The College Hill Independent Vol. 35 Issue 10

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A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY DEC 01 2017

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COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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COVER

INDY

Tapestry Kathryn LaMontagne

NEWS

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 35 / ISSUE 10 DEC 01 2017

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Week in Review Mark Benz, Sophie Kasakove, Patrick McMenamin, Will Weatherly, Eve Zelickson

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Still In for What?

Mara Dolan

METRO

FROM THE EDITORS

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Denied Recourse Alicia Mies

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A Push for Sanctuary Paula Pacheco Soto

ARTS 11

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Less Time Than You Cate Turner Crown Molding William Samosir

FEATURES 08

Mark Train Julia Tompkins

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About a Girl Lisa Borst

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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.

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.

B my Boo Will Tavlin

SCIENCE

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Chemtrails Liz Cory

EPHEMERA

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Toe Tags

X 18

Junkpile

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 Julia Rock Julia Petrini Harry August 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

Gabriel Matesanz THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN POST-APOCALYPSE

BY Mark Benz, Sophie Kasakove, Patrick McMenamin, Eve Zelickson,

Will Weatherly ILLUSTRATION BY Sophia Meng DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

A Fizzling Housing Market

Cold Chicken

Consider the Lobster

Like a specter haunting Middle America, the remnants of Cold War industry are making for a strange housing market this month in the Great Plains. Six months ago now, Ed and Dianna Penen, current owners of a former nuclear missile silo in Eskridge, Kansas, decided to list their concrete grotto on the short-term lodging site Airbnb. Although the transfer of Castle Subterra, as the missile silo is now called, is pending, business looks to be certain for the new owners. Late to the news, just the past week has seen dozens of articles publicizing the strange accommodation. Visitors can enjoy being below the surface of the earth, a lack of natural light, a very long concrete tube, and what seems to be a normal looking couch. And guests that don’t wish to be entombed also have the option to visit the “ritual stone circle” that sits on the property aboveground. Though what happens at the circle is uncertain, guesses are that it has something to do with the Penens’ online ‘Vision Statement’: “We of Subterra hold a vision of a healthy, healing, community environment, nurturing Body, Mind, and Spirit. Relying on Spirit, we invite eclectic and esoteric learning experiences that create sustainable lifestyle models and project a transformational vision of peace to the world.” Indeed, this is certainly one way to interpret their apparent monument to nuclear disarmament. Perhaps, however, things seem different to the latest casuality of the sharing economy and displaced, former resident of Castle Subterra, Matt Fulkerson, who now hosts the property for its owners. God bless his heart.

Meanwhile, while former nuclear land looks to be a boon for at least some homeowners in Kansas, 550 miles west, radioactive waste continues to cause grief for property owners downwind of Colorado Superfund site Rocky Flats. Administered by Rockwell International since 1975 after opening in 1952 to manufacture plutonium triggers for bombs like those that sat at Eskridge, the facility was finally shuttered in 1989 after an FBI raid determined that the site’s operators were illegally handling the facility’s toxic by-products. Since being convicted of environmental crimes, houses in the path of Rockwell’s airborne cancer-dust have been unable to sell for market value. This month, however, saw the first payout to property owners as the result of a 27-year-long legal battle between approximately 7,500 claimants and the managers of Rocky Flats. Good as it may be, the settlement only handles losses on the value of homes as assessed for the year 1989, a paltry sum for those looking to abandon ship in 2017. In fact, their losses don’t look to be recuperated any time soon: Growing up and down the road from Rocky Flats, livestock birth defects were an open secret, and living too close to the site is still perceived to be a risk. Ironically, much of Rocky Flats is now a Wildlife “Refuge.” Sorry, Squirrel.

If you, dear reader, like us, find yourself searching for inspiration as the winter months set in, you may find yourself googling “inspirational quotes” or “coping with disappointment.” We have certainly found such statements comforting as we close out our time at this dear paper, mollified by the knowledge that our youthful follies will have forged us into something greater.

Certainly, American fast-food institution KFC understands something of this. In advance of Cyber Monday, KFC marketed a one-of-a-kind Internet Escape Pod, a WiFi-proof Faraday cage (an enclosure used to block electromagnetic fields), for $10,000. Encircled by the hug of Colonel Sanders himself and featuring a fried chicken door handle, the Pod is meant to bring families together free of distraction, in the kind of enclosed space that inspires fried-chicken eating. Unfortunately, seeing nary a taker, KFC recently marked their Pod down to $5,000.

(Colonel) Harland Sanders began selling fried chicken on the side of the road in Corbin, Kentucky during the Great Depression. Sanders was granted “Colonel” status in 1950 by a Kentucky Governor and within years refused to leave the house without a white suit and string tie. His associates adopted the title change “jokingly at first and then in earnest,” according to a biographer. By 2015, the company was struggling: their sales surpassed by Chick-fil-A, CEO David Novak soaked in fake blood by a PETA protester. Amid reports that more and more are turning to vegetarianism (a recently published report estimates that 400 million fewer animals were killed for food this last year than 2007), Sanders & Co. certainly face a new world.

Does KFC merely want us to turn back time? To join their almost-definitely racist, good ol’ boy America of string-tied white Southerners? Or—advertising the Pod via Instagram—are they using such symbols to ride viral marketing trends all too happy to pick up on out-oftouch or downright bigoted brands? KFC’s recent history of marketing ploys would certainly seem to indicate the latter: they sold a 400-year-old chunk of meteorite carved into the shape of a Zinger sandwich to commemorate its [the sandwich’s] recent trip to space (It sold for $20,000 to a vegetarian), made chicken-scented candles and bath bombs, and even offered an edible chicken-flavored nail polish. These desperate ploys certainly seem the mark of a dying brand.

Are we, dear reader, asking too much from the ups-and-downs of a corporation chock-full of animal rights and labor violations? Why see our hopes and disappointments at all in the Colonel? Leaving our fancy college, we find our shoes equipped with Velcro rather than bootstraps: we seem poor fits for the Colonel’s American Dream. Besides, dear reader, our fingers have become slippery, having eaten the much superior Popeyes chicken in the meantime.

Here is my inconvenient truth: when I was 18, I received a rush-job stick-and-poke, which has since sprouted so much leg acne that its message (the high school proto-male-feminist-anthem #GirlsBeforeBoys!) has been rendered pretty illegible and really gnarly. I was drunk, and I am sorry. I am, however, reticent to tell my mother, for whom tattoos are a permanent mistake, that she may have been right.

When she brings it up, I grit my teeth and bear my pimples with pride, because, after all, this shadow of a tattoo is part of who I am, my identity, as if this puts my zitty outline beyond regret. I acknowledge my misstep, but a part of me is sad the tattoo has faded behind mountainous pustules.

This past week, Karissa Lindstrand, member of a Canadian fishing crew in New Brunswick, expressed a similar sentiment about a lobster she found branded with a Pepsi logo. “I’m really wishing I would have kept it now…it was pretty neat. Kind of bad, but pretty neat,” she said. Cornered in the waters off Grand Manan, the lobster was on the brink of having its claws banded when Lindstrand spotted it. Like a good caffeine dependent American, Lindstrand crushes 12 cans of Pepsi every day and instantly recognized the silver rim, blue body, and red crest of the Pepsi globe. “I was like: ‘Oh, that’s a Pepsi can,’” Lindstrand told The Guardian.

How the lobster became a crawling advertisement for the carbonated soft drink company is disputed.

Original theories included: 1. the lobster grew around the can 2. a Pepsi box somehow got stuck to the lobster.

Lindstrand disproved both theories. The tat was pixelated, she declared, suggesting it did not come from a can. Furthermore, the logo on a Pepsi box is much larger than what appeared on the lobster. The Indy’s original hypothesis—that the lobster adopted the American high-schooler’s most popular form of employment and enlisted as a brand ambassador for Pepsi—has also been debunked. What lobster would voluntarily don an image of a company whose cans and plastic six-pack rings have injured and killed thousands of its peers? How could a lobster condone the 5 to 13 million tons of plastic annually seeping into the world’s oceans?

While we got to choose our body mods, others are not as lucky, forced to parade around the vaguely patriotic logo of a bronze plated soda company. At Thanksgiving dinner last week, when my mother asked me what I was grateful for, I hiked up my jeans to reveal the faint, blemish bordered expression of my 18 year-old self. Cherish the ink you choose.

—MB

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

—WW & EZ

—SK & PM

WEEK IN REVIEW

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GREENER ON THE OTHER SIDE

BY Mara Dolan

ILLUSTRATION BY Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

The group members, huddling together in the German winter, have banners strewn across their shoulders.

Unfurled only moments ago, their messages are still readable: “California Republic of Oil” and “We are the solution, stop the pollution.” The activists, regrouping on the street after being expelled from the US Climate Action Center, are gathered outside the entrance. The muted cheering inside continues.

Inside, California Governor Jerry Brown is speaking at the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP), the annual international summit on climate change.

For two short weeks of every year, tens of thousands of people, representing almost every nation on earth, convene under the COP banner: delegates sent by their nations’ leaders, activists working to pressure negotiators, leading climate scientists and scholars, even ‘green’ corporations hoping to make a buck. These two weeks, this time in Bonn, Germany from November 6–17, were unusually politically charged. Everyone involved in climate policy attends these conferences, and the halls are always humming with a nervous and hopeful energy. But this year, the elephant in the room threatened the fragile optimism of years past.

Earlier this fall, Syria and Nicaragua signed the Paris climate accord—the contentious and delicate agreement produced at the 2015 Conference in Paris, largely heralded as a triumph of international cooperation. After these two countries signed on, the US became the final, lone dissenter. President Trump’s Rose Garden speech on June 17 announced that the US would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, with a statement from Trump declaring, “I was elected by the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” It is worth noting, however, that the legal process for the US withdrawal would not even be possible until November 4, 2020—one day after the next presidential election.

Trump’s statement still had teeth, though. The symbolism of the US exempting itself introduced doubts over other countries’ commitments and undermined any hope the US would act on climate change. Trump’s statement brought condemnation from both domestic and international academic and political figures and rattled the already fragile sense of cooperation leading up to Bonn. If the US —the largest historical greenhouse gas emitter, and a necessary source of finance for adaptation—was out, would all hopes for international cooperation on climate change fall apart in Germany? +++ Some of Trump’s most outspoken critics were political leaders in the US, representing cities and states that still want to abide by the Paris Agreement. An unofficial delegation of these officials joined the Conference on November 9. While Trump’s official US delegation—a small group of State Department officials who allegedly received no clear instruction on their stance on climate change—flew under the radar, the “alternative” delegation was packed with star power, political celebrity, and financial clout.

Five US Senators, including Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, were joined at the Conference by former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg and California

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Governor Jerry Brown. Working to convince the international community that “we are still in,” Governor Brown was widely perceived to have taken up an unofficial mantle as the country’s green political crusader. In the weeks before Bonn, he spoke in venues across Europe on his commitment to climate action. “California will resist this misguided and insane course of action,” he said in response to Trump’s exit from the Paris accord. “Trump is AWOL but California is on the field, ready for battle.”

Parading as California’s climate hero has given Governor Brown the perfect opportunity to become the de facto climate leader for the whole US, the anti-Trump Democrat poised perfectly for a rumored 2020 presidential run (“Don’t rule it out!” he quipped in March).

Around the world, Governor Brown, a fiery speaker with deep financial ties to Democratic donors, is seen by many as a powerful and welcome face for the anti-Trump climate movement.

When Governor Brown arrived to speak on November 11, despite the fact that he had no real negotiating capabilities, the room was packed. The US Climate Action Zone, the hub of the alternative delegation’s activity and the site of Governor Brown’s speech, was awash with red, white, and blue decorations. Thousands of free stickers, bags, and other swag were handed out, all flaunting #We’reStillIn. Hundreds of audience members in suits exchanged business cards and statements of appreciation for Governor Brown’s leadership, eagerly awaiting his on-stage arrival. In the speech, it was expected that he would be announcing “America’s Pledge,” the plan for states and cities to uphold the US emissions reduction goals in the absence of federal action.

Governor Brown stood behind the podium, a sprawling screen behind him proclaiming “America’s Pledge: WE ARE STILL IN.” Less than a minute into his speech, a small group of indigenous activists stood up in the middle of the crowd, unfurling a sign that read, “Still in for WHAT?” More people rose from the audience, adding signs and voices as they begin to chant, “Keep it in the ground! Keep it in the ground!”

The slogan is familiar to anyone who has followed the opposition movement to fossil fuel extraction around the country, typically in relation to fracking. Made popular by the Keystone XL protest movement, it has rarely been seen in national coverage in reference to California.

Governor Brown responded in real time, yelling back with a pointed finger, “Someone should put you in the ground so we can get on with the show here!”

The activists continued to chant, this time with, “No more pollution! We are the solution!”

He shouted back into the microphone, “I think to get the job done we are going to need to have a little more intellectual content than just repeating slogans.”

As security escorted the protesters outside, Governor Brown hurled one last comment, “And I’m reframing my speech: beyond noise to real climate action!”

Later that day, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now asked Governor Brown what he meant by his “put you in the ground” comment. “That was a joke,” he responded.

“Now, Amy, don’t use your media outlet for this kind of silliness. That was an ironic remark in the face of a noisy demonstration.”

She pushed back: “But it was Native Americans,

and they took it very seriously. Do you apologize for that comment?”

“No! Come on, you know we have the strongest Native American policy of any state in the country.

And we have the most environmental [policy], and the toughest rules on oil!” +++ The activists who joined for the action at Governor Brown’s speech came from a wide variety of organizations. The coalition, called It Takes Roots, is a multiracial “alliance of alliances,” led by “women and gender oppressed people of color and Indigenous Peoples on the frontlines of racial, housing, and climate justice across the US and Canada,” according to their mission statement for the Conference. They joined together in demand for climate justice—the realization that climate change is simultaneously an environmental, ethical, and political issue. These dimensions are inextricable from one another, and climate change is the place and process where the intersection becomes visible.

The fight for climate justice is an environmental social movement that recognizes that those who have contributed the least to climate change are the ones who will suffer first and the most from its effects. The movement’s proponents state that the vulnerabilities produced by socioeconomic and racial inequalities—which are themselves interconnected—amplify those produced by climate change. The ability to deal with the consequences of climate change—from relocation after displacement, to accessing disaster recovery assistance, to building protective infrastructure—depends on economic capital, political representation, and legal protections. Climate justice demands that “frontline communities”—communities that will bear the brunt of rising sea levels and temperatures, droughts, heat waves, and devastating storms—are prioritized and centered in policy decisions. Around the world, these frontline communities are largely Indigenous Peoples, people of color, and low-income communities.

Their action at the speech, according to It Takes Roots organizers, aimed to highlight Governor Brown’s hypocrisy. While he positions himself as the political face of climate action abroad, his actions in California tell a different story. He has embraced the transition to renewable energy not as an urgent necessity, but as a gradual process. Fracking, the process of extracting fossil fuels by injecting shale with liquid (a combination of sand and over 600 chemicals) to expand fissures of oil or gas, is associated with a myriad of health hazards. Produced by the leakage of the toxins in the liquid, these include increased respiratory problems, endocrine disruptions in pregnancies, and contaminations of local water sources.

Some argue that natural gas produced by fracking is a “bridge” fuel, weaning us off coal before the transition to renewables like wind and solar energy. Under this view—that fracking may be risky, but at least it’s better than coal—fracking has flourished under Brown's administration. California is the third-largest state in oil and gas production, and state regulators have approved thousands of new permits for drilling projects in the coming years. These include urban drilling, which many argue is the dirtiest form of fracking and has the most serious

DECEMBER 01, 2017

Climate justice activists hold California Governor accountable at world summit

implications for human health in populations living nearby. California is one of only two states that has no tax on extraction. Aliso Canyon, the natural gas storage facility that was the site of the largest methane leak in the country’s history, has still not been closed. With all of his rhetoric on clean energy, Governor Brown has made little effort to truly slow oil and gas extraction and production in his own state.

In March of this year, Maryland became the first state with a known wealth of potential reserves to ban fracking. It joins Vermont, which has not discovered any reserves, but has maintained a ban on fracking for more than five years. And while New York outlawed drilling in 2012, Governor Brown’s administration awarded drilling permits to more than 2,000 wells in Kern County just this year. Kern County, in the San Joaquin Valley, is the largest oil producing county in the entire country. It is also a region heavily reliant on agricultural labor, with a predominantly low-income, immigrant community. The impact of drilling in a place like Kern County illustrate how environmental degradation and racial discrimination can intersect to compound harm. As long as fossil fuel extraction persists in Kern County, it is communities of color who face the greatest risk.

In an op-ed in the Sacramento Bee, one of the protestors, Jean Su, wrote that, in addition to those significant hypocrisies in energy policy, there are devastating health impacts of those policies for California’s people.

She wrote, “compounding the climate damage, many California oilfields operate dangerously close to homes and schools, emitting air pollutants that cause asthma, cancer and other health problems.” A striking 14 percent of California’s population lives within just one mile of an oil or gas facility.

To be sure, California has ambitious goals for renewable energy in the future. It proudly states that it will be 100 percent renewable energy-dependent by 2045.

But that goal is impossible if the oil and gas industries continue to flourish—with few regulations and relegated to communities with little political or economic power.

Indigenous activist Dallas Goldtooth, representing the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) in Bonn, was one of the central organizers of the action at Governor Brown’s speech. Goldtooth is the ‘Keep it in the Ground’ campaign organizer for IEN, and has been at the forefront of anti-fracking movements for years, including the Keystone XL opposition. When asked by the Independent about the intention of the action, he emphasized the need to reveal the truth behind the Governor’s policies.

“The action was to call out Jerry Brown and California’s climate policy… Jerry Brown has positioned himself here as a climate leader, meanwhile promoting continued fracking in the Central Valley and the expansion of oil refineries in the Bay Area.” Goldtooth wanted to be clear that the coalition calling for climate justice in California would not stop at the Conference. “Our purpose was to let Jerry Brown know that we are here, that we’re going to be here, and that we will be at the Global Climate Summit in California next year, in full force, holding him accountable for his actions and policies,” he told the Indy.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The demands of the activists were as follows: 1. End pollution from oil refineries, 2. Ban fracking in California, 3. Stop advocating for carbon markets and false solutions, 4. Address community impacts of recent methane disasters, 5. Stop importing and refining Canada tar sands oil in California.

These demands recognize that Governor Brown’s climate policies are reinforcing and reproducing environmental racism. As the US, and other parts of the world, celebrate Governor Brown’s leadership, applauding his every mention of global warming, the communities who know his policies best are demanding to be heard. As he shouted them out of his event, the Governor made it clear that their interruption was “noise” to him. It was not “real climate action.” As he silenced their demands, he silenced any meaningful recognition of climate justice. +++ Governor Brown is not the only political leader whose hypocrisy must be recognized. At a time when the country is searching for climate leadership, activists like Goldtooth remind us that we cannot allow rhetoric

that embraces climate action without climate justice.

Environmental leaders must address environmental injustices. If climate policy still disproportionately targets and affects populations based on race and class, it is no true solution. And if this comes to light only once a year in an international conference, we risk losing any true domestic, local accountability. Democratic political leaders at the city, county, and state levels must all answer to the demands of climate justice. Electing leaders who believe in climate change does not mean they will address climate change in an equitable way.

“Climate justice is more than just ecological damage,” Goldtooth told the Indy. “We’re talking about addressing the social and racial and environmental injustices that communities of color, frontline communities, ocean-dependent communities, forest-dependent communities are facing due to climate change. Climate justice is a holistic approach to take us in the direction we need to go.”

He continued after a pause. “When you have frontline communities, who are speaking up and standing up and saying, ‘your policy is killing our people and killing our relationship to the land, and you must be held accountable to that,’ then we have to stand up and support those voices.”

MARA DOLAN B’20 thinks Jerry Brown ain't green.

NEWS

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CIVIL

DEATH

RI statute removes civil rights from incarcerated people with life sentences

BY Alicia Mies ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Ashley Min

In his cell at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, Richard Paiva has slept without winter clothing and in unsanitary living conditions since being incarcerated in 2009.

In most other states, Paiva would be able to successfully sue the state for violation of his civil rights. Rhode Island, however, is an anomaly. Since 1909, the state has had a ‘civil death’ law, which declares people sentenced to life in prison to lose all their civil rights, even if granted parole.

In 1937, there were 18 states that still had ‘civil death’ laws on the books; in 1976, 13 states still had the law.

Today, only New York and Rhode Island retain forms of the law for people sentenced to life imprisonment, while Idaho retains a version of the law for all incarcerated people.

According to Steven Brown, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union Rhode Island, most other states have repealed the statute through legislative action.

“We’re talking about a law that deals with the rights of prisoners,” Brown told the Independent. “As a political matter, state legislatures, at least here [Rhode Island], simply don’t want to go on record as repealing a law that is tough on crime.”

In 2007, after efforts from the ACLU, a Rhode Island representative introduced a bill to repeal the statute. Although the bill was passed in the legislature, the governor at the time, Governor Donald Carcieri, vetoed the bill. He argued that “the loss of property, and even the right to marry, is not unreasonable” for those serving life sentences, and that there was “insufficient reason to pass legislation,” according to the ACLU. The legislature decided not to try to override the veto.

Incarcerated people like Paiva are civilly vulnerable to torture by prison guards and other forms of cruel and unusual punishment. They could go to court to challenge the conditions of their confinement, but the DOC could simply argue that they are simply ‘civilly dead,’ a legal argument that deems almost all of the plaintiff’s complaints practically irrelevant.

“In other words, they [prison guards] could deprive them [incarcerated people] of food,” Sonja Deyoe, the attorney who filed the brief about Paiva’s case, told the Indy. “They could deprive them of water. They could

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METRO

put them in solitary confinement forever. They could do whatever they want short of murdering these guys, and there’s nothing that the prisoners and anyone on their behalf can do.” +++ To understand the ‘civil death’ law in all its complexity, it is necessary to first contextualize it with a long history of systematic racism and disenfranchisement. To scholars and activists like Marco McWilliams—a Swearer Center Junior Fellow and Practitioner in Residence at Brown University—the ‘civil death’ law parallels the violence of the Thirteenth Amendment, as well as the Dred Scott case in 1857. In that case, Judge Roger B. Taney wrote a 200-page legal argument for the disenfranchisement of Scott, an enslaved man who attempted to sue for his freedom. However, at the very end of this document, Judge Taney asserts that all of that legal argument is unnecessary. The only requisite argument is the fact that Scott is not a legal citizen and, therefore, has no rights.

The court set a precedent that no Black people—free or enslaved—could claim US citizenship, and therefore Black people were unable to petition the court for their freedom.

McWilliams argued, in an interview with the Indy, that ‘civil death’ is an effort by the state to create a “sub-human status” in a criminal legal system that already thrives on unfair power and racial dynamics. Similar to how people like Paiva are stripped of legal rights, recently emancipated slaves were ushered into the prison system and stripped of legal rights. To McWilliams, the civil death law is simply a continuation of the country’s long history of disenfranchising incarcerated people.

“You dehumanize first so that you can disenfranchise,” McWilliams says. “The structure [of the prison system] is based on punishment… But when we put it in historical context, it's functioning in a way that it's designed to function. It's destroying and abusing in the way that it's designed to do.” +++ Paiva initially filed a suit against the DOC, but the DOC asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit due to the ‘civil

death’ statute. This caused the ACLU of RI to file a brief asking the Superior Court to reject the DOC’s claim that Paiva cannot sue for violations of civil rights.

“In the case like Mr. Paiva’s it’s especially troubling to see the state rely on that law,” Steven Brown, executive director of the ACLU Rhode Island, told the Indy.

“It essentially means he has no recourse whatsoever to the courts if his civil rights are violated, and the state is not subject to any legal challenge or further actions.”

According to the ACLU’s court brief filed by Deyoe on September 7, Paiva’s case challenges various issues of his confinement as a violation of his constitutional rights.

Paiva alleges that there are mice in his cell that pee and defecate on his clothing, bedding, and cell floor on a routine basis, and that steam from showers enters his cell, causing his bedding to become moldy and causing him to suffer from chronic sinus problems and sore throats.

According to Paiva, the DOC was aware of the molding but did nothing to help him. He also says that the DOC failed to issue him essential clothing items and the clothing that he was issued was used and unwearable. For these issues, Deyoe mainly argues that Paiva’s allegations constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution.

Additionally, he claims that he was denied all access to any newspaper or personal photographs and in solitary confinement denied all visitation and telephone calls, which Deyoe argues violates the Freedom of Speech Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution. He also says he was disallowed an hour of outdoor recreation and participate in any rehabilitation programming.

“What the statute is doing is putting far too much power in the hands of the state to treat prisoners how they want to,” Deyoe says. “This goes far beyond what any other state is doing in the nation as far as taking any action to try to enforce this sort of legislation.” +++ In addition to Paiva’s lawsuit, there is another challenge to the ‘civil death’ statute pending before the Rhode Island Supreme Court, filed by attorney Ronald Resmini.

Resmini is defending Dana Gallop, a pretrial detainee at the Adult Correctional Institute who sustained severe and permanent injuries after being attacked by

DECEMBER 01, 2017

another inmate on April 26, 2010. Gallop filed an initial complaint in 2010 and then amended the complaint in 2013 to add that his claims were based on violations of his civil rights because the prison guards did not protect him.

The DOC’s counsel argued that the ‘civil death’ statute protected the prison guards.

However, according to Deyoe, it is more likely that legislative action, rather than legal challenge, will lead to the repeal of the statute.

“If the Attorney General’s office keeps trying to enforce the statute, there might be enough of a groundswell that they can get the statute repealed in the next session,” Deyoe says.

Unlike then-governor Carciari’s vote of the statute’s repeal, this time around, Deyoe believes it is more likely that Governor Gina Raimondo will pass a bill similar to the one vetoed in 2007.

In a letter to Governor Raimondo published on September 7, the ACLU expressed concern for the implications of the statute, noting: “This [relying on the ‘civil death’ law] is a legal argument we might expect to hear from disgraced ex-Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, not from the State of Rhode Island.”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

+++ By “displacing” emancipated slaves to the prisons, structural racism and discrimination found a home in the inner workings of the state prison system, according to McWilliams.

“This is really about an evolution of what it means to be a citizen in a nation-state, but when we're talking about the prison-industrial complex and the prison system, now it's this idea of what it means to be a non-human entity, a chattel slave,” McWilliams says. “The first move for Black folks was not to get rights, but to get free, meaning to become a human in society.”

The Thirteenth Amendment allowed the criminal legal system to continue to disenfranchise recently emancipated Black slaves. Today, ‘civil death’ represents another effort by the state to disenfranchise and punish people in the prison system. However, to Deyoe, the problem with the statute extends beyond simply an unequal power dynamic between people in prisons and the state, but to a basic understanding and sympathy for those who are serving life sentences.

McWilliams often asks his students: “Should people in prison be allowed to vote?” He finds that often times

his students who oppose incarcerated people’s right to vote give into the narrative that incarcerated people are inherently immoral. He believes that this conception is what allows the ‘civil death’ law to still be in place in Rhode Island.

“One of the things that the system does is demonize a segment of the population in a particular kind of way that creates and constructs a narrative about them that dehumanizes [them],” McWilliams says. “That’s when it's easy to take rights away.”

ALICIA MIES B’21 thinks the state shouldn't determine humanity.

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LA LUCHA SIGUE Migrant protection after the TPS repeal

BY Paula Pacheco Soto ILLUSTRATION BY Alex Westfall DESIGN BY Ashley Min

On November 6, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke scheduled the termination of the temporary protected status for Nicaraguan citizens, leaving 2,500 people on the verge of deportation as the January 5, 2019 deadline approaches. On average, Nicaraguan TPS holders have been living in the United States for 21 years, and the termination of this program anticipates the dissolution of a life project.

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is granted by the US Department of Homeland Security to eligible individuals born in other countries, unable to return to their home country due to unsafe circumstances such as armed conflict or natural disasters. This program provides over 300,000 people with temporary residency, granting them permission for employment and travel.

Following the termination of protection for Nicaraguans, the program has also been repealed for Haitian citizens, who are expected to either self-deport or adjust their status before July 22, 2019. While changes for nationals from El Salvador, Honduras, Nepal, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen have not been announced, the overall future of the program is uncertain.

Little is known about the concrete implications of the TPS repeal in Rhode Island. As opposed to the outrage expressed by local authorities after the DACA repeal, the termination of TPS has passed largely unnoticed by local politicians and media. Even though DACAmented folks could very well belong to families that also have TPS holders, the breakup of families is not often mentioned in the rhetoric. As the number of affected RI residents remains uncertain, community organizers are preparing for the worst, given the lack of will state authorities have shown for providing protection to undocumented communities. Providence has yet to become a sanctuary city. Back in 2007, former Councilman Miguel Luna put forward legislation that would have provided greater protection for undocumented people, including the extension of state IDs and large limitations to police inquiry over immigration status. The project did not pass.

Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza has used the term “sanctuary city” lightly in the past, benefiting from its vague meaning. As reported by the Providence Journal this March, he declared: “[the label of sanctuary city] is so ambiguous, the position I’ve taken, and that we’ve taken, is, ‘Let’s own it’... Let’s celebrate the fact we’re a welcoming city.” But a welcoming city means little to the lives that are being threat by the latest changes in immigration.

According to the Department of Justice, a city is labeled a sanctuary city “if they prohibit officials from communicating with ICE, if they block ICE from interviewing jail inmates, and if they fail to notify ICE of the pending release of criminal aliens ICE is seeking to deport.” During a recent debate regarding the provision of driver’s licenses for undocumented residents, Elorza explained that so far Rhode Island’s standard policy is that “police officers are not going to ask folks about their immigration status (...) they’ll get a ticket, just like anyone else, but we’re not going to ask them if they have legal papers.” Thus, Providence does not fit the actual definition of a sanctuary city. While Providence might

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not alert Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of civil infractions directly, if an individual is arrested, fingerprints will be recorded and made available to ICE. If the individual has unlawful presence, meaning they either overstayed their visa or entered the country in an unauthorized manner, this could lead to deportation.

Concretely, a misdemeanor (punishable in Rhode Island with a $500 fine or 6–12 months in prison) such as drunk driving or a petty crime, is enough to prompt someone’s deportation. Community activists’ push to make Rhode Island a sanctuary state has gained even more attention, as the cancellation of TPS will increasingly create undocumented immigrants in the state. +++ “It happened. So now we are preparing for the worst,” says Catarina Lorenzo. The cancellation of TPS does not come as a surprise to many activists, and it has added up to a greater feeling of continuity and closed doors when it comes to the struggle for fair immigration policy in Rhode Island. Cata is a community organizer and the director of AMOR (Alliance to Mobilize and Organize the Resistance), currently focused on providing emergency services to individuals and families facing deportation and other forms of state violence. AMOR brings together several organizations, such as Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), Fighting Against Natural Gas (FANG Collective), Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics RI (COYOTE, RI), Colectivo Sin Fronteras, and the Refugee Dream Center. In a way, this alliance directly interpellates the unresponsiveness of the state administration. As expressed by one of its volunteers the collective is “a form of community made sanctuary in the works.”

“We’ve been fighting for the license for a long time.”

Cata is talking about the H5686 act, last submitted in March 2017, that would have allowed driver privileges, licenses and permits to be issued for applicants unable to prove lawful presence. In a context where a minor misdemeanor like driving without a license opens up the potential of being deported, this would have taken undocumented communities a long way, as well have diminished some of the anxiety and hassle of the everyday life for undocumented individuals and families. The RI Senate Judiciary Committee voted against the bill in June, in a 6 to 4 vote.

As we discuss the voting down of these policies, the frustration is palpable in her voice. “What else can we expect? If we can’t manage the local, how can we speak back to this [the Trump] administration?” Still, in the face of political disregard, AMOR has redirected their efforts towards family readiness and grassroot forms of resistance. They are currently structuring an ICE watch program that is training people to accompany undocumented immigrants to court and watch out for ICE presence. It is hard, she admits. “People don’t want to prepare for the worse.” But in the face of little guarantees coming from the state house, there is not much of a choice.

+++ “There is and always will be a place here in Rhode Island for everyone, no matter your race, no matter your gender, no matter where you’re from, no matter your immigration status...” promised Governor Gina Raimondo during her speech in the Resist Hate RI rally in late January. But even within undocumented communities, the possibilities of belonging in the Ocean State vary. Somewhere along the way, Raimondo’s enthusiasm—exemplified by the $170,000 raised to cover the fee for all Rhode Island residents who were eligible for DACA renewal—diminished when it came to a long-term solution for the protection of undocumented communities. Raimondo’s 2014 promise of granting, through executive order, driving permits irrespective of lawful presence is yet to be fulfilled.

There are nearly 30,000 undocumented immigrants in Rhode Island, many of those who never counted with the protection of TPS or DACA, and whose contribution to our communities is as valuable. A discussion around the threat to these programs falls short if what we aim is to safeguard the lives of those who, fleeing conflict and economic hardship, find themselves without papers in a nation which increasingly politicizes, criminalizes, and targets undocumented peoples’ livelihood. These programs were never meant to be permanent solutions and each of them has exclusive stipulations built into their enactment. For example, a person from these ten countries who has previously crossed the border unlawfully cannot be granted temporary status. This stipulation takes for granted the economic security needed to otherwise enter the country lawfully. In other words, these specific provisions often generate greater exclusion for other parts of the community and obscure the structural violence that the current immigration law perpetuates in the long run.

On the local level, a true commitment to the protection of people regardless of their immigration status can only be accomplished through universal solutions such as the provision of driver permits or the establishment of a sanctuary city/state. Such programs ensure that, regardless of the particular circumstances that drive undocumented migration into this country, we universally oppose the criminalization of these communities and continue to recognize the humanity of all immigrants.

Trump’s appeal during the election was largely linked to his promise of vicious immigration reform. Politics are always in play in this debate and the state level is not the exception. As the 2018 state election approaches, it can be anticipated that immigration issues will be a central part of the program, leaving people’s lives to the disposal of politics. The popularity of anti-immigrant sentiment is daunting, as is its influence over the national policy agenda. Building an opposition to this rhetoric and its policies can provide new opportunities for rethinking more comprehensive immigration laws at the state level, and a new ground for solidarity.

PAULA PACHECO SOTO B’20 wants the word sanctuary to mean something.

DECEMBER 01, 2017

THE RAILROAD LIE Trains and nostalgia

BY Julia Tompkins ILLUSTRATION BY Mark Benz DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

In a May 1867 letter to the San Francisco Alta California, Mark Twain wrote: “A railroad is like a lie—you have to keep building to it to make it stand.” When Twain penned the letter, the lie was one of promise. He reminds the Alta California: “A railroad is a ravenous destroyer of towns.” Along with the industry the railways brought, so, too, did they suggest a way onwards. They provided a means of travel to the American West and the South, and could funnel passengers into the great metropoles: Chicago, New York, San Francisco. Commerce flowed at an unprecedented rate. With the advent of the train, the country opened up. Passenger rails allowed those who could afford a ticket to see parts of the country never before glimpsed by the masses: valleys in the Rocky Mountains, the Great Lakes, the bright blue runoff water from the Sierra Nevadas. Traversing the country was a matter of practice.

The railroad had great potential for lies, a ‘lie’ herein being the aspects of the railroad that fell in contrast with its promise of progress and expansion. There were the lies of its infrastructure: the shaky trestles and steep inclines, its potential to reshape towns and slice through neighborhoods. There were the passenger lies—the train is remembered for its white, wealthy passengers. Train cars of enslaved peoples were brought throughout the South by rail. The railway allowed the slave trade to continue—in fact, it made it more efficient. The railways were built by immigrant labor. It was hard and dangerous work.

The railroad is also full of warnings. Dr. James Anderson from Edinburgh, Scotland, wrote in 1801— years before the railway became necessity, back when it was still invention—that the railway should never be made the subject of control by the “‘avaricious moneylender,’” warning against the privatization of the new industry: “All is necessary to prevent these railways from ever becoming private property on any account.”

Anderson’s warning would weave in and out of truth through the next two decades. The rails would become privatized, and they would stay that way for a long time—through their boom, through the Great Crash of 1929, through the birth of the automobile industry, the Second World War, the 1950s, and the birth of the American highway system. All the way up to the 1970s, the railways would remain private.

The formation of Amtrak changed that. The company is for-profit but functions as a public entity, and it receives funding from the US government. Public opinion holds that the railways—in their semi-public state—are rolling towards their end. In the spring of 2017, the Trump administration announced numerous budget cuts to Amtrak, slashing funding for the long-distance passenger trains and eliminating money for infrastructure repairs and personnel increases. Not only was train service at risk of worsening, but it appeared to suddenly face a future towards which its been rolling for years— complete elimination. Perhaps Dr. Anderson was wrong, and privatization might be able to sustain the rail system.

The railroad tells a great many lies. The question now is—to which of them do we listen? +++ In August of this year, I rode around the continental United States on Amtrak’s long-haul passenger trains.

I wanted to learn why people still ride the train, to understand what truths train-riders choose to believe. I have always seen the train as a place of nostalgia. This nostalgia lingers in our public consciousness—look at the

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recently released film adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express. The fascination with passenger trains and the inherent glamour they call to mind doesn’t appear to be waning. This nostalgia feeds on a lie—the cultural image of trains as the paragon of glamour, whizzing connectors that joined the country. Both of these things are true in part, neither in whole. I assumed I was not alone in my nostalgia; on the train, I learned this was the case.

The first train buff I met was Gene Ednes, a septuagenarian from Ithaca, New York. We met on the Lake Shore Limited at 7 am passing through Ohio. The Lake Shore runs between New York City and Chicago, up through the Hudson River Valley and along the Great Lakes. Ednes told me he’d taken the Lake Shore seven or eight times, and all of Amtrak’s other long-haul trains at least once.

“You have a favorite?” I asked him.

“Southwest Chief, without a doubt. It still has some of the old luxury. It’s the train the stars used to take from Los Angeles to Chicago and then on to New York. The best fried chicken I’ve ever had was on the Southwest Chief.”

Ednes and I talked for a long time. He told me he takes the train whenever possible. He loves it— he always had, he always will. His wife usually flies to meet him at their destinations. She’ll take the train with him occasionally, but she doesn’t love it like he does.

He tells me that if I want to meet other trains buffs, I should linger in the vestibules between train cars. Most train buffs I met were like Gene, white and male. Many of them harbored an obsessive knowledge of the train routes and history. They could list off freight lines and track ownership rights. On the California Zephyr, travelling between Chicago and San Francisco, I met two parents travelling with their young son. The parents, Ben and Charlene, had taken their son Benjamin Patrick to Rochelle, Illinois, from San Jose, California, so that Benjamin Patrick could watch the freights pass in the Rochelle freight yards. The yards are famous for their daily freight traffic. When we spoke, Benjamin Patrick relayed his stored knowledge of the train. He told me how trains could pull large amounts of cargo using much less energy than a truck might for the same load.

Trains, he (a ten-year-old) suggested, are relevant when we consider how to approach our response to climate change.

I met one female train buff during my time on the train. Her name was Anne, she is from Rhode Island, and she specializes in the study of dragonflies. Like Gene, she takes the train whenever possible. “Are you doing it alone?” I asked her.

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?” “How do you feel about travelling alone?”

“I always go alone,” she tells me. Oftentimes her husband will meet her by plane at their destination.

She and I traded off saving seats for each other in the California Zephyr’s glass-walled observation car. Two women looking out.

The train buffs represented a special class of nostalgia on the train, one of reverence and boundless interest.

Many of them have seen the same landscapes time and time again. The routes do not get old. The nostalgia of the train buffs is soft-spoken. They do not advertise it, perhaps because the railways are as much a part of their present as they were their past.

Many individuals I met take the train because they don’t like to fly. For some, airplanes cause anxiety. For others, many of them over fifty years old, they believe, as one woman put it, that “flying is not what it used to be.”

For individuals who feel as though the government and the TSA have too much access to their lives, the train provides a worthy means of getting places. There is no security, no pat-downs or checking of IDs. The train lets its passengers exist in a realm of relative leeway. Most behavior is tolerated. The individuals I met who were on the train because they didn’t like to fly spoke of both flying, and the train, with a heavy dose of nostalgia. Two women, who I spoke to separately, recalled trips on the old Pullman rail cars with their parents. The train turns trips that can take three hours on a plane into multi-day journeys. Very few people I met seemed to mind. The persistent statement throughout the trains I rode was that the train was better—better than planes, better than cars. The best way to travel and see the country. Not because it is faster, or more comfortable, or more convenient. It is none of those things. It was better because it filled a niche in the (white, middle class) American imagination as a means of surveying the country. How else might one wake up near Glacier National Park, eat lunch rolling alongside the Blackfoot Indian Reservation, and fall asleep outside of Fargo, North Dakota?

Nostalgia is dubious and I reveled in it. I kept notes on most things I saw and most people I talked to. Trump voters I met from middle America became emblems of a frustrated agricultural sector, subsumed by the great Monsanto empire. A seatmate of mine from the Coast Starlight who was arrested during our trip for fornication in the café car came to represent the underbelly of the train microcosm, and the potential for intimacy in a train full of strangers. Train buffs like Gene and Anne were my Mark Twain characters. Twain longed for a life of movement on the Mississippi River. Gene and Anne sought that life on the the train.

My nostalgia played out as ignorance-turned-awe for much of my trip across the country. Born and raised on the East Coast, I marveled at the prairie. For long stretches of time, the train passed only corn and houses, no people. In late afternoon we entered Iowa. Dirt roads meeting other dirt roads at the railroad crossings, forming long dirt crosses through the corn fields. Around dinner it became Nebraska, but there was no change in the scenery to announce this, only the appearance of wheat, golden and corn-high.

Nostalgia is a lie because the train, as it is now and not as it was, is worth marveling over. It rolls towards its decline. It gets delayed, sometimes as my Coast Starlight did, for eight hours at a time. The history of the train is unkempt. The train could be elegant. It could also supply wars, move slaves, destroy the urban fabric of cities and towns. The train reveals the country’s inheritance in a way no other form of transport can. I met a great many people who are fearful for its end, who see the eulogy coming and will read it with acceptance and sorrow.

The railroad does not lie in that it cannot mask the spaces through which it moves. It cannot disguise poverty; it cannot mask the errors in its infrastructure.

Its greatest attribute lies in the horizon lines outside its picture windows.

6:30am—Woke up to sunrise over Lake Erie. I spent the first thirty minutes of my morning watching Cleveland go by. First the stadiums, then marinas on the lake shore, then the downtown comprised of highways and cement buildings and the airport all touched with purple by sunrise.

JULIA TOMPKINS B’18 is riding in the space between train cars.

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ALL YOUNG THE WOMEN Lady Bird and shifting representations of teenage girlhood

content warning: sexual assault/harassment There’s a subplot in Greta Gerwig’s acclaimed new movie, Lady Bird, in which the titular protagonist’s best friend yearns after the math teacher at her Catholic high school. In return, the older man heaps praise upon her for her skills in trigonometry, her commendable work ethic.

One night he comes to see her perform in a musical. Like much of the film, the scenes between the two characters are banter-y, funny, and relatively realistic, infused with a warmth and slight awkwardness that feel true to life.

I liked Lady Bird quite a bit, but I watched the scenes between Jenna and her math teacher on the edge of my seat—and then with surprisingly intense relief when it was revealed that the math teacher was in a committed marriage, that he seemed to just really respect Jenna as a student.

Gerwig’s film—her first as both writer and director— is the most recent in a robust tradition of coming-of-age movies about cool, independent teenage girls, a tradition unified by a shared adherence to certain aesthetic and narrative tropes. Usually the main characters of these movies are sort of, for lack of a better word, alternative—they wear patched army jackets or, like Lady Bird, have dyed their hair—and have to negotiate high school life without the armor of social popularity. They generally take place in the suburban US (Lady Bird is set in Gerwig’s real-life hometown of Sacramento, which the main character refers to as “the Midwest of California”); the protagonists are mostly white and usually straight, although there exists a very sweet subgenre of coolqueer-girl coming-of-age films too. A lot of these films have killer soundtracks.

I have long had a soft spot for movies like this. As a teenager especially, I loved 10 Things I Hate About You, Sixteen Candles, Ghost World, Heathers, Freaks and Geeks.

These films (and TV show) offered exaggerated, narratively tidy maps with which to navigate the dramas of adolescent girlhood, the mundanities of high school life— and none more than what was, for me, the ur-text of the genre: Juno.

Juno came out in 2007, when I was 12. For me, and, I suspect, for many people my age, the film was enormously influential. The smart, funny, grungy protagonist felt like an older sister to me, someone in whose image I could mold myself. The music in the film—Belle and Sebastian, the Kinks, the Velvet Underground—laid the groundwork for what I’d listen to for years afterward.

Phrases from the film’s dialogue crept into my middleschool vocabulary.

I re-watched Juno recently. It’s a little embarrassing now: the rose-toned, Moldy Peaches-soundtracked scenes, which had once filled me with hope about what being a teenager could look like, now seemed precious, overdone, and manufactured to make adolescent viewers like seventh-grade me want to go out and buy quirky hamburger phones or, more cynically, abstain from abortion. But I was also struck by an element of the film I hadn’t remembered from my repeated viewings in middle and high school: the tense, creepy relationship between Juno (Ellen Page) and the adult Mark (Jason Bateman),

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who, along with his wife, has decided to adopt Juno’s baby. In the film, the two characters, probably 20 years apart, bond over a shared interest in music. Pregnant and 16, Juno starts to drive over to the couple’s house while only Mark is home, and together they watch slasher films and listen to Sonic Youth. They never sleep together, but the dynamic between them feels undeniably predatory.

How had I forgotten? Juno is far from the only film in the cool-teen-girl genre to present this kind of relationship as one among many normal aspects of adolescence.

Toward the end of Ghost World, Steve Buscemi sleeps with one of the film’s just-out-of-high-school protagonists. Almost Famous, another favorite, revolves around a teenage groupie who’s left her life behind to follow around a rock band and sleep with its grown-up members. And then there are the movies whose creepy adult-teen sexual dynamics horribly mirror real-life ones: for years, to sound more grown-up, I told people my favorite movie was American Beauty. I mean, I even loved Manhattan! If Louis C.K.’s disastrous I Love You, Daddy had somehow presaged the present onslaught of sexual assault allegations and come out when I was in high school, I probably would have loved that too, in that uncritical way we consume bad media made by people whose other works have spoken to us.

In the weeks since its theatrical release, Lady Bird has been widely praised for its realism, especially in its depiction of a mother and daughter’s relationship with each other and with class. And much of the film does feel very true to reality, at least for a specific slice of white, lower-middle-class suburban adolescent life: not much really happens in the film—over the course of the 20022003 school year, Lady Bird applies to college (despite not having much money, she dreams of going to school in New York, or at least “in Connecticut or New Hampshire, where writers live in the woods”), fights with her mother, dates a nice boy who turns out to be gay and a punk boy who turns out to be a jerk—but the writing is sharp and funny and there is realism, too, in the absence of much drama.

And maybe that’s what troubled me so much about what I saw as the threatened student-teacher relationship in the film: it feels very plausible that those scenes could have taken a darker, creepier turn and still been realistic, that—despite the surprise with which recent and highly visible allegations of sexual assault have been publicly met—this kind of thing is built into the realities of many young women. When I watched Juno once with my mom, I remembered recently, she paused on a scene in which Ellen Page and Jason Bateman slow-dance together to Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes” to tell me that, when she was 14 years old, the adult lead singer of Mott the Hoople had tried to sleep with her after a concert. +++ Next week, Juno will turn 10. The week after that, the citizens of Alabama will likely vote into the US Senate a twice-disgraced Republican judge who has been repeatedly accused of sexual misconduct with minors. It’s no coincidence, I think, that a number of the allegations

against Roy Moore—and much of the press surrounding those allegations—have centered around the site of the mall, that widely acknowledged locus of adolescence.

As the New Yorker reported last week, conflicting accounts suggest that Moore was likely banned from Alabama’s Gadsden Mall in the 1980s in response to inappropriate behavior toward a number of teenage girls who worked and shopped there. Building on the Washington Post’s reporting on allegations against Moore by four women (the number has since grown to nine), who have all said that Moore tried to date them when he was in his 30s and they were teenagers, the New Yorker suggests that many residents of Moore’s hometown of Gadsden were aware that Moore spent a lot of time at the mall.

And according to one source, the Gadsden Mall, in the early 1980s, was “the place to be. There were no empty stores. And lots of kids came around. Lots of teenagers.

You went there to see and be seen.”

One young woman, who worked at the mall as a Santa’s helper, told the Washington Post that an adult Moore approached her at the mall when she was 14, and then, when she was 16, asked her out on a date, which her mother forbade. Another former resident of Gadsden told the New Yorker that in the ’80s, for his teenage friends, a movie theater near the mall was a hangout spot. He remembers a movie theater employee telling his friends that “some older guy had been trying to pick up younger girls” outside the theater. “They didn’t go beyond that but one of the concession workers whispered to us later that it was Roy Moore he was talking about.”

These allegations, of course, come alongside the widely publicized accusations that Moore, in 1979, exchanged phone numbers with then-14-year-old Leigh Corfman outside a child custody hearing, then picked her up from her mother’s home, took her to his home, and molested her—a felony in the state of Alabama—and that in 1977, he picked up then-16-year-old Beverly Young Nelson from her restaurant job, signed her high school yearbook, and sexually assaulted her in his car. +++ Yearbooks, the mall, the movie theater: these, as much as pink-dyed hair and college applications, are the familiar tropes and codes of adolescence, the metonyms of schoolyear nostalgia and suburban sprawl that we expect to see in movies like Lady Bird or Juno, and I hate thinking about the young Alabamian women whose relationships with these tropes were so conditioned by the desires of a powerful man. But perhaps that’s always, at some scale, true of spaces like the mall or the movies, which are at once important sites for identity formation and for the production of a certain kind of adolescent subject whose entry into adult sexuality is contingent upon and codependent with her participation in a consumer economy.

This participation is never quite unmediated by the interests of powerful men: a mall, it almost goes without saying, is a fundamentally top-down operation designed to maximize profits from teenagers (largely girls) while moderated by wealthy adults (largely men). Consider, for example, that once-ubiquitous genre of “mall rock,”

DECEMBER 01, 2017

BY Lisa Borst ILLUSTRATION BY Isabelle Rea DESIGN BY Eliza Chen which reached its height in the mid-2000s, the same time Lady Bird takes place. Aping and sugarcoating many of the styles and aesthetics of youth-driven, DIY, and often explicitly feminist punk and emo music of the 1990s, the pop-punk that you might remember hearing over Hot Topic speakers or at Vans Warped Tour (recently cancelled after a 20-year run, amid allegations of sexual assault against a number of performers) was always a corporate attempt to manipulate the tastes and buying patterns of young consumers, and it’s no surprise that toxic masculinity was central to the workings of this music from its inception.

But if one facet of a culture of sexual assault is its reliance upon the manipulation of an adolescent female subject in the name of market interests, then a contingent effect is the making and remaking of an image of girlhood so abstract and pliable as to constitute not just market but commodity. Rethinking a movie like Juno, I’m led to wonder who it was really for when it was released 10 years ago—whether it was ever targeting a Juno-aged audience or something closer to a Jason Bateman demographic.

What is the point, really, of the unsettling, half-formed relationship between the teenage Juno and the adult Mark? Part of why this tertiary plot point totally escaped my memory is that it’s not, in the end, all that necessary for the film. More than developing the character of Juno or moving the narrative along, what the scenes between Mark and Juno really do is make the film’s vision of adolescent femininity palatable and familiar to male viewers. (While I was writing this, a friend reminded me that the demographic among whom HBO’s Girls was by far the most popular was middle-aged males.)

What’s refreshing about Lady Bird, then, is how relatively unmoderated it feels by the kinds of top-down interests that produce and regulate the adolescent space of the mall, how unencumbered it feels from a male directorial or spectatorial gaze. It’s certainly not of the breed of ultra-low-budget mumblecore film that brought Gerwig to prominence as an actor and writer in the mid-2000s, but it does feel small-scale and autobiographical, and that is, I think, what lends the film its realism and believability. In that way I think it’s a stronger movie than something like Frances Ha or Mistress America, those

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Noah Baumbach-directed films in which Gerwig is in front of the camera instead of behind it, and which can thus never quite avoid being about the real-life romance between Baumbach and Gerwig—which is to say, about the camera’s desire for its female subject.

It feels trite and recycled to say, in the contemporary midst of what writer Claire Dederer calls the “the free-fall pig-pile of the #MeToo campaign,” that what’s needed now are more movies made by women, more music made by people who aren’t men, more political or cultural power afforded to people who fall outside of the white male subjectivity that unites Baumbach and Jason Reitman—the director of Juno—with Roy Moore and Woody Allen and Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein.

But certainly there is something about Lady Bird that has resonated in the present moment. The critical conversation surrounding the film has been nothing less than gushing: A.O. Scott called it “perfect,” Richard Brody “exquisite.” (That these critics are both middle-aged men should not escape our attention.) This past week, Lady Bird beat out Toy Story 2 to hold the record for “longest unspoiled streak of positive reviews” on Rotten Tomatoes, making it, by one definition, the best-reviewed film of all time. In response, film critic Guy Lodge wrote in the Guardian on Tuesday that it’s no wonder Gerwig’s movie has resonated so strongly with critics at the current moment: the film, along with “speaking generously to the ‘just getting by’ belt of America that rarely sees itself on screen,” also effectively “counters the crisis of gender representation now coming to a head in Hollywood. That makes it tacitly a film for the moment, a modest cinematic antidote to Trump culture.”

This is timely praise of a sort we maybe haven’t seen since the release of Moonlight, another film toward which critics turned (rightly I think) as a reparative amelioration of certain election-season anxieties last fall. And it may be true that at a moment when adolescent girlhood is regarded more as a potential object of creepiness or predation than on its own complex and multiple terms, there’s something particularly comforting about a film that sweetly, carefully depicts adolescent femininity— and even adolescent sexuality—outside of the leering gaze of older men. But I’m not actually convinced that

Lady Bird, for all its realism and charm, is all that revolutionary in its resistance of any sort of representational crisis or culture of sexual assault. Sure, the math teacher passively cuts short his flirtation with Jenna. But that the bar for resistance could be that low—that just the absence of monstrosity could constitute any sort of reparation or critique—is pretty disappointing. +++ I wondered, for a while, what those girls at the Gadsden Mall were doing when the man who is now a US Senate candidate approached them: whether they were selling shoes or shopping for records, buying Bibles at Books-a-Million or playing with the drum kits at Guitar Center. Maybe, since it was the ’80s, some of them went to the Gadsden Mall to see Sixteen Candles at the movie theater nearby.

But it doesn’t really matter what brought these girls to the mall. I realized I was trying to determine whether the teenage objects of Roy Moore’s lechery were aligned with Veronica or with the Heathers, whether they were more like Juno or more like the normie girls who tease her in chemistry class.

Ultimately, what’s so insidious about a culture of sexual assault—what it seems like some kind of mainstream zeitgeist is just starting to reflect—is that it does not discriminate; it does not slow down or speed up in any deference to what you wear or what kinds of music you listen to. But even if Moore’s victims were standing outside a showing of Lady Bird instead of Sixteen Candles, and even if they were allowed to be whole people as opposed to Heathers or Veronicas, and even if they didn’t conform to the normative vision of race and class that these movies often present as though it were the full spectrum of girlhood—even then, they would still be subject to the same predation.

LISA BORST B’17.5 still loves Freaks and Geeks.

FEATURES

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INSPIRING ANGELS Freakery and resistance in AIDS crisis performance

In 1970s San Francisco, to be gay was often to be spectacular. The Angels of Light, a free theatre formed in 1970, were then something of an emblem of San Francisco’s queer politics and opportunities for representation. The group was known for its politically radical “musical extravaganzas”: fantasy stories with titles like “Myth Thing,” “Flaming Hot Exotica Erotica,” and “Ghoul Diggers of Transylvania,” which they performed in elaborate costumes on homemade sets. These productions summed up many of the sensibilities of their community and time: liberation, unapologetic pageantry, and wild abandon.

To be gay in 1980s San Francisco meant something altogether different. The AIDS crisis hit the Angels of Light as violently as it hit communities everywhere—by 1992, 1,641 people had died of AIDS in San Francisco.

Rodney Price, one of the group’s actors, was diagnosed in 1987. In 1988, he performed in “Song From An Angel,” a five-minute film directed by David Weissman. The film features Price singing “Less Time Than You,” a song with a melody adapted from Kurt Weill’s “One Life to Live” (from the musical Lady in the Dark) and lyrics by Janice Sukaitis.

“Song From An Angel” is shot facing Price headon, alternating between full-body shots of Price sitting in his wheelchair, close-ups on his face, and, briefly, a shot closed in on his dancing feet. The film opens with white text on a black screen, describing Price’s involvement in the Angels of Light and his AIDS diagnosis. Next, the film cuts to Price. What registers first: Rodney Price is dying. His limbs are thin, his cheeks hollow. The medical objects surrounding him—his hospital gown, his wheelchair—only drive home the point his body itself makes.

His head is bowed, as though in prayer, his sightline seemingly directed toward the cross that dangles from his neck.

But within seconds, the image changes completely.

What registers next, as Price lifts his gaze to the viewer, raises his eyebrows, and opens his mouth, is that he is singing. Price’s voice is a powerful tenor, upbeat and clear. Stylistically, he pays homage to musical theater, as the origin of his song’s melody suggests. The lyrics he starts with are as seemingly at odds with his delivery as is his body: “There’s an element of doom and desperation / When I’m the subject of the conversation,” he sings, eyes wide, face elastic. “Locals agree / I’ll never see / My washboard stomach or my derriere,” he continues, caressing his stomach. The contrast between the vivacity of Price’s song and his emaciated body is stark.

Price goes on to outline a certain manifesto of life for a gay man with AIDS in 1988. “I start the day every morning / Inspiring angels like you,” he tells the audience, rarely breaking full eye contact. He implores, “Don’t feel that you’ve got to cure me,” then sings, “If I feel shoddy / I’ll leave my body / ’Cause I’ve got less time than you.” This line is followed by a cut to Price in the same wheelchair but a different outfit, medical garb replaced by tuxedo, top hat, and dance shoes. He performs a tap

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number while sitting in his wheelchair, during which he stomps percussively on both the floor and the wheelchair.

After the dance interlude, during which Price does not sing, he is suddenly wearing the hospital gown, once again and again starts singing. The song closes: “I need romance in my life, dear / Please try to open your heart / Let’s face this fear as it happens / You’ll be richer right from the start / ’Cause when they scatter my ashes / The things I said will ring true / We’re both the winner, but you’ll go to dinner / ’Cause I’ve got less time than you.”

After going silent, Price stares at the camera a moment longer, wide-eyed, without expression. +++ Price’s performance is elementally jarring. It is rare that people as visibly sick as Price are portrayed performing alone, never breaking eye contact, unapologetic. It is even rarer that these portrayals present their audience with a challenge as great as Price’s. He dares his spectator to view his performance as a spectacle, the kind for which musical theater—and gay culture—is so well known. He dares them to put “romance in [his] life.” In doing so, in his adamant refusal to back down from the gay aesthetic he has staked out, he absolutely refutes pity. He refuses to be the object of anyone’s desire to help him on anything other than his terms, to treat him as a body with AIDS and not as a human, or to treat these two categories as mutually exclusive.

Price’s use of spectacle is a reflection on and critique of culturally legitimated models for gay self-presentation in the late 20th century. These models underwent seismic change during the early AIDS crisis. Before the onset of the epidemic in the United States, gay aesthetics of camp and pageant were widely regarded as exciting, cosmopolitan, and stylish. One need look no further than the success of the Village People to realize that gay culture had been made, by the 1970s, into an enormously popular product for straight consumption. It may be impossible to trace the origins of a trend so widespread and diffuse, but it is possible that the popularity of musical theater was a manifestation of mainstream enthusiasm for gay aesthetics. Musical theater’s deployment of camp sensibility—an aesthetic of artifice, excess, and irony—is part of what makes it an appealing art form, and it is an institution both cherished and significantly shaped by gay culture. Straight audiences cannot miss musical theater’s campiness, especially when it is so integral to the form.

Instead, that campiness is part and parcel with what draws straight viewers. To watch a musical is to engage, on some level, with gay cultural aesthetics, and that engagement was held at a premium up until the 1980s.

The American AIDS crisis, however, dramatically shifted cultural responses to gay bodies. The optics of gayness had once been constituted by camp, promiscuity, exciting and fashionable deviances from heterosexual norms that the mainstream denounced for their so-called perversion even as it ravenously consumed their cultural

expressions. The gay body of the AIDS crisis, on the other hand, was entirely different. Whereas the representation of the 1970s gay body was a spectacle, a display of the aesthetics of inflation, the 1980s gay body was represented as fundamentally deflated—weaker, smaller, less.

Because terror of AIDS-contagion reached a fever pitch early in the ’80s that has, perhaps, still not quieted, the passive threat of an ill gay man was just as potent as the active threat of a gay man whose body was represented as excessive (too bright, too loud, too sexual, too much).

The political rhetoric of the ’80s shows clearly the development of pathologizing models of gayness during the AIDS crisis. In 1987, arguing for an amendment barring the Federal Centers for Disease Control from funding AIDS-related programs that “promote[d], encourage[d] or condone[d] homosexual activities,” Senator Jesse Helms said, “We have got to call a spade a spade, and a perverted human being a perverted human being.”

Then-mayor of New York, Ed Koch, wrote a New York Times op-ed lambasting Helms for his comments. But in that op-ed, and in his other actions during the crisis, Koch participated in a type of pathologization different than Helms’, but just as pernicious. In his op-ed, Koch refers to people with AIDS as “AIDS victims,” writing that cutting funding to programs would cause “the deaths of not only homosexuals but heterosexuals of both sexes and, most tragic of all, innocent infants.” At first glance, these remarks may seem hypocritical, given Koch’s notorious inaction during the crisis. They are. But, fundamentally, Koch’s inaction and his rhetoric share ideological ground. The language of victimization, sympathy, innocence—the language of pity—was a useful tactic for containing the threats of queerness and AIDS. By casting people with AIDS as inert victims and bystanders as spectators to suffering, pity placed the straight public in the role of audience, gay men with AIDS in the role of performers. Pity never encouraged straight people in power to break the fourth wall. +++ In The Social Construction of Freaks, Robert Bogdan investigates the historical transition from spectatorship to pity in cultural responses to “freak shows,” circus sideshows displaying people whose bodies were, for a wide variety of reasons, conceived of as “abnormal.”

Bogdan first outlines the ways freak shows were initially marketed to audiences. “Exhibits,” he writes, were advertised by their relationship to prestigious institutions, like science. Potential audiences were drawn in by the promise that the exhibits were immensely popular cultural phenomena, the opportunity to see one was “the chance of a lifetime.” Freak shows were also portrayed as “morally uplifting and educational, not merely as frivolous amusement.” In other words, audiences stood to gain from the experience of spectatorship. To consume a freak show was to access a certain kind of cultural

DECEMBER 01, 2017

BY Cate Turner ILLUSTRATION BY Teri Minogue DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

capital, a kind many audiences were willing to pay for, just as gay bodies were marketed to straight viewers as cultural currency and education. Gay bodies have been conscripted into the same roles in broader culture as the “freak” bodies that performed in these shows, used to elicit the same audience responses.

During the ’70s, the fetishization of gay aesthetics constructed gayness as a freak show and gay men as freaks. In dancing to disco, framing Warhol facsimiles, and wearing Chester Weinberg (a prominent gay fashion designer), the straight public was able to try on the exotic qualities of the gay other without submitting to its stigma. Consumers could be swept up in the pop cultural phenomenon of gay aesthetic without engaging with the realities of gayness; they remained audience, never crossing over into performer.

In the ’80s, this fetishization of gay aesthetic morphed into an obsession with sensational details of the bodies of gay men with AIDS. This, too, constructed gay men as freaks, and is reflected in news reporting on the AIDS crisis. Dudley Clendinen, writing for the New York Times in 1983, catalogues the state of the AIDS-infected gay body in painstaking, visceral detail: he describes Paul DiAngelo, a gay man with AIDS, as “gripped by a cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma, racked by infections his body's stricken immune system cannot throw off, losing 10 quarts of fluid a day to a diarrhea the doctors cannot quell.” Noting the precise amount of fluid a sick person loses per day might otherwise be considered in poor taste, but Cleninden uses it as a pyrotechnic flourish, a proof of the spectacular quality of the gay body with AIDS. Pity rose to prominence alongside freak-spectatorship as a mode of response to gay men with AIDS. In the very same sentence in which he describes the medical

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

details of DiAngelo’s illness, Cleninden writes that DiAngelo “struggles at the age of 33 to survive, to hope, to remain brave and to divine the meaning of this dread disorder.” At one stroke, Cleninden both sensationalizes DiAngelo’s body and elicits sympathy on its (not DiAngelo’s, but his flesh’s) behalf. Straight consumers of this kind of media needed never to reckon with gay bodies as human bodies, only as objects to be either marveled at or pitied. Across spectatorship and pity, mainstream culture’s relationship to gay culture—a relationship firmly based in voyeurism, delegitimization, and contempt—remained intact. Audiences to gay performance and experience were still rewarded with certain pleasures. These pleasures had merely changed from the gains in social capital enjoyed by straight audiences who appropriated the signifiers of gay culture to their own ends, to the self-satisfaction of distancing oneself from a suffering person through sympathy. +++ Rodney Price weighs two models of AIDS crisis-era gayness, the spectacular and the pitiable. He chooses the model in which he has a choice. The situation of gay men in the ’70s, when they were so often perceived as nothing more than an aesthetic to be aped, was unenviable. The ’80s focus on the condition of the bodies of gay men with AIDS was profoundly dehumanizing. But pity, in secluding the sick (or “sick”), in creating distance between viewer and viewed, kills quietly. It was self-distancing pity that allowed government agencies to ignore AIDS, coded as it was as a “gay plague,” as blithely and for as long as they did. Pity reifies a division between viewer and viewed; it allowed straight bystanders to

justify inaction with the reasoning that they were audience, were observer, were fundamentally separate from the suffering they witnessed. Ronald Reagan, then president, did not publicly discuss AIDS until 1987, after the disease had struck down more than 20,000 Americans. Self-distancing pity creates the so-called “tolerance” of queerness that often amounts to a tolerance of the conditions that endanger HIV-positive people, queer and straight.

Although the straight public was increasingly conscious of gay people in the ’80s, and is even more so now, the rhetoric around AIDS continues to cast the needs of people with AIDS as separate from the health of the general, implicitly straight, public.

Straight viewers remain rapt in their own immobilizing sympathy.

Freakishness can be resignified as an identification: a marker not to be bestowed, but to be claimed, to be staked out. In “Song From An Angel,” Rodney Price names himself, proudly, a freak. Price died two weeks after appearing in “Song From An Angel,” and his performance suggests that he found, in staking out spectacle, a way to maintain dignity in the face of all circumstances arguing against his dignity. You wanted a show, he seems to tell his audience. Here: take it. Take it all, and don’t for a second convince yourself that you are kind for it. “I’ve got less time than you,” he says, speaking directly to everyone who does, in fact, have more time than he does. Price refuses to shield viewers from that truth.

CATE TURNER B’21 doesn’t like RENT.

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DIGITAL DRUGS mHealth and mental illness treatment

BY Liz Cory ILLUSTRATION BY Dorothy Windham DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

On November 13, the FDA approved Abilify MyCite, a new version of the antipsychotic drug Abilify engineered to include a sensor that can track whether patients have ingested their medication. When the pill hits the patient’s stomach, a signal is sent to an adhesive patch they wear on the left side of their abdomen. The patch then transmits that information wirelessly to an app on the patient’s smartphone. If the patient chooses, the data can also be sent to their doctor and family members.

Otsuka Pharmaceutical, the patent-owner of Abilify MyCite, and Proteus, developer of its sensing and patch technology, claim the tracking capability of the drug takes a step toward remedying a major public health concern: nonadherence to medication in schizophrenia. Current research shows that 50 percent of schizophrenic patients taking antipsychotics don’t adhere to their treatment. This often leads to higher rates of relapse and hospitalization.

Further, nonadherence and homelessness are reciprocally linked, amplifying each other as unstable living situations make following medication regimens more difficult. One study estimates that consistent medication use in this population, which amounts to one percent of the US, could save over $100 million annually in Medicaid costs for acute inpatient treatment alone.

Yet, the drug’s promises are muddied by a variety of concerns. Perhaps most glaring is that there is currently no science to suggest that using Abilify MyCite increases adherence. Further, the drug’s new FDA approval opens several questions about the benefits and ethics of digital tracking in mental health treatment.

Tracking technology Implementing tracking methods for medication adherence is nothing new. Medication event monitoring systems (MEMS) are electronic pill bottle caps that track the date and time that patients take their medication.

MEMS have been tested on a variety of patient populations with rigid medication regimens, including patients with schizophrenia, tuberculosis, and pediatric patients post–kidney transplant. One issue with this method is obvious: it’s impossible to know with this method alone whether a patient is actually taking any pills from the bottle and, if so, how many.

In an attempt to better capture a person’s true mental and physical states, many researchers— including those developing Abilify MyCite—are turning to biosensors, which directly interact with the body.

Wearable technology for medical monitoring is also being produced in discrete forms suitable for daily use. Some 2016 FDA approvals include: Triggerfish, a contact lens that can help track the progression of glaucoma; MoMe Kardia, a cardiac arrhythmia detector that’s worn as a belt attachment; and FreeStyle Libre Pro, a diabetes monitoring system that allows users to forego finger pricks and instead wear a small sensor on their arms.

Above all, proponents of biosensors praise their efficiency and their capacity for capturing precise health data in real time. Many supporters also note the potential for this technology to aid early interventions when a patient’s health worsens precipitously. But these benefits become more dubious when the technology is applied to mental illness, since much of the research necessary to recommend technological interventions has yet to be done.

mHealth for mental health “We think we know a lot more than we actually know with mental illness,” Michael Armey told the Indy.

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Armey is a researcher at Butler Hospital in Providence with a faculty appointment in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University’s medical school. In a recent project, Armey examined the role of digital interventions in better understanding patients’ fluctuating schizophrenia symptoms.

“Asking people how they live their lives tends to provide us an inaccurate picture of how they really live their lives,” Armey explained.

People are generally poor at remembering the details of their lives clearly even a few days in the past.

In a population with psychotic symptoms that sometimes include delusions, this memory log can get even blurrier.

In this way, gathering reliable information about a schizophrenic person’s pill intake—as well as information about their mood and rest, which the Abilify MyCite smartphone app supports—could provide crucial insight into what specific barriers to adherence they face.

Even simpler digital treatment components, such as smartphone alert systems and health apps could enrich treatment for patients who need more frequent care.

Mobile apps could expand access to care for patients who need less rigorous treatment plans by providing a cheaper, more convenient way to get help.

“One of the challenges of psychotherapy is that you go to an appointment maybe once a week, but most of the problems you’re experiencing aren’t happening on that day,” Armey said, “The technology can help close that gap.”

Yet, Armey cautioned, a lot of similar technology hasn’t been researched enough to be considered effective.

The majority of self-proclaimed health apps available don’t have much predictive power beyond user testimonials. Furthermore, developing digital interventions for patients experiencing psychosis is a much more difficult process than doing the same for patients with mood disorders.

Neuroethics In addition to questions about scientific reliability, the advent of Abilify MyCite—and other digital interventions used to treat mental illness—gives rise to several ethical concerns.

Key to the Abilify MyCite system is the corresponding MyCite app that allows patients to track their data, as well as share it with healthcare providers or caregivers of their choosing. The goal according to the drug’s creators is “to provide additional clarity to better inform physicians and their patients.” If this system helps foster better communication between patients and their providers and caregivers, it could lead to more effective treatment plans.

But many people have expressed worries about privacy infringements enabled by sending health data to smartphones. After all, the portability of smartphones makes them relatively easy to steal, and even secure platforms can be hacked with the right finesse.

Hoping to quell these worries, Otsuka collaborated with bioethicists in designing their app to ensure the product was secure and built around user consent. “From the Otsuka standpoint, we believe the data is owned by the patients and we are custodians,” Andrew Wright, VP of digital medicine at Otsuka, told MobiHealthNews.

The patient is given choices at every step, according to Otsuka: they opt into taking the drug, choose who they share their treatment data with, and decide whether to add in additional information such as mood, rest, and movement information.

Whether and how much choice the patient will truly have is unclear, however. Questions naturally arise about the extent to which patients with psychosis can consistently give informed consent, which is crucial for this system to gain the trust of patients and providers— lest its surveillance capability resemble a “Biomedical Big Brother,” as the New York Times called it.

“Abilify MyCite is a confusing product,” Armey told the Indy. “This doesn’t strike me as population where the medication is a good fit.” Armey noted that the choice seemed peculiar considering that people with schizophrenia are often paranoid about being watched or tracked. Dr. Paul Appelbaum, director of law, ethics and psychiatry at Columbia University’s psychiatry department, echoed this point even more emphatically to the Times: “You would think that, whether in psychiatry or general medicine, drugs for almost any other condition would be a better place to start than a drug for schizophrenia.”

These questions about the appropriateness of choosing schizophrenic patients as the new drug’s target population have also prompted concerns about a potential conflict of interest for Otsuka, who recently lost their patent protection for the non-trackable form of Abilify.

Twice in 2015, Otsuka sued the FDA for the loss of its Abilify patent, claiming it had the rights to the drug until 2021 due to its “orphan drug” protection for use on pediatric Tourette syndrome. Since Abilify’s other approved uses don’t get the same status, a judge ruled against Otsuka.

Further, some have noted that the availability of tracking pharmaceuticals like Abilify MyCite could enable insurance companies to incentivize patients with subsidized copayments to take the trackable version of their medication.

“If the incentive comes with bonuses for compliance, that can start to border on coercive activity,” Poland told the Indy. +++ Antipsychotic treatment without coincident digital interventions themselves remain controversial in the medical world; although they’re typically considered beneficial for acute treatment of psychotic episodes, the drugs’ unpleasant side effects frequently drive patients away, and the sustainability of long-term use is hotly debated.

Abilify MyCite introduces a slew of new controversy to the mental health field regarding the ethics and appropriateness of using digital tracking on mentally ill patients. Biosensing and mHealth have the potential to revolutionize treatment and mollify major public health concerns, but there’s still a lot of science that needs to be done to suggest digital intervention as the sure way forward.

LIZ CORY B’18 wants to see the research.

DECEMBER 01, 2017

SK I miss everyone that I ever knew “{Sophie Kasakove} is just so attractive” a friend confessed to me while we bopped around in a grungy co-op dining room, getting dried lentils stuck to our sneakers, brushing up against sweaty limbs, letting Sophie’s soft-punk voice fill our ears—and loving it.

It’s the way she looks, sure, her warm smile and effortlessly put-together style, but it’s also the way she looks at you—I mean really looks at you—when she’s talking to you that’s so captivating. You know you have her full attention and you hope you’ll stay the center of it at least until she’s done telling you about the forthcoming article she has in that one journal (you can never keep up, there’s too many of them) or effortlessly offering advice about what you thought no one could have possibly noticed. Before you know it, it’s been a half hour and she has to go—Bolt Coffee is offering one dollar off their Americanos. But she means it when she tells you, it was really good to see you.

You’re gonna go far, Sophie Kasakove. Just promise, one day, when you’ve made it big (as a journalist? punk rocker? twist! a bigwig politician?) you won’t forget us: the ones dancing at your show, the ones chatting with you on the library steps, the ones who’ve gotten to know you in countless other moments as the multi-talented, freaking HOT rockstar you truly are.

Everyone you knew, will miss you too.

FROM MOLDING TO DEMOLDING Musings on casting, the Internet, and the things in between

BY William Samosir DESIGN BY Amos Jackson The below diagram is a non-comprehensive illustration of a casting procedure.

Casting commences by wrapping a blanket of material around a physical object through a process called mold-making. In forming a ceramic shell for a bronze cast, for example, one dips a wax shape over and over again into a bath of slurry—a viscous, greenish-yellow fluid filled with pulverized silica that dries into a light orange crust. A mold can also be made by brushing thickened rubber onto an object multiple times, accumulating gauzy laminations into an elastic slab. Clay, plaster, and resin-coated sand are also utilized as mold materials by means of padding or daubing.

The original object is then removed, and the mold becomes a vessel that envelop a hollow cavity. Through the pouring spout, one can now pour molten metal, self-hardening liquid, or gooey chemical mixtures. Just like soup in a bowl, the material will take the shape of its holder. After a period of waiting called cure time, the material solidifies. The resulting cast can finally be extracted—or demolded—either by carefully taking apart a hard shell, or gently unveiling a flexible mold.

What is so fascinating about casting is that it resurrects an object that had once been turned into an empty space. The sensation of successfully demolding is similar to perfectly peeling a hard-boiled egg, or sliding a lychee out from its half-split shell. However, while such fluent conclusion registers the thrill of excavation, it also conceals the energy exerted from painstakingly forming the mold, the many hours spent waiting for wet coatings to dry, or the days spent incubating the cast.

In the early Copper and Bronze Ages of Western Asia, casting and moldmaking were developed to replace physical labor. Circa 3000 B.C., instead of mining for metal chunks, the people of Mesopotamia began to extract copper from their unprocessed ore by heating and melting it—through a process called smelting. This paved the way for metal casting to slowly replace the backbreaking process of endless chiseling. As a result, hunting tools, ornaments, and religious items could be churned out in tens and hundreds every day in almost identical configurations, bolstering the ability to trade and commodify objects.

In the early 20th century, the billowing demand for machines and automobiles propelled the mechanization and automation of casting. Even now, many mass-produced goods are made this way: ceramic mugs in souvenir shops, disposable plastic utensils, styrofoam ice boxes, and flexible phone casings—even troll dolls and jelly bears. Computer-aided manufacturing allows machines to carve precise and long-lasting molds from solid blocks of steel, and casting materials are injected mechanically, and hyper-efficiently, through high pressure air vents.

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The pre-casting hand-wrought items of the Mesopotamian are nowhere close to being as sleek as the state-of-the-art iPhone X—which was released earlier this November while appraised as a “living 3D model.”

That said, the handcrafted object embodies a chronicle of inimitable moments that are intimately human: marks of pounding, chipping, bending, shearing, and twisting are evident on the object’s surface. Conversely, in their almost magical existence, replication turns caster and mold makers into invisible hands. It treads on a path that is systematic, automated, and almost inhumanly mechanic.

Yet, between molding and demolding, there is space; there is time and space for casters and mold makers to experiment with the rules of casting, interrupt its pipeline, and produce a creative outcome.

For example, the multi-disciplinary artist Kaari Upson brushes latex on a salvaged couch repeatedly over the span of two years, almost as if he were making a mold.

Yet unexpectedly, she proceeded to peel this synthetic skin and turn it inside out as a cast on its own. By altering the couch’s mold, not only does Upson shun replication, but she also allows for mutation; she allows the shape of an old piece of furniture to evolve into a magical and otherworldly entity. In this context, creative intervention transforms the certainty of casting into poetic expression.

Despite their seeming immateriality, the logic and procedure of digital processes are in proximity to that of casting and mold-making. In this analogy there is space for materiality to be re-introduced; there is space for the online and the algorithmic to be similarly, and necessarily, interruptible. +++ Casting and mold-making can perhaps be defined as the analog forebearers of copy-pasting. Press ctrl + C, ctrl + V, and lo and behold: a copy is made.

Casting is also similar to downloading. The latter involves duplicating recorded data that exists within a distant, unknown server into personal computer memory.

Before the era of Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music, we used to cast .mp3 files into our computers and music players. The mold was the data structure of the file, and casting happened as one clicked the “click here to download” button.

Similarly, distributing online content—sharing memes on Facebook, retweeting news, and reblogging a Tumblr post—occurs by duplicating and casting content onto another person’s newsfeed. Even liking a picture or a post spreads content across our network of friends, and our friends’ network of friends. Based on the statistics provided by a data-analysis platform called Domo,

the two billion active users of Facebook alone produce roughly five million likes per minute. The banality of our digital experience is inundated with replicas of content and material.

Nonetheless, the ease of clicking, tapping, and swiping allows us to forget that we are in fact laboring as casters and mold-makers, continually fueling the conveyor belt for social media expansion. We are giving broad license rights to the global distribution of our content and personal history. Instagram users are bound to grant the company the full right to use any of their photos for free, for any reason, worldwide. Google and Facebook can even sublicense this right to third party organizations in their pursuit for corporate expansion. Facebook, for one, has grown to be a giant ‘cookie’ monster—frantically consuming our digital trails to display targeted ads, even to web visitors who are not members of its social network. This controversy includes the recent accusations of Facebook eavesdropping on phone conversations to hone its ads-targeting campaign.

But this forgetting may also be perhaps a product of our increasing insulation. Aside from being casters, we are also the cast; our digital environment as the surrounding mold. Our liquidness is perhaps already a matter of fact: drop-down menus, virtual keyboards, and integrated-camera encode us into free-flowing assets such as texts, sound waves, ‘react’ faces, and short video snippets. Just as smelting extracted copper from its ore, digital interfaces distillate specific datas from our presence.

However, the infrastructure of the Internet is continually re-molded to be increasingly algorithmic, privileging predictable data patterns over creative anomalies.

Instagram, for example, curates content based on a user’s profile searches, accounts interactions, and time spent viewing a particular post. The notion of contingency that is associated with discovery—as in social media’s Discovery tab—grows increasingly suspect, as it is filled with vapid, on-your-doorstep caterings: “Watch: Videos You Might Like,” “Picked For You: Science Experiments,” “Oddly Satisfying,” “3D Motion Graphics.” The rest are replete with posts which have received upwards of a thousand likes. Similarly, YouTube’s homepage recommendation does not favor less-than-100-views videos, or those which are totally alien to the Previously Watched archive. Instead, it features Recommended Channels, such as Today’s Funniest Clips with million-views clips that are “racking up the LOLs across the web right now.”

More frighteningly, both humans and machines are churning out replicas of contents which are deemed to be highly engaging—and therefore profitable. For instance, social media has allowed for the propagation of sped-up food recipe videos, the popularization of zoomed-in sprinkled-slime kneading, and the proliferation of

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otherworldly. Yet, its alienness only testifies to our engineered contentment of residing in a mode of online consumption. Dark Content shows that our perception of the Web is controlled by corporate system; that outside the Internet, there is a cacophony that has been silenced and rendered invisible. +++

algorithmically-titled cartoon videos on YouTube Kids.

Artificial neural networks such as Google’s Creatism are also learning to create images that mimic “high-ranking” photography, scavenging on Google Map’s assets while generating numerous “aesthetically pleasing” landscape photographs.

Amidst being engulfed by a culture that is tethered to algorithms, we rarely think of ourselves as digital labors— or virtual casters and mold-makers—because physical exertion, hours, and wages are by-passed and hid from view, while gratifications (as well as notifications) appear as intimate and instant. It almost feels as if we are left only with the pleasing sensations of constantly demolding and discovering ourselves—but, unbeknownst to us, our clicks are caught in the frenzy of copy-pasting.

Beyond the sheen of our screens, we are not only engineered to cannibalize content, but also to stream a massive amount of personal and interpersonal data.

Yet, being a part of a giant virtual factory is an elusive concept, and perhaps it is because data itself only appears to be transfigured into the gaseous Cloud. Snaps ‘disappear’ after being opened, and Instagram stories ‘expire’ in a day—but, in reality, they hover within Google’s server for a month. Data Center Frontier has written about how Facebook stores their exabytes of data inside innumerable Blu-Ray discs, stored within 14 racks of housing square enclosures in Forest City, North Carolina. The network intelligence research group called Deepfield also found that one third of worldwide Internet usage transits on Amazon’s data center in North Virginia—its facade inconspicuous, it could almost be mistaken as any other ambiguously industrial building. Almost imperceptibly, we are siphoning ourselves into these “molds”.

Artists Eva and Franco Mattes are among those who decided to interrupt the effacing of labor and physical processes. Their work Dark Content (2015) presents glimpses into what occurs on the outside of “the mold.”

The real life installation of Dark Content includes viewing chambers which are veiled behind the abstract, minimalistic facade of an overturned office table. Yet, it also consists of episodic videos which are released periodically on the Darknet (to view it, you have to download the Tor browser and access a cryptic link with a .onion domain).

It features anonymous interviews with online media content moderators, and each of their stories are narrated by digital avatars in the robotic sound of text-to-speech transcription. With the video’s white background and

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

uncanny avatars, the whole video illustrates the zombification of a corporate graveyard.

The video exposes us to the fringes of the readily accessible Internet, especially as workers reveal that they are laboring at the periphery of large companies. For instance, a Vimeo content moderator admitted to having never interacted with the “engineers, marketers, data analysts, or any other positions in the [InterActive Corp] headquarters.” They recount the experience of working in a building likened to a “call center” stationed among “typical grey cubicles and granite countertops.” Some of these employees work from within their cars using their own mobile hotspots, while others station themselves in recognizable public places such as Starbucks, McDonald's, and Panera Bread.

These invisible workers (some reside in the US, while most are outsourced in the Philippines) spend their day scanning through photos, videos, and texts before their distribution is made public. Without knowing their contractor, they scour for “unacceptable” content with the goal of removing it from our daily consumption. In the video, many claim that the work experience is disturbing, having to encounter traumatizing and gruesome visuals on a daily basis. Some report having “lost faith in humanity,” others say they feel mentally exhausted.

Through Dark Content, we skim a familiar space that feels palpable, but at the same time nebulous and

No matter how many identical objects there are, or how perfect they all seem, physical casts do not come to be simply with the click of ctrl + C and ctrl + V. There is always labor involved in casting and production, and it is well the case with today’s digital phenomena. It is erroneous to think that digital infrastructure can somehow be made non-human, or that there is no force at play other than the supposedly ‘neutral’ machine itself.

Today, the emancipatory and democratic ideals of the Internet are not only underscored by corporate headlines—they are bracketed by governmental agendas. The Federal Communication Commission’s recent plan to overturn Net Neutrality means that internet service providers (ISPs) will be able to throttle the agendas of web giants while blocking other, less-profitable competition; it will mold the open market into a group of unrestrained, quasi-monopolistic winners. This privatization also creates a loophole that allows major companies to override the utility of common carriage by investing in highgrade fiber optic that reaches poorer and rural areas.

More concerningly, ISPs will be able to suppress dissents and political speech deemed unfavorable by their own corporate interests; on Capitol Hill itself, the public is already out-lobbied by the resources of capital giants such as Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast.

While simultaneously weighed down by an automated and immaterial up-in-the-Cloud imagination, the Internet is forced to be an enclosure of self-cannibalization that suffocates complexities and productive exchanges; a single receptacle cast repeatedly in an unyielding, post-truth rhetoric.

A political critique of computational culture, then, is suffocated when it appears solely online. An urgent interruption of the Internet demands a political consciousness that engages with material conditions while tactfully implicating—and complicating—the hegemony of self-replication. It calls for an awareness that the digital is not divorced from the physical; that their dualism is at best bogus; and that there is a vast, unexplored territory that has been excluded from our molds. In remembering our commonality as laborers, casters, and mold makers, the creative and political interruption within the digital and the online has never been, and never will be limited to the purview of established artists and creatives. In our voyage amidst the sea of replicas, our horizon is always uncharted—never just the clouds.

WILLIAM SAMOSIR RISD'18 is a giant ‘cookie’ monster.

ARTS

16

DEAR INDY...

BY W

ILLUSTRATION BY Alex Hanesworth DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

Submit your questions for future Indy advice columns at tinyurl.com/indyadvicecolumn Dear Indy, I’ve just been ghosted by my Tinder date. It feels like a fist in my stomach. What do I do?

Best, Sad & Confused Dear Indy, I have a friend, who, for various reasons, I feel it is best to move away from. Recently, I’ve intentionally allowed space to grow between us but am wondering if I should acknowledge my intentions outright. There are well-worn scripts for telling someone you’re dating, “this just isn’t working” (or something along those lines) but I’m having a hard time figuring out how/if to communicate that to my friend. I feel bad “ghosting” them but I’m not sure an explicit conversation is any kinder.

Help a Friendly Ghost?

Dear Indy, I think my house is haunted, but I also love science.

How do I exorcise a ghost I don’t believe in?

Warmly, A Homeowner A therapist once told me that ghosting is a form of bullying and I’m inclined to agree. I’m sorry you were ghosted, Sad & Confused. Are you angry? I would be, too.

The problem with ghosts, as Homeowner has clearly discovered, is that their haunting can make the most measured rationalist into a superstitious erratic. You might find yourself, Sad & Confused, assessing and reassessing what happened with your love interest, rehashing every word you spoke, every text you sent, looking for indicators that might tell you what you did wrong or what you could have done differently. Part of what’s so enraging about ghosting is not only that your love interest ignores you, but that this person creates a scenario in which it is inappropriate for you to reach out to ask them: why? In this arrangement, which you likely did not agree to, you have waived your right to any sort of closure.

Ask your interest to quell your unrest, and risk being perceived as needy or neurotic or difficult or insecure or not-getting-the-picture. As if it was needy to want to feel included in a relationship that bears on your well-being!

I want to make space here for the possibility that your ghost has a very real, necessary reason for vanishing from the face of your earth. In fact they certainly do: it’s just bad timing, or Geminis and Cancers just shouldn’t go, or you remind me too much of my dad. (The number of tiny things that can turn a human off would astound you.) Just as likely, your ghost might be going through some really heavy shit right now and would simply prefer not to tell you about it. Aren’t they entitled to that kind of autonomy? The experts behind www.psychologytoday.com side with the haunted: “People who ghost are primarily focused on avoiding their own emotional discomfort and they aren’t thinking about how it makes the other person feel.” So whose feelings matter more: the ghost’s or your own, Sad & Confused? Is everyone entitled to knowing why anyone does anything at any given moment?

But maybe your ghost isn’t always ignoring you to spare their emotional discomfort; sometimes they do it to spare your own. “I don’t want to see you again because I don’t think you’re that interesting,” my roommate tells me she once thought, but did not say, as she ignored a guy’s messages on Tinder. Such is the nature of your concern, Friendly Ghost, which I hear. Friendships drift naturally over time and acknowledging this fact in your relationship often means acknowledging something larger

17

FEATURES

about how you position yourself in the world, what you want from your loved ones, the kind of person you want to be in the future. According to you, Friendly Ghost, an explicit conversation about the state of your friendship with your friend might not be “kinder” than dropping communication altogether because, I’m guessing, doing so would force you to unpack larger tensions about how you value each other. But to me, your question presumes that kindness should be privileged as an outcome of ending your relationship—and I’m not so sure I agree.

Personally, I think the idea that ghosting lets any party exit a relationship unscathed is bunk. For one, forcibly removing yourself from a relationship without the other person’s blessing, as we have already discussed, tends to cause a lot of unintended (sometimes intended) harm. But ghosting also promises harm in your own future relationships: you risk becoming accustomed to offering silence instead of truth for the sake of preserving comfort.

What I’m trying to say is not that you shouldn’t work to instill kindness in your relationships, but that, as an end goal, it would be worthwhile to instead try to secure your relationship’s safe passage to a place that feels good, or healthy, or fine for the time being—a place that looks something like closure. It’s not closure as such; your lowly advice columnist cannot accurately predict any given person’s emotional needs—sometimes closure isn’t the answer!—I mean only that beginning the process toward closure seems like a good practice in addressing our most haunting relationships. For instance, for you, Friendly Ghost, securing a safe passage in your relationship might mean generating between you and your friend an understanding of how your friendship developed to where it is now. Perhaps you go further and discuss specific harm that was exchanged between the two of you. Perhaps you don’t. We owe the people in our lives different levels of care and concern, and so the kinds of safe passages we’re responsible for securing will differ depending on your circumstances: the nature of the relationship, the degree of its turbulence, how much you love this person.

For Sad & Confused, I think safely guiding your relationship forward with a Tinder date who you will likely never see again perhaps looks something more like care of the self. I’ve always thought that the ghost metaphor describes the person who ignores your calls/texts/DMs as ‘ghosting you’ because, like a ghost, your love interest vanishes out of thin air, haunting your dreams or whatever. But I’m beginning to think that I’ve got the metaphor all wrong. In fact, it is you who is made the ghost, you who feels sad at the missed opportunity of a romantic relationship, and confused about how to begin anew; it is you who’s made to feel invisible, like your grasp slips through whatever it is you want most.

So let’s rephrase your question, Sad & Confused: what can you do to feel a little less ghastly?

that some outcomes have no internal logic and that when it comes to relationships, logic is always failing us. The worst thing you might discover is a family of mice.

Dear Sad & Confused: you are not needy or neurotic or difficult or not-getting-the-picture for wanting someone to guarantee your safe passage. But just because, for whatever reason, they chose not to, doesn’t mean you can’t navigate your own. You are beautiful and kind and caring, and despite what I assume are your rancid qualities (everybody has them), it is the fact you can feel like a fist landed in your stomach that makes you a real person worthy of another real human being. So go outside and take a walk. Hold your own hand. Lock together the nooks in your knuckles. Trace your finger on bark as you would the seam from your toe to your ear. It can be hard to believe yourself this time of year, I know. Daylight in December has a way of making everything look like a bad refraction of the real thing. So find the things that make you feel real, even when others pretend not to see you.

Dear Friendly Ghost: the most important conversations I’ve had with friends were the ones on the verge of exploding. When we were most angry, most irritable, most alienated from each other. Some of those friends I don’t speak to anymore. Some of them are my most important friends. I suggest you have that conversation with your friend, because you never know where it might take you. Safe passage does not guarantee finding closure comfortably. Truth be told, you might end up feeling worse than you did before.

As your advice columnist, I can never give you solutions to your problems in a way that will make you feel like you’ve figured it all out. Advice columns are funny in this way; you don’t come to me, the advice giver, so I can make decisions for you (that would be wildly inappropriate). I have literally no context, and it’s for this reason I might be most equipped to instead offer you a new way of thinking about your problem, one that might give you the tools to better find a solution in the future.

So I can’t tell you how to find closure, Friendly Ghost, in the same way Sad & Confused will never know exactly why or when they’ll stop feeling haunted. But what I can tell you is that the grounds for any moving on or moving away from a relationship need to be based on open mutuality, so that the conditions for closure might exist, whenever it decides to hit you.

Here’s a fact you might not know about me, Dear Reader: I’m having a really hard time figuring out how to end this advice column. After two long years of doing my best to be there for you in your darkest hours, our time together is waning. This is my last column—I’m about to graduate and, due to conditions beyond my control, I have to end things between us. Here you are, you’ve come to me for guidance, and here I am: jumping ship.

But I’m definitely not ghosting you. I care too much to go without telling you one more time: you are so real to me.

With love, W.

+++ Dear Homeowner: given that your ghost is likely not a real human who thought you really had something with, I suggest attacking your ghost outright. Spend an hour alone in your pitch dark basement, or wherever it is you feel the specter’s presence. Sit still. As you begin to feel more comfortable in your space, swing your arms and taunt the ghost you once let terrorize you. Appreciate

DECEMBER 01, 2017

THE

LIST!

FRIDAY 12 ∫ 01

SATURDAY 12 ∫ 02

SUNDAY 12 ∫ 03

STEEL YARD HOLIDAY SALE

MANTON AVENUE PROJECT PRESENTS: OLNEYVILLE, THE OPERETTA

EARLY 2000S ON ICE

The Steel Yard 6 PM —————

Cool art—ceramics, metalworks, and more— by the Steel Yard’s resident artists. Give your loved one a nice piece of pottery this holiday season! That’s what I always give my mom!

THE POLER BEARS: NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS

The Dark Lady 8 PM $5 18+ / $3 21+ —————

Brown’s best crew of pole-dancers contains two members who are also on the Indy staff!

Come see these multitalented athletes perform a mysterious holiday special.

MONDAY 12 ∫ 04 LEGAL OBSERVER TRAINING

The FANG Collective 6 PM —————

Join lawyers from the RI Chapter of the Lawyers Guild to become an official NGL legal observer. According to the event, “Legal observers assist at protests, rallies, and other events to document and be a witness to any occurrences, and NLG legal observers, often in neon green hats and apparel, are deployed to rallies and protests on behalf of political protesters committing acts of civil disobedience, to observe should arrests occur.”

TUESDAY 12 ∫ 05 HOLIDAY LETTERPRESS

DWRI Letterpress 40 Rice Street 6:30 PM $20 —————

A holiday card making workshop hosted by the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Kinda pricey though! Sometimes the AS220 print shop has free letterpress workshops, maybe you should hold off for one of those.

HOROSCOPE ∫ GEMINI

Manton Avenue Project 55 Putnam Street 2 PM —————

The Manton Avenue Project is one of my favorite things in the world! Kids write plays about Providence history and then adults perform them. Hilarious! This one’s about the social history of Olneyville and it’s by a bunch of fifth graders.

BROWN’S .5ER GRADUATION

Salomon Hall at Brown University 3:30 PM free snacks at 5 PM —————

Meeham Auditorium 3:30 PM —————

Brown’s figure skating club presents an early2000s-themed ice show. Not sure what to expect here—skate dancing to “Stacy’s Mom”?

Icy renditions of the Iraq invasion?

FULL MOON MARKET

Sutton Street 4 PM —————

A space for young and emerging queer, people of color, women, and femme-identified artists to showcase their art, design and innovation.

Free and open to all.

Come see the rinky-dink little ceremony Brown puts on for all the bums who waited until midyear to finish college, including yours truly. This is my last List! Goodbye forever!

VERITAS & VALUES: DACA DECONSTRUCTED

Moore Hall at Providence College 6:30 PM —————

An interactive alumni panel, with panelists sharing how their current career has been affected by DACA. Reception to follow in the Moore Hall Lobby.

WEDNESDAY 12 ∫ 06 UTILITY JUSTICE: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

George Wiley Center 7 PM —————

Join the George Wiley Center in downtown Pawtucket for the first of an ongoing panel and presentation series. These community discussions will be a forum to raise awareness, increase involvement, and consider future goals in the context of collaboration and intersectional struggles toward utility justice. Childcare provided.

THURSDAY 12 ∫ 07 SOCIAL MEDIA FOR ACTIONS AND DEMONSTRATIONS

The FANG Collective 6:30 PM —————

Over the past four years FANG has coordinated social media for dozens of direct actions and mobilizations. This workshop will focus on how to use social media to cover actions, demonstrations and for pressure campaigns, discussing best practices for preparing media before an action, carrying out social media during an action and then using social media to maintain campaign narratives. Specific topics will include how to organize a social media storm, using Facebook live and security culture for social media.

NATIONAL VIGIL FOR VICTIMS OF GUN VIOLENCE

First Unitarian Church of Providence 7 PM —————

WE LOVE YOU LISA! THANK YOU FOR HELPING US FIND THINGS TO DO AND CAUSES TO HELP AND SIGHTS TO SEE THIS SEASON! BEST OF LUCK IN THE LONG FUTURE! WE BELIEVE IN YOU!

This week Mercury (YOUR PLANET) conjuncts Saturn AND squares Neptune AND goes in retrograde -- no wonder I am SO GODDAMN ANGRY today! Shit is going to go WRONG. DON’T stir the pot; DON’T talk too much; CARE about the people you care about!!!! A lot of people hate you, Gem, but I do really love you and I know we would make a great fun spy team but NOT this weekend. Instead, come see the Brown U. Poler Bears perform at The Dark Lady and I Want A Country in Leeds -- you won’t be able to talk during those, and if you still want to fight afterwards, I’ll be backstage.

The Religious Coalition for a ViolenceFree Rhode Island, Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence, and Moms Demand Action Against Gun Violence in America are joining the Newtown Foundation and Faiths United to Prevent Gun Violence in a nationwide interfaith memorial observance.