The College Hill Independent Vol. 35 Issue 9

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THE

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY NOV 17 2017

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COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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COVER

INDY

Party Animals Elodie Freymann

NEWS 02

Week in Review Julia Rock, Julia Petrini, and Kelton Ellis

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Crisis in Rakhine Isabel DeBre and Chris Packs

METRO

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 35 / ISSUE 09 NOV 17 2017

FROM THE EDITORS Give up Bitcoin. Install Bail Bloc!

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Fish Out of Water Kion You

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I'm Walkin’ Here Harry August

ARTS

Starting this past Wednesday, the online magazine the New Inquiry and the Bronx Freedom Fund are using Bail Bloc to raise funds to pay bail for low-income people in New York who have been detained.

How it works, from the creators: “When you download the app, a small part of your computer's unused processing power is redirected toward mining a popular cryptocurrency called Monero, which is secure, private, and untraceable. At the end of every month, we exchange the Monero for US dollars and donate the earnings to the Bronx Freedom Fund and through them, [towards] a new nation-wide initiative, The Bail Project.”

Bail is money that a recently-arrested person can pay to walk free until a trial takes place. This period can last for many weeks or months, sometimes years. But for lowincome people who get arrested, bail is just another method of criminalizing poverty and refusing them the right to a free trial. Their freedom is often only guaranteed by coercive plea deals. Bail Bloc is one step you can take to combat mass incarceration.

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FEATURES

Fuck a Fake Fandom Liby Hays

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A Personal Collection Isabelle Rea

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Beautiful Nightmare Marielle Burt

SCIENCE

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Cuddle-fish Lee Pivnik

TECH

You can install the program at: https://bailbloc.thenewinquiry.com/about.html.

— KE

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Habitat Hotdogs Olivia Kan-Sperling

LITERARY

MISSION STATEMENT 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

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The Water Cycle Ava Cheaito and Fadwa Ahmed

I Humbly Request Apprenticeship Maria Gerdyman

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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.

Course of Empire Adrian Gonzalez

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

TECH

Jane Argodale Will Weatherly Robin Manley

Ruby Gerber Erin West

Jonah Max

FEATURES

NEWS

Isabel DeBre Chris Packs

Zack Kligler Gabriela Naigeborin Julia Tompkins

Sheena Raza Faisal Signe Swanson

WEEK IN REVIEW

METABOLICS

Eve Zelickson

Dominique Pariso Neidin Hernandez

METRO

Jack Brook Saanya Jain Katrina Northrop

SCIENCE

Liz Cory Paige Parsons

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

OCCULT

LITERARY

Fadwa Ahmed Isabelle Doyle EPHEMERA

Maya Bjornson X

Liby Hays

LIST

Lisa Borst Fadwa Ahmed STAFF WRITERS

Mara Dolan Soraya Ferdman Nora Gosselin Anna Hundert Mariela Pichardo Paula Pacheco Soto Marly Toledano Kion You Harry August Julia Rock Julia Petrini Isabelle Rea Olivia Kan-Sperling

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

Gabriel Matesanz

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS

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

COPY EDITOR

Miles Taylor Cate Turner

SOCIAL MEDIA

Fadwa Ahmed SENIOR EDITORS

DESIGN EDITOR

Eliza Chen

DESIGNERS

Amos Jackson Ashley Min WEB MANAGER

Alyssa McGillvery BUSINESS MANAGER

Maria Gonzalez

Lisa Borst Kelton Ellis Sophie Kasakove Will Tavlin MVP

Eliza Chen THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN PARTY ANIMALS

BY Julia Rock, Julia Petrini, and Kelton Ellis ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

THE POLISH WAY

A RA(U)NCHY SATURDAY NIGHT

MILD HORSES

Last week, the Polish Health Ministry released a public service announcement encouraging it citizens to “breed like rabbits.” According to European Union data, Poland has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe at 1.32 births per woman, which has led to rapid population decline.

The 30-second video shows rabbits munching on rabbit food, hopping around, and hanging out in the grass.

The rabbit narrator tells the viewer, “So, if you want to become a parent one day, you should follow our example.

I know what I am talking about, our father had 63 children.” The Indy doesn’t know much about rabbit reproduction, but finds it unlikely that the rabbit’s father gave birth to any children at all. In fact, it seems unlikely that rabbits organize themselves around the two-parent family structure that is common in Poland.

The Polish government seems to be exceptionally concerned about the fact that its citizens don’t know how to have more children: it spent about $800,000 on the media campaign to produce and publicize the rabbit video. The obvious solution here might have been to distribute information pertaining to reproductive health and sex, but that is not the Polish Way. According to the Guardian, Polish government officials wanted to encourage people to have children in a manner that “did not offend anyone and was not vulgar.” The obvious way to do this was to discuss bunny sex rather than human sex. This decision might have unforeseen consequences: perhaps rabbits have so many children due to practices that Poland’s 87.5 percent Catholic population would not endorse.

Since the campaign was launched last week, the government has received immense backlash. Euronews reported that “Famous Polish illustrator and political cartoonist, Andrzej Mleczko, mocked the video by publishing a drawing which showed a rabbit asking a kiosk owner to sell him eight hundred condoms.” The humor in this cartoon was lost upon the Indy: is the cartoon funny because rabbits don’t use condoms? Or is it funny because the cartoonist seems to imply that the problem is not that Polish people aren’t having enough babies, but rather that rabbits are having too many? The majority of the Reproduce Like Rabbits campaign backlash has come from people who criticized the government for spending money on erotic rabbit content, rather than spending money on in-vitro fertility treatment, which lost funding on the grounds that it was too expensive.

It would be very exciting if Polish citizens were turned on by the reproductive habits of rabbits. The Indy, however, is skeptical that more than one or two people will be inspired to have children on the grounds that “all the rabbits are doing it.” The more likely scenario seems to be an explosion in the rate of rabbit births.

Everything is falling into place. You have a reasonably clean bucket for jungle juice, copper wire string lights, and 10 pounds of baby carrots. You’ve synced all the Bluetooth speakers your roommates still have from the 10th grade. Spotify’s ‘Get Turnt’ playlist blares. You walk to the kitchen to retrieve the final touch. You open the refrigerator. Time stops.

You forgot to purchase the taste of Original Ranch® from the valley. You call Whole Foods, all they have is one 16 ounce Hidden Valley® Old-Fashioned Buttermilk Ranch. It’s not nearly enough. Isn’t all ranch buttermilk ranch? you wonder. Buttermilk is one of the most important components of ranch; it’s like selling a ketchup flavor called “Old-Fashioned Tomato.” What the hell is that?

You know what you need to do. You Google, “I need five liters of ranch immediately.” The search returns articles on buying ranches to diversify your investment profile. Shit. You file the tip away for later. You type the same sentence into Microsoft Word 1997, and Clippy, your favorite intelligent user interface, responds “It looks like you’re having a rager and need five liters of ranch immediately, would you like help?” Clippy understands.

He takes you to the Flavour Gallery online store page, “Hidden Valley® - Mini Ranch Keg.” It measures 9.7 by 6.3 inches and is stackable. Safety is your utmost priority; you worry it doesn’t have an FDA approved coating. It does. You rest assured your ranch will taste fresh all night long. You wonder if it’s sensible to provide this much ranch at your gathering since the keg has over 20 times the amount of recommended daily saturated fat and you’re only having four people over.

The keg is $50 but by your calculations you could buy the same amount of ranch at Costco for $24.92. It’s a statement piece, you tell yourself. They have another item, “Holiday Ranch Fountain,” which would be perfect for a more formal occasion. It has four easy to assemble tiers and includes a “jolly fountain skirt.” It’s stunning, but doesn’t fit the vibe. You add the “If you can read this bring me ranch” socks and the “Peace Love Ranch” canvas tote to your cart alongside the keg. You check out; free rush shipping. It arrives right before your guests.

The rest of the night is a blur, but someone grammed you doing a kegstand with the caption “legalize ranch.”

Low-hanging fruit, ripe for dipping.

On November 2, Lakeland, Florida resident Donna Byrne was arrested and charged for driving down a busy highway while under the influence. This writer has witnessed—and, to be fair, participated in—his fair share of I-95 shenanigans, but on that infamous day Ms. Byrne beat all of it out. The accused was not found driving a Mustang Sally, but she was driving a mustang that could well have been named “Sally.”

No... Boduke. The horse is named Boduke, reports the Orlando Sentinel. Yes, that’s right. That’s good!

Authorities responded to a 911 call about a woman who seemed confused and possibly in danger, making little mention of a five-to-six-foot-tall, thousand-pound ungulate. They arrived on the scene to find Ms. Byrne mounted atop Boduke with a blood alcohol level of .161—twice Florida’s legal limit—and charged her with animal neglect in addition to the aforementioned DUI. Byrne will receive misdemeanors for those charges, although she will likely get Boduke back in her stable.

To be clear. Animal neglect, driving under the influence—these are no jokes. And to that point, the arbitrary nature of our “justice” “system” is on full display when the Polk County Sheriff’s can’t decide if a horse is an automobile-like object with no agency, or a sentient domestic animal, dependent on Homo sapiens for its well-being.

Who would be able to follow a law that law enforcement hardly knows how to apply?

Anyway, I do have to wonder just what circumstances put Byrne in the mood to trot down the highway. Perhaps the erstwhile equestrian was reliving a halcyon youth in the saddle, performing a drunken dressage beneath the eyes of an imaginary audience. Unexpectedly found beyond her limits, sacrificing legal innocence for the sake of her art. How many people dream of Olympic gold until, without knowing it, they’ve settled for a routine? Once, long ago, I myself wanted to be a sprinter like Usain.

Ultimately, Byrne’s horseback adventure might be a message from the future. And by the future, I mean the past. Fossil fuels threaten ecological collapse. Meanwhile, sustainable alternatives like electric cars remain under the control of dubious, money-hungry weirdos like Elon Musk. A large-scale regression to horseback riding could be our only hope for Earth’s preservation—and something’s gotta put that Eisenhower-era infrastructure to use after we give up all our machines. Justice for Boduke, a medal for Byrne, life for planet Earth.

—JP

—KE

—JR

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

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NO DELUSIONS A conversation with Dr. Maung Zarni on the Rohingya genocide content warning: state violence, sexual violence, genocide, Islamophobia, graphic bodily mutilation

The Indy: What accounts for the recent surge in global attention?

This fall, the persecution of Rohingya people overwhelmed global media in the wake of renewed waves of military violence. Yet the uptick in brutality against Myanmar’s Muslim minority does not represent a rupture in the history of ethnic violence—rather a continuation of a genocide lasting over four decades. Since the late 1970s, Myanmar’s Buddhist government has systematically disenfranched and persecuted its minority Rohingya Muslim population in the Rakhine state. Over one million Rohingyas have fled their historic homeland to harsh camp conditions in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Malaysia, among other countries. Hundreds of villages have burned and thousands have been killed.

Meanwhile, the Burmese government conceals precise numbers, circulates false narratives, and denies accusations that it is initiating a genocide.

As these atrocities escalate, the Independent Skyped with Dr. Maung Zarni, a longtime Burmese human rights activist and a research fellow with the Genocide Documentation Center of Cambodia. Merging scholarship with activism, Dr. Zarni has organized numerous international conferences on the Rohingya crisis, published extensively on Burmese politics and peace processes, initiated the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on Myanmar in 2013, and founded the Free Burma Coalition in 1995.

When we spoke this November, Dr. Zarni had just returned from Bangladesh, where he worked with international investigators to gather testimony from interviews with Rohingya refugees.

MZ: The issue first hit the headlines around 2012, which coincided with media reforms in Burma that enabled foreign reporters to open offices in Burma (of course in conjunction with government-controlled media organizations). This liberalization of the media—a way to placate the international community, occurring coincidentally as Western commercial interest in the country grew—was the only positive thing to come out of the government’s military-led, top-down reform process. For the past four years, the formerly inaccessible areas of the Rakhine state became accessible, and their stories began to find the spotlight.

More recently, Western media coverage has surged largely due to social media—much more so than mainstream media (since banned from the Rakhine state).

Social media has enabled Rohingya activists to set up the information infrastructure. This is the first ever Facebooked genocide in the 21st century. It’s a genocide brought to you by your service provider on your mobile phone. You can see footage of women and children running for their lives while you wait for the train.

The Burmese military made a mistake in not considering the power of social media when it turned the Rakhine state into an informational black hole. Now, the government is scrambling, accusing humanitarian NGOs and UN agencies of aiding and abetting Rohingya militant groups.

The College Hill Independent: Can you tell us about your work in Bangladesh? What did you discover from talking to survivors?

MZ: The first major problematic aspect of the media coverage is that mainstream news outlets have long adopted the spin that Burma’s quasi-civilian government feeds it. This is that the military are just attempting to maintain social order in a Balkans-like scenario, where animosities have erupted into mass violence after the democratic transition. In the midst of the chaos, the military (the institution initiating genocide), peddles the view it is just playing referee. The media fell for it.

Second, the fact that the Buddhist military is persecuting Muslims plays into these meta-templates of stories that the West knows how to consume. It’s Muslims versus Buddhists; two religious civilizations fighting head-tohead as the military is trying to sort things out. As a result, the segregation and ghettoization of Rohingyas becomes normalized, because the logic goes that if these communities are not separated by the state, they will just kill each other. In other words, the Burmese military plays up the local conflicts between Buddhists and Rohingyas in their shared Rakhine state, and doesn’t talk about the fact that its pitting these groups against each other. So the media looks at these non-Western civilizations as still premodern and fighting based on primordialist emotions, instead of understanding the ways in which the Burmese military has fabricated a divide-and-rule strategy, playing the race and religion cards which were never front-loaded historically.

Lastly, two different orientalisms play into Western coverage of this conflict. There’s negative orientalism in that there’s the problematic association of Islam with violence. Some of my old fellow dissidents now openly say that human rights don’t apply to Rohingyas because

Dr. Maung Zarni: The stories survivors told me were unimaginable. We’re looking at over a million stories right now, each usually including one death. That is a staggering number. And this is not just overnight; it has been occurring for over 40 years. In last year’s wave, close to 90,000 Rohingyas fled across the border to Bangladesh.

I interviewed children, rape victims, young mothers, and older men who had survived previous waves of attacks and have been living at the refugee camps for decades.

One girl told me about how she watched from the window as her father ran into the house where her sister was about to be gang-raped by Burmese soldiers. A soldier shot her father in the head, stuck his hand into his skull to show the remnants of his brain in the village yard. I’ve visited Auschwitz—we’re talking about a situation in that league. This is systematic and sadistic killing, mass executions, based on racial, religious, and ethnic hatred. These people are not raped or burned alive as individuals; they are members of a group singled out for extermination.

I’m starting a long-term project that involves collecting these stories to preserve the memories of this genocide. It’s one thing to lose your family, but another thing to forget what happened to them. That’s the least those of us privileged to live through this crisis can do, despite the overwhelming power of my country’s fascist state. If their identity is recognized and they are given a home, perhaps not all is lost. In the long run it is the perpetrators that lose, not the survivors.

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The Indy: What is your view on the way Western media has covered the crisis so far?

they are a threat to national security. And then in the case of Burma and Buddhism, there’s positive orientalism.

The West romanticizes the Buddhists as peaceful, meditating people who wouldn’t kill a fly. But the reality is that Buddhism can be violent, vile, and hateful like any other religious community—it has nothing to do with the religion.

All of these discursive problems make Western media much more susceptible to accepting government lies that Rohingyas are not among the indigenous national races of Burma—which I keep hearing reporters say. All it takes is a Google search to understand Rohingyas are from Burma, but no—the media continues to go with the state narrative. The society—from Suu Kyi to the ex-generals to the vile racists on the street of Yangon to the racist Burmese journalists—unanimously says that Rohingyas are Bengali and don’t belong to Burma. It’s like saying Mexicans don’t belong in California; they were there before the others arrived.

The Indy: International critics have been talking a lot about the silent complicity of Nobel Prize-winning activist and Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi. Can you talk a bit about the paradox between what she symbolizes—Burma’s supposed democratization of its recently-installed civilian government—and the state’s heightened militarism?

MZ: Something seriously flawed is going on in the Western thinking if people think that out of a genocidal process there still is a possibility of a liberal democracy and human rights regime rising from Burma’s civilian government. The US government, EU, UK, and others assumed Suu Kyi, a presentable media-genic woman who speaks English with a posher accent than the Queen of England, would invest in democracy when she came to power. This delusion continues to be entertained despite overwhelming evidence that Burmese society has turned fascist.

We cannot separate Suu Kyi and her civilian government from the actions of the military. It is true that Suu Kyi and the military leadership do not see eye-to-eye on democratization, and Suu Kyi would ideally like a liberal regime with more human rights and faster implementation of reform. But on the question of the Rohingyas, these historical antagonists are on exactly the same page.

Suu Kyi has dismissed allegations of ethnic cleansing as an exaggeration.

In my country, human rights activists like Suu Kyi speak the language of their former jailers [the socialist military government that the West so opposed], which is national security and defense. In a society supposedly undergoing a democratic transition, we’re seeing a surge in vulgar nationalism and deep Islamophobia—an essentially totalitarian ethos. History has reversed: the regime, society, spiritual leaders, and the Burmese media, who fought so long for press freedom and called for solidarity with imprisoned activists, now work to justify genocide.

The Indy: The international community has so far failed to act, raising the specter of another Rwanda. What would a responsible humanitarian response look like?

How should foreign governments negotiate between immediate aid and long-term intervention, given the risks of the latter?

NOVEMBER 17, 2017

BY Chris Packs and Isabel DeBre ILLUSTRATION BY Eve O'Shea DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

effort could make a difference. If Russia and China don’t get on board, there are still 180+ member states of the UN that can exert pressure.

The Indy: As we continue to see this genocide streamed live, along with all the other violence in the world, how might we break out of what some call ‘compassion fatigue,’ paralysis in the face of this horror, and toward deep solidarity, engagement, and direct action?

MZ: The UN and Human Rights Council in Geneva have both officially described this crisis as ethnic cleansing. But I object to that word. Ethnic cleansing is a euphemism [infamously used by former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević to conceal the genocide in Bosnia]. As murderous as Milošević was, he was smart enough to know that there was no international law that would indict him at the International Criminal Court if his crimes were just called ethnic cleansing, a word that carries something positive with it, as though it’s merely preventing future violence between ethnic groups.

For me, the best scenario would be what was implemented in Kosovo. Rohingyas would return to their birthplace under UN protection in a completely demilitarized zone. Bangladesh should open the border and allow the Rohingyas to participate in the economy. Of course, you can’t simply repatriate people and allow them to languish as Burmese society neglects them. Perhaps it will take a generation or more to reverse the psychological effects of the past 40 years of Burmese state propaganda and to convince society that Rohingyas belong in their homes and are not illegal.

But before we can change the social psychology of the nation, we have to make sure Rohingyas have access to livelihoods. We have to staff the clinics, give them access to health care (currently there is one doctor for every 150,000 Rohingya patients), provide nutrition (80,000 children under the age of five are living in a famine), build schools (80 percent of Rohingya adults are illiterate). If Burmese society neglects them, let the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Rohingyas interact with the larger world. This to me is the only viable solution, provided that there is the political will, which is a different story.

At the moment, UN military intervention is unlikely because it requires Security Council authorization. Even the ICC requires Security Council authorization. And because China and Russia have made it clear that they consider this a Burmese internal affair and a complex humanitarian situation (Russia even considers it an issue of rebel terrorism), any intervention would likely face a veto from either of these countries.

It’s a trope at this point—every genocide requires the paralysis of the Security Council. The difficult situation here is that there is no regional or world power that will put its foot down and say we must stop this genocide.

That is why the Burmese military is so confident that there will be such few consequences.

If you look at international involvement in economic and strategic projects within Rakhine state itself, humanitarian intervention becomes even less likely. In this small strip of the state, you have China exploring titanium deposits and building a deep-sea port, India building a deep-sea port, and a massive special economic zone designed for corporate tax-havens. Japan, South Korea, Vietnam—everyone’s invested. And offshore, you have gas deposits where over 30 countries have a stake.

The current killing fields, 100 kilometers long, are going to be turned into a special economic zone.

The Burmese government has already said that if the Rohingyas return, they would not be going back to where they have lived for generations, they will be quarantined in an apartheid-like situation. It doesn’t pay to end genocide, and the Rohingyas control nothing that is valuable to these powerful countries. Only concerted international

MZ: You can never be fatigued if you know that there’s a genocide going on. Genocide is not war. The only way we can honor Jewish victims who walked to the gas chambers, and all those killed in past genocides, is to speak out.

‘Never again’ is not just a bumper sticker. It has to mean something. It has to be sacred.

Yes, we’re just individuals, but there is strength in numbers. We need to keep screaming, saying that this is unacceptable, that this is not in our name. It’s not just about Muslims or Rohingyas, but about a human community being slaughtered. After watching on your cell phone, what are you going to tell your children? ‘Oh, I watched a genocide on Facebook when I was 20, but I was powerless’?

I was the only Burmese five years ago to blow the whistle and say, look, this is genocide. I was called all kinds of names, portrayed as a mad-activist exaggerating things. My job is to tell it like it is, and that’s what I’m doing still.

I think we’re not as powerless as we often feel.

Whether the world listens is separate from whether we do what is right.

Dr. Zarni will be speaking at the Watson Institute (Joukowsky Forum) at Brown University on Monday, November 20, at 12 PM.

NEWS

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LOSING OCEAN IN THE OCEAN STATE After the rush of summer tourism at Point Judith, a small village home to Rhode Island’s largest fishing fleet, only those working on the docks remain; fall days become quiet and methodical. On a November morning, a small day boat arrives with the morning’s catch, dumping a load of scup onto a conveyor belt. A group of workers hurry onto the dock, sorting and throwing the fish into the appropriate crates. But most of the workers simply mill about, propping cardboard boxes into shape to prepare for the next landing. A silence cuts through the still waters.

Point Judith boasts seafood processing plants, engine repair shops, net stores, restaurants, and coast guard stations, all revolving around an economic focal point: commercial wild harvest fishing. Called the “commerce center of Rhode Island fishing” by Richard Fuka, the president of the Rhode Island Fishermen’s Association, Point Judith is responsible for transporting 16 million pounds of seafood and shellfish each year: squid, lobster, flounder, and scallops are the most abundantly caught.

Overall, Point Judith is emblematic of Rhode Island’s commercial fishing industry at large, described in February 2016 press statements as “vital to our economy and embedded in our state's tradition and culture” by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and “an essential part of our economy that supports thousands of good-paying jobs” by Congressman David Cicilline. Gina Raimondo sees fishing as “an industry ripe for growth.”

For Fuka, “the whole industry is just special.” A burly and affable man, Fuka graduated from URI’s commercial fishing and marine technology program over 30 years ago (the program closed in the 1990s). Fuka has spent his entire life immersed in the industry: he grew up in the fishing village of Belport, New York, worked as a fisherman for decades, and now advocates on behalf of Rhode Island fishermen, through policy initiatives and education.

Commercial fishing contributes about $750 million in sales to Rhode Island’s $57.4 billion GDP, when accounting for its indirect impact on distributors, grocers, and restaurants. According to a study by the Cornell University Cooperative Extension Marine Program, commercial fish sales alone add up to around $200 million, and provide $22 million to state tax revenue.

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METRO

Around 7,000 individuals are directly tied to harvesting, processing, distributing, and selling fish in the state.

Today, however, commercial fishing stands on much more tenuous grounds. The same Cornell study cites that between 2005 to 2011, the number of state-licensed boats dropped from 1,488 to 1,298; state-issued multipurpose licenses dropped from 1017 to 867; and sales have dropped to historic lows. The average fisherman’s age is 54, and the average age of a sea vessel is 26.

Overall, Rhode Island’s fishing industry is in desperate need of recovery.

J.V. Houlihan, a local for 40 years, states that “the footprint [of Point Judith] hasn’t changed.” However, the environment has changed from a fishing port to an embarkation port. “People come here to go somewhere else,” Houlihan says, namely to nearby Block Island.

What once was a thriving fishing port has now become more geared towards tourism.

Increasingly restrictive federal regulations, such as a drastic 2013 groundfish catch limit that was spurred by the failure of groundfish to rebuild their population, have cut the commercial fishing fleet in half over the last four years. “The fishing industry... cannot afford to go backwards,” Fuka states. These suffocating catch limits and the severe lack of young fishermen may soon turn Rhode Island’s fleet into “museum pieces.”

+++ John Bullard, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries Greater Atlantic Regional Administrator, balances commercial, environmental, and governmental interests in the realm of fishing from North Carolina to Maine. Bullard, who also grew up in the fishing town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, sees fishing as crucial to Rhode Island’s identity. “While Rhode Island is a small state, it is the Ocean State,” Bullard says. “Fishing has a far greater impact than what an economist could measure.” For Bullard, the “planet is defined by the ocean, and fishing defines the character of a place.” And that character, for Bullard, is one that recognizes uncontrollable external circumstances: “When you’re out in the ocean, it changes you. There’s a humility that’s rare on land.”

Recently, fish off Rhode Island’s coast have also taken lasting hits to their population size and ability to reproduce, causing a conflict between those in the industry and environmental activists. As waters have warmed with climate change, species like cod and summer flounder have moved north. Overfishing has also decimated historically populous fish such as alewife, shad, and smelt.

Overall, overfishing has contributed to steep declines in populations across the board. According to a joint study by the URI and the Department of Environmental

NOVEMBER 17, 2017

A fishing industry in crisis Management, fish populations have dropped 81 percent from figures reported in 1898. Shellfish biomass has dropped 88 percent in that same period.

Oceans also acidify when taking in more carbon dioxide, which has inhibited creatures like scallops from forming their shells and exoskeletons. (Moreover, because the oceans take in more energy, storms have become more severe, further impacting fishermen.) The NOAA Fisheries Science Center estimates that about half of the 82 fish and invertebrate species in the region are highly vulnerable or very highly vulnerable to climate change.

“I think it’s very hard to adapt,” Bullard says.

“Fishermen are definitely victims of climate change.”

It is on this foundation of struggle that Bullard attempts to juggle several different interests in his purview over fisheries management. A conflict between preserving and rehabilitating a dying industry while protecting fish populations arises, and though Bullard and Fuka agree on the importance of fishing, they lean towards different sides in terms of privileging environmental concerns versus commercial fishing jobs, respectively. +++ “Catch limits are unequivocally preventing jobs from growing in the industry,” Fuka asserts firmly. He describes the process of instituting catch limits as such: research vessels, such as NOAA’s Henry B. Bigelow, catch fish to set a model dictating the sustainability of a species.

These numbers then determine the limit of fish that can be caught. The problem arises, Fuka states, when the amount of fish NOAA catches are much lower than that of collaborative research vessels (commercial fishermen working in tandem with government biologists) fishing in the same area.

“What happens is,” Fuka states, “[NOAA’s] numbers are under so much scrutiny by the federal government that they are already on guard in not creating too much of a big number. In fact, the numbers are so conservative that if the number of Rhode Island was 100 metric tons for squid that season, that number would be would be cut 50 percent. And that’s something lobbied very heavily for by environmental groups.”

John Bullard explains the limits a bit differently, however. He claims that the catch survey is simply one piece of information out of many that the Northeast Fisheries Science Center uses to determine its catch limits for the year. Other factors include catch history from the vessels and metrics such as changing levels in ocean acidity and currents. Overall, reliable data on fish populations is still scarce, so NOAA generally issues very cautious projections that have very high values of uncertainty. +++ These strict government regulations are connected to the lack of young people in the industry. “First of all,” Fuka states, “it’s impossible to get a boat today. Licenses are extremely limited, and no bank would loan you money to buy one.” Ultimately, however, it is catch limits, according to Fuka, that are disintegrating not only the commercial fishing industry, but also all the jobs related to fishing, including distribution, processing, and shipbuilding. “If we had more fish to catch, there would be more money to make, and then young people would join the industry,” Fuka asserts.

During a Resilient Fisheries RI workshop entitled “Fostering a New Generation of RI Fishermen,” third generation fisherman Joe Raposa stated, “a lot of the younger generation doesn’t know how to work or want to work.” During the same workshop, fisherman Josh Bird brought up how the death of “shop classes” in schools has

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

discouraged students from pursuing hands-on tracks like fishing.

Bullard is a bit more optimistic about the future of the workforce, especially with the introduction of new apprenticeship programs through Governor Raimondo’s Real Jobs RI initiative, which provided $150,000 to train 15 fishing-industry apprentices. “Port Galilee [in Point Judith] has diversified tremendously to squid and butterfish, and as a result they are healthier,” Bullard says.

“They’ve got the opportunity to attract a lot of people to it because they have a sustainable, healthy industry.

You’ve got to give the apprentice program a bit of time to work.”

However, Fuka questions the efficacy of an apprenticeship program. “There was a mindset that if you could have a training program, you could become a fisherman,” Fuka says, and mentions that only around a third of the original fishing apprentices from Raimondo’s program are still working as fishers. “People have this Linda Greenlaw, Perfect Storm conception about fishing,” regarding fishing’s romanticized popular conceptions, “but in reality, nine out of 10 people quit the job.” On the flip side, the 10 percent who do stay are in it for the long haul, and often bring their families into the industry as well, kindling a multigenerational operation. +++ Moving forward, Bullard only sees a modest future for commercial fishing, but places his bets on aquaculture, the cultivation of seafood under controlled conditions. Aquaculture producers grow fish either in tightly contained ocean regions, or in man-made tanks and ponds. Bullard describes aquaculture as a technologically advanced and a rapidly growing $227 million industry that must be fully embraced. “Wild harvest can only produce a level demand, while the world’s demand for fish protein keeps rising. The only way to fill the gap,” Bullard says, “is through aquaculture.”

According to Bullard, aquaculture will create an economic environment where 90 percent of United States seafood is not imported, and will answer Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross’s question of “why are we importing fish, when we should be exporting it?” A World Bank study states that currently, aquaculture produces 50 percent of the world’s seafood, but in the United States, that rate is 21 percent. Aquaculture is expected to account for two thirds of global seafood production by 2030, and here in the United States, the industry is growing by eight percent annually.

Fuka, when spotting a newly installed aquaculture tank growing kelp on the docks, states that he avidly supports its use to raise shellfish and plants, but states that “it doesn’t have much success on the fish end.” For fish, Fuka argues, growing in tanks leads to a lack of biological stamina, and fish like sea bass and fluke readily catch diseases when placed in more ocean-like environments to mature. Overall, Fuka argues adamantly against giving up wild harvest fishing and its intimate connection to the ocean for aquaculture. +++ Amidst fluctuating fish populations (squid is now the major local catch), constantly shifting catch limits, and changes in the environment, commercial fishermen must continually adapt to volatile conditions. “Fishermen here in Rhode Island reinvent themselves every day,” Fuka states. Recently, however, the racial demographics of Rhode Island fishermen have also been changing. The “new fishing family” is, to Fuka, made up of immigrants from places like Guatemala and Costa Rica, who begin by working in processing plants, doing manual labor,

BY Kion You ILLUSTRATION BY Julie Benbassat DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

and acting as mechanics and carpenters. Sooner or later, Fuka states, “they are working on the boats.”

The influx of immigrant workers who become fishers helps alleviate the growing need for harvesters in the water, and they pick up the passing-down of fishing jobs within the family.

“The entire crew depends on each other,” Fuka states, referencing the “life or death” nature of being out in the water for days. Overall, he asserts, the commercial fishing industry in Rhode Island has always focused solely on providing well-paying jobs to those willing to do the difficult work. +++ Bullard fully believes that environmental, governmental, and commercial interests can work in tandem. He sees this cooperation occurring in the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council, a stakeholder-driven advisory council to NOAA, which recently agreed in a joint effort between NGOs and the squid industry, to permanently protect a chain of 15 underwater canyons. Seafreeze, a major Rhode Islander seafood wholesaler, was a major player in the agreement. Bullard cites a similar effort currently going on in New England, that will be voted on in their January meeting. Seafreeze is participating in these discussions as well. Referring to environmental and job sustainability, “I think they go hand in hand,” Bullard says.

Fuka, on the other hand states that “fishermen aren’t destroying any fisheries. They are probably the best stewards of the ocean.” He remains optimistic for the future, saying that “there’s just a ton of fish in the water.” And when asked about the future of commercial fishing in Rhode Island, Fuka states, “I always, always keep the glass half full.”

“I see more and more politicians of all types paying attention to the problem here,” Fuka says.

However, he does not expect major legislative change to happen on the state level in regards to catch limits, citing the complexities of the problem and unglamorous veneer such proposals would have for politicians. “[Governor] Gina Raimondo simply has too many other issues that need to be fixed,” Fuka states, despite Raimondo’s praise of the industry. And in a Democrat-leaning state like Rhode Island, Fuka claims that the environmentalist agenda takes precedent over pushing for fishing jobs.

As president of the Rhode Island Fishermen’s Association, Fuka’s vision is simple. He wants government officials to see the value in collaborative research so that catch limits can be raised and jobs can be sustained. But what he wants most is to “see fishermen excited and coming in with a boatload of squid, having some consistency in what they land,” Fuka says, “so that they can provide for their household.” +++ During the conversation with Fuka, one of the few people actively working on the docks is a woman in a grey knit beanie and a bright orange apron. She strings together skate rays in groups of three, which will be used as lobster bait. “You’re stringing together those rays like an expert,” Fuka remarks, “must’ve been doing it forever.” “My entire life,” she responds.

Fuka nods in a tacit understanding and continues walking.

KION YOU B’20 notices the old man in the sea.

METRO

06

A HOUSE MUSEUM

Mystery in the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum WRITING, ILLUSTRATION, AND DESIGN

BY Isabelle Rea Underneath the premiere painting of the Isabella Stewart Gardner collection, Titian’s Europa, hangs the skirt of Isabella Gardner’s own ball gown. In the context of the sexualized painting, Gardner’s gesture is scandalous for a married woman in 1903. While Gardner was alive, most did not recognize that it was her skirt, but now that its provenance has been revealed, it is used as an example of the eccentric puzzles hidden throughout the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum.

Beyond the 30 centuries of history that provided for the subject matter of its collections, the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum is one marked by its own storied legacy.

An unsolved 1990 theft of 13 works, including paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt, blankets the collection in the thrill of tragedy turned mystery, glittered by a $10 million dollar award for information connected to the recovery. And the collection has been permanently united with a woman, the namesake of the building and collection, Isabella Stewart Gardner herself—long dead, yet still lingering in the ineffability of the collection she left behind. +++ Born into New York City wealth in 1840, Gardner became a Boston socialite who liked, among other things, luxury objects and travelling. While voyaging through Europe with her husband, Gardner found herself with a Vermeer after outbidding the Louvre and the National Gallery in London in an auction for the piece. From there, Gardner became a ‘big man’ among her male collecting peers (though she sat at the back of auction halls, face covered, while a man bid on her behalf). She travelled throughout Europe in luxury, collecting paintings, statues, tapestries, ceramics, furniture, and architectural pieces. In 1898, she built a museum based on the architectural model of Italian Renaissance palaces, with a courtyard sporting a glass ceiling, in Boston. Gardner hired others, but made sure to insert her own autonomy and personality, even climbing up the scaffolding if she needed to, and then spent a year arranging her collection within the space.

In her will, Gardner makes the final act of individuality, the cherry on the top of a regime of personal agency: if anything is moved from the place where she left it, the collection will be dissolved, sold, and the money donated to Harvard University.

Patrons wandered through two floors of galleries congested with the “treasures” of Europe, Asia, and Egypt. Art historian Anne Higgonet explains that the idea of democracy associated with the museum’s status as open to the public (who, nevertheless, had to pay a fee), “justified America’s acquisition of the world’s cultural heritage; indeed, it transformed a right into an obligation” in the early 20th century. The appropriation of artifacts, long driven by both European and American colonialism, was presented as laudable public education.

Such a collection of valuable global art and artifacts was new to America in 1903, the year that the museum opened its doors, and especially inaccessible to anyone other than the rich. Gardner treated collecting like the men around her—fighting over the same old masters, and, in the terms of biographer Kathleen McCarthy, “publicly celebrating the acquisitive prowess of American capitalism.” For Gardner and the others accumulating pieces and stripping them of their religious and cultural context, this kind of collecting operated as their troubling attempt towards philanthropy. Gardner ensured that her collection would be left “for the education and enjoyment of the public forever.” But the Isabella Stewart Gardner was never just a catalog of learning or instruction, but instead a place to experience. A review of the collection from 1927 celebrates the museum’s supposed emphasis

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on enjoyment over the reception of culture, repeatedly calling the collection “enchanting”—“every room has an inviting aspect and makes one feel it would be a pleasure to linger indefinitely.” The website promises that “a veritable feast for the senses is in store.” But with the collection’s lack of provided context for its pieces (and with nothing to place them in a legacy of colonialism, art history, and the confluence of the two), part of the museum’s provocation might be what, exactly, visitors might be able to sense in its collections. +++ Today, the Isabella Stewart Gardner stands as one of many Boston art museums. Five minutes away, the Museum of Fine Arts houses similar art but falls closer in line with the white wall, institutional art showing tradition. Carefully delegated wings and floors separate “19th to Early 20th Century American” from “Chinese Song Dynasty.” On the other side of Boston, the Institute of Contemporary Art stands in all of its glass and stone, walls and doorways negated in pursuit of austere showspace. In these public institutions that are free of individual names, era, origin, artist, and theme are used to organize materials for the sake of clarity, and curators make decisions about the placement of works within categorical limitations.

Higgonet explains that “on the whole, private collections express individual impulses, while public museums express cultural values.” But the Isabella Stewart Gardner lies not-so-neatly in between the two. Gardner certainly expressed individual impulse. But the collection was always meant to be viewed by the public, and Gardner’s guiding philosophy was searching for both what she liked and what she believed America wanted to see. To say that a public museum expresses cultural values seems reductive: how does the museum define the public’s cultural values? In public museums too, like the MFA down the road, decisions still fall on individuals, just far more of them. In Gardner’s philanthropic mentality, her museum was never explicitly created for her own enjoyment, but instead to have a place, purpose, and collection that had her name attached.

All the floors surround the central courtyard, a collage of broken up marble female goddesses, a variety of pots, and different kinds of ferns. Since it opened, this courtyard has been the museum’s primary public association, not necessarily exemplifying the collection as a whole (each space has a character of its own), but taking the role of first Google image and the most popular subject of visitors’ Instagram stories. “Gardner wished to create dialogues across period and place,” is the basic monologue, “so she designed the pieces in ways that draw out connections and new revelations.” Therefore, she divided the 5,000 objects into loosely organized rooms that round the courtyard in no specific order.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner feels—and, through its careful preservation, is—petrified in time. While it is natural for institutions to evolve over one hundred years, Gardner’s will means that the museum will keep its turn of the century daze until its dissolution. The museum’s age, in combination with the domestic qualities of the space, create an atmosphere that feels more formal and guarded than contemporary or recently renovated spaces.

Traditional furniture and wall paper make the space more stuffy than a gallery clean and sterile. But the rooms are spacious and brightly it from the courtyard. Objects are placed out in the open like they would be in any home.

The “whole” in an any art collection is not clearly discernable, let alone definitively possible. But in Gardner’s case, there is at least one unifying quality: herself. Anyone who enters will encounter Gardner. Such an individual focus may seem exclusive, if not dull. But

the intentions behind Gardner’s will point away from her representation as an individual and towards the continuation of her design principles. While the museum was always intended to remain standing after her death, the emphasis on keeping everything it its original place assigns the value of her collection to the arrangement of the art and objects, and not to the coherence or totality of the collection. ‘ +++ In a New York Times review, Utrecht Boser explains the anger of some curators and art historians who find the intent of the Gardner museum to “solicit not an intellectual but an emotional, highly personal response” impure.

The lack of organization and identification plates upsets an academic vision of the representation of pieces indispensable to a traditional art history. Down the road at the MFA, visitors can walk from gallery to gallery to view a continuous line of clearly labeled images and objects.

The only quality of such a museum that is not intimidating is the predictability—there are few surprises here.

For the pure viewing of a painting, direct minimalism may be optimal. But the appeal of a collection exists in the dialogue between the parts, and not just the single and the whole. In contrast, the Gardner includes emotionally driven compositions. Gardner combined meaning-making with her own whims to create a system of affect rather than order in her design. Her method creates an untraditional viewing experience, but may provide needed respite for many from the stoic academia of the public museum.

Gardner left her museum beautiful and grand but, at some points, unsettling and strange. The kitsch exposes itself in the corners, in the distance between the chair and the desk, or in the strange combination of vase and bowl.

The arrangement of furniture is not perfect or seamless in any way, and in many intersections, it is just plain awkward. Embedded in the idiosyncracy, the art is less serious and more approachable, and invites the visitor to draw their own affective conclusions.

To most visitors, Isabella Stewart Gardner is present but unobstructing. Collections, by nature, present multiplicities, variation, and choice. There are different points of entrance, internal relationships, and connections to be made. All of these qualities make any museum collection intriguing for the individual eye and mind, and this is no different in the Gardner museum, despite the scattering of her personality.

In one of their most practical critiques of the museum, art experts have chastised the museum for its upkeep of the collection, citing sun damage due to overexposure.

While the preservation of art is a serious concern, the idea that the museum places its art at the level of its visitors (and thus, at its most vulnerable position) might be reflective of the best of the house-museum: Gardner’s devotion, above all else, to the experience of those who she invites inside.

ISABELLE REA B’20 gets in free with her name.

NOVEMBER 17, 2017

WITHOUT PEDESTALS EVERYTHING FALLS IN THE MUD Male cuttlefish have evolved a unique reproductive behavior. During mating season, they win the eye of a female by fighting off competing males, ensuring that the largest, strongest cephalopods pass on their genes.

Smaller males which have no chance of winning these fights have adapted a less violent mating ritual, in which they tuck in their tentacles, change their visual pattern, and disguise themselves as females. These males in drag fool the larger males into thinking they are females, thus avoiding the violent fighting. When a large male moves to mate with a female, the smaller male will sneak in, convincing the macho male that he has secured the rights to mate with two females. As the three huddle together, the smaller male will mate with the female, securing another generation of small, clever queers. In some situations, this genderqueer male can even split his coloration bilaterally, appearing male to a female on one side of him, and female to a male opposite him. A fast read of this behavior would make the cuttlefish appear to be a queer role model of some kind, but his lack of consent and deceitful approach to sexual activity in general reflects the immediate impossibility of discussing human sexuality and animal sexual activity as one and the same. The cuttlefish’s behavior does, however, allow us to consider alternative possibilities for how we construct our own identities.

The evolution of a bilateral drag queen is just one example in a swarm of idiosyncrasies that demonstrates the unfathomable diversity present in animal reproductive behavior. At the Institute of Queer Ecology, we work to communicate this diversity, because on every political, social, and biological level, diversity is an indisputable strength. Queer ecology can communicate aspects of biodiversity that have been left out of textbooks.

It doesn’t pave the way for the justification of human behaviors because of their “naturalness,” but rather allows for imagining one’s queerness in the context of a larger natural history, free from marginalization. This process of dreaming interspecific queer utopias is especially helpful for people who find themselves oppressed and marginalized by current hetero-regimes. Another strength of queer ecology is its ability to decenter humanity from its own constructions of the world. In this way, queer ecology counters environmental destruction and advocates for the same biodiversity it draws on for inspiration. Alex Johnson writes about this endless biological complexity in his essay “How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Time,” reiterating positions he intends to disagree with: “If straight is the identity of I am, then gay becomes I am not… Instead of talking about nonconformity, I want to talk about possibility and unnameably complex reality. What queer can offer is the identity of I am also.” The Institute of Queer Ecology is a research, exhibition, and publishing platform dedicated broadly to these issues, looking to mitigate the violence and oppression inflicted upon LGBTQ+ communities and the environment. Queer folks and ‘nature’ alike can no longer be othered if we want to achieve this goal. +++ As we continue our search for queer kin, it’s worth mentioning that dolphins are also notably gay. Not all of them, of course—and it’s more appropriate to refer to many of these animals as bisexual. In an effort to understand queerness in a Darwinian view of the world, some researchers believe that young male dolphins relate adolescent queer sexual activity to early forms of social bonding. If the dolphins benefit from the activity, it therefore becomes a survival mechanism in some sense of the word. In scientific circles there is a sharp distinction in how animal sexuality and human sexuality are talked about and labeled. The use of terms like ‘gay’ to describe animals like dolphins is discouraged, as it

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Queer ecology as an attack on hierarchy

personifies them in a way that is undesirable in mainstream ecological discourse. In an article for the New York Times, Jon Mooallem writes of an encounter he had with an albatross researcher who vehemently operated within this jargon while studying a nest with two females.

The scientist, Lindsay C. Young, referred to the word “lesbian” as a human term, and was “devoted to using the most aseptic language possible and resisting any tinge of anthropomorphism.”

Emerging from a history of suppressed research, Bruce Bagemihl presented his book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity in 1999, which presented over 450 examples of previously overlooked research into homosexuality across species. Near the end of this book, he questions the effectiveness of the research: what are the implications of this work in a society that has such a messy relationship to ascribing morality to acts viewed either as ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’?

Bagemihl writes, “More information about same-sex activity in animals simply means more possible interpretations: the information can be used to support or refute a variety of positions on the naturalness or acceptability of homosexuality, depending (as before) on the particular outlook of whoever is drawing the conclusions.”

Bagemihl’s book, however, did go on to change discussions, and is sourced as a precedent in almost every text on queer ecology. While the application of this research becomes troubled with multiple interpretations, one positive example emerged when the American Psychiatric Association cited Biological Exuberance in their brief to the United States Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas.

This case led to the removal of sodomy laws across 14 states, illustrating that this argument that Bagemihl feared may be futile is able to sit in an ecology of other framings as justified.

At the Institute of Queer Ecology, we believe that while calling animals gay may bring us closer to them, it oversimplifies the situation. As much as we’d like to acknowledge ourselves and dolphins to be the same kind of queer, that’s not the case. The mapping of queerness onto nonhuman organisms can be an irresponsible act, as projecting these identities onto animals makes their actions appear synonymous with ours. But the terminology used currently to describe their behaviors—mainly the word ‘homosexual’—feels so rooted in a history of discrimination and essentialization, such that it does not entirely fit either. In her discussion of the queerness and sexiness of mulberries, Catriona Sandilands states, “I don’t mean to suggest that their complicated sex/gender/species lives should naturalize the living of other complicated sexualities and genders, as if their particular species-being could justify queer lives in other species, as if to take the parameters of one kind of life to normalize the socially and politically enmeshed becomings of others.” This positionality is where we sit at IQECO; we are aware of the complexities of this field, but willing to push on towards imagining with queer ecological thinking regardless.

The study of non-normative animal sexualities is almost never discussed on its own. This research is muddied with human concerns and is used in various ways to inform human understandings of sexual orientation. For much of natural history, documentation of homosexuality in animals has been unexamined or suppressed. But in the last half century, coinciding with the timeline of the queer liberation movement (and the environmental movement) there has been an upswelling

BY Lee Pivnik DESIGN & ILLUSTRATION BY Eliza Chen

of previously fringe research into mainstream debates.

Historically, field biologists would omit observations of nonhuman same-sex encounters, because those who did publish this work were accused of forwarding a gay agenda and their own sexual orientations would be questioned. Of course, no research on animal behavior would be dismissed if it confirmed ‘desired’ traits like heterosexuality, family bonds or mating for life as ‘natural.’ The politicization and suppression of same-sex research, and the unchallenged acceptance of research representing ‘straight’ animal behaviors, is one method by which traditional animal studies research replicates categories of ignorance and oppression under the banner of objective science. +++ As a word, “queer” flamboyantly inhabits a gray area in language. Originally meaning strange or odd, it is now both an umbrella term for diverse gender identities and sexual orientations, and a tool to theorize the position of people marginalized by their sexual and gender identities within historically determined power structures.

While it may seem, well, queer, that the word is both one that refers to human sexuality and becomes a term for destabilizing a number of commonly held beliefs, we intend to use both definitions at the Institute of Queer Ecology. We aim to unsettle heteronormative discourses with this research, while providing an alternative history for LGBTQ+ youth to access. For those who grew up in queerphobic environments, who felt isolated and alone in their identities, an expanded notion of queer community including every other species might prove to be invaluable. However, early childhood access to these multispecies queer manifestations is hard to come by. The American Library Association reports that And Tango Makes Three, a children’s book based on a real life gay penguin couple and their adopted daughter, has been constantly on their list of the books most actively vilified by parents since it came out in 2006. While the book has been banned in school libraries across the country, its co-author Justin Richardson has said, “We wrote the book to help parents teach children about same-sex parent families. It’s no more an argument in favor of human gay relationships than it is a call for children to swallow their fish whole or sleep on rocks.”

Traversing this field is no easy task. The terrain is rocky with agendas and muddy with misinterpretation.

The animals that I’ve described as queer do not totally embody the identity that has been mapped onto them.

They haven’t been ridiculed by their peers for that identity, nor have they become emboldened by a queer community in opposition to that oppression. They have, however, become catalysts for the movement to queer ecology. The best way to undermine heteronormative systems of oppression may be a more successful education on biological diversity and its potentiality as a tool for utopian dreaming.

LEE PIVNIK RISD’18 only puts empty things on pedestals.

SCIENCE

08

A WINDING PATH

Providence is a divided city. Physical barriers—both natural, such as the Providence River, and manmade, like the I-95 highway system—work to separate and isolate the people and neighborhoods of Providence, forcing residents to cross 11-lane highways and long bridges to walk from one side of the city to the other. The construction of I-95 especially divided the city. “When I-95 was rammed into Providence, Upper South Providence became detached from Downtown,” C.J. Opperthauser, training manager for Grow Smart Rhode Island, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable and equitable economic growth in the state, told the Independent. He marks this as a decision that isolated the predominantly Latinx neighborhood and discouraged investment in the area.

To help bridge these divisions, this month Providence is launching “City Walk: Connecting Providence Neighborhoods,” an initiative to improve the connections between nine Providence neighborhoods, from India Point to Roger Williams Park. According to the plan’s website, the City Walk route, which runs about 4 miles end-to-end, will receive investments in pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure, thus improving transportation safety and encouraging celebration of the culture and diversity of neighborhoods along the route.

However, Dwayne Key, chair of the South Providence Neighborhood Association and a member of the City Walk advisory board, told the Indy that “those who live here can’t see the benefits of this project—I can’t see it solving any of our needs.” Key stressed that the plan is more likely to improve the experiences of those outside the neighborhood than meet the needs of South Providence residents. Key’s claim negates much of how City Walk’s proponents frame the stakes of the project, especially in its ability to connect the area to the infrastructure and development of the rest of the city. But the project’s success for the people of South Providence might lie instead on the city’s ability to incorporate the already present—and pressing—residents’ concerns into a plan that has existed, in some form or another, for over a decade. +++ The idea of an east-west pedestrian corridor was not drafted by the city, however, but instead originated in 2006, when I-195, one of Providence’s biggest physical barriers, was relocated outside of the Jewelry District, freeing up 20 acres of land for redevelopment. While the area has attracted some investment, such as the recent $220 million renovation of an old power station into office space, most of this I-195 land remains undeveloped. In fact, around 60 percent of the Jewelry District’s land is covered with surface level parking lots, said Phoebe Blake, Chair of the Jewelry District Association’s Planning & Zoning Committee, and 15 of the 19 available land parcels remain available for purchase on the I-195 Redevelopment District Commission website.

The concept of an “East-West Greenway” first emerged in the midst of this I-195 relocation process

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METRO

as part of the Old Harbor Forums, a joint initiative of the Providence Planning Department, the Providence Foundation, the American Institute of Architects RI, and the Providence Preservation Society. The original idea focused more narrowly on the I-195 land and the Jewelry District, extending only to the beginning of the South Side, as opposed to its current inclusion of Broad Street to Roger Williams Park. In the decade since, the plan has been expanded and refined in what Blake described as a “very slow” process, one that required organizations like the Jewelry District Association and the Providence Foundation to rely on private fundraising and advocacy before the City of Providence took ownership of the project a year ago.

After securing money from both private and public organizations—such as Brown University, the Colosseum, and the Providence Foundation—as well as pro bono landscape design work from architect Ron Henderson, Blake and Beaudoin spearheaded a 79 page vision paper for the project released in 2014: “City Walk: Connecting Providence.” The report is based on two principles: first, that City Walk “connects eight Providence neighborhoods via a network of pedestrian spaces and bicycle routes” and second that it “improves equitable access to urban assets.” If City Walk is successful, Blake told the Indy, “people will feel comfortable in any neighborhood.”

The report dedicates 10 pages to suggesting improvements to the Clifford Street Bridge, a two lane, 500-foot long overpass that spans the 11 lanes of I-95 and demarcates South Providence from the Jewelry District. The bridge is a concrete tundra: poorly lit, devoid of any color, and subject to the noise pollution of cars flying by underneath. Because it’s so exposed, the bridge becomes “especially crappy in bad weather,” said Opperthauser.

An appendix to the 2014 Plan contrasts the lack of investment on the Clifford Street bridge with the India Point and (forthcoming) Providence River pedestrian bridges, both of which enhance access between higher income neighborhoods and, correspondingly, have received pedestrian design enhancements. Through improvements like “green thresholds and buffers,” “pedestrian scale lighting,” and colored surfaces, the plan suggests that the Clifford Street bridge can become a “gateway” between two disparate neighborhoods that currently have little interaction. There is disagreement, however, about the ability of bridge developments to unite neighborhoods that are divided by more than just barren infrastructure. As Phyllis Gingerella Wade, an Elmwood resident, said to the Indy, the barriers between neighborhoods in Providence are not only physical but demographic, and often founded in racism, such that it will take far more than infrastructure to work towards the idealized, unifying goals of the project.

Blake told the Indy that the 2014 Report, which was produced independent of the city planners, is still “quite preliminary,” and Ellis described the report as “more of a visionary document” than a detailed engineering and planning document to guide the city’s actions. The city included support for the idea of a City Walk in its 2010 “Providence Tomorrow Comprehensive Plan,” and the report, according to its introduction, “is a call for action to get City Walk moving.” By the time of the document’s release in 2014, the project had been swirling around for

almost a decade and its advocates were exhausted, said Blake, with most of the plan still yet to see any concrete improvements.

“Recently, new life has been breathed into the project,” said Opperthauser, as the city took ownership over the project in the past few years as they applied for and received large funding sources for the project.

Of the total funding, $1.875 million comes from the State Transportation Improvement Program, $500,000 comes from the federal Highway Safety Improvement Program, and some other funding is available as part of the city’s cultural programming budget and from a recent bicycle infrastructure improvement grant, reported the Providence Journal.

Now that the project is finally gaining steam, “it’s about taking a step back and getting better feedback, and making sure it’s fleshed out the way it’s been promised,” Opperthauser said. While the organizers of the 2014 City Walk study did speak to residents of the South Side and incorporate public input into the report, Blake said, it was still produced as a private effort separate from the city’s planning department. The team is now conducting more formal community meetings to present their mission and hear feedback on the plan. The city's "standard for whether enough outreach has been done” is high, said Ellis. The first of these meetings will take place at the Southside Cultural Center on November 28, 2017 at 6 PM. +++ On the corner of Broad and Oxford Streets in South Providence, a mural called “La Plaza Del Arte y Las Culturas” is displayed on the side of a grocery store, depicting a street filled with people: a child playing chess with her grandparents, an artist painting a canvas, a man selling ice cream, and a woman riding her bike down the middle of the pavement. In the mural, there are no cars in sight.

The circulation of traffic on Broad Street, on the other hand, provides a stark contrast to the pastoral scene painted beside it, with cars and trucks fighting for space on the store-lined, two-lane road divided by a centerline painted with the colors of the Dominican Republic.

The street, which runs from downtown through the South Providence and Elmwood neighborhoods, is one of the city’s most dangerous for transportation: a study commissioned by the city found that the street accounts for more car crashes with pedestrians and bicyclists than any other corridor in the city. And while many residents did acknowledge the challenge of traveling without a car, “it’s not so much of a challenge that you don’t want to go out into the community,” Renay Omisore, a resident of South Providence who also works on Broad Street, told the Indy.

Broad Street is a major transportation vein, serving as the fastest way to get downtown to much of South Providence and Elmwood, especially for those who

NOVEMBER 17, 2017

Community outreach begins on a decade old idea for uniting Providence

BY Harry August ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY Gabriel Matesanz

cannot afford cars, Opperthauser told the Indy. In fact, more than 40 percent of residents of South Providence walk, bike, carpool or take public transit to get to work, according to a city report. Furthermore, as Alex Ellis, city planner and project manager for City Walk told the Indy, many of these bicyclists are high school students riding to school and adults going to the central businesses areas of Broad Street. As a result, Opperthauser told the Indy, City Walk “is going to be a commuter route—it will help with employment opportunities for people in South Providence.”

Beyond this transportation importance, Broad Street has a huge cultural significance in Providence. Two-thirds of the population of the neighborhood are people of color, many of them born outside of the United States, and the neighborhood is home to countless Caribbean grocery stores, restaurants, and celebrations. Accordingly, the city has begun to recognize the neighborhood's importance to Providence’s Latinx culture, with Mayor Elorza (the son of Guatemalan immigrants) branding the street last April as the “Latino Corridor of Providence.” Recently the City has launched a “Celebrate Broad Street” initiative that will market art and cultural events happening along Broad Street. Phyllis Gingerella Wade, who works on Broad Street, told the Indy, “it’s a cool hub for community serving organizations—people use the area to access a lot of services.” For example, Broad Street is home to organizations like the Southside Cultural Center, the African Alliance of RI, and Youth in Action.

Beyond just “celebrating” the culture of Broad Street and South Providence, however, the planners of City Walk must also recognize the structural discrimination the community has faced—and incorporate those needs into the plan. As outlined in the city’s South Providence Neighborhood Plan, the neighborhood was primarily Irish immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century, but as these families became more prosperous and moved to suburbs in the 1950s, South Providence saw a decline in both its population and economy. “This out-migration, in turn, led to an increase in the supply of cheap, poorly maintained rental housing,” the report writes, leading to a cycle of speculative home purchases, high debt loads, and plummeting property values that still affect the neighborhood. Upper South Providence, for example, has one of the lowest median family incomes in the city and twice the unemployment rates of the city average, according to the report. As Key told the Indy, in “everything from development to housing policy to snow removal to road paving to schools, South Providence was always put last.” +++ As part of the upcoming community outreach process, the city has an opportunity to address the many issues residents have with the project, especially with regards to avoiding potential gentrification that might result from connecting neighborhoods with vast disparities in income. Providence has a long and troubled history with gentrification, with a trend of low-income households

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

being priced out of neighborhoods like Fox Point and the West End. By eliminating barriers between the East Side and the South Side, City Walk could contribute to this tradition by driving up housing prices in the South Side.

This is an especially important concern for residents of the South Side, like Gingerella Wade, who told the Indy she moved to the neighborhood after being priced out of her last apartment. When asked about these concerns, Blake said to the Indy, “I don’t know if there’s anything we can do [to prevent gentrification from occurring].” This viewpoint, however, ignores the fact that gentrification is not a forgone conclusion of the City Walk project, and can be limited, if not altogether avoided, with a deliberate and community-driven planning process.

When the Indy asked about these concerns, Ellis emphasized that gentrification is “something [the City] is taking very seriously,” and added that “the equitable way to invest in the safety of our streets is to make them safe for people without means.” Furthermore, he said that "the answer is not to not invest, it’s to do so conscientiously and respectfully, giving residents a leading voice." Accordingly, the city will be holding focus groups, conducting stakeholder interviews, and employing local residents to attend community events and gather feedback about the project, in addition to the aforementioned community meeting. Crucially, the city must then be able to effectively incorporate this feedback into City Walk, and ensure that people’s concerns are actually met.

And because some residents have criticized not just the minutia but the core idea of a pedestrian corridor, the city must be willing to reframe aspects of the entire project.

Opperthauser also addressed the concern for gentrification, but stressed that the City Walk will in fact be beneficial to neighborhoods along the route. “This kind of thing is always seen as a harbinger of gentrification— and often it does precede gentrification,” Opperthauser told the Indy, but “people probably won’t move into the neighborhood just because there is now a bike path.”

While a bike path alone might not drive up housing prices, the circulation of people into South Providence, and the commercial activity and development that City Walk planners hope the project will deliver, must be considered as at least part of the much broader relationship between urban renewal and gentrification. “Ultimately,” Opperthauser concluded, “this is being built for people in that neighborhood who would like to bike or walk more safely.”

Under the assumption that bicyclists are predominantly white and wealthy (based on the perception of biking as a leisure activity which might be expensive to maintain), one can imagine that the bike path will be used to facilitate access to South Providence from the East Side and perhaps drive up the cost of living in those areas.

Many surveys, however, have found that bicycling is used far more as a means of transportation by people of color than by white people. For example, a 2014 People For

Bikes study found that at the national level, Hispanic people are about 50 percent more likely than white people to regularly ride their bikes for both transportation and recreation. These findings are supported by 2017 Providence bike count data, said Ellis, in which high numbers of people were recorded biking by certain intersections in the historically disadvantaged South Side. This ridership data supports the idea that City Walk will in fact “improve equitable access to urban assets” by reducing the barriers to residents of the South Side from resources in other parts of the city accessible by car or bus.

The 2014 City Walk report stresses that the plan will “advance economic development,” but more than transportation infrastructure will be required to turn this area into a transportation corridor that actually benefits the South Providence community. For example, Key suggested that in addition to bike lanes, the Plan incorporates initiatives to make bicycles more accessible, such as free bicycles (like a similar program in Boston), repair stations, bike clinics, and programs that encourage people to get active.

If the community outreach process is successful, and City Walk is implemented in a way that does incorporate and address meet the needs of Broad Street and South Providence, the project could lead to improvements that do in fact connect neighborhoods and address inequalities. Within the constraints of the funding, which comes from transportation-specific sources (and thus cannot be applied to any community project as desired), City Walk must balance needed infrastructure development with resident’s concerns about affordability and gentrification. Much of the debate thus rests on what impact the development of City Walk will actually have on Broad Street and South Providence, something that will be determined by the effectiveness of the city’s outreach process. The need for a more connected Providence, however, is clear: “You can’t celebrate your diversity if you stay in one community,” Omisore told the Indy, “[City Walk] is an opportunity for our city to grow.”

HARRY AUGUST B’19 enjoyed walking from India Point to Roger Williams park with his mother while researching this article.

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THE WORLD UNDER GLASS Mars, money, and matter in Arizona

BY Olivia Kan-Sperling ILLUSTRATION BY Teri Minogue DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

Once upon a time in the 1980s, a Texas oil magnate, an architect, a systems theorist, and a hippie-businessman-scientist re-made the Earth inside a three-acre dome at the foot of the Santa Catalina Mountains. In the Arizona desert, ideologies of libertarianism, techno-utopianism, and environmentalism mingled with the last vestiges of 1960s counterculture. In the spirit of the times, this curious array of figures hoped that somewhere in their confluence of capital, expertise, and experiment a new world could be created. For once, this new world was not metaphorical; the fruit of their efforts (and money) was to be nothing less than a model of and substitute for the Earth, one that would ultimately serve as a vehicle for space colonization. The leadership of this conglomerate, “Space Biosphere Ventures” (SBV), named their project “Biosphere 2”—Biosphere 1 being Earth itself. Both utopic commune and high-tech space capsule, Biosphere 2 was propelled by a fantasy of escape via human innovation and rationality amid anxieties of economic meltdown, ecological crisis, and nuclear annihilation. At the time, Discover lauded it as “the most exciting scientific project undertaken in the US since President Kennedy launched us toward the Moon.”

And how photogenic it all was! The $150 million glimmering glass prism rose up out of the desert like a mirage. Its pristine facets, suspended by a white lattice, reflected the purple Arizona sunset like some alien vessel just landed 30 miles north of Tucson. Inside, the Biosphere boasted an expansive simulation of Earth: a tropical rainforest, a marsh, a desert, a savannah, and an ocean, all in miniature, complete with a tiny coral reef, apartments, a library, and recreational areas. Fashioned as a “closed system” with near-zero air exchange with its surroundings, Biosphere 2 (B2) was designed to contain an atmosphere completely severed from Earth. Heavily influenced by new thinking on ecosystems, which figured them as complex, interconnected webs of life, self-contained and self-sufficient (thus “closed”), the scientists curated the 3,800 species destined for B2 with an eye for symbiotic harmony. One of these species was our own: for two years, under the glass dome of the Biosphere, a crew of scientific researchers was to collect data in total isolation. Both cultivators and constituents of their environment, inside and above it, they too would become part of the ecosystem.

On September 26, 1991, the eight “bionauts”—four men, four women—were set to board this “Glass Ark.” SBV ensured that the event received media coverage akin to that of a rocket launch. Clad in Star Trek-esque navy jumpsuits with black belts, green piping, and a white

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“BIO2” Earth logo on the back, the smiling, clean-faced crew members waved beatifically at the cameras before disappearing into the dome. In pictures, they seem to each be holding a single asparagus. This is only the first in a series of bizarre, human oddities surrounding B2.

Things went wrong pretty quickly. Several weeks into the “mission,” Jane Poynter, the “biospherian” in charge of agriculture, needed to leave because she had cut off her finger in a wheat thresher. Upon her re-entrance, as was later revealed, she snuck in some “supplies.” What these were is unclear: she claims they were “just some drawings,” while other team members maintained they were plastic bags, and one newspaper accuses her of bringing in “sleeping pills, mousetraps, and makeup.” There was no evidence of mouse problems, so perhaps this was a fabrication, but the mission was plagued by cockroaches and a species of ants that had infiltrated the dome. All the tropical birds, honey bees, and frogs went extinct almost immediately. Morning glories multiplied wildly in the rainforest, suffocating other plants. Although they had been provided with stylishly minimalist, granite-counter-topped kitchens, they had little to eat; the researchers were chronically hungry and ate so many sweet potatoes that they started to turn orange. In November, it was revealed that a carbon dioxide scrubber, a device that removes the gas from the atmosphere, had been installed prior to the start of the mission. In fact, carbon dioxide levels had immediately proved too high, and B2 steadily lost oxygen, rendering the crew depressed, fatigued, and barely able to sustain themselves, much less do research.

Accusations abounded that the scientific value of the endeavor was rendered void by the team’s non-adherence to the policy of isolation and self-sufficiency. Most damning was the leadership’s unwillingness to grant the press details on the project. What secrets, it was asked, was SBV trying to hide?

The media’s tone quickly changed: rather than a team of daring scientific pioneers, the bionauts were painted as cult members enthralled by the New Age-y SBV director, John Allen (the aforementioned hippie-cum-entrepreneur). In fact, the signs were there all along. Dr. Ghillean Prance, designer of the “rainforest” biome, gave this ominous warning in a 1983 interview: “Their interest in science is not genuine. They seem to have some sort of secret agenda, they seem to be guided by some sort of religious or philosophical system.” While the Biosphere’s glitzy glass, futuristic glamour, and billionaire backing may have previously blinded the media to the project’s less respectable origins, they now pounced on all hints of the “unscientific.” Training for the mission had

consisted, among other things, of mandatory meditation and theatrical performances. The group had largely been formed at a New Mexico “ecovillage,” Allen’s groovily named “Synergia Ranch,” and also met at sites including a conference center on the French Riviera, a boat, and a Texas arts space called the “Caravan of Dreams.” Most of the bionauts were not seriously scientifically educated, but received “degrees” from the SBV parent institution, “Institute for Ecotechnics.” Allen himself was heavily qualified, but his theater activities in San Francisco’s 1960s countercultural Haight-Ashbury district, as well as his many books authored under the pen name “Johnny Dolphin” and published by a press that boasts titles like Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics, cost him credibility in the eyes of the public.

Inside B2, things were equally melodramatic. In addition to the stresses of the nonhuman environment, the bionauts had to deal with each other—perhaps Allen had the right idea in training them in meditation. It was not enough; hungry and oxygen-deprived, they quarrelled bitterly over food rations. When Poynter broke into the emergency food supplies, which were not grown “inside” and thus reflected poorly on the experiment, she was dismissed by the SBV CEO and ordered to leave the bubble—an order which she ignored, figuring that no one would risk further compromising the experiment by forcibly removing her. Despite everything, in September 1993, the team emerged via red carpet into the outside world to the strains of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” an average of 29 pounds thinner but still smiling in their jumpsuits after two years and 20 minutes inside B2.

Speaker systems warned the crowds not to approach or touch the crew, as one does with gods, though it is unclear from where this strange safety precaution stemmed— out of concern for the health of the biospherians, or the public? Nevertheless, one overcome journalist rushed to shower them with hugs and kisses. The crew spoke on the wonders of viscerally connecting to one’s environment. The hatred they later admitted to feeling for each other was kept under wraps: one reporter, commenting on their serenely happy composure, described them as: “Good soldiers, team players, keen as mustard. You wanted to slap all their faces.” Despite the bitterness and controversy plaguing the mission, there was one happy ending: several months after “re-entrance,” Jane Poynter and fellow biospherian Taber MacCallum were married on the B2 campus lawn.

But this is not the end of the story for Biosphere 2.

After improvements were made that mainly addressed the carbon dioxide issue, a second crew was sent into

NOVEMBER 17, 2017

the bubble, with considerably less fanfare, on March 6, 1994. This time, the trouble came from outside. B2 was proving financially disastrous, and one month in, Ed Bass, the oil baron financier, ousted the entire project leadership. “Johnny Dolphin” was replaced by a banking team.

The project’s scientific advisory panel, which included NASA experts, quit. In a letter, Crew 1 member Abigail Alling described the turnover: “Limousines arrived on the biosphere site… with two investment bankers hired

by Mr. Bass… They arrived with a temporary restraining order to take over direct control of the project... With them were six to eight police officers hired by the Bass organization…They immediately changed locks on the offices…

All communication systems were changed (telephone and access codes), and [we] were prevented from receiving any data regarding safety, operations, and research of Biosphere 2.” Claiming that the new management knew nothing about the experiment’s intricate life systems, and concerned over the safety of Crew 2, Alling and another ex-bionaut cut short a business trip in Japan and broke into the complex in the middle of the night, smashing several glass windows and opening doors to communicate with those inside. In the end, arrested and charged with criminal trespass, burglary, and criminal damage, they were unable to halt the transformation of the scientific project.

The objectionable new CEO was none other than Steven Bannon, then working as an investment banker in Beverly Hills. During a trial brought by Alling against SBV for abuse of process and breach of contract, Bannon stated that, in response to a document Alling penned stating her safety concerns, he had vowed to “ram it down her fucking throat,” and that he had called her a “self-centered, deluded young woman” and a “bimbo.” Project director Margret Augustine also accused Bannon of harassment: he and his partner had "made lewd remarks, told offensive off-color stories, made disparaging remarks about females, made sexually suggestive remarks, [and] discussed females they had known in a lewd and derogatory fashion." Bannon attributed these “hard feelings and broken dreams” to the stress of the company’s bankruptcy.

Under Bannon, the scientific goal of the project was also fundamentally shifted. Whereas the Biosphere had previously been imagined as an alternate, more perfect Earth, the escapist vehicle for a future played out in space, its new leadership re-figured it as a test site for the Earth itself under extreme global warming. As Bannon explains in a 1995 interview, “A lot of the scientists who are studying… the effects of greenhouse gases, many of

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them feel that the Earth's atmosphere in 100 years is what Biosphere 2's atmosphere is today.” Bannon, despite using his current media platform to deny anthropogenic climate change, was clearly well aware of its existence. This is a common pattern. Exxon, for which Trump’s Secretary of State was formerly CEO, funded early global warming research in order to spread misinformation. While associated with environmentalism, B2 had always been predicated on the future uninhabitability of Earth. It was funded by oil money, and the immense daily energy costs of operating the system were supplied by natural gas rather than renewables. Given the humans’ utter failure to survive self-sufficiently in this brave new world of cockroaches and sweet potatoes, Bannon’s repurposing of the Biosphere as a window into the future was grim indeed. +++ Once, the park sold its visitors “biomeburgers,” “habitat hotdogs,” and “planetary pizzas.” Now, B2 serves simple “sandwiches,” and has done its best to shed its colorful past in favor of a more down-to-earth brand. It “does not have ziplines,” as its current Associate Director insisted in an interview—“We do not have rollercoasters going around!”

Recently, the project has been somewhat vindicated: the press, it is said, if initially overenthusiastic, was also overzealous in its condemnation. The facility has produced respectable papers, including some of the first research on the effects of carbon dioxide on coral reefs. Today, it is operated by the University of Arizona as a research and educational institute. Though no longer a closed system, its “mission statement” remains similar to that under Bannon—“to be an adaptive tool for Earth education and outreach to industry, government, and the public”—minus the controversy.

Nevertheless, the Biosphere, in all its arrogance, beauty, and confusion, still leaves one with a strange sense of ideological and narrative vertigo. As one befuddled reporter confessed at the time, “my mind is aspin with ambivalent impressions!” It is difficult to reconcile the facts and figures into a satisfactory story; in the end, it seems,

everything worked out OK. The few ex-bionauts still in the public eye look back on their experience with fondness and have gone on to work on—though never in—similar projects in systems ecology and space exploration. There is no evidence that they suffered long-term health consequences from their time in the bubble: in fact, the program has been held up as an excellent example of the fitness benefits of lowered caloric intake and exercise—though at the time, their diet restrictions and intense labor were matters of survival rather than aesthetics.

It is a mistake, however, to read B2 as no more than a piece of late-20th century nostalgia, when the future was shiny and monumental rather than some Harvard dropout’s online yearbook idea.

Silicon Valley, with its rhetoric of “think-novating the future” and “hacking for humanity,” is fueled by a similarly toxic mix of techno-utopianism backed by big money. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, for which Jane Poynter and Taber MacCallum have done work, is its direct descendant: his first goal on the way to space colonization was to land a “miniature experimental greenhouse” on Mars. SBV, with its ties to oil money and Bannon, simply carried its politics closer to the surface. Unlike B2, many geoengineering experiments today—most notably the dumping of tonnes of iron into the ocean to boost phytoplankton—do not operate on a closed system but on the Earth itself, with potentially disastrous consequences.

Biosphere 2 is simultaneously a history of intersecting ideologies, of media sensationalism, of Disneyland-era simulation, and of the Wild West of venture capital. There are lessons, here, of course— about hubris, and the dangers of playing Mother Nature—but perhaps also some pleasure: in the strangeness and beauty of human creation and desires as well as those of nature, and how both are inside, outside, and in-between each other.

OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING B’20 wants one of those jumpsuits.

TECH

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New Releases / Reissues

Recommended: Art & Design

Cunny Poem by Bunny Rogers

The Language of Design... because great places are all about design

by Maureen Steele-Bellows and Barry Petit

Meet the Artists!

The First Collaboration by the Phenomenal Pop Combo Jake, George, Paul and Dinos

Oh man, I love this book, The Language of Design...

This book is written by two designers, Maureen SteeleBellows and Barry Petit, whose job is to transform preexisting strip malls from a “D-minus” to a “strong C” (in their words). This is done mostly by removing superfluous “birdhouse features” like tiny fake roofs and windows and adding olive green detailing so the names of the stores really pop. The opening chapter, in which the designers make an appeal for regionalism, might seem at odds with their job as stripmall refurbishers...

They are sympathetic to the concerns of architectural preservationists, but seem to believe that, the economy being what it is, we might as well try and make generic chain-store architecture as effective as it can be. (“While some fear design standards may create sameness, the real fear should be the possibility of circus-like chaos…”)

There is something disturbingly pleasurable about seeing glossy reproductions of non-structures like Jared Jewlery Galleria or the Christmas Tree Shops and reading criticism of their awning placement... And Bellows and Petit’s design philosophy can be lucid to a sometimes disarming extent: side-by-side stock images of a lambchop and glass of champagne are captioned, “Choices change as conditions are added…” The book is best, I think, when the personalities of the designers really come through.

This is a super fun one... It’s documentation from Deitch Projects (a high-profile NYC pop art gallery) of a 2006 collaboration between four famous artists. The participants would start on the canvases independently and then pass them along, “rotat[ing] in sequence from one artist’s studio to the next” on four- to six-week intervals.

Sixteen co-authored artworks emerge in total, documented at every stage of the process. The great joy of the book is turning the page and discovering how the paintings evolve, depending on the order in which the artists received them. George Condo (a painter favored

by Kanye West and Jay-Z) is the most predictable of the group, sticking to his trademark clown-face anagrammatics... Scottish twins, Jake and Dinos Chapman are too clever for their own good and make some sly reference to the canvas surface (cutting it up, adding a door, a big signature, coloring book outline of a child painting).

And then whenever it gets sent to Paul McCarthy it’s a complete disaster, everything is lost, so you’re always hoping he gets the painting first so the other artists can fix it up a little.

The book is very nice as an object, I might mention— the size and shape of a vinyl LP, parodying the iconic Meet the Beatles record.

Cunny Poem is a collection of Bunny Rogers’s poetry written between 2012 and 2014, originally published on Tumblr, then in a limited edition hardback, and now this softcover reissue from Sorry House Books. Bunny is a genius, and probably the greatest living artist, and I’m not interested in a contrary opinion. Art writers always bring up her interest in ‘the forces of collective mourning’ or mention that she ‘draws from Neopets.com imagery.’

But this rhetoric is sorely lacking IMHO—‘collective mourning’ makes you think of some normative psychological categorization, whereas Bunny never generalizes. She is pin-prick articulate, leaves no dark smudges for critics to pathologize or phallologize… And then the ‘drawing from Neopets.com imagery’ line makes her sound like another nostalgic Tumblrite whereas Bunny’s work is never nostalgic, only as droll and inert and ingenius as a pale pumpkin (her sometimes-muse).

As for the book—I find the poetry entirely sufficient; every poem is ungodly... I just cannot believe this book…. I don’t read poetry because it makes me dizzy, but from what I’ve been able to tolerate of it, I LOVE this book!!!!!!! Chilling, cutting, blasé and perfect. 10 out of 10 Shadow Usuls.

Sample Poem: The Coldest Shoulder Two childhood animal friends find themselves forced to become enemies.

Noone breaks up with you Everyone just goes away

Krazy Kat 1937-1938: Shifting Sands Dusts its Cheeks in Powdered Beauty

by George Herriman

Internal Affairs III by Patrick Crotty

Peow Studio in Singapore has been at the forefront of the alt illustration scene for a few years at this point. They publish gorgeously designed, anime-influenced comics with sensitive MS paint-y linework and volumetric characters (reminiscent of Masaaki Yuasa’s 2005 series Kaiba in paricular). Internal Affairs III picks up with the story of Onion, an unpaid intern/‘Personal Mech Vehicle’ driver at BANERVELT AMCS, who is “on a mission to infiltrate an office sckyscreapyr (sic) and destroy a powerpoint presentation....” Onion is chill and there is a lot of #relatable BS office banter, intercut with more dynamic action sequences. Crotty’s character designs, with bulbous heads and extremities, have significant appeal and the cyan and magenta printing looks sharp.

If you don’t know Krazy Kat, you can check out these full-color full page comic strip collections from Fantagraphics Books. Originally running in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Evening Journal, these are some of the most highly regarded and influential commix ever created. Herriman projects the slapstick projectile gag (Ignatz throwing a brick at Krazy Kat’s head) into hallowed desert terrain, carving out a neat flat space for all breeds of surrealist wonkery. Peppered with alliteration, faux-rhetoric, Latin quotations, and idle poesy, the work is as erudite as it is deranged. (Intellectualism even leeches onto the Wikipedia page... supporting characters are described as “an inconsequential heterodox coyote,” “a transient, bearded insect,”et cetera....) Reading Krazy Kat is taxing, but gainful. Punchlines skew diagonally, or set up a scenario and leave the reader to imagine how it might unfold. You can also recognize Herriman’s aesthetic influence in the unscrubbed, gumshoe-chumbly vibe of Philip Guston’s paintings.

Not Recommended Journal of Fandom Studies I’m maybe cheating here, because I’ve only read this book as a free PDF. But it really deserves special mention as one of the laziest pieces of academic writing I’ve ever come across. In the very first line of the Journal’s mission statement, we already encounter an excuse: “The multi -disciplinary nature of fan studies makes the development of a community of scholars sometimes difficult to achieve…” The entire issue is about the problems making it nigh-impossible for the field of Fandom Studies to emerge, coalesce or progress... One academic suggests that fan studies scholars adopt a more ethnographic methodology and “try harder to engage with fans themselves,” mentioning with admiration how “[fan studies scholar] Booth has recently been attending conventions (including the large Doctor Who convention where he researched his article).” There is layer upon layer of self-congratulatory stupidity here and it feels as immersive as a Spiderman

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hell-pit, or whatever fans are into these days (I wouldn’t know, since I haven’t done the necessary field work).

The fan studies discipline is also weirdly gendered...

Another article describes how “The group [of scholars] was divided into 22 pairs of one female and one male scholar, and each pair produced a back-and-forth dialogue about their work and approaches to fan studies.”

What’s with the gendered structure? This is academia, not speed dating. Who has less game, the fans or the fan scholars?

No joke, this journal contains an article titled “Fuck Yeah, Fandom Is Beautiful.” I think this academic could try a bit harder... The whole publication seems like a small-scale conspiracy for a bunch of lazy professors to get tenure. I wonder if other offerings from publisher ‘Intellect Limited,’ such as Ubiquity: The Journal of Pervasive Media, are in the same vein.

BOOK REVIEWS

BY Liby Hays

DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

Recommended, with reservation Peeps: A Candy Coated Tale

by Martin Ohlin and Mark Masyga

People make fun of me constantly for loving shitty bathroom books with bad photocomposite art... I mean constantly… but bear with me for one second here. This book is a lot better than you would expect. It’s an epistolary novel of sorts, presenting us with all these primary sources from the Peeps world: a newspaper, a yearbook, Peeple Magazine (please don’t groan, it’s terribly rude...)

They strike a subtle balance between dessert recipes and visual puns, and there is also a kidnapping mystery, the Peeps go to Easter Island or something and there is a history of the Just Born company at the end. It doesn’t sound so bad, does it? I always thought Peeps were on par with Hershey Kisses as the mass-manufactured candy fetish par excellence because their shape embodies the process of extrusion…

Will this book look cool on your shelf? Is it going to enrich your life in any way? I can’t make any promises. But, I mean, I like it. And Barnes & Noble sells the hardcover for only $1.99. Goodreads reviewer Micheal perhaps puts it best:“Why not.... it’s just fun. Of course, it helps if you’re a fan of Peeps!”

NOVEMBER 17, 2017

VINEGAR, NOT JAM

A magical, maximalist artist “The Two of Swords! This card is something to fear.

It means stability, equilibrium. Of course! I’m fucking terrified of stability,” Jennifer “Vinegar” Avery exclaims with their signature cackle of delight. I hold a tarot card the size of a mini fridge with twelve other audience volunteers who have agreed to take part in a communal divination ceremony led by Vinegar—a performance artist, Providence personality, and recent graduate from Brown’s Resumed Undergraduate Education Program.

Every seat is taken in the small black box theater at AS220, the non-profit art center where Providence’s creative community converges. Vinegar’s performance is the finale piece of AS220’s Luna Loba series, a recurring cabaret night dedicated to the full moon of the month.

Tonight, the celebration is in honor of the Beaver Moon, a symbol of water, feminine energy, and sexuality.

Vinegar wears a seaweed green velvet jacket, revealing their bare chest and a tangle of golden and black lace necklaces. Their bright yellowish eyes are circled with thick eyeliner; gnarled black roots grow into the magenta tips of their hair, as if fighting the colored strands for headspace. Vinegar is tall, loud, and unafraid to laugh at themself. Their arms are decorated with a collage of tattoos, both detailed figures and simple geometric shapes. “I usually play the jester in my performances,” they proclaim to the audience, “but today, I’m just myself.”

The crew of card holders waits to be choreographed, vessels through which Vinegar will work their magic.

Vinegar’s heeled boots click against the floor as they pace around the theater, weaving in and out of the participants who hide the faces of their cards from the rest of the audience. Vinegar suddenly pauses, mid-strut, and looks directly into the eyes of a card holder. Vinegar pulls the startled audience volunteer into position, and squeals in response to the requested reveal of the card’s face before launching into the explanation of its symbolic meaning.

The printed figures on the cards (designed by Vinegar on an electronic drawing tablet) have a childlike aesthetic: the royal figures are rendered in multicolored scribbled lines yet also showcase an impeccable sense of proportion and composition. There is poetry in the chaos, but no prediction of the future.

The performance lasts only 10 minutes, and the audience is enthralled. This may be in part out of confusion—Vinegar does not fully explain how the cards relate to each other or what particular message they might hold. But there is something captivating in the eccentricity and energy of Vinegar’s performance, even if the meaning of the piece is not immediately comprehensible.

After Vinegar finishes the tarot card divination, the final piece in the night’s series, everyone in the theater jumps up to hug or congratulate someone. The performers and audience members all seem to know each other, citizens of this small, ragtag corner of Providence’s art scene.

Erminio Pinque, the artistic director of the beloved BIG NAZO monster-puppet performance group is acting as photographer for the event, and Sheyla Rivera the artistic director of AS220 who organizes Luna Loba, is also

15

FEATURES

present, as are several performers in FringePVD events (Providence’s summer theater festival) and art students from Brown and RISD. “You can ask me questions while I change if you like!” Vinegar exclaims to me after the show, poking their head out from behind a curtain while I awkwardly lean against the wall of the black box. I laugh and tell them to take their time. Vinegar leads me outside to chat with them and a few of the other artists after the show as they smoke under a narrow awning to avoid the drizzle and pass around a bottle of espresso vodka someone gave Vinegar as a congratulatory token. “Alright, go ahead.”

Vinegar says, turning to me, “Anything you want to know you can ask me in front of these people.” +++ Vinegar has not always been known as “Vinegar.” They adopted the name first as a Facebook alias when they left their first husband and wanted to cut ties. But like Vinegar’s art, the name is layered with meaning: from Vinegar Valentines, a Victorian tradition of sending rude valentines that featured caricatures or cynical poems; to Vinegar’s favorite flavor, and “how forceful it is;” to the eponymous line from the musical Cabaret: “a tiger is a tiger, not a lamb, you’ll never turn Vinegar into jam.”

Vinegar is in Providence for just over a week to perform in Luna Loba and set up an installation piece entitled The Fainting Room, The Vanity Table: A Period Piece or Cats and Pansies go f*ck yourself, open through November 25 in AS220’s reading room. The cramped room is a dizzying collision of color and texture. The walls are caked with vibrant silk scarves, glittery fabrics, body-like sculptures made of yarn, and beautiful scraps of trash. A yellow dress embroidered with the word “FUCK,” gloves with bloody tips, a teddy bear with vampire fangs, and a robotic head with orange plastic cups for eyes can all be found in the room that feels like a bizarre, 3D eye-spy. This piece, Vinegar tells me, is about how masturbation was used to treat female hysteria, and how women’s pleasure was at once recognized and pathologized. Viewers are invited try on wild costumes Vinegar made, and integrate themselves into this twisted sanctuary. There are secret party poppers throughout the space that explode with glitter when pulled so folks can “pop one off” so to speak, if they find them. The layers of materials are a bit alarming and can be difficult to connect to the broader theme, but the experience is thought-provoking and engaging. Vinegar’s aesthetic is defined by the fact that they create explicitly for themself, and claim to be unconcerned by how anyone interprets it. “My work is really selfish,” they say when asked about what drives them to create, “I don’t care at all what other people think of it. It just brings me so much joy! ” In addition to the AS220 installation piece, Vinegar’s art has been showcased in dozens of other art spaces, including Providence’s Yellow Peril Gallery and the SATELLITE Art Basel Festival in Miami, a showcase of promising new artists from around the world. Vinegar

has also worked with Hermès Foundation, a Parisian fashion house with a silk workshop just south of Lyon that accepts three emerging artists each year to take part in a four month long, fully funded artistic retreat. The artists have full access to Hermès’ luxury materials and support from their staff. Vinegar was the first American artist invited to the program—while there, they produced 300 fabric creations printed with drawings, photocopies, and trash textures.

Vinegar’s creations are impossible to categorize into one artistic discipline. “It’s a beautiful nightmare,” they say when asked to describe their artistic practice. “I’m always inspired by what is just lying about and how I can turn that into a fantasy world.” Their fantasy sometimes manifests as a performance piece, like the interactive tarot card reading, and at other times as installation art, fashion, puppetry, fabric design, and homemade dolls. Nothing is off-limits. Vinegar works extensively with found materials, and is particularly interested in the integration of trash as an art medium. Vinegar views the process of transforming litter into art as a form of magic. +++ Vinegar’s magical, maximalist aesthetic has deep roots.

They moved several times throughout their childhood, living in York, Maine; Dover, New Hampshire; and Vernon, Connecticut, among other places in the northeast. Vinegar lived in a trailer home for most of their youth, which was elaborately decorated with items Vinegar’s family collected. They found their decor in the same places Vinegar now sources their art materials: thrift stores, yard sales, and trash bins. Vinegar made a habit as a young child of stalking cats and snatching away the small animals the felines were preying up; young Vinegar constructed shrines for these dead vermin and orchestrated extensive funeral ceremonies on their behalf. So too, Vinegar’s grandmother was an important early influence: she was a doll maker and taught Vinegar her practice. Vinegar’s grandmother also introduced them to tarot reading at age 12, a practice which is still important to Vinegar both artistically and spiritually.

Vinegar’s early eclecticism led to their involvement in the local punk scene in high school. When they got in trouble for wearing spiked bracelets to school, they created paper maché versions to keep their edge while begrudgingly complying with the dress code. When asked what drew them to punk music, Vinegar’s eyes lit up: “I fell in love with the whole neo-cabaret of the early 2000s—that whole ‘crust glam’ thing.” Vinegar’s band was called “Army of Broken Toys,” for which they played bass, screamed a lot, and spat blood on stage.

The motley Army of Broken Toys moved to Boston after Vinegar finished high school, where the band became part of an artist group called the Ominous Collective. The band squatted in abandoned buildings and made “wild youthful decisions,” only some of which have become fond memories of adventure. Eventually, Vinegar became fed up with the angsty egos of the

NOVEMBER 17, 2017

BY Marielle Burt ILLUSTRATION BY Bryn Brunnstrom & Eliza Chen DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

musician community, and they ran away with the head of the art collective (which was quite scandalous, as both he and Vinegar were married to other people at the time) in the middle of the night, driving across the country to Portland hungry for a new start on a new coast. But Portland didn’t pan out, and soon Vinegar returned to the East Coast, ready for a change.

Driven by a desire to help others and find a new sense of purpose, Vinegar enrolled in the nursing program at Bristol Community College and began working at a nursing home. Vinegar found the nursing home deeply depressing, and found that they lacked an outlet for their creativity. Vinegar started once again to consider that spreading their artistic passion might be a way of serving others. +++ Vinegar swapped their nursing scrubs for an artist’s smock. They changed their major from nursing to art, and began the most fruitful period of their artistic and personal growth. “I really committed then—like I am a fucking artist,” Vinegar told me. In the art program, Vinegar immersed themself in the technique of an array of artistic styles, thriving in the intense, detailed work.

They studied realistic figure drawing and sculpture work, mastering how to capture the exact curve of a face and the shadow of eye in clay, charcoal, and ink.

Though Vinegar acknowledges that their art can seem “anti-technique,” they credit the Bristol CC arts program and their mentors there for teaching them to have a great “empathy for materials.” Their mastery of technique is also handy for Vinegar as someone who supports themself entirely by making art. Vinegar has been commissioned by a friend to sculpt ears for busts, an apparently difficult task, even for trained sculptors, that Vinegar does with ease.

After two years at Bristol, Vinegar was selected as valedictorian of their class and their mentors encouraged them to apply to Brown. Vinegar saw acceptance as a pipe dream, but applied anyway. For Vinegar, dreams

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

and reality have a way of converging: they were accepted on a full scholarship. At Brown, Vinegar found their artistic “fairy godfather,” Professor Richard Fishman, who they met in his class on Hybrid Art. Fishman connected Vinegar with an array of professional artistic opportunities, nominated them for the Hermès program, and encouraged them to seek out other art residency opportunities.

Vinegar spent the summer after their junior year at the fine art residency program at Yale. They were frustrated by the program’s emphasis on critique and rigid aesthetic rules; Vinegar’s unconventional work was incompatible with this stringent pedagogy. But Vinegar was unphased by this critique, and continued to create work that resisted traditional aesthetic rubrics. Though Vinegar’s art did not mesh with Yale’s pedagogy, their work caught the eye of acclaimed art galleries and festivals.

During their first semester at Brown, Vinegar submitted their work to the SATELLITE Art Basel festival in Miami, a renowned, multi-disciplinary arts festival. There, Vinegar met an artist named James who drunkenly called out to them while dancing on top of a bar: “Hey YOU! Do you want to make out in the bathroom?” The pair got kicked out of the bathroom for public nudity, and several days later, they wed in a ceremony officiated and attended solely by the cadre of artists that they met through the festival—making the wedding itself a form of performance art. James and Vinegar are still happily married a year later. They just bought a run-down manor house in Winsted, Connecticut, that they have grand plans to turn into a home, workspace, and artist retreat, living out what Vinegar describes as their own “Gilmore Girls’ dreams.” The decoration of this home, Vinegar says, is their next big project.

Before they set up in Connecticut, Vinegar is heading to Paris to install an immersive performance piece called Pupa, Poubelles et Les Bêtes at the Palais de Tokyo, and will then bring another work to a Berlin Gallery, The House of Presence. Pupa, Poubelles et Les Bêtes, called The Beast Boutique when it was performed in Providence

last spring, is a dark reinterpretation of Little Red Riding Hood, wherein Vinegar portrays “one fragmented patchwork body,” part Little Red Riding Hood, part Wolf, and part Grandmother. In the piece, set in a warped version of a doll shop, Vinegar alternates between selling their doll creations (made of mutilated stuffed animal parts, trash, and other found materials) as a symbolic act of sexual labor and greed, and creating new dolls as an expression of autoeroticism and corporeal passion.

The magic of The Beast Boutique, like all of Vinegar’s art, is in its contradictions: the piece is at once a fairy tale and a haunted house as well as a celebration of the multiplicity of femininity as animalistic, innocent, and generative, and a recognition of the social pressures that aim to regulate and contort it. Vinegar’s life as an artist is similarly defined by contradictions. They are a master of technique, yet often break technical rules in their work. They claim not to let critical reception define their art, yet depend on audience interest to make a living. Other artists who support themselves with their art face similar contradictions. These tensions are not easily resolved and may pose discouraging hurdles for those pursuing creative careers. But embracing broad and multiple contradictions is part of what defines Vinegar’s art, producing a quality that is simultaneously richly enigmatic and startlingly authentic. This openness to incongruity extends beyond Vinegar’s artistic work into their life—a naughty Valentine and an acrid flavor, Vinegar will never mold their individuality into the singular sweetness of jam.

MARIELLE BURT B’19 just had her first sip of espresso vodka.

FEATURES

16

BY Aya Cheaito and Fadwa Ahmed ILLUSTRATION BY Sam Berenfield DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

THE TRIALS OF ODYSSEUS AND ME BUT MOSTLY ME Perhaps it was the milk of the moon I drank tonight.

Rivers poured vehemently. Poseidon.

The sea was not as cold as it was in the living room.

The sound of the bombs wasn’t loud. It was lodged in the lungs.

Deaf.

I couldn’t hear a word, letters were falling off your mouth. I picked them up from the floor and

With new breath and rusty letters I’m telling you: I’m king of the marble floors so why can’t I stop crying ha ha.

On my 18th birthday I grew skin and on my 29th the world will die when I will it —

Rain.

My body is frail, mother. It requires hydration, and non-verbal truth. My third eye is blind. When will Ulysses be back?

And the nerves, mother, are connected to high voltage. Floating clouds and a fierce growling earth swallow the throbbing.

The leaves will not burgeon from my mouth and cover my sinful body. Mother, I do not look like Mary and the dark circles around my eyes have been traced back to unsolicited men and fearful legs and immaculate wombs and discombobulated shopping malls.

Bismillah, when Joseph went inside the well, he kissed me (Manhattan Psalm: 2016).

Ever since mother the lonely shepherds talk to me in my sleep and sit in my stomach solitude has lost its madness in my waist and I found a knife in my uterus to harness the unborn children dangerous methods for dangerous bodies and microwave for the pop tarts.

this is the truth and this is from a play I’m writing that is so momentous it will become a word.

I used to keep a journal because I couldn’t read my own handwriting and now I do not keep a journal because I cannot read my own handwriting.

Maybe one day I will be able to say: I can Not read my own handwriting and on that day I do not know whether or not I will keep a journal.

I don’t know how rain vapor condenses to negate itself to become sharper than itself but if I can’t tell you: it hurts here then I can’t tell you anything I can’t even say the word I and here we are so Poseidon can fuck myself.

—Fadwa Ahmed

—Aya Cheaito

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LITERARY

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THE

LIST!

FRIDAY 11 ∫ 17

SATURDAY 11 ∫ 18

SUNDAY 11 ∫ 19

YOU ARE DOING GOOD: MENTOR ART SHOW EXHIBITION

BEHIND THE SCENES TOUR

MODERN SOUNDS

New Urban Arts 5 PM —————— NUA mentors and study buddies will showcase artwork. Light refreshments served, and then you can hop down the street and get some pizza at Nice Slice’s new spot.

BACH TO THE FUTURE

Manning Chapel at Brown University 7 PM — 7 AM ————— Stay up all night with classical and experimental performances of Bach numbers.

There’ll be free coffee provided, but bring your own pillows and blankets. This is the fifth year of an annual favorite and lots of friends of the Indy are playing this year!

Lippitt House Museum 10 AM ————— A special behind-the-scenes tour of the museum, built for RI Governor Henry Lippitt, offers visitors a chance to hear about “how the ‘other half’ lived in this Victorian-era mansion” and get “a fuller picture of what daily life was like for servants.” A hint: probably really badly!!

BOTANICAL CENTERPIECES

Roger Williams Park Botanical Center 11:15 AM $10 ————— Learn how to make a “holiday tabletop centerpiece,” which I guess is something people do, at the Roger Williams greenhouse. The greenhouse is worth a visit whether or not you need a holiday centerpiece, tbh!

Tea in Sahara 2 PM ————— An original and improvised jazz series happening at Tea in Sahara on the last Sunday of every month. Don’t forget to try the hummus!!

LIVE PRO(V) WRESTLING

AS220 Black Box Theatre 7 PM ————— This event promises that you “will be pleased with our balance of character, athleticism, comedy, and art.”

PROVIDENCE EMO NIGHT: KARAOKE EDITION

Fete Music Hall 9 PM ————— Apparently this will be karaoke backed by a live band?? But only for pop-punk classics.

MONDAY 10 ∫ 20

TUESDAY 11 ∫ 21

WEDNESDAY 11 ∫ 22

SAVE TPS PHONE BANK

POWER BACK ON FOR ALL!

FRIENDSGIVING

Faunce Memorial Room – Brown University 1:30 PM ————— Join Brown Immigrant Rights Coalition, Central American United Student Association, and their allies to fight to extend Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and to pressure representatives to pass H.R. 4253, the American Promise Act, which would allow TPS holders to become permanent residents. Food and scripts provided!

TRANS DAY OF REMEMBRANCE

Southside Cultural Center 7 PM ————— An annual day of observance to remember the lives lost to anti-trans violence as well as to celebrate past trans and queer leaders that inspire us to resist. This evening of reflection, remembrance, and resistance will feature performances and art from local community members, as well as tabling from organizations that provide resources for the trans and queer community.

State of Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission ( Warwick) 10 AM ————— Join the George Wiley Center to support affordable utility restoration. Thousands in RI are still without utility service or are facing shut-off, and the Center has submitted a proposal to enact emergency utility services for the winter.

THE LAST WALTZ

Greenwich Odeum Auditorium 8 PM ————— Chiller Scorcese movie about The Band!

Have you ever been to the Greenwich Odeum? One time I saw Girlpool and Waxahatchee there and it was really weird.

Everyone had to stay seated.

The Grange 9 PM ————— Music, vegan BBQ, and free entry! You’ll just get charged $14 for an appetizer cause they’ll call it a “small plate” lol

THURSDAY 11 ∫ 23 THANKSGIVING!

My favorite holiday! I hope you all have somewhere nice to be! Watch a movie!

Roast a vegetable!

HOROSCOPE ∫ TAURUS The moon enters Scorpio this weekend, where the sun, Jupiter, and Venus are still hanging out. You know who resides directly opposite Scorpio? You do, baby bull! Yikes! Watch yourself oscillate between hatred and obsession at the speed of sound! Try not to start a family with someone you almost punched in the face yesterday (or the other way around)! Instead of being scary in your interpersonal relationships, go on a ghost tour of PVD or something.