able to support life proves inconsequential in her expressions of intimacy. Unconcerned with whether the egg will really develop into a chick, she constructs her own sense of reality by becoming intimate with an entity she deems worthy of more gentle handling and tender care. The inner biological process that occurs during the formation of the egg, as well as the hen’s broody actions—using her beak to fold the egg under her feathers and hiding the egg from the outside world—allow the hen to enfold elements of herself into the egg.

VI. Permeability In reconsidering an unfertilized egg as a permeable membrane, rather than a three-dimensional cell, we can envision it serving as a barrier between an inside world and an outside world, receiving stimuli, or affections, through intimate tactile contact. The hen’s intimacy warms the egg, and the warmth passes through this “permeable membrane,” impresses on the egg, and raises its internal temperature. Similarly, physical elements from

BY Shannon Kingsley ILLUSTRATION BY Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

the egg’s environment—such as excretion, dirt, and the hen’s bodily fluids—may over time (as the bloom disintegrates and the shell becomes more porous) seep through the egg’s shelled form and penetrate its interior, changing the makeup of the egg’s inside world. Here, just like a cell found in the body of a multicellular organism, the egg enfolds these elements of the outside world into its interior, allowing for a becoming with the outside world beyond its “membrane.”

VII. Suspension Like the yolk suspended in the albumen, held in place by two chalazae, the unfertilized egg remains suspended in the liminal space between living and non-living, anchored by intimacy and enfoldings. The egg’s enfoldings and inner complexities save it from existing as a non-living form and allow it to occupy a space of liminality. To broadly classify the egg as a non-living entity would strip it of its complexity and its capacity for becoming.

VIII. Liminality The yolk, anchored to float in folds of membranes and fluid cushions, epitomizes the egg’s position in the in-between space of living and non-living forms. By serving as the lifeline of a developing chick, the yolk functions as the center, or essence, of the egg. If the egg itself is a yolk suspended in enfoldings, then the egg’s enfoldings and intimacies, which render it existent in this liminal space, produce the egg’s becoming into a suspended space of living/non-living. As Deleuze and Guattari posit, “a becoming produces nothing other than itself.” The egg’s own interior anatomy of enfoldings and intimacies provides a model for the brooded-over egg’s becoming into a liminal position between living and non-living worlds.

The Science of the Egg Propelled into a spinning motion, the yolk, a sac of carbohydrates, protein, and lipids, twists itself through the oviduct’s magnum, becoming encased in the egg white and forming two chalazae, protein anchors that suspend the yolk inside its egg white envelope. The egg then passes to the isthmus, a passage of tissue that bridges the magnum to the uterus, where two gossamer membranes enfold themselves around the egg white until the egg collapses into the nest of the shell gland. Here, a cushion of fluid begins to surround the membrane-bound egg. As if erecting tiny monuments undersea, calcite begins to deposit itself onto the membrane of the egg, growing out as tall, lateral structures that remain suspended in the fluid cushion, but anchored to the membrane.

Then, leaning toward each other, these monuments mesh together, forming calcified lattices that result in the enfolding of a hardened shell around the egg’s numerous membranes. A final protein solution, called the cuticle, or bloom, encases the shell to seal up the tiny pores between the monuments of calcite.

SHANNON KINGSLEY B’20 is reading A Thousand Platœufs.

OCTOBER 27, 2017

Suspicion

by Zak Ziebell

internet’s popularization, you can see glimmers of that frenzied autodidacticism.

There’s been plenty written about post-truth in the wake of last year’s presidential election, but reading commentary that doesn’t suffer from obvious blind spots is rare.

While our culture is growing increasingly self-aware of its own confusion over political and scientific realities, the finger-pointing which surrounds the subject usually lacks historical dimension. Social media bubbles, the news cycle, and political mass psychology all play roles in perpetuating post-truth, but they are not its origins. The rise in populist skeptical thought is a phenomena that official historical accounts struggle to capture because decentering shifts in political consciousness grow silently, like diseases with long incubation periods. What causes a society to become skeptical in a moment of hyper-connectivity and technological power? Technological interconnection, social complexity, and a lack of clarity are all sides of the same triangle. The contemporary-Western-internet-hooked-subject has access to technical procedures which exceed and thwart facticity as much as they complement it. The technology that was supposed to clarify and spread human knowledge has instead undermined it.

I have a theory about DK EyeWitness books, a series that millennials who had access to American elementary school libraries will likely be familiar with. It’s not an exaggeration to say that these slim, hardbacked volumes forever changed the world of children’s nonfiction publishing. Prior to the late 1980s (when EyeWitness first appeared on the scene) most nonfiction books on generic academic topics like Egypt, the human brain, or dinosaurs were filled with pages of type and small, gray images. Dorling Kindersley did something unprecedented, introducing networked spreads of bite-sized text and glossy, full-color imagery. The name “EyeWitness” itself is a bold claim of verisimilitude, that the books represented the closest thing to apprehending pyramids, velociraptors, or the inner-workings of the mind with your own eyes.

While institutions leave people depoliticized and uprooted from their social power, the individual does have the means to create their own political context independent of central authority. The internet offers a well-stocked shopping mall of political ideologies, life-philosophies, and other frameworks for deriving meaning. The tools to construct a center-right, centerleft, alt-right, radical left, anarcho-primitivist, Christian Scientist, Western Buddhist, vegan, libertarian, or nihilist worldview are freely available. The kaleidoscopic growth of lenses for understanding the world has happened in tandem with the technological revolution in part because increased reliance on technology distances individuals from the facts they use to generate opinions. A weird thing about living in the 21st century is that beyond the basics of navigating the world around us, most judgments we make are the result of evidence several times removed from its actual source. For the preindustrial individual, a political outlook might be formed by someone waving a weapon or a bag of food in front of their face. Today’s worldviews are shaped more often by media than anything witnessed firsthand. As the technologies we rely on grow in complexity, the outsourcing of judgment from the human mind deepens the possibility of philosophically skeptical attitudes about external reality. I’m not arguing that there are more people walking around who are actual, hard-line, “nothing-exists” skeptics about reality, but rather that it lurks threateningly in the background, surfacing through trends like ironic and postironic culture, the marketization of belief systems, and deep political apathy.

Skepticism isn’t an option among beliefs—instead, it’s the absence of any belief, swirling around and eating away at the foundation like a caustic wind. Nobody chooses skepticism. As the gap between human and technological judgment widens asymptotically, an irrational faith in the powers of our own agency—conspiratorial thought—presents itself as a dire alternative. The allure of conspiracy lies in its comfortable assurance that you will discover the truth with your own eyes. Enlightenment ideas of humanism and reason emerge once again from their slumber as parodies of themselves. In a nebulous, vibrating mass of confused information, you trace your own route. That’s the heart of the conspiratorial mindset. +++ Scanning through forums and watching YouTube videos late into the night are common methodologies through which a conspiratorial worldview is constructed. They’re of a certain style of handling information—synthesis through frantic traversal—which the Internet encourages. If you take a look back at pre-digital objects though, especially those that date right to the cusp of the

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My theory is that the same kids who had their noses buried in DK Books are now creating and disseminating images like this.

If a single unit of information (like a photograph or a text clipping) can no longer exist on its own, an important way of raising its credibility is to present it as a piece of a larger pattern. It’s true that traditionally linear and hierarchical methods will present units of information as pieces of a larger story. But even the idea of a narrative can draw suspicion; it's better to present things in a manner where the subject has a greater degree of autonomy over their traversal of the information, and the ability to apprehend it all at once as a series of interconnections. The visual narrative of DK EyeWitness books and conspiracy memes is: we have no narrative, here are some facts, use your own eyes to connect the dots. For the conspiracy theorist everything exists as a plot point in a larger story that is unravelable. The way that story is put together, however, must be by means of individual agency. The flash of revelation—the sudden falling together of all pieces—can’t happen unless you arrived at it yourself.

There’s an idea that technology turns the world around us into a standing reserve, as in modern industrial production, where a forest becomes little more than a store of future toilet paper. Social media apps which facilitate the sharing of ephemeral life experiences— Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter—turn our everyday lived experience into a kind of standing reserve. Each pleasant, funny, or poignant moment is subject to the gaze of an invisible audience. Even if you don’t put an image on your story, you’re still left considering how many likes it could garner.

The most direct problem with experiencing your life among an audience is that it increases the amount of perceived social pressure around you. Among things that might be hallucinated, social pressure is one of the most insidious; unlike hallucinations of sight, touch, or sound, we have no means of apprehending it through any single sensory organ. For the contemporary individual, the social must be conceived as a constellation-like pattern among points of evidence.

It’s rare that you get to know someone through social media by talking to them. Usually, you’re sorting through scattered pieces of media: likes, comments, photographs. Just as a conspiracy theorist assembles a worldview by drawing assumptions from media artifacts, the social media user gains an understanding of their peer by guessing at the life implied by posts and a profile. A user’s social status or personality can be ascertained by the quick scan of a well-trained pair of eyes. People have learned to do this over time, but it also became easier as the nature of identity on the web shifted.

In the late ’90s and early 2000s, the public internet was much more anonymous. The cryptic

OCTOBER 27, 2017

usernames which have lately reemerged on social media in ironic pastiche—titles like “Hunter2,” “born1986,” or “JHawk111420”—were employed as a form of disguise for a reason. Chatrooms and messageboards were realms of escape from the everyday, and in the web’s early hacker culture, the cruelest punishment one could inflict was a “dox.” Short for “dropping documents,” doxing refers to the act of publically connecting somebody’s online persona to the facts of their real identity. For a geeky teenager on an IRC chatroom, the public announcement of your home address, full name, and parents’ phone numbers could lead to devastating consequences. Calls in the middle of the night threatening violence, countless undesired pizzas, even SWAT raids could ensue.

In today’s internet of verified Twitter accounts and livestreaming, doxing can only inflict damage if your internet persona deviates heavily from your IRL persona—unassuming suburbanites who happen to also be white nationalist bloggers, for instance—or if it contains the threat of violence lurking behind it. The deadliest dox I’m aware of happened on May 30, 2016 in a “Syria General” thread on 4chan’s politics board.

The thread began with a link to two new propaganda videos released by an unnamed, presumably Islamist group of Syrian rebels. The 4chan users on the thread, who lean heavily Assadist, immediately began searching for clues within the videos of the whereabouts of the rebel training camp. By identifying the make and model of an electrical transmission tower in the distance, one user was able to calculate its position relative to the camp with trigonometry. A likely candidate for the location was identified through Google Maps satellite imagery, and quickly confirmed through the correspondence of several other landmarks between the two perspectives. Another user direct messaged the coordinates to Ivan Sidorenko, a Syria news Twitter account with connections to the Russian Ministry of Defense. Within hours, the camp was demolished in a Russian airstrike, the rebels presumably killed.

This incident is as bizarre as it is chilling. We’re living in a world where the boundaries between people arguing over political ideologies on internet forums and people fighting over political ideologies in a war are dissolving.

For anyone with violent enemies, the social media gaze has the power to kill. +++ In clinical psychology, there exists a behavioral tendency known as apophenia. Originally invented to describe one of the classic pathologies of schizophrenia, it refers to the hallucination of patterns among things that aren’t actually connected. For the apophenic, the world is soaked with meaning to such a degree that even the most trivial of perceptions can appear deeply auspicious.

It may not be surprising that computers fall victim to the exact same tendency. Machine learning algorithms often battle against a phenomenon known as “overfitting,” in which random patterns in noisy data become perceived as underlying relationships. The most severe technical consequence of overfitting is that an algorithm loses the ability to generalize anything beyond its training data. The most severe political consequence of overfitting is that a supposedly objective algorithm can become just a means of confirming the expectations of its designer.

The 2016 Machine Learning paper “Automated Inference on Criminality Using Face Images” made a media splash when its authors, Xialoin Wu of McMaster University and Xi Zhang of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, claimed that their algorithm had discovered associations between rates of criminality and certain facial features among a database of Chinese male mugshots. Strangely, the authors were surprised when people reacted with horror to the idea of an algorithm marking citizens as likely criminals based on the configuration of their facial landmarks. Similarly phrenologic practices are already

commonplace in America, though. Algorithmbased methods for facial reconstruction from DNA are in common use in criminal justice circuits.

Additionally, US state governments occasionally sentence people based on the risk assessments of so-called criminal justice algorithms; they include the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS), Public Safety Assessment (PSA), and Level of Service Inventory Revised (LSI-R).

The 2014 paper “Using publically visible social media to build detailed forecasts of civil unrest” raised comparatively fewer eyebrows. In it, the authors present an algorithm and data mining system which was able to predict thousands of incidents of civil unrest in Latin America using information from Twitter and Tumblr. The algorithm was able to create accurate forecasts many days in advance, leading the authors to brag that “traditional assumptions” about reporting events only after they have occurred can now be relaxed. In the past five years, social media analytics software has been eagerly adopted by government, law enforcement, and political groups. You may be familiar with the company Geofeedia; the Baltimore Police Department used its facial recognition software to identify protesters with outstanding warrants in Instagram photos of the protests against Freddie Gray’s murder.

The Romans famously relied on augury—divination by bird—for decisions of state. We rely on the briefing. It took two dossiers and a Powerpoint presentation to launch the Coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003: the British September and February dossiers, and Colin Powell’s speech to the UN Security Council. All three briefings largely consisted of faulty connections drawn between dubious sources: fake documents alleging uranium transactions between Niger and Iraq, creative interpretations of satellite photos. Many other political developments of this century have transpired from the release of information packages. The Trump-Russia story, for instance, was born of a leaked dossier.

We’re accustomed to the idea of conspiracy as a strongly populist attitude. But what happens when its methods of thought filter upwards, and the people who are supposed to be behind the conspiracies are thinking like conspiracy theorists themselves? The nature of mid-21st century evidence is to foster a conspiratorial state of mind. As computers grow more adept at analyzing information, they become more adept at synthesizing information. The same statistical and algorithmic techniques used to understand data can be employed to fake data. The introduction of Adobe Photoshop completely eliminated the last remnants of photography's truth claim. Similarly, as techniques of data synthesis grow more sophisticated, information has greater difficulty convincing us of its integrity. In an ironic twist, our society's ability to survey the world with unprecedented detail has deepened its levels of doubt and confusion. +++ The only DK EyeWitness book I held on to was called Future, an introduction to futurology. About a third of the book is identifying societal trends from the year it was published (2000), the rest is full of predictions about the upcoming 21st century. Most of them are as hilariously optimistic as you’d expect: nanorobots cleaning our rooms, humans on Mars by 2014, underground cities. The only dire predictions are left for the bottom corner of the book’s final page, undated, as if the authors were afraid to get too specific. Right around “viruses become immune to all known treatments” and “international financial collapse,” the authors predict a “major information disruption.” Oddly prescient, I think, for a kid’s book.

ZAK ZIEBELL B/RISD ’19 is searching for an honest man.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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content warning: body horror, sexual violence

TWO POEMS

BY Ashley Dun ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

PRINCESS PĀRAMITĀ I thought I told you to stop coming here.

You make me sick, girl.

Pali prayers dribble off your lips like nursery rhymes.

You meditate with one eye open, shirt unbuttoned all the way down, thinking nobody will notice.

The taped sermons your mother plays in the car get stuck in your head like heirloom pop songs. But you’d rather listen to sutras that teach you to lie to your parents, that skin color can fade five shades paler, that you should tweeze your eyebrows until they’re painfully sparse.

At your age Sujata had already prepared the sweet milk-rice and offered it to The Blessed One. But you spend your time eating junk food and letting white boys look through your brown body to look at white girls.

Remember the sutra you wrote for yourself?

Repeat after me: Don’t go to pool parties.

Don’t buy bright colors.

Wear jeans in gym class.

By the way, you do realize that you can’t put thanaka over four inches of makeup, right?

You’re crying in your aunt’s bathroom, on your twentieth birthday, ugly-sobbing into my ear.

But you can’t fool me, or fool an older man.

And he’ll still give you a glass of water and mouthwash after you’ve finished puking in his sink.

He’ll lay you—a failed, barely conscious ascetic— on his bed and give you a ride home the next morning.

Just get out, go away, pity my poor precepts when I say What the fuck am I supposed to do with you?

You stand there as brazen as ever: imperfect, impudent, incapable of loving yourself.

But you’re not even listening, no, you’re too wavy on it, high and mighty with it…

You don’t want to visit the monastery right now, not for a while.

Get over yourself, girl Stop smiling at me.

Don’t worry about it.

Take a deep breath, girl, and keep meditating.

And don’t you know that Yasodhara never wore foundation two shades too light?

Her face was always naked so that nothing would smear off when she bowed her head at the Buddha’s feet.

BURMESE DECOMPRESSION SICKNESS No, my love is not the most selfless but it is the deepest.

It clings like tamarind paste once you cut my stomach open and expose that brown, sticky acidic pulp within.

On some days it’s shallow.

You can put your hand six inches in, feel the walls of my cardia and pull out spiny, squirming, red blood cells, ferment and salt them, grind and sun dry them.

On Sundays you can jump in feet first and never reach the bottom.

The candy can be tangy,

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savory, spicy or sweet, but you might get stuck in strands of veins and choke on the seeds.

If you just want to bruise my insides, gut me like a papaya, just know it won’t be long before you get the bends, and tartaric bubbles dissolve your joints and bone tissue.

I’ll gag when you call it poison, the ‘motion of my ocean’— dizziness, vertigo, or nausea-inducing...

I’ll think about the right way to miss you long after I’ve swallowed you whole.

OCTOBER 27, 2017

Bateson’s Apple Farm Rehoboth, MA 7 PM ————— After compiling a number of sparse descriptions of this event, the forecast is: high likelihood of air traffic. Ghosts, ghouls, enchanted goblins, disembodied trolls; who knows what classic Halloween spooksters will come out for this ride. Hay and transportation provided, but BYOSD (bring your own spooky disposition). Who knows, maybe by the end you will have been swept off your feet!

HAUNTED HAYRIDE

Shelter Arcade Bar 8 PM ————— I honestly think Stranger Things is so fun and good. But if you really want to relive the 80s you should probably just go get a hot wiener around the corner at Olneyville NY System cause that place is a real time capsule!

STRANGER THINGS VIEWING PARTY

Aurora 9 PM $5 before 11, $10 after ————— Vampire dance cave fundraiser for the RI Trans Assistance Project. See inside the Indy this week for some testimony about how much people love Aurora and these kinds of safe spaces that happen there!

GAY GOTH NITE: HALLOWEEN EDITION

Wow! Not so bad this week!

Though we’ve just entered abysmal Scorpio season, Jupiter and Sun are in the same place, so, you are looking ahead (as always), and (for the first time in a while) ahead looks pretty OK! Sun and Uranus will also be opposite each other for a hot second, so things will be very strange -- which you can for sure dig, but also might also be some….accidents? Go to a local orchard, carve a weird looking pumpkin, and make sure it’s a pie before Halloween when it will definitely be smashed in a place your springy feet are not going to want to stop to clean.

HOROSCOPE ∫ AQUARIUS

RISD Museum 5 PM $30 ————— This award-winning film will kick off a 10-day festival around the state. Your $30 buys you “Scandinavian vittles and drink,” which, is anyone else weirdly creeped out by the word “vittles”?

FESTIVAL

THE PVD ART AND DESIGN FILM

THE SQUARE: OPENING NIGHT OF

THURSDAY 11 ∫ 02

HALLOWEEN! HALLOWEEN! HALLOWEEN! I hope you get to hand out some candy or go dancing or whatever jims your jam!

TUESDAY 10 ∫ 31

Sarah Doyle Women’s Center Brown University 7 PM ————— At a moment when we are often more likely to hear more about transphobia and violence than about the positive lived experiences of trans folks, this kind of celebration seems really nice. The event will feature DIY zine-making, interactive arts and crafts stations (including a queer photo booth), opportunities to peruse through a selection of zines and books from the SDWC library centered on trans life and liberation, and more. Open to all.

SIERRA CLUB ADVENTURE AT NEUTACONKANUT HILL

“Meet at the parking lot by the skate park” 1 PM ————— Have you ever been to Neutaconkanut Hill? It’s a great spot to see the city and there are miles of hiking trails throughout.

A CELEBRATION OF TRANS LIFE AND LIBERATION

MONDAY 10 ∫ 30

WOMEN, TRANS, AND FEMME NIGHT

WEDNESDAY 11 ∫ 01 Recycle-a-Bike 6 PM $5 suggested donation ————— I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: bike bros are the bane of the cycling world! Come fix your bike before it gets too cold and snowy to ride around with your femme posse.

LIST!

Roger Williams Park Zoo All Day ————— Kids are invited to come and trick-or-treat. Will the animals be giving out candy? Unclear, but here is a joke I just made up: Q: What’s an exotic and endangered fish’s favorite Halloween candy?

A: Bottlecaps!

SPOOKY ZOO

ARTIST TALK: ARIEL JACKSON

RISD Museum 3 PM ————— Through her researchbased practice, Ariel Jackson investigates individual and collective trauma in the Black American community creating fictional narratives, alter egos, and alternate dimensions that allow space for inquiry and envisioning different futures.

She’ll be talking about her work The Origin of the Blues, on display at the Museum now. At 10 AM, she’s giving a workshop for high school and college students of color.

SUNDAY 10 ∫ 29

THE

Bucklin Park 1 PM ————— Candy booths, festival games, music, food and family fun. Last year at this event I tried to talk to Mayor Jorge Elorza but he was really distracted by this bicycle that could make smoothies when you rode on it.

3RD ANNUAL WEST END FALL FEST

CCRI Knight Campus 10 AM ————— This event seems like it has something to do with a group called the Rhode Island Mineral Hunters! Sounds like it will rock.

GEM, MINERAL, AND FOSSIL SHOW

DOG COSTUME CONTEST

The Cheeky Hound Pet Store on Hope St. 6 PM ————— Costumes are encouraged for humans and dogs. Suggestions: Charlie Brown and Snoopy!

Shaggy and Scooby! Hagrid and his three-headed dog Fluffy! A single adult and their impoverished but lovable standin for romantic companionship!

SATURDAY 10 ∫ 28

FRIDAY 10 ∫ 27