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COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY OCT 21 2016
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Garbage Man Jamie Packs A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 33 / NUMBER 05 OCT 21 2016
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Week in Review Will Tavlin, Eve Zelickson, Liz Cory, and Camila Ruiz Segovia Dove Tat Nicolas Montaño
METRO 03
We Demand Police Accountability Jack Brook
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Manton Family Rachel McMahon and Reilly Blum
ARTS 15
Power Suit Kelton Ellis
FEATURES 08
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Popcorn Spine Isabelle Doyle Walk This Way Isabel DeBre
FROM THE EDITORS “This is a Call to Action Against Slavery in America…Prisoners are forced to work for little or no pay. That is slavery. The 13th amendment to the US constitution maintains a legal exception for continued slavery in US prisons. It states ‘neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.’ Overseers watch over our every move, and if we do not perform our appointed tasks to their liking, we are punished. They may have replaced the whip with pepper spray, but many of the other torments remain: isolation, restraint positions, stripping off our clothes and investigating our bodies as though we are animals.” –Zine from the National Prison Strike, September 2016 On September 9, a nationwide strike of incarcerated people began in order to protest the contemporary conditions of American slavery. At its peak, an estimated 24,000 incarcerated people in at least 12 states participated in the coordinated work strike. Organizers on the inside have been facing intense retaliation: being put into solitary confinement, being transferred to different facilities, ‘bird-fed’ (serving meals much smaller than usual), and given additional charges. Strikers have called for renewed actions in solidarity with the prison strike for the week of October 15-22. The Indy expresses support and solidarity. For updates and to support: SupportPrisonerResistance.net FreeAlabamaMovement.com IWOC.noblogs.org
SCIENCE 11
Michelle Nijhuis Eve Zelickson
METABOLICS 12
Acci-dental Joshua Kurtz
Camila Ruiz Segovia Shane Potts Liz Cory METRO
Liminal Limes Anna Hundert
Jane Argodale Will Weatherly Marianna McMurdock ARTS
Will Tavlin Ryan Rosenberg Kelton Ellis
X 18
Sophie Kasakove Lisa Borst Jamie Packs NEWS
LITERARY 17
MANAGING EDITORS
Sitting Su Qiao-Qiao
FEATURES
Dominique Pariso Elias Bresnick Dolma Ombadykow METABOLICS
Sam Samore Isabelle Doyle SCIENCE
Fatima Husain TECH
Jonah Max OCCULT
Sophia Washburn
LITERARY
Stefania Gomez EPHEMERA
Patrick McMenamin Mark Benz
Maria Cano-Flavia My Tran Daniel Chimes Bryn Brunnstrom Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN & LAYOUT
Liby Hays Nichole Cochary
Celeste Matsui Meryl Charleston Andrew Linder
LIST
WEB MANAGER
Malcolm Drenttel Alec Mapes-Frances
Charlie Windolf
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BUSINESS MANAGER COVER
Dolma Ombadykow
Jamie Packs SENIOR EDITOR ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR
Alec Mapes-Frances
Gabriel Matesanz MVP STAFF WRITERS
Hannah Maier-Katkin Kim Meilun Jack Brook Eve Zelickson Saanya Jain Anna Hundert Andrew Deck Signe Swanson Josh Kurtz STAFF ILLUSTRATORS
Frans van Hoek Teri Minogue Yuko Okabe Ivan Rios-Fetchko
Dolma Ombadykow The College Hill Independent — P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.
WEEK IN CREEPS BY
Will Tavlin, Liz Cory, Dominique Pariso, and Eve Zelickson Gabriel Matesanz
ILLUSTRATION BY
FRIGHT NIGHT
THE KREMLIN GREMLIN
Children of the night and survivors of the early aughts emo phase, take heart. Instead of sitting on your couch this halloween watching A Nightmare Before Christmas for the thirty-third time, you can enter a contest to stay in Dracula’s castle. *Nosferatu flickers lights* Well, not exactly Dracula’s Castle. It’s actually Bran Castle, possibly the home of Bram Stoker. Or it might just be a typo. Hard to tell. But anyway, Bram Stoker’s great grand-nephew, instead of going out and actually getting a real job, has decided to capitalize on the fantasies of his much more imaginative ancestor. Dacre Stoker (Yes, that is his real name) will be your gracious host for the evening. The College Hill Independent cannot confirm nor deny if he will wear a billowing cape and dollar store fangs for the duration of the evening. But we do think that would be a nice touch. The AirBnB listing promises “labyrinths of lamplit corridors, creepy nooks, and squeaky staircases,” as well as free range of all 57 (!) rooms. You will also be treated to a candlelight dinner in the main dining room. But that’s where the romance ends because the provided velvet-lined coffins only sleep one. All you have to do is submit a story of 50-300 characters detailing what you would say to the Count if you were to meet him in his castle. Our submission:
Poise and power: these are the chief values of Vladimir Putin’s official 2017 calendar released by the Russian magazine Zvezdi I Soveti (translated as Stars and Advice) this past Saturday. The calendar features 12 intimate portraits of the Russian president cruising the steppes of Russia in a photo series that demonstrates his well-toned pecs and tender peacekeeping heart. Mashable described the photo series as “candid” while USA Today called it “not as weird as the Putin calendar that was published in 2016” (wherein Putin was famously pictured fishing topless). If 2016 Putin was busty and brash, 2017 Putin is a little more sensitive. In the calendar’s April photograph, Putin is curled in the arc of a drooping tree branch. “I spent the day walking. I walked almost nine kilometers, everything is still hurting!” reads the caption, translated by CNN. So too do our hearts! In August, the Russian leader is pictured climbing into a green tractor seated in a plentiful wheat field. “Without bread, it is impossible to live,” Putin philosophizes. “It is correct to say—bread is the staff [sic?] of life. That’s how it was, that’s how it is, and that’s how it probably will always be.” The calendar arrives at newsstands and kiosks across the borscht bloc amidst a pivotal moment for Putin and his foreign policy agenda. Four days after the calendar was released, the Kremlin met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Berlin in talks to build on the 2015 Minsk Agreement that reached a fragile ceasefire. Oleh Rybachuk, the former chief of staff to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, told WNYC’s The Takeaway that Putin’s negotiating position has weakened severely in the past year. “Putin was the most popular politician in the Ukraine before he annexed Crimea,” Rybachuk said. “He never expected such a heavy resistance.… He lost more special troops [in six months] than in 15 years of war in Afghanistan.” According to Putin, “Russia is a peace-loving and self-sufficient country. We don’t need other peoples’ territories. We don’t need other peoples’ natural resources. But if we are threatened we are prepared to use weapons to guarantee our security.” No, this quote isn’t from a Kremlin press release preceding the peace negotiations, but inscribed on the back page of Putin’s 2017 calendar alongside a photo of the Russian leader in a trim grey sports jacket and Oakley(?) sunglasses. The mainstream media has largely approached the calendar as just another quirk from the former communist state, but the College Hill Independent knows better: Putin’s 2017 calendar is political propaganda intended to both rally Russian nationalism and shore up the Kremlin’s tenuous international image in order to boost the leader’s clout at the negotiating table. “Me and pussy liked each other instantly. I love animals and evidently they feel this too!” says Putin in the March photograph as he gently cradles a kitten to his breast.
Suck my dick. —DM + LC
—WT
A McTARNISHED REPUTATION This week, a third party has stepped onto the heated stage of clown politics, highlighting the current fragmented and polarized state of the clown community. With creepy clowns fueling meme accounts across the country and some veteran clowns attempting to trend the hashtag #realclownsareaboutlove, a new, red-nosed spokesman has entered the (circus) arena to proclaim: “I’m only as creepy as I was before, like two months ago.” These are the thoughts of capitalist clowns everywhere, a cohort led by the golden arches’ own, Ronald McDonald. The birth of the clown hysteria is debated; some cite August 1, when a clown in Wisconsin was reported walking through Green Bay with a bouquet of black balloons. Others point to May 4: when we nominated one for the highest office in our nation. Regardless, Ronald feels the clown craze has vilified him and he’s not Lovin’ it. In an emailed statement to NBC News, McDonald’s spokesperson Terri Hickey stated that “McDonald’s and franchises in local markets are mindful of the current climate around clown sightings in communities” and will be “thoughtful with respect to Ronald McDonald’s participation in community events for the time being.” To many this news comes as a shock, considering that before the clown epidemic Ronald was an upstanding citizen; he offered free educational Ronald McDonald programs to schools, community organizations, and nonprofits. These included campaigns to “go active with Ronald McDonald” and “a friendship adventure with Ronald McDonald,” with details about Ronald’s plan to befriend your child elided. Now Ronald will spend his days cloistered behind a deep fryer, entertained only by McDonald’s schlocky October themed happy meal toys. The hysteria that has unfolded in the past months has left the clown community split on party lines, as none of the moderate clowns have been able to sway their extremist counterparts. These divisive divisions have left clowns like Ronald McDonald with no option but to collect their unemployment benefits and desperately hope for a change of tides. When the Indy reached out to ask how he felt about his tainted image, Ronald McDonald declined to comment, perhaps humiliated by his descent to the depraved level of his peer, the Hamburglar. —EZ
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THE 12 POINTS OF THE COMMUNITY SAFETY ACT 1. Prohibition on racial profiling and other forms of profiling Police cannot use race, ethnicity, color, national origin, language, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, political affiliation, religion, physical or mental disability, or serious medical condition as a reason to suspect someone of a crime.
2. Standardized Encounter Form Every time police stop someone, they must fill out a card with race, gender, and age of the person stopped; reason for the stop; if there was a search, and the results of the search; how long the stop lasted; results of the stop (ticket, arrest, nothing); and officer’s name and badge number. They must provide a copy of the form to the person who was stopped.
3. Video Recording by Police For dashboard cameras, body cameras, and any other devices, recording must start as soon as the officer tells someone to stop, or arrives at the scene where a person is stopped, and recording continues until the stop is ended or that officer leaves. On duty police CANNOT use their personal phones to record anyone unless they are subject to the same policies as department cameras.
4. Video Recording by People Police cannot interfere with, harass, or intimidate members of the public who are recording audio or video of police activity in any place that person has a legal right to be. Any officer who violates this section may be subject to a fine of up to $5,000 and/ or a jail term of up to 15 days.
5. Traffic Stops Police have to tell the driver why s/he was stopped before they ask ask for any documents and can only ask for driver’s license, car registration and proof of insurance, unless they have probable cause of a criminal offense. Police can’t ask passengers for ID without probable cause of a criminal offense. If the only criminal charge is driving without a license, police cannot arrest the person; they can only give the person a summons to appear in court. Traffic violations are not enough to arrest someone.
6. Searches Police cannot ask for consent to search a person, his or her car, or belongings without probable cause of some criminal activity. Police must ask the person what gender officer is appropriate to search the person. No canine (dog) searches allowed without probable cause of criminal activity.
7. Surveillance and Privacy Providence Police cannot collect or store information about individuals or groups, or engage in electronic or physical surveillance, or undercover infiltration, without reasonable suspicion that the activities they are monitoring relate to criminal activity.
8. Privacy – Youth and Immigrants Police cannot ask youth for proof of identification beyond name and address and cannot photograph juveniles (except as part of the booking process if the youth is charged with a crime or through the automatic cameras, like the ones used in police cars). Police may not inquire about an individual’s immigration status, and any identification issued by a government outside the U.S. like a consular ID, foreign driver’s license, or passport, will be accepted the same as an ID from a U.S. government agency.
9. “Gang” list Police must have a written, public list of criteria or factors before they mark someone as a “gang” member on any list or database. “Associating” with someone else on the list cannot be one of the factors. If police put someone on the “gang list” they must send that person a form to appeal. If the person denies being a gang member, the accusation may not be shared with anyone else including schools, courts, or prosecutors. If the person is not convicted of any crime within two years , his or her name must be removed. Every year, Providence Police must produce a report with the total number of people on the “gang list,” and a breakdown by age, race, ethnicity, and gender, and the number of people who have appealed being put on the “gang list.”
10. Language access The Police Department will create a language access hotline. Officers who don’t speak a person’s language fluently, may not question that person until a qualified interpreter is present. Police may not use family members, friends or bystanders as interpreters except in emergency. No Police Department employee may serve as interpreter during interrogation. Miranda Warnings, and all other important written materials, will be available to a person in her or his primary language. At each police building signs must be posted in the most commonly spoken languages stating that interpreters are available free of charge.
11. Collaboration with other law enforcement agencies Formal agreements between Providence Police and other law enforcement agencies must be approved by City Council and posted to the PPD website. The outside agency must comply with all the terms of this ordinance. No one acting on behalf of the City of Providence shall assist in the enforcement of federal immigration law or gather or disseminate information on the immigration status of individuals. The Providence Police Department will not honor requests by ICE to arrest or detain any individual.
12. Accountability and Enforcement Quarterly reports of all violations of this ordinance will be posted on the Police Department website and provided to the City Council. The Providence External Review Authority (PERA) will have power to review and recommend that Public Safety and Police Department budgets be reapportioned toward youth recreation and job training programs for failure to enforce this ordinance.
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TAKING ACTION TOWARDS COMMUNITY SAFETY Inside the movement to end racial profiling in Providence Jack Brook ILLUSTRATION BY Dorothy Windham BY
From the center of Burnside Park came the brash blasting of trumpets, the pounding of bass drums, the snapping of snares, and the high hooting of saxophones, all strewn together in the 2016 Providence Honk Fest! (PRONK!) music parade, on October 10th. Despite the apparent sonic chaos, a unifying force directed the cacophony: the sound and spirit of protest. Over a dozen community organizations marched with posters reading “Safety, Respect and Justice Together”, “No Justice! No Peace! No Racist Police!”, and “We Demand Police Accountability”. In the center of it all, Vanessa Flores-Maldonado carried a banner expressing the day’s message in red and black paint: “PVD City Council, Pass the Community Safety Act”. “A whole community has noticed what’s been going on and got behind the CSA,” Flores-Maldonado told The College Hill Independent. As part of the Stand Together to End Profiling and Un-do Poverty (STEPUP) Coalition, Flores-Maldonado has coordinated a grassroots movement to reform the Providence Police Department. STEP-UP succeeded in incorporating the Community Safety Act as the central facet and unifying theme of this year’s PRONK!, allowing it to receive significant exposure. The CSA—a proposed city-wide ordinance—seeks to implement 12 measures designed to prevent racial profiling while increasing police accountability and transparency across the board. Although the CSA has been in the works for nearly two years and continues to face skepticism from the City Council and stiff opposition from the Providence Police Department (PPD), a widespread and mounting community movement led by STEP-UP has put pressure on the city to take decisive action. In an address on September 28, Mayor Elorza stated that the CSA could pass “by the end of the year.” Passing such an ordinance would not be unprecedented—the New York City Council succeeded in overpowering the veto of Mayor Bloomberg in 2013 to put into effect its own Community Safety Act, also designed to limit profiling and stop and frisk policies. “The future of Providence is young people of color,” says Daniel Schleifer, a founding member of the What Cheer? Brigade, a band that has been performing at PRONK! for ten years. “The CSA is a chance not only for the city to treat its young people more fairly, but to send a message that we understand where our future lies and that we’re trying to do something to take care of our future rather than write it off.” The formation of STEP-UP in 2014 reflected the fundamental and increasingly visible divide between the PPD and the neighborhoods, largely made up of communities of color, that it interacts with on a daily basis. A special City Council report on “Diversity and Equity in City Government” published in September revealed
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
that, in spite of a 40% decrease in the white population in the city of Providence and a doubling of the Latinx population since 1970, the police department remains overwhelmingly white, with little proportional increase in Latinx or Black officers. The President of the Providence Fraternal Order of the Police, Sgt. Robert K. Boehm, chose to pin the root of the divide on a misplaced distrust of the police, which he felt contributed to unnecessary hostility against all officers. “Some people may feel they’ve been victimized,” Boehm told The Independent. “But to generalize an entire occupation, much the same as to generalize an entire race, agenda or nationality is wrong. There are a lot of good police officers who just want to do their job and don’t want to have animosity in the community.” But regardless of whether officers “just want to do their job,” the CSA asks the police department to confront some of the harmful consequences of officers’ actions. A 2014 study by Northeastern University’s Institute on Race and Justice found that people of color in Rhode Island remain more likely to be stopped by the police while driving, and less likely to be found with contraband than white drivers. These findings are consistent with previous studies by the Rhode Island American Civil Liberties Union, all of which point to an increase in disproportionate stops of minorities in the past ten years. Even more disturbingly, that same year, USA Today revealed that the PPD arrests African Americans at 3.7 times the rate of other races. This is a greater racial disparity than that found in cities like Baltimore and Ferguson, which was the subject of a scathing Department of Justice report exposing police practices targeting African Americans. “We believe that in our society we need to have trust in each other,” says 14-year-old Ethan Montañez, a student at Trinity Academy for the Performing Arts who marched at PRONK!. “We need to know that everybody is safe, and no matter where they go, nobody will be intimidated. The Providence police need to stop, think about what they’re doing, and improve.” +++ Providence and Rhode Island have instituted some significant reforms in the past year, beginning with the Comprehensive Community-Police Relationship Act of 2015. Among other policies, the act mandated that police departments across the state publicly document all stops that don’t result in criminal charges; in addition, it allows juveniles to waive police searches without a warrant. Another important change came in September, when the Justice Department granted the PPD a $375,000 fund to outfit 250 officers with body cameras.
With these reforms under its belt, the PPD has been reluctant to adopt the additional restrictions of the CSA. Commissioner of Public Safety Steven M. Paré told The Independent that he thinks “the city is doing enough to eliminate racial discrimination.” However, proponents of the CSA argue that the new state legislation is merely a watered down version of their proposed ordinance and does not do enough to protect vulnerable individuals and communities of color. “Why can’t we as a city go beyond the state law?” Councilman Jackson says. “Just because it’s acceptable doesn’t mean it’s the best it can be. If we can have both groups [STEP-UP and the PPD] come together and look at that state law and find the pieces that are missing and bring everyone together, why can’t we be an example to the rest of the U.S. about community police relations?” Another reason for adding more regulations at the municipal level is that, while policies like the Community-Police Relationship Act exist on paper, it is not clear whether these policies are implemented and enforced. The Providence Police Department has had a historically spotty record of complying with state law. According to the RI ACLU, it took years for the PPD (along with the majority of police departments across the state) to properly put into place the necessary forms for citizens to file complaints against police officers, despite a state law from 2004, the Racial Profiling Prevention Act, mandating these forms be made available through department websites. Further testimony detailing the need for reform at the municipal level came on September 14th, when, in response to months of pressure by STEP-UP and other community groups, the city finally held a public hearing at City Hall to discuss the CSA. The hearing featured over twenty speakers, each strategically chosen by STEP-UP to highlight a certain facet of the CSA. Although the hall filled to standing-room-only capacity, with others crowding onto the the balcony overhead, less than half the City Council was in attendance. One of the youngest speakers of the night, Andy Chao, told of walking home alone this summer, shortly before his sixteenth birthday, when he was stopped and detained by Providence police officers. They told him to empty his pockets and asked him questions like whether he was carrying a weapon. “I was told I was being detained because I was supposedly hustling down the street with my hoodie over my head. I was wearing my ordinary, day-to-day outfit. This is the outfit I wore that night,” Chao said, gesturing to his hoodie. “And I want you to keep that question in your mind—do I look like a criminal to you?” A long silence followed. Then, from behind him, a chorus of loud “No’s” erupted.
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“One officer asked me, ‘which gang did I represent?’” Chao said, shaking his head. “Man, I don’t represent nothing. I said I didn’t. “When that officer finally left, I asked the other officer, did that guy ask what gang I represented simply because I was Cambodian? Surprisingly, this officer nodded yes.” Another speaker, Steven Dy, told of visiting a friend under house arrest when he was 15. As soon as Dy left he says an officer held him against his will and took his photograph, a violation of department policy. He was then told that he was being put in Providence’s “Gang Database.” Dy, now 23, only found out after emailing the commissioner this year that “in this moment” he was not currently in the database. “It felt like we were losing in a war we never even knew we were in,” said Dy, the organizing director of Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), one of the four organizations comprising the STEP-UP Coalition. The gang database is one of the most pressing concerns the CSA attempts to address. In an interview with The Independent, the Public Safety Commissioner said the database “is nothing more than knowledge for us, and doesn’t give any greater weight to our decisions.” Such gang databases are employed by police departments across the country, often obscured from the public eye, and proven to contain serious flaws. In August, California released an audit of its police departments’ gang databases and found them to be rife with errors and unfounded claims. The condition of the Providence gang database remains unclear, because, as Dy and others highlight, there is no public document stating the reasons for adding someone to the database, nor any way of finding out whether you are on it. There isn’t even a clear definition of a gang member. The Public Safety Commissioner told The Independent that anybody interested can come and ask if they are on the list. However, there is no formal policy in place for allowing this, and those placed on the list are not notified. The CSA demands that the PPD publish an annual report on the demographics of the gang list and allow those placed on it to have a formal opportunity to appeal. Hillary Davis, policy associate for the RI ACLU, says that being listed on the gang database makes people more vulnerable to discrimination by the police. If they are charged with a felony, they could potentially face serious consequences under the Gang Enhancement Sentencing Bill, a state law passed in 2014 adding up to 10 years to sentences for gang-related felonies. “This becomes a way of branding someone as engaging in criminal activity,” Davis says. “These youth are under constant scrutiny and no person should be under constant suspicion of being under criminal activity.” +++
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At the heart of the difference between those in favor of the CSA and those against it is the whether or not certain aspects of policing—what the PPD considers its essential “tools” and techniques—are used in ways that perpetuate institutional racism, regardless of officer intention. “The project is to find a way to advance the CSA goals without harming legitimate law enforcement,” Councilman Sam Zurier, who remains on the fence about the CSA, told The Independent. “The goal of the CSA is to prohibit traffic stops made just on the basis of race—that needs to stop. But should it be done to eliminate all [pretextual] traffic stops on a broader basis? What needs to happen is to have the language revised so discrimination ends, but legitimate law enforcement continues.” Others, like Sergeant Mike Fallon of the Fraternal Order of the Police, say that profiling is a legitimate and necessary part of policing. “There’s a huge difference between profiling and racial profiling,” Fallon says. “Racial profiling is racism. When you stop somebody solely because of their color, that’s racism. If I get a description of a Black male running down Whitehall street, and I’m on Whitehall street, and I see a black male running, I’m going to stop that male. Not based on his profile, but on the information given to me. We do it all the time. Everyone profiles. You have to profile.” While it is true that officers are often only given general information about suspects—“Black male, twenties, in jeans and white shirt”—this is the kind of mentality that entrenches the implicit racial biases that have lead to the deaths of Terrance Sterling, Keith L. Scott, Tamir Rice, and the 901 other people of color shot by police in the past two years, according to the Guardian’s police killings database. It’s worth noting, that many instances of racial profiling don’t happen in response to suspected crimes that have been called in, they happen because an officer believes a person of color may be engaged in criminal activity. Take the Christopher Johnson case, for example. On May 18th, Johnson was walking back to his South Providence home after a night out with friends when police officer Matthew Sheridan drove by. Sheridan then made a U-turn and approached Johnson, writing in his subsequent police report that he made “an attempt to check the well-being of the suspect” by asking him “who he was and where he was going.” Johnson, aware he had done nothing wrong and a block away from his home, asked why he was being stopped. Sheridan did not answer and asked again for his name. Johnson then said, citing Rhode Island law, that if there was no reason for stopping him he had no reason to give Sheridan his name. Sheridan then blocked Johnson’s path and grabbed him. Johnson asked if he was being detained and if Sheridan was a public servant. “Why you got to go and do that?” Sheridan responded. He then forced Johnson
into the car and, in his subsequent report, wrote that Johnson had “attempted to overpower” him. “Let me tell you, he has a taser and a gun,” Johnson said. “Why would I do that? I am a law abiding citizen who was walking home and was profiled.” By the end of the night, Johnson, who is a 2016 Rhode Island poet laureate nominee, faced three pending misdemeanors for assault, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. For his part, Sheridan will have to articulate the reasoning behind Johnson’s arrest and why he stopped him in the first place at the time of the trial. If he does, he will likely not face consequences, despite previously facing discipline for a past violent arrest. The police department issued a statement saying they would not be conducting an internal review of Sheridan’s actions because no civil complaint had been filed. Johnson made the decision not to take a plea bargain in court and instead took the case to trial, currently ongoing. “The DA told me ‘Well, you have no reason to talk with a police officer like that’,” Johnson says. “What he is actually saying to me is ‘Black man you should know your place’.” Cases like Johnson’s are exactly the sort of instances that the CSA would seek to minimize by making officers think twice before confronting someone without probable cause. These are exactly the sort of instances that the CSA would seek to minimize by making officers think twice before confronting someone without probable cause. “If police officers have some kind of reason or probable cause [for stopping someone], other than he’s Black, just document it,” says Fred Ordoñez, Executive Director of Direct Action for Rights and Equality. “Obviously, it’s not going to fix the problem but it’s going to force them to take a second and pause. If an officer is stopping people solely based on race and they start having to write it down, it will reduce the blatant racial profiling that is happening.” However, Commissioner Paré looks to instances like these as problems not so much with specific techniques like pretextual stops, but as instances demanding citizen vigilance in reporting alleged police brutality. “If I get stopped and the officer says it’s because the car I’m driving looks similar to one that was stolen, I might feel violated because I think that the police stopped me for other reasons,” Paré says. “Well, laws won’t change that. What will is when people come in and let that department know; say that ‘this doesn’t feel right’, when they come forward and say ‘this is what happened to me’. That’s what’s going to change behavior, when police are scrutinized and reviewed based on what’s happening outside in the streets.” Paré’s statement relies on the “bad apples” theory, a claim long made by law enforcement agencies that obscures the structural problems of policing by suggesting that instances of police brutality or racial prejudice are perpetrated by a handful of rogue officers, the excep-
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tions rather than the rule. The increased data collection could help point this issue of contention, but the consistently disproportional rates of arrest for people of color in Providence strongly suggests the problem extends beyond merely a few bad apples to encompass the whole tree, along with its roots in the prison industrial complex and colorblind ideology. Besides, as Johnson says, “If all police are covering for the bad apples and not speaking up, they’re just as guilty.” The solution of holding police officers accountable primarily through civil complaints ignores how difficult this actually is, given that Rhode Island has the strictest police union laws in the books. The Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights provides significant protection for any officer accused of misconduct by a citizen. Under the Officer’s Bill of Rights, not only is the officer informed of the complaints and the testimony against him in advance, before being questioned, but, if found guilty, the officer can choose one of the three people who decides their punishment. Even if they are suspended, the department must continue to pay their salary and benefits, as well as the cost of the officer’s attorney. Moreover, officers are given the benefit of the doubt through a legal device known as “qualified immunity,” meaning that they can only be found guilty of misconduct if there is an explicit precedent for the unconstitutionality of their act. As the RI ACLU has stressed, the immunity statute can be applied by courts to get police officers off the hook in the face of almost any complaint. Given the safeguards protecting officers from complaints, it is telling that of the 75 citizen complaints filed against an officer in the PPD in 2015, only seven were sustained by the internal review system. Shannah Kurland, the legal director of PrYSM who has worked on several cases against the PPD, suggested that for many citizens, particularly those of lower socioeconomic status, the actual process of filing a complaint can be quite intimidating and resource-draining, meaning most don’t take the steps to do so. According to a US Department of Justice nation wide survey, “although 75 percent of citizens experiencing force
thought the level of force used was excessive,” only 11 percent filed a formal complaint. In Providence, citizens who do must be ready at the time they file to appear and testify. “Most people don’t have the resources to deal with the emotional and psychological violence they encounter” in police brutality cases, said Kurland. “You know the old saying, if you don’t have broken bones, don’t bother? The department’s internal review staff are very professional, very courteous and nice, but they are looking at these issues from the perspective of the police officers.”
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+++ Whether or not the CSA will be passed by the end of the year, or ever, rests largely on the willingness of PPD and the Office of Public Safety to engage in a constructive dialogue with STEP-UP Coalition. Mayor Elorza, who endorsed ten of the twelve CSA measures in his 2014 mayoral campaign, has since toned down his support in response to concerns from the police, though he continues to endorse the broader goals of ending racial discrimination. “Doing good police work...does not have to come at the expense of people feeling unsafe or unsure of whether they can trust the police,” Elorza said at a forum on the CSA in September. “These are questions and issues that are not always answered by one piece of legislation but by a comprehensive approach of the community acting together.” However, members of STEP-UP remain skeptical that the Police Department and the Mayor’s office are willing to take the step of “acting together” with the communities they serve, particularly if that means working closely with activist groups. “The big problem here is institutional,” Ordoñez says. “What these communities need is help and opportunities. Police here operate as part of a punitive system, where we have punishments in lieu of rehabilitative services.” If the past can offer us any insight into how such an attempt at institutional reform will play out, it is not optimistic. Last year, DARE learned that the Open Society Foundation, a grant-making organization, was looking to expand a drug treatment program which had enjoyed tremendous success the past few years in Seattle. After three years, the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program there had shown a 58 percent reduction in recidivism by redirecting low level offenders with mental illnesses and drug abuse issues to special services instead of jail. With $200,000 in grant money on the line, DARE went about gathering the support of all those whose involvement would be needed to make the program successful in Providence, receiving the support of a wide range of organizations and prominent city officials. Ordoñez knew that to receive the grant and implement the program, the support of the Mayor and the police department would be vital. He says that he spoke with Elorza, who initially “loved the opportunity and said they [the Mayor’s office and the police] would fully cooperate.” Soon after, however, the Mayor’s office sent him an email, saying, “we do not feel that DARE would be an appropriate partner to implement the program. As DARE becomes a more collaborative partner with the PPD, we are willing to consider any future requests and
opportunities to work together.”
Ordoñez then learned that the Public Safety Commissioner, citing DARE’s outspoken criticism of the police, refused to offer his support for the program, effectively sabotaging the opportunity. In the past, DARE had managed to successfully work with the PPD on several projects, such as the Community-Police Relations Act. “The reason we could not work collaboratively with DARE is because Fred [Ordoñez] attempted to incite violence and publicly condemned the PPD as racists and brutal,” Paré wrote in an email to The Independent. The PPD may feel that it doesn’t receive enough respect from organizations like DARE and the communities it represents, and thus avoids working with them. But showing a willingness to work together is the very key to establishing better relations with distrustful communities. “You as a police officer don’t automatically get respect, you have to earn respect, you have to show people that you genuinely care about them as human beings,” Councilman Jackson says. “You have to give respect first before you get it in return.” +++ As the PRONK! parade rolled forward down the side the Providence River, a clear sense of hope remained, visible in the coalescence of the hundreds of individuals, all rallying around a cause and a city. The hope was there in the smile of ninth grader Deury Tavarez, marching with his friends from Youth in Action, and it was splattered all over the hand painted “Kids for the CSA” sign 7-year-old Violet Polloch carried above her head. It was in the twirls of the Extraordinary Rendition dance team, the piece of paper saying “Support the CSA” pinned to the back of a white haired drummer, and the dozens of CSA shirts STEP-UP had made in the public library the past week. By the Point Street Bridge, while the marching bands played on into the night, PRONK! participant Jamie Washington reflected on the afternoon’s experience: “I believe in any movement that has a good beat,” said Washington. “If I can dance to it and it brings us joy—look at all these different kinds of people from every walk of life, coming together intentionally, joyfully, seeking to create a positive space where we can completely be who we are and be okay with that and revel in it and encourage each other to be safe.”
JACK BROOK B’19 thinks you should tell your local councilperson why they should support the CSA.
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PLAYING AROUND Olneyville’s Manton Avenue Project transports students to the stage BY
Two sister birds stand on the stage of AS220’s blackbox theater. The elder sister, Redy Red, tells her younger sister, Flicky Flick, the heartbreaking story of their parents’ forbidden love and subsequent disappearance. Their parents had to keep their love secret, “because there was this mean hawk that wanted birds that had the same colors to be together. He did not want birds with different colors to be together,” Redy Red tells her little sister. The two sister birds are costume clad professional adult actors who have volunteered to act in Jordany Jimeniz’s first work, Two Best Sisters. Jordany, now 10 years old and in fourth grade, wrote Two Best Sisters as a third grader, in his first year at the Manton Avenue Project. The Project, founded by Jenny Pete in 2004, offers students from Olneyville’s William D’Abate Elementary free after-school playwriting classes and weekend intensives led by volunteers from the Providence acting community. The final performances, in which the adult volunteers star in plays written exclusively by children, are quirky and often hilarious. In addition to the fun and silly moments within Manton Avenue performances, each play also demonstrates Manton Avenue’s larger goal of empowering students and uniting communities through empathy and education. Each collection of plays relates to a locally inspired and community-oriented theme. Jordany’s play was featured in Manton Avenue’s “This Land is Your Land: the Public Park Plays!” last April. For this program, the Manton Avenue Project partnered with the Roger Williams National memorial and was supported in part by the National Park Foundation. The third-grade playwrights spent class time exploring the importance of public parks in their lives and discussing the ways public parks foster community engagement. Jordany addressed the theme of public parks through the setting of each scene in Two Best Sisters. Scene Two, in which the Redy Red tells Flicky Flick the story of their parents’ disappearance, is set “at home in a tree in the park in the city,” drawing his actors and audience into ever-expanding sense of community that the Manton Avenue Project seeks to promote. +++ The Manton Avenue Project is successful in part because it doesn’t operate in isolation. Numerous partnerships with local organizations have allowed the nonprofit to both grow physically and to better cater its classes to specific issues and themes, such as environmental conservation. Meg Sullivan, the current artistic director and head of the Manton Avenue Project, said that Pete, the organization’s founder, chose to work with the Olneyville community because she recognized the neighborhood’s need for youth arts organizations. Olneyville is “a historically neglected and overlooked area [that was] really hard hit by the foreclosure crisis,” Sullivan said. “The goal is really to level the playing field and offer opportunities to lower-income families. It’s an incredible community of families, so there was a lot of interest and support from the community.” In 2004, Pete began to cultivate the symbiotic partnership between the Manton Avenue Project and Olneyville’s D’Abate Elementary school that exists today. By immediately connecting with both
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Rachel McMahon & Reilly Blum ILLUSTRATION BY Julie Benbasset
the school’s teachers and principal as well as the Olneyville Housing Corporation (now known as ONE Neighborhood Builders), which renovated the Manton Avenue Project’s current space in 2013 and is its current landlord, Pete’s rooted her organization into the heart of the Olneyville community. “We always say that D’Abate elementary school is kind of like the town hall of Olneyville,” Sullivan told the Independent. Sullivan says the Manton Avenue Project has also benefitted from working with other Olneyville organizations through the Olneyville Collaborative. Peter Deffet, an actor who works with the program, said that the project has brought together many of Providence’s actors and artists. “We have a list of 200 people who have been volunteering for a long, long time,” Sullivan agreed. “We’ve worked with over 400 people in the past 10 years. Providence is an incredible community of artists that are willing and want to do this kind of work.” This culture of volunteering has helped to make the Manton Avenue Project an integral part of the Olneyville community. “We all partner with each other and we all support each other,” Sullivan said. “Because [Pete] was able to plug into that network and work with the teachers and principal, who were incredibly supportive, we were able to generate interest.” +++ The Manton Avenue Project’s underlying philosophy is that valuing students’ voices and ideas will help nurture their sense of self-confidence, which will in turn help them succeed in adulthood. “When the kids see their plays done by professional actors, it’s a really empowering thing. We value their plays really highly and we are going to take them really seriously and perform the plays professionally,” Sullivan told the Independent. During both the play writing and performing processes, the Manton Avenue volunteers work closely with their mentees to retain the integrity of the kids’ writing. Each six- to eight-week drama course concludes with a two-day playwriting weekend, when each playwright is matched with a dramaturg who devotes five hours each day to mentoring their partner students through the playwriting process. The mentors ensure the kids follow a specific playwriting format, but don’t edit the plays for grammar or influence plot and dialogue construction. The mentors’ goal is “not to help the playwright come up with the play, but to bring their ideas to the page and translate their ideas and imagination into something that can happen onstage,” according to Sullivan. Manton Avenue’s commitment to valuing the Olneyville community and the diverse voices of its children is further reflected in their eagerness to support Olneyville’s large Spanish-speaking population. Flyers and advertisements for Manton Avenue performances are marketed in both English and Spanish and the playwrights are encouraged to write in either language. +++ Jordany is a strong supporter of the artistic freedom the Manton Avenue Project promotes. “My favorite part of Manton Avenue is writing the plays, because I can write anything I want,” Jordany told the Independent.
“Tell me more,” Flicky Flick asks her older sister Redy Red as she begins to tell the story of their parents’ disappearance. “Well,” says Redy Red, “they waited until they were older, then they said that you can be with the one your heart decides and the one you love. And then the hawk saw them and that’s why they’re in a volcano.” The two sister birds, with the help of their friend Blue Jay, set off on a quest to reunite with their parents. The play’s themes reflect the organization’s emphasis on close community relationships. The program accepts only 10 third and fourth grade students a year in order to allow students to “really grow together as a cohort so there’s that continuity from being a group since third grade together.” The group continues taking classes together through middle school. In order to select each incoming class, Sullivan works closely with the teachers at D’Abate to determine which students will benefit most from playwriting classes and mentorship. “Either they’re incredibly creative and they just need an outlet, or they love to write or they have some tough stuff going on at home and they need some kind of continuity, a safe, fun place to go after school,” Sullivan said. “We have a real family feeling here.” In seeking to further create a close-knit family dynamic, the program invites younger siblings or cousins of current or past Manton Avenue students to join the Manton Avenue family. “A lot of them have grown up seeing their olders sisters or brothers or cousins in plays or seen the plays that they’ve written,” Sullivan said. “There’s a real sense of family connection.” +++ In the final moments of Two Best Sisters, Redy Red, Flicky Flick, and Blue Jay rescue their parents from the Hawk. “So, the family lived happy together, and followed their hearts,” Jordany concludes. Jordany is already busy brainstorming characters and plotlines for the newest theme, bicycles. Currently, Manton Avenue’s fourth- and fifth-grade classes are writing plays which express the ways bicycles empower people and communities. The students, who were each given a bike, helmet, and lock courtesy of the Pawtucket River Watershed Council, will spend a few afternoons riding their new bikes before creating plays, which expand upon and explore their biking experience. “We partnered with the Lunacio-Tucket River Watershed Council, and we’re partnered with Recycle-a-Bike and the Rhode Island Historical Commission,” Sullivan said. “Invitations go out to those organizations, [so the audience will be] a really neat cross section of the city [made up of] family, Olneyville organizations, actors, community activists, and people from Brown.” “This play has to be about bikes. I’m gonna use a turtle and mice, I think,” Jordany said. The turtle and mice will make their debut in Jordany’s bicycle play in early December. The bicycle plays will run from December 1 through 4, Thursday and Friday at 7pm, and Saturday, Sunday at 2pm at AS220’s black box theater. All shows are free and open to the public. RACHEL McMAHON B’19 and REILLY BLUM RISD’20 will be there.
OCTOBER 21, 2016
WHAT I NEED TO TELL YOU / WHAT I NEED YOU TO KNOW BY
Isabelle Doyle
Italicized text is taken from the Obsessive Compulsive Inventory, a self-report questionnaire that is used to measure the presence of and severity of obsessive-compulsive symptoms. The following statements refer to experiences which many people have in their everyday lives. In the column labeled DISTRESS, please circle each statement that describes an experience that has DISTRESSED or BOTHERED you during the past month. You tell me that whenever I feel sad or dirty or like I am a bad person, I should drink a glass of warm milk and pretend I am an inchworm farmer with ten thousand inchworms, each inchworm with its own history, each history a history in which heart palpitations and grime and fat and excess are present, but not dangerous, and nothing kills a person or an inchworm, and nothing makes a person or an inchworm feel like a flabby monster not worth the value of their own weight, and nobody sees a person or an inchworm on the street and looks away, repulsed. You tell me that whenever I feel unclean or like I am a bad person, I should drink a glass of warm milk, and think about that. 1. I go back to places to make sure that I have not harmed anyone. This bird wasn’t born blind. He only has one eye when I find him in a gutter, a milky film over the other. He has open cuts on his back, his bloody feathers dark and matted. I crouch next to the gutter looking into the fog of his eye, and there is rain on my face, and I am crying. The blood on his back. You shout my name. You say, “Don’t play in the rain! I told you that.” You come outside in your sweater and underwear. It’s six in the morning. I’m not supposed to be awake but I can’t help it and I can’t sleep. I don’t sleep a lot. You see the bird and your mouth makes a little round shape. You say, “Oh, Isabelle.” You lean down, put your arms around me, press your lips to my back. Don’t play in the rain! I told you that.
before they go to bed they will think about me and call me and I will hear their low voices through the telephone. They will be calling me from right upstairs because when I am old, I will be rich, and the people I love will all live in the same house, where I can keep track of them, and check on them, and make sure they are all safe, and won’t get upset and leave me, and will keep eating food that I pay for. 5. I feel that I must repeat certain words or phrases in my mind in order to wipe out bad thoughts, feelings or actions. I dream of flowers raining up from the ground. I dream of a man in a space helmet diving through the earth. I dream that I am ten thousand inchworms, each bearing an equal share of stomach pains that start and stop and start and stop. I dream the stars fall down like a fishing net around me. I dream I am buried in an icebox, 10 girls deep.
7. Unpleasant thoughts come into my mind against my will and I cannot get rid of them. Cocoa is sick for a long time. His hair falls out, his cheeks puffy as plums. I can see his skin slipping. 8. I find it difficult to touch an object when I know it has been touched by strangers or certain people.
Three: One day, when I stop expecting it, when I stop being afraid of it, you will be gone from me.
The woman takes notes on a yellow legal pad. She asks me what has “happened” to me. Nothing has “happened” to me.
I know that love is something you can say to somebody. I have always known this. I go into your room every night, stick my curly head through the door, and say, “I love you! Good night!” and you say, “I love you, Isabelle. Good night.” I crawl back into my bed until I know I need to say it again and I go back to your room and say loudly, “I love you, good night!” and hold my breath until you say, “I love you. Good night.” I can breathe, then, and I can go back to bed, until my stomach curls up like a mean cat and I need to go back and tell you I love you again, and hear you say I love you back to me. I need the full thing, not just “love you,” not just “me too.” I need to say I love you to you every night, as many times as I need, and hear you say it back to me every single time. I need to do this until I stop feeling wrong. I need to feel right. 4. I find it difficult to control my thoughts. There is a cat in my stomach and a dog in my house. I am ten years old. The dog in my house is named Cocoa and he is pretty skinny and sleeps in my blue room. My room has striped sheets with zigzags and a big furry beanbag chair. Cocoa is so skinny I can run my finger down his back and feel his vertebrae like his spine is made of popcorn. You tell me my spine is like that, too, but there’s too much flesh covering it to feel it. When I am old I will look like you and be long and sleek and have popcorn beneath my skin, and the people who love me the way I love you and Cocoa will put their fingers on me and touch me, and
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
I have a sticky head. 11. Even when I do something very carefully I feel that it is not quite right. Okay how do you feel right now? Rotten.
12. I have thoughts that I might want to harm myself or others.
9. I get upset at the sight of knives, scissors or other sharp objects in case I lose control with them.
3. I have to do things over and over again until it feels right.
The woman tells me a lot of things about the person I am. She tells me I have a “sticky head.”
Lots of people who love a sick person or animal hate hospitals. I love hospitals. I love their cleanness. I love how safe they are. At home we have to be careful of everything. We have to keep you away from dust. We have to scrub all the time. We have to make sure there is not a single speck of dirt anywhere, nothing that could harm you. You tell me, “We don’t have to do this.” I say, “Yes, we do.” I say, “Germs can make you sick.” You say, “I’m already sick.” I say, “Germs can keep you from getting better.” Because you’re going to get better. That’s one thing that is completely true. That’s something you have to do.
Two: I live in a house with a red door on Vanderlyn Lane.
Every morning I have to wake up and find at least three things that are absolutely true. Pin legs in yellow sheets, my cheeks wrinkled as linen.
Three: One day, when I am not expecting it, when I am not afraid of it, you will be gone from me.
Okay so how do you want to feel? Right.
One: I am ten years old.
2. I check things more often than necessary.
Two: Somebody will like me, and then get to know me, and find out how bad I am, and never like me again.
6. I have thoughts of having hurt someone without knowing it.
You take me to a dim office that smells like almonds and a woman inside it whose eyes are so beady and so blue. I take my towel out of my new fifth-grade backpack and spread it across the chair so I am not touching the almond-smelling chair in the almond-smelling room; I am only touching my own towel, my own shirt, jeans, my own two wool socks in my two blue shoes. The woman gives me a questionnaire to fill out. I write my name at the top, and the letters look like stick insects starving on their journey across a white earth. They look like dark crickets in the snow.
I told you that.
One: Nobody will ever like me.
I put a caterpillar in a cup of water once because I wanted to see if his body would swell all up and then I was going to take him out but when I came back he was dead and I was a caterpillar killer. I wanted to put towels in the cracks beneath my doors and fall asleep under a bell jar like Sylvia Plath. I heard she did something like that. You got so mad when I told you I wanted to do that. You told me to stop making jokes when I wanted to get rid of something about myself. You told me, “You need to start thinking about happy people. You need to stop making jokes about yourself. I told you that.” You need to stop thinking of yourself as a joke. I told you that. I told you that. 10. I need things to be arranged in a particular order. The woman asks me if I am afraid something is going to “happen” to me. Nothing is going to “happen” to me, as long as I keep track of things, as long as I can organize myself in a way that makes sense to me, as long as I can make everything I know into good, whole numbers. There are two good, whole numbers: ten and three. These two numbers are completely safe. I can wrap them around me like a coat. I am ten years old. Yesterday, I was ten years old. Tomorrow, I will be ten years old. In ten years, I will be ten years old.
Your body has ached for a long time. You have been sick for a long time. I have been sick in a different way, but I will be sick for a long time, too. 13. I am upset by unpleasant thoughts that come into my mind against my will. I have a sticky head your sticky voice is stuck inside of. 14. I feel compelled to count while I’m doing things. Three things I am afraid of: One: I am afraid that people are going to think that I did it, that I hurt this bird, but I am also afraid that I did do it, that it was me, that this hurt bird is something I have done. Two: I do terrible things to people I love, and it is going to live inside my body forever. Three: When I finally stop expecting it, when I stop being afraid of it, you will be gone from me. I will do something terrible because I will have neglected to organize myself in a way that ensures the safety of people who love me, and this lack of foresight on my part will hurt you, especially, in some irrevocable way, and everyone will see how bad I am, and you will be gone from me, and you will be gone from me, and it is going to live inside my body forever. 15. I have to review mentally past events, conversations, and actions to make sure that I didn’t do something wrong. I feel like I am the one who is asking questions, but I am also the one who will never know, and I am also the one who is not supposed to know. 16. I am upset by unpleasant thoughts that come into my mind against my will. This is what “gone” is: first, it is three things I know are absolutely true. Then it is my heart opening like a fist. Then it is a foot kicking me between my eyes. 17. I have saved up so many things that they get in the way. I say, “I need you.” You say, “You don’t need me. You just want me around. But you don’t need me.” I am quiet. You say, “You have to say it, Isabelle. You have to tell me you don’t need me, so I know you’re okay.” I say, “I want you around.” You are quiet. I say, “I really, really want you around. I need you around.” Somehow I am crying like I did the day we were crouching in the rain, and I needed you then, too, and I told you that when you wrapped the bird in a blanket and fed him some pumpkin seeds and gave him water, and rubbed my back. I am nineteen years old. I am scared even now. I need you even now. I’m telling you that. I’m telling you that. ISABELLE DOYLE B’19 is going to be an inchworm farmer when she grows up.
Three things I am afraid of:
FEATURES
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SHE SHALL INHAB Isabelle DeBre ILLUSTRATION BY Ivan Rios-Fetchko BY
In Assia Djebar's novel Fantasia, an Algerian woman walks alone through the streets of Paris. She screams. But her cry is one of joy, not of danger. The simple act of strolling freely, observing the city and its inhabitants, is a form of ecstasy for this woman: “Just to put one foot energetically down in front of the other, feeling my hips swinging, sensing my body lightly moving, makes my life seem brighter and the walls, all the walls vanish.” All things being equal, it would be easy to think of this unnamed woman wanderer in the image of the “flâneur.” French poet Charles Baudelaire coined the term in 1863 to describe the peculiar luxury of the street walker observing the city. “The joy of watching is triumphant,” Walter Benjamin later writes of the flâneur in Illuminations. But all things are not equal when it comes to who gets to walk and watch. While walking, Djebar’s woman, the would-be flâneur, notices a French man behind her. “Instinctively I draw back. The lamp-light falls on the tall figure reflected in the glint of the man’s eyes as he stares at me. I lower my gaze.” No longer free to do the watching, the walls close back in around her, along with distorted social conceptions of what it means to be a lone woman wandering the streets: they “could be prostitutes, windows, lesbians or murder victims,” writes Kevin Milburn in his essay, “Following the Flâneur.” “The ‘respectable’ woman could not stroll alone in the city.” In other words, the flâneur could not be female. The term’s masculinity is even written into its Oxford English Dictionary definition: “a man who saunters around observing society.” The streets have always been bound by gender, dominated by men and their gaze. And in the 19th century, when Baudelaire was writing, this gaze was not only gendered but also colonial. As the French encroached on the Arab world, global travel exploded, and with it, the figure of the flâneur as a European man who “objectively” observed foreign societies. His inquisitive stance was also acquisitive—he appropriated people and things for their exoticism. Assia Djebar, like her protagonist, lived in Algeria, where Baudelaire’s French flâneurs were roaming and writing. The women of her prose subvert the male gaze by eavesdropping behind closed doors and inscribing their lives into their landscapes.
her protagonists) lingered alone in cafes surrounded by gentlemen and traipsed along the cobblestones, “detached, independent of the rest of humanity.” French novelist George Sand assumed the masculine privilege of the flâneur by cross-dressing so she could move freely through the streets. In Venice, Elkin encounters an exhibit of French conceptual artist Sophie Calle and delves into her eerie projects that emerge from following strangers home through the city. In New York, her home, she loses her way amid gentrifying neighborhoods and discovers Didion’s reflections on Midtown. In London, Elkin retraces the steps of Virginia Woolf and her famous heroine Mrs. Dalloway, who falls desperately in love with everything she passes on sidewalks and street corners. Woolf felt similarly: in her ground-breaking essay “Street Haunting,” she captures her own deep pleasure of being “a central oyster of perceptiveness,” preoccupied with the world as she experiences it. The courage to wander into “darkness and lamplight” was not without its risks. Woolf describes the danger of relinquishing the solace of one’s home to mingle with “anonymous ramparts,” referring to the stereotypical street dwellers—the prostitutes, beggars, madwomen that Baudelaire also observes. What Elkin does not acknowledge is that the female-ness of the self does not erase the power dynamics between the self and the other. In her essay, Woolf’s privilege is socioeconomic. Baudelaire’s is male. And Elkin’s is Western. Elkin has only one chapter not located in Europe or America—“Inside,” in which she writes about her own experience of Tokyo, neglecting local flâneuse-related texts. Inherent in Elkin’s definition of the flâneuse is an acceptance of Western feminists’ lives and liberations as universal. But journey outside Europe or America, specifically to the Arab world—and into its literature—and one can see that Elkin’s revised literary history excludes women whose public visibility continues to be contested.
+++ I read Elkin’s book when I was living in Amman, Jordan this summer, in a small apartment on the outskirts of a conservative Muslim neighborhood. Security cameras hid in hallways and elevators, ensuring that women returned to their rooms by curfew and did not visit the men’s floors. Free movement felt hindered. But I wanted to encounter the city by foot. Walking freely has always been my way of getting to know unfamiliar places. I grew up in Los Angeles, a city not designed for accidental discoveries. Getting around in L.A. follows a certain rhythm: you think of a place, you look it up, you drive; you look up the way back, you drive home. Growing up, I dreamed of living somewhere else, somewhere flâneur-friendly—a city where aimless walking is like watching television, a way of observing what it means to be human. In Amman, I fancied myself a flâneuse, ready to roam. But Amman is not a walkable city. Its roads zigzag, highways sprawl, traffic streams over steep hills. People avoid walking long distances. Even more challenging to navigate was the complexity of my role as a flâneuse—my whiteness and femaleness produced a fraught privilege that set me apart. During my first week in the city, I went out for a shawarma at night with a new Jordanian friend, who asked me to wait in the car. But I wanted to be outside, to experience the city. Finally, he relented. “But it’s not your place,” he warned. As we walked toward the cafe I understood: Not a single woman
+++ In the Oxford English Dictionary, “flâneuse”—the feminine of flâneur—is defined as a type of lounge chair. Although the flâneur has been canonized and analyzed in all corners of academia, the flâneuse has been dismissed and largely obscured. In her new book, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, published in the UK in August and coming to the US this winter, literary critic Lauren Elkin strives to construct a history of the female wanderer—those women who walk “where they’re not meant to. Where other people (men) walk without eliciting comment.” Elkin devotes each chapter to a different city she has lived in, mixing her memories of wandering with accounts of both fictional flâneuses and real-life artists and writers who haunted the same streets. In Paris, she stumbles into a sense of national belonging, narrating the lives of women writers like Jean Rhys and George Sand. Rhys, born in the West Indies to Welsh/Scottish parents, became an enthusiastic patron of the Left Bank, where she (and many of
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FEATURES
OCTOBER 21, 2016
BIT THE STREETS on the street. Mobs of men, laughing, chatting, and smoking, crowded the patio. I watched the men watch me. I did feel out of place. And I got the message—the space for unchaperoned and uncovered women, for their Dalloway-esque dallying, had limits. “If you were a Jordanian woman, this would be really weird,” he whispered. “But you’re American. So I guess it’s fine.” As a female foreigner, I’d managed to slip into the realm of the flâneuse. Even so, I felt like a trespasser. Elkin isolates the root of the flâneur’s male privilege: invisibility. If being a flâneur depends on observation, how does a flâneuse contend with being the one observed? Women do not slip by unnoticed, in New York or in Amman. In Elkin’s Western-focused analysis, women’s sexual visibility challenges their ability to be flâneuses. But for local women in Jordan, or Arab immigrants in the United States, visibility becomes even laden with not only sexual, but cultural, and even political, implications. Many Arab women home and abroad are not granted the luxury of casual observation. Arab immigrants and refugees must negotiate xenophobia, Islamophobia, and cultural barriers. For many Arab women, the ability to move freely in their cities depends on complex gender-based hierarchies. +++ In the 1980s, with the emergence of global women’s rights movements and the increase of state-sponsored job and educational opportunities, women began to enter the labor force in the Arab world, overcoming patriarchal laws and traditions. No longer were they
confined to the home—they were alone, out in the streets, working, studying, walking. This freedom came at a cost. A 2014 piece in the Nation describes how the rise of women working outside the home in Jordan parallels the rise of street harassment. The streets were once men’s spaces, and women were suddenly appearing in them. Many Jordanian women featured in the piece reported experiencing “lewd catcalls, groping, indecent exposure, men in cars trying to pick up women walking by the side of the road.” At an anti-street harassment rally last spring in the capital, a leader of the grassroots organization ActionAid told the Jordan Times, “It is our right as women to enjoy this city, our city. We should have the right to walk down the streets with safety and with pleasure, without having to experience distress.” +++ Despite these challenges, there are Arab women out walking alone in the streets of their cities. Assia Djebar was one of them. The acclaimed Egyptian/Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela is another. In an interview with The Oxford Journals, Aboulela says that, in Egypt, the hijab offers her an “entirely positive” invisibility, a means of liberation from the male gaze. Abroad, though, veiled women become hypervisible, often perceived as asserting their religion, culture, and womanhood, in threatening ways. Negotiating these tensions, flâneuses are forging an alternative meaning of the term, transcending its patriarchal and colonial associations. Miral al-Tahawy, a writer from a Bedouin village in Egypt who immigrated to Brooklyn, describes how her act of observation is, like Djebar’s, a radical act. In an interview with the New York Times about her 2011 novel, Brooklyn Heights, al-Tahawy says, “The foreigner was the Orientalist. He was there to watch us. The first time for me to live this role was in Brooklyn Heights. I was the foreigner and I watched them. I was the one doing the ethnography and I was the one drawing them.” Her novel Brooklyn Heights tells the story of Hend, a single mother from Egypt who relocates to Brooklyn, where she works at Dunkin’ Donuts but takes up
wandering as her primary occupation. She is always in motion, walking through unfamiliar neighborhoods “with no particular goal in mind,” meeting newly arrived Arabs, Africans, and Russians. More than anything, Hend takes pleasure in her powers of observation. She is not quite invisible—“men flash curious smiles at her.” But she has found a means not only of coping with attention, but of owning a newfound femaleness that enables her to wander: “She exchanged the loose robes that she used to drag behind her in the dust for others that were shorter, tighter, and more flattering to the curves of her body.” Even under the gaze of others, she forges a vantage point from which she can observe her new home. In An Unnecessary Woman, the 2014 novel by Lebanese-American Rabih Alameddine, an introverted widow named Aaliya lives in Beirut and thrives on her solitary city strolls. “Aaliya is a female flâneur—an idle wanderer about town,” says critic Hector Tobar of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He explains that she would have an easier time of it “if it weren’t for the bombs going off periodically.” On her long walks through the city, her musings on literature and philosophy mingle with violent memories of Lebanon’s Civil War: “Every Beiruti of a certain age has learned that on leaving for a walk you should never be too sure of returning home, not only because, as a woman, something might happen to you personally, but also because your home might cease to exist.” There are real landmines in the streets, and emotional ones: the public bus where her husband died, the gardens she visited with her mother before the war, the roof where she once saw a girl jump. And yet Aaliya persists on her journey. Her life as a wanderer speaks to a larger experience of exile—specifically the great Palestinian exodus from Lebanon during the Israeli siege in 1982. “To walk is to know that you are not home,” she says. Filmmaker Ana Lily Amipour creates a subversive incarnation of the Arab flâneuse in her 2014 indie vampire thriller, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The film opens with a televised political figure instructing women to stay inside. But the film’s protagonist ignores the order. She skateboards through the city in a black chador, stalking and fatally biting any men who disrespect women. It’s an aggressive twist to the traditional male/ female dynamic on city streets—the feminine wanderer preying on those she observes. The unifying questions remain: what is the way out for women in the world excluded from public (read: male) street life? How can they move about safely and freely? For Amipour, the answer may call for drastic measures. Outside of the West a new kind of wanderer has been born. If the flâneur is in revival, as The Paris Review claimed in 2013, and the time is ripe for her to enter our mainstream conversation. Gender and cultural identity might compromise her ability to observe. Still, this flâneuse is out there, in works of art and in the flesh, wandering and watching her way from Paris and London to Beirut and Amman. She is in good company—and her movement is growing stronger. ISABEL DeBRE‘18 now thinks too much when she walks.
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
FEATURES
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FROM SCIENCE TO SOCIETY A word with Michelle Nijhuis Eve Zelickson ILLUSTRATION BY Sophie Kidd-Myers BY
Michelle Nijhuis is an award-winning science journalist whose pieces, which have been featured in the New Yorker and National Geographic, offer access to unknown spaces and niche scientific perspectives. Her work unfolds various layers of history, diving into archeological, historic, and literary records to show us how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can inform responses to environmental disasters and how 700-year-old weather documentations by Japanese monks have captured the trajectory of climate change. Tuned into voices of the past and present, Nijhuis never fails to listen to the landscape, painting rich pictures of global change and describing the enormous challenges our environment faces. She has transported readers to the sunny Columbia Gorge to investigate the explosion of a train carrying crude oil, and to the canyons of Yellowstone to examine the changing role of the National Park Service. In a field of writing where it is easy to build a wall, to let jargon and scientific complexity barricade readers, Nijhuis invites us in. This year, Nijhuis published The Science Writers’ Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish and Prosper in the Digital Age, a guidebook for writers of all backgrounds. The book, targeted at both the novice and expert writer, is a tour, reflection, and case for science writing: “no matter who you are, my goal is to help you produce considered, accurate, and compelling essays.” Nijhuis is not the only science writer who, faced with the looming challenges of climate change and its disastrous effects, is taking action to provide resources to future science writers who will continue to document a problem that has no simple solution. The mission of programs and cohorts such as the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, the National Association of Science Writers, and MIT’s Grad Program in science writing is to expand the discipline and increase the amount of science news that reaches the public. As research continues to reveal the dramatic fraying of our ecosystems, science writing, as a field, has worked towards greater accessibility. And Nijhuis’ book is a model example of the field’s efforts to expand its audience. Using accessible language as a point of entry, Nijhuis writes science with feeling and strong presence. From pinpointing the moment when blazing wildfires turned from friend to foe, to tackling heated disputes among conservation biologists over human impact, to debating the effectiveness of international climate negotiations, Nijhuis reports scientists, conservationists, politicians, and most importantly, wildlife’s story of climate change. In her e-mail correspondence with the College Hill Independent, Nijhuis addressed the difficulty of writing about climate change and the qualities of great science journalism.
Michelle Nijuis: Covering climate change is a challenge, but it is becoming easier— for the unfortunate reason that many of us are already experiencing the effects of climate change, or at least experiencing conditions that are very much like the predicted effects of climate change. Droughts, sea-level rise, and intensifying storms are no longer happening in the distant future or faraway places, but right now and often very close to home.
+++
MN: Studying biology as an undergraduate didn’t make me a scientist by any means, but it did make me more alert to all the science and conservation stories that are waiting to be told. It also introduced me to the culture of science, and I think that’s helped me build good relationships with scientists as sources—I understand their language and know something about their daily concerns.
I’ve been writing about climate change since 2003. It’s a fascinating job, one I love. But it’s always been a bit like working the crime beat in a lawless nation: no matter how diligently I or anyone else documents the problem, there are effectively no system-wide mechanisms in place to solve it—and none on the way. —Michelle Nijuis, “Let Us Celebrate the Lack of Total Failure,” published on “Science Blog, The Last Word on Nothing” The College Hill Independent: In one of your pieces in the New Yorker, “Are Conservationists Worried Too Much About Climate Change?” you discuss the challenges of covering climate change as news, writing that its story is “narratively impaired” because the ramifications are often multifaceted, distant, and creeping. What is your approach to addressing climate change?
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The Indy: A Pew Research Center’s survey recently found that a global median of only 54% believe climate change is a very serious problem. There are many examples of this science-to-society gap, even when a plethora of convincing research is available. How do you go about convincing these non-believers who likely have had contact with some of this evidence? MN: For a long time I think scientists, and to some extent journalists, believed that if people only had more accurate information they would change their minds—this is sometimes called the “information-deficit model.” We know now that more information alone isn’t enough—we need to understand where the people in our particular audience are coming from, and we need to speak to their concerns. We [science writers] communicate what we’ve learned as clearly and accurately as possible, and then we move on to a new story, sometimes about the same field but sometimes about something completely different. We’re serial experts, and professional amateurs. —“Let Us Celebrate the Lack of Total Failure” The Indy: You just wrote a book that teaches people how to construct an effective scientific essay. How did you come to realize scientific journalism was your niche? MN: I studied biology in college and really enjoyed it, but I think I always knew I didn’t have the intensity of focus needed to be a successful researcher myself—instead of knowing a lot about a few things, I wanted to know a little about a lot of things! Seriously, I realized I was better at seeing connections and context than I was at delving deep into a single subject, and connections and context are an essential part of science journalism. The Indy: How essential do you think your scientific background has been to your position in the journalistic world and the work that you do?
The Indy: In your new book The Science Writers’ Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish and Prosper in the Digital Age, you describe essays as a journey. What do you believe (if anything) sets the scientist’s journey apart from others?
products of the Enlightenment. Both begin with a question, and both use observation and reflection to draw a conclusion—a conclusion that they know is tentative, and will be questioned and examined by others in turn. The Indy: Your book advocates for using other media platforms like social media to promote one’s work. How do you ensure journalistic and scientific integrity in these untraditional media outlets? MN: For journalists, social media is just another delivery method for our work. While it changes how and when people access and experience the work, it doesn’t—it shouldn’t, at least—change the work in any essential way. Reporters might share quotes on Twitter as they’re putting together a story, but it’s still the same story. As science writers, we can’t just insist that people act more rationally. We have to meet them where they are, which happens to be where we are, too. —The Science Writers’ Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish and Prosper in the Digital Age The Indy: You are currently a freelance journalist. How does this affect what you write or who you write for? MN: As a freelance journalist I can choose who I write for—I’m not obligated to any publication or subject. The intellectual independence is wonderful, but the downside is that I have less access to reporting resources and collaborators than staff writers do. So when I’m interested in a time or travel-intensive story, I have to convince a publication to support me or find grant funding for the project. The Indy: You do a wonderful job weaving current scientific contentions with engaging anecdotes both historic and compositional. When writing on scientific hot topics is it ever difficult to maintain the journalistic and scientific standard of objectivity? MN: Thanks, I’m glad to hear that! I really don’t attempt to be objective, not only because I think it’s impossible but also because it’s undesirable—even if I could write a truly “objective” account, one in which I didn’t exercise any judgment over what to cover or which information to include in the coverage, no one would want to read it. What I do aim for is fair-mindedness—of course I have my own assumptions and opinions, but like other journalists I make every effort to set those aside while reporting a story. I may draw a conclusion in the story itself, but that’s only after I’ve done my best to listen to everyone involved with a truly open mind.
MN: When I was writing my guide to science essays, I realized that the scientist’s journey is very much like the essayist’s journey—which makes sense, because both the scientific method and the essay form are
OCTOBER 21, 2016
A RESTORATION
Joshua Kurtz ILLUSTRATION BY Yuko Okabe BY
The telling of history necessitates a well-functioning set of teeth. The thing about teeth is that they are required to collaborate; the realization of one tooth is contingent upon its neighbors. When my grandmother first learned to mold teeth out of gold, acrylic, and metal, Nicolae Ceausescu was president of Romania. When he was executed, by firing squad, in 1989, a chord of laughter must have echoed through the streets of Bucharest, though my grandmother had already fled. It is a miracle of craving.
instructing, “Don’t play with anything sharp.” Embedded in this directive is her deeply held conviction that teeth are the most essential mechanisms for living—thus, their shape, the integrity of their curvature, must be protected. I wonder, though, why the emphasis is on dullness, on avoiding or, perhaps more accurately, sanding down that which is sharp—that which pierces us. My grandmother has lived a piercing life. And I understand her desire for her children and grandchildren to build fences—to experience and construct narratives marked by continuity and calm. Nonetheless, I often question whether she is aware of the profound privilege of such a life.
+++ My grandmother called today to warn me of the perils of hiking. In Denver, the cityscape has an almost yearning quality to it. The Rocky Mountains, to the west, are visible from nearly every elevated point in the city. Thus, each body moving east is framed by the suggestion of wilderness, and inherent in this portrait, some would argue, is a dichotomy between the human and the wild, though such a distinction seems counterintuitive. Or, does this portrait—of a human being removed from but entrenched in a landscape—recall the estrangement characteristic of memory, the capacity of an emigrant to so entirely cast off a homeland that it evolves into a permanent backdrop, a light fixture hanging from the ceiling that cannot be torn off without the roof cascading with it? Dental health requires a sort of rootedness—a continual maintenance of those structures and forms that hold the tooth in place—the gum, the nerve, the root itself. My dentist asks me questions while my mouth is full. I mumble to the best of my ability, compelled to rely on the rest of my body—the slight nod of my head, my hands, my eyelashes—to communicate and, thus, compelled to interrogate the roots of communication itself. What voices emerge in the excavation of a root? Unlike Denver, New York City exudes a restlessness that shapes its residents similar to how rocks are worn smooth by water. Walking through midtown, I’m overwhelmed by the abstraction of faces into a crowd. When my younger cousin is especially restless, his grinds his back teeth, a sort of symbolic effort to eradicate the abstraction of a mouth—to ground himself in the almost mineral clamor of molars against molars. Flying over the NYC skyline toward a circuit of factories and sports arenas, I reflect on the sheer number of machines that were required to move my body to this place: several computers, a bus, a car, a TSA body scanner, a plane, not to mention the component parts of each contraption—the motors and gears and hands that assemble them. In 1965, my grandmother, her husband, and two children arrived in a NYC deeply entrenched in such spectacles. Referring to scaffolding, fire escapes, exposed brick, my grandmother exclaims, They haven’t finished building the city yet! And the cab drives silently into a night, whose clichés are many, but whose windowless rooms and light-stained sidewalks are anything but human. +++ “Your teeth are your best friends” is a familiar cliché. My grandmother concludes conversations by
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
Nana, narrate to child: 1) When your mother was little, her grandmother kept turkeys in the backyard. 2) When your mother was small, her grandmother grew her own cherries. 3) When your mother was tiny, her grandmother brewed her own cherry liquor. 4) When the liquor was bottled, she threw the cherry pits into the backyard. Can you guess what happened then? The turkeys were drunk. I am straddling a line between nostalgia and fantasy—a history that is not mine to claim, but has been given to me like an archive—dusty, demanding respect. There’s an intersection between hiking and history, I imagine: both inspire, or necessitate awe, yet both demand a sort of subservience—the recognition that neither a mountain, nor a memory, will save you. I have resisted purchasing winter boots for almost a decade now, and this has been a perpetual source of anxiety for my grandmother. +++ A couple years after her arrival in the Bronx, my grandmother moved into an apartment that, today, appears to be mourning the ’70s. The couches, offwhite, are protected against stain by layers of thick blanket. The coffee table, marble, is fashionably stumpy, which renders it useless as a footrest or art-book display. The lamps are a bit too geometric, the artwork—predominately Kandinsky and Chagall—is too chaotic, colorful. Under what condition does an object evolve into an artifact? When has a life outlived its context? When the abstract expressionist Clyfford Still died, he bequeathed the majority of his work to his wife, Patricia, with the strict instruction that his paintings were to be given to “an American city that will agree to build or assign and maintain permanent quarters exclusively for these works of art.” Though his paintings are notoriously “non-figurative,” when I visited the Still museum in Denver, I could not help noticing the figure of a woman in one particularly abstract painting. The woman looked oddly familiar, though I assume I was projecting, similar to the way a forest, when navigated, is not merely a cluster of trees but a visceral landscape, where a cast of anthropomorphized passions interact with each other as in a devised play. I have never known how to vocalize experiences such as these, what echoes to chart in the mouth of a museum. +++
I bet that, if painted in earth tones, a row of teeth would resemble a landscape. A successful dental technician must learn to handle a variety of materials—must learn to treat porcelain different than gold, ceramic different than plastic. Though they all require care, stewardship. I’ve seen my grandmother laugh on several occasions, such as while she was reading a Billy Crystal memoir. Often, when I ask her how she’s feeling, she replies, “Well, you know what they say. Either you die young, or you grow old.” It’s funny how you can trace the teleology of an emotional state through one phrase, repeated. There’s generally no defeat in her voice, though I can’t always tell over the thick Romanian accent. +++ I am uncertain whether my grandmother was ever interested in teeth, or whether my grandfather had merely needed help at the factory. “Teeth are among the most distinctive (and long-lasting) features of mammal species” (ScienceDaily). Humans, like other mammals, develop two sets of teeth over their lifetimes. When a tooth has been damaged or destroyed, restoration of the missing structure can be accomplished through various methods: a dental technician casts a restoration—perhaps molded from porcelain (in the dining room, my grandmother has rows of porcelain sculptures that were once, or may once be, teeth)—using the lost-wax casting technique, which is the process by which a duplicate metal sculpture is formed from an original. The oldest known instance of this practice comes from the Cave of the Treasure in Israel, dating back to the 4th or 5th millennium BCE. +++ What is the association, if there is one, between casting a tooth and telling a story? Our diction, so often, prevents us from navigating the divine. We experience wonder—in a canyon or city or human being—and fail so deeply to represent such a moment in words. In essence, all oral communication is the tongue’s attempt to navigate the mouth, to probe its nooks, its weaknesses. Perhaps this is why our institutions, our churches and governments, have historically tried so hard to concretize ideology, and why, in the same vain, artists have and continue to struggle with representation. Perhaps persecution, of all sorts, can be viewed in this light—as a response to the failure of our language, a desperate and final attempt to embody ideology into practice, to impose one’s experience of the world onto another, a wrestling for and against difference. My grandmother fled Romania because of such a system, one that attempted to police the processes by which human beings project meaning onto their world. To romanticize her profession would be to claim that the act of molding teeth is an act of storytelling, of giving speech. With language, of course, comes responsibility. I believe that she and my grandfather carved teeth because that is what was needed, what was practical, and I like to think that this activity, when performed for decades, can make a person more attentive, more willing to observe and to absorb. JOSHUA KURTZ B’17 flosses every night.
METABOLICS
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PUTTING THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE Colombia's would-be peace deal Nicolas Montaño ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz BY
On September 26, media attention shifted to the city of Cartagena on Colombia’s Atlantic coast. There, 15 heads of state, along with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, converged to witness the signing of a historic peace deal between the Colombian government and the Marxist guerilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known commonly by their Spanish acronym FARC), effectively ending 52 years of war. Every participant was dressed in white and both parties signed the accords with pens made from bullet casings. Many international news sources declared that the Western Hemisphere’s last war was over, and marked the event as the end of Latin America’s Cold War insurgencies. All that was needed for the accords to take effect and become legally binding was popular approval in a plebiscite, something that Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos had personally insisted upon since the peace process was made public four years ago. Because President Santos had dedicated the vast majority of his two terms in office to garnering domestic and international support for the peace deal, gaining the backing of most of Colombia’s political parties as well as the US, the EU, and the UN, many considered the plebiscite to be a formality. This belief was reinforced with opinion polls signaling that the deal would be approved with almost 75% of the population voting in favor. President Santos even stated that, should the deal be nixed, there was no plan B. On the rainy Sunday morning of October 2, Colombians headed out to vote. They were confronted with a prompt that read, “Do you support the final accord for the cessation of the conflict and the construction of a stable and lasting peace?” Politicians made speeches at polling stations. The first lady even got a dove tattooed preemptively on her wrist. In Havana, where members of the FARC’s ruling body were awaiting results, celebratory drinks and cigars were ordered in anticipation of a ‘yes’ landslide. And yet, in what has been likened many times to a Latin American ‘Brexit,’ when the results came in in the early evening, the seemingly unthinkable happened. With a majority of 50.22% (meaning that the margin of victory was less than 54,000 votes), Colombians had rejected the deal. With the ‘no’ side’s victory, the accords, which had taken six years of constant negotiation to be finalized, legally no longer existed. +++ To an international audience, it may seem difficult to understand why, after more than a half-century of civil war, Colombians would decide to vote against a peace deal. While many abroad painted the accords and their acceptance as a straightforward choice between peace and war, domestically, things were never so black and white. First of all, the FARC’s unpopularity was a major factor in helping do the deal in. With an approval rating of 10%, the Marxist group—despite self-branding as “the people’s army”—is loathed by large swaths of the population because of its violent tactics. The group, which sought to finance its insurrection via drug trafficking, illegal mining, extortion, and kidnapping, has left deep scars in Colombia’s collective consciousness. Many of those who fell into the FARC’s hands over
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the course of the war were forcibly disappeared, and even those that managed to be ransomed out or rescued by the army were often subjected to decades-long imprisonment in the Amazon. Many former FARC combatants also came forward throughout the process to describe abuses they endured as members of the insurgency’s rank and file. They described practices such as the recruitment of child soldiers and a pervasive culture of sexual violence against female fighters. This, coupled with the guerilla’s reluctance to apologize for its human rights abuses, made the peace talks an easy target for the ‘no’ campaign. Similarly, the group, which has financed itself via cocaine production and has estimated revenues of 100 million USD a year, was adamant throughout the vast majority of the process that they had no money. The FARC maintained that they would not contribute any reparations to victims of the five-decades-long conflict—causing massive indignation amongst the Colombian population. For many citizens, the thought that members of the FARC would soon be able to hold elected offices, be amnestied for certain crimes, and be guaranteed political representation in congress—all of which were key points in the accord—was too much to handle. President Santos, whose approval rating fell to 21% this May, also hurt the deal through his involvement. He was criticized throughout the process by many undecided voters and victims of the conflict for alienating those with reservations about the talks, and for framing the political discourse in an ‘us versus them’ rhetoric that labeled opponents to the peace deal as ‘warmongers.’ In a speech he gave to the Colombian Liberal Party earlier this year, the President stated about his opponents, “There are those who cannot stand this advancement, those who are desperate because their oxygen, which is fear, which is war, is running out.” Assuming that the Colombian people would accept any peace deal, the administration made little effort to explain the reasoning behind different points of the accord, especially more sensitive ones—such as the establishment of special judicial processes that amnestied certain ‘political’ crimes for members of the FARC, or the payment of a base salary to demobilized guerrilla fighters (meant to prevent their return to illicit activities). Instead, Santos simply stated that the Colombian public would just have to swallow these bitter pills in order to convince the FARC to hand in their weapons. He gained notoriety for stating several times that peace required “swallowing very large toads,” a Spanish expression akin to ‘biting the bullet.’ The prominent former President and current Senator Alvaro Uribe, a vocal critic of the peace talks, also helped to sway public opinion. Uribe has become an advocate for a military solution to the conflict, broke with Santos (who was his defense minister and protegé), and became his main political rival over the peace process. Governing from 2002 until 2010, Uribe is a tremendously polarizing figure in Colombia. He oversaw the implementation of the US-funded Plan Colombia, which served as a military offensive against the FARC when they were on the verge of toppling the Colombian state after they launched an aggressive offensive campaign in the late 1990s and early 2000s. His two terms were marked by many successful campaigns against armed
groups in the country and a reduction in the levels of kidnappings and homicides nationwide. As such, he left office with a comfortable 80% approval rating, and earned the adoration of residents of many in Colombia’s once-besieged urban centers. However, his time in office was also marked by accusations of human rights abuses, including the “false-positives” scandal in which civilians were killed by the army and reported as FARC members in order to receive monetary compensation. He was also accused of numerous accounts of wiretapping and of having ties with right-wing paramilitary groups—leading to his vilification by the Colombian left. Over the summer, Uribe mobilized his large support base and his political party, the Centro Democratico, in successful opposition to the accords. By labeling the accords as a deal that offered impunity for crimes while ignoring victims of the conflict, and focusing on the widespread discontent with the Santos administration, Uribe was able to tap into a large voter pool of those dissatisfied with Colombia’s current state of affairs. +++ After the vote, the political climate in Colombia shifted immediately, with the government suddenly finding itself much weaker. All sides were tense and uncertain as to how the rest of the night would play out because, as Santos had warned, there was no contingency plan in the event that the referendum be rejected. Uribe, who had steadily been losing support politically, was staking his legacy on the results of this referendum. Many of his critics hoped that the passage of the deal would render him irrelevant and firmly place his government in the realm of the past. However, with the vote swaying his way, Uribe emerged once again as the man of the hour and his political party alone claimed electoral victory. The results seemed to surprise even him, as he had left Bogotá after casting his ballot and retired to his ranch in the Antioquia region in anticipation of the results. Santos, on the other hand, was dealt a crippling blow. Many speculated that he would step down as the executive by the end of the evening, as he had insinuated in a BBC interview last year that a defeat in the plebiscite would seriously compromise his ability to govern. The FARC had yet to comment on their electoral loss, and as there was previously little doubt as to the referendum outcome, there was much speculation as to what their next move would be. After some time, President Santos addressed the nation in a speech that lasted little more than four minutes, conceding defeat, ensuring his continuation as commander in chief, inviting Uribe and his supporters to a dialogue with the government, and maintaining the bilateral ceasefire with the insurgent group. The FARC, on their part, reiterated their commitment to “use words as their only weapons.” As more detailed breakdowns of the results came through, it became evident how close the vote actually was. Domestic and international media outlets (such as the New York Times) blamed Hurricane Matthew for preventing voters from casting their ballots on the coast of the country, which was projected to vote overwhelmingly for the ‘yes’ option. Geographical discrepancies were also evident, with central provinces voting against the deal, while almost all of the border departments, which had seen
OCTOBER 21 , 2016
higher levels of active combat in recent years, had voted in favor of it. Most notably, however, there was an overwhelming amount of voter absenteeism. In what both sides described as one of the most important votes in the nation’s history, little more than one third of the eligible population actually showed up to make their voices heard. While this level is normal for presidential and congressional elections in Colombia, which has had historically low voter turnout, election-watchers were expecting more people to head to the polls due to the importance of the event. César Valderrama, the director of Datexo (a polling agency that predicted a wide margin of victory of the ‘yes’ side), speculated that many who were for the accords, so assured of their electoral victory, were less pressured to get to the polls than their ‘no’ counterparts. +++ In Colombia now, little is certain. Uribe and his party must come up with propositions on how to make the accords more palatable to the Colombian people. Uribe will likely seek to increase the penalties to FARC leaders and insist they serve jail time, cut down on the benefits given to demobilized FARC fighters, and remove gender-inclusive language in the peace deal as a nod to evangelical communities that backed the ‘no’ campaign. Meanwhile, the FARC, which had already begun to concentrate in certain zones in preparation for demobilization, has stated that it has no intention of renegotiating. President Santos, severely weakened, has extended the bilateral ceasefire until December 31 of this year, and reiterated his commitment to working with all Colombians in order to salvage the peace deal. Meanwhile, there have been numerous demonstrations and marches—from both opponents and supporters—pushing all parties to produce a workable deal. Those who voted ‘no’ have repeatedly stated that they too want peace, but through a peace deal that is harsher to the FARC. Even Uribe has reiterated his will to work with the government and make changes to the existing accords, instead of
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
scrapping the entirety of the document. Less than a week after voters rejected the peace deal, President Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as a show of solidarity from the international community for his efforts to continue the negotiations. Many international groups were hoping that the prestige of the prize would help move the talks from their impasse. Similarly, the fact that it was given exclusively to the president, and not shared with the FARC as was expected, was seen as a concession to those who wanted to see the FARC punished, and were skeptical of its role in future Colombian politics. With the plebiscite having been held only weeks ago, and the political situation still very nebulous, there will inevitably be more developments regarding the peace accords and the FARC. With millions in loans from the international community, and the possibility of re-starting a bitter civil war, there is a lot at stake. NICOLAS MONTAÑO B’17 asks that you please not spell it Columbia.
NEWS
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MO ST S U I TA BLE CA
A complicated love letter to Hillary Clinton's pantsu BY
Kelton Ellis Nicole Cochary
ILLUSTRATION BY
“Fashion! Turn to the left./Fashion! Turn to the right.” -David Bowie, “Fashion” (1980) Fashion matters. Though it’s tempting to think of style as a financial and decorative indulgence, a person’s mode of dress is connected to their priorities and identities, which aren’t so superficial. Often this phenomenon is intentional. An athletic logo on a cap is a way to represent one’s local heritage; a simple skirt can be deployed to queer the binary notions of gender that are loudly reinforced by “Men’s” and “Women’s” sections at every shopping mall in America; some secondhand shopping might be read as a commentary against the continuous generation of novelty that gets privileged over gratefulness for what material objects we already possess. And clothing has a bizarre power to imprint assumptions on others. Though the process is problematic, though it’s imperfect, we all engage in it every day—making unstated judgments about class, race, gender, or ideology based on what someone’s wearing, or broadcasting our own inner selves via graphic t-shirts and sloganeering tote bags. Sometimes fashion choices aren’t merely unexpected color pairings; sometimes they constitute statements about a host of important issues, forming an aesthetic parallel to the abstractions of beliefs and personalities. Politicians know this well, as a rarefied class of individuals whose job description involves transmitting miniature versions of themselves to your television screen on a daily basis. Image consultants and stylists are now a standard, if unspoken, part of most major presidential campaigns. Ever since the first televised presidential debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy on September 24, 1960, appearance has been crucial to garnering the nation’s vote. Nixon, riding off of two terms as Vice President for the popular Dwight Eisenhower, had boasted better poll numbers than Kennedy before their debate. Listeners who tuned in with radio sets thought Nixon had prevailed, but America’s nascent community of television viewers thought Kennedy won. Nixon, who’d had a recent illness, looked like a mess: sweat beading, stubble sprouting. And would you look at that suit! Nothing conveys stuffiness quite like Nixon’s boxy three-button jacket when contrasted with the rakish, low-slung “V” of the two-button gracing Jack Kennedy’s chest. Liette Gidlow, a professor of history at Wayne State University, adds that Nixon’s choice of a gray suit “blended with the television backdrop,” which only diminished him further as he debated Kennedy on TV sets across the country. Kennedy overtook Nixon in the polls after that debate and won the election. Though it’s impossible to draw a direct causal line, it’s clear that Nixon’s suit wasn’t helping him navigate a crucial turning point. Campaigning in the age of easy visual communications, then, has rendered everything a candidate wears more calculated. A seemingly nonchalant affectation like a shirt has become studied and intentional. Think of Mitt Romney’s last presidential gambit. Romney, stilted as he was, frequently appeared at campaign rallies in baggy, medium-blue jeans and a tucked-in Oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, as if his clothing could communicate to voters: I’m professional and neat, but disregard my millions; I’m comfortably casual just like you, working middle class of America! As a white man, Romney could attire himself informally with nary a critical comment. Other candidates don’t have the privilege of freely toggling between formal and relaxed—especially not female politicians. +++
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This year, Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton as the first female presidential candidate for a major American political party. It’s a milestone— albeit a long overdue one—for a party that touts itself as the vanguard of progress and equality, a role it’s gotten especially comfortable inhabiting since it nominated the US’ first Black president eight distant years ago. Much like Obama, Clinton has faced disproportionate scrutiny on account of her identity, whether her detractors admit it or not. Some of this criticism is warranted: the American people deserve to know whether Clinton was being furtive with her emails or in the speeches she delivered to bankers. They deserve to know whether she’s truly shifted away from racist criminal justice protocols she advocated in the 1990s, which continue to inflict damage on America’s communities of color. Clinton, however, doesn’t deserve all the gendered personal attacks she’s endured. Like many women, Clinton is ceaselessly tied to her husband’s actions as if her own vast and diverse career in public service didn’t exist. Like many women, Clinton isn’t free to be expressive lest she appear too emotional to hold office, but if she seems detached, raging misogynists like Donald Trump will publicly insist that she smile more. And like many women who live under the gaze of the media’s public eye, Clinton’s appearance is critiqued and re-critiqued. Thus the pantsuit. +++ In her feature “The Revolutionary History of the Pantsuit,” Vice contributor Erica Euse charts the origins of women’s suiting, how a few progressive designers used fashion to express their belief in women’s equality and liberation. Coco Chanel was the first of these pioneers. In 1923, she drafted a design for a menswear-inspired suit that combined a wool jacket and knee-length skirt for women who wanted to enter the corporate workforce and gain some degree of financial independence. Marcel Rochas pressed further in 1932, when he introduced a women’s suit for which trousers were the bottom piece. Other designers continued to experiment with pantsuits over the next decade, and iconic actresses like Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn prompted scandal for wearing their slacks as they pleased. By the time Yves Saint-Laurent inaugurated a women’s tuxedo he named “Le Smoking Suit” in 1966, the sight of a woman in pants was still radical enough to provoke controversy. It took until 1972, just over 40 years ago, for the US government to mandate that schools allow female students to wear pants. That was the year before Hillary Clinton’s graduation from Yale Law School. Controversies about pantsuits continued deep into the unabashed corporatism of the 1980s, as sharp suiting became the decade’s main method of office power dressing. Pantsuits are ubiquitous wardrobe pieces for today’s female politicians. But they weren’t allowed to wear them on the Senate floor until 1993, when Sen. Barbara Mikulski sported trousers to a session of Congress in protest of that little-known procedural rule. How far removed are we, really, from an age when a woman in a suit was necessarily intimidating and scandalous?
Merkel sport pantsuits out of an “uneasy compromise” between gender and power, which results in a style paradox. A pantsuit, Garber writes, has become a way to make a statement for women’s equality by making no statement at all, so as to preclude any of the fashion debates that unfairly plague female politicians. No one talks about the men’s clothing because it’s usually variations on the same baggy, dark suits around Washington. Garber’s analysis is especially fitting for Merkel, who tends to wear conservative black and navy suits that belie her governing principles. The same doesn’t hold true for Clinton. Though she opted for dark pantsuits at the Democratic Primary debates, much of her pantsuit arsenal is colorful and unique. And it’s presidential. That Clinton publicly identifies herself, in part, by her pantsuits is some indication that she doesn’t mind people talking about her fashion; in fact, she relishes that attention, finds humor in it. Hillary Clinton isn’t the first powerful woman to make the pantsuit her uniform, but she is the first to wear it with such publicly personal flair and variability. Clinton has pantsuits in numerous shades of blue: periwinkle, powder, navy, turquoise. Not to mention the fuschia, the forest green, the golden metallic sheen. The white she wore head-to-toe as she accepted her nomination at the Democratic National Convention radiated. Her red suit at her first presidential debate with Donald Trump looked intense, confident, and natural all at once. She wears pantsuits in a veritable panoply of silhouettes: her jackets might be the usual waist length or longer, they might have an upward-pointing or shawl or classic collar
+++ “Pantsuit aficionado,” reads her Twitter bio, alongside a slew of gendered descriptors: “wife, mom, grandma, women+kids advocate, FLOTUS, hair icon.” The Atlantic’s Megan Garber wrote in August that female politicians like Clinton and Angela
OCTOBER 21, 2016
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uits
with lapels, or no collar at all. My personal favorite is an astonishing ensemble in black leather that she wore to a private fundraiser in New York this April. Just for that, I could submit that Hillary Clinton is the most fashion-forward presidential candidate in recent American history. Garber’s suggestion that Clinton’s pantsuits are non-statements seems unfair in light of their sheer glamour. Rather, the statement they make comes from her manipulation of what began as a drab menswear-inspired garment to her own multichromatic ends; she’s taken on the businesslike conformity of the pantsuit format, yes, but she wears it boldly. A collection of padded charcoal pantsuits, for instance, would read more like an attempt to work alongside the men in Washington without distinction. Her pantsuits have a quiet, under-acknowledged ambition about them—a description that I’d argue equally applies to Clinton’s career. In their own way, Clinton’s pantsuits say a lot about her, which can’t be a mistake, given that she’s one of the most scrutinized statespeople in modern politics. She has been the subject of global media for well over two decades now, and she’s a woman, so she doubtlessly knows people are researching and ogling at what she wears. On a state trip to Kyrgyzstan in 2010, Clinton advised a female lawyer: “it’s rare for someone to say, ‘Oh, look what he is wearing.’ But if…any young woman walks into a courtroom, people are going to notice. And that will be an additional requirement that you have to meet.” That requirement is totally sexist, but Clinton works with it anyway. Though a seeming contradiction lies at the heart of this framing—how can one criticize an unjust fixation on women’s appearance
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
while fixating on it?—that’s the sort of position Clinton operates within. Clinton’s style-maneuvers reflect a phrase writer Minh-Ha Pham wrote in a 2011 piece for Ms.: “If feminists ignore fashion, we are ceding our power to influence it.” Often, Clinton’s hair and clothing unfortunately supersede her policy discourse, but she finds it more productive to work that dynamic to her advantage. For one, note that Clinton prefers uber-American designers like Ralph Lauren, whose suiting she’s worn at two debates so far, as if to literally wear the nationalism required of political candidates upon her jacket sleeve. Lauren’s catalogs are known for preppy, 20th-century Ivy-League staples like prohibitively expensive polo shirts. It’s grandly ironic that Clinton wears Lauren’s pantsuits while pandering to middle- and working-class voters. These looks convey an iconic brand of Americana that’s out of reach for average Americans; note as well that she wore red at the first debate, blue at the second, and white at the final one this past Wednesday. To add to these sartorial displays of wealth, she’ll occasionally wear a high-powered European fashion house; she donned an Armani tweed jacket ($12,495, says the New York Post) as she declared victory over Bernie Sanders in New York’s Democratic primary. That jacket garnered much criticism, as did the revelation that she spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on her campaign uniform. Wardrobe pieces like these demonstrate a central problem that Clinton has never resolved: as a Democratic politician, Clinton is supposed to be at least somewhat anti-elite in her rhetoric, yet she’s elite enough to outfit herself in haute couture from the world’s best-known designers. Yet, as Rachel Lubitz writes for Mic. com, female politicians get more flak than their male
counterparts for spending too much on clothes. Where’s the widespread critique of Donald Trump’s own luxurious Brioni suits, which, mind you, still fit him poorly? He too begs for the working-class vote as he thrives in one-percenter privilege. That this election cycle, or any for that matter, has focused so much energy on appearance is admittedly bizarre. To devote any time to style seems a distraction from the pressing policy issues of a highstakes campaign. It prompts a head-shake, for example, that Ken Bone became famous primarily for the red sweater he wore as he asked a question about climate change, one of the most important concerns of our time. But politicians are well aware of our aestheticization of politics, and they work hard, spend wildly, to appeal to that baser instinct of we, the voters. If only to deconstruct the weird necessity of image-making, there’s value in analyzing how they use fashion as a persuasive tool. Particularly as Hillary Clinton faces Donald Trump, the most misogynistic presidential candidate in recent memory, eyes are on her as the woman who’ll combat his sexism at the polls. This week, fashion magazine Vogue made its first presidential endorsement ever for Clinton, collating fashion sense and politics in its pages. It wasn’t just for her policies. Her pantsuits are suits of armor, at once projecting ‘presidentiality’ and style; they reflect the problematic contradictions of a rich elite campaigning on a platform of egalitarianism; and they attempt to make good on the original promise of pantsuits—that a woman can be, can look, as qualified as anyone else to serve. KELTON ELLIS B’18 is more of a Bernie guy, but really wants a tailored leather suit now.
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SPLINTERS FROM A WOODEN LOOM Anna Hundert ILLUSTRATION BY Pia Mileaf-Patel BY
so unspool or gather, coil or recoil
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LITERARY
a. the sounds of words, the meanings of words / the need for repetition, the importance of structured spaces, and the / house as entity, its construction, its ritual destruction / imagining Christ in this way / deposit in ancient Iberian dwellings is that of human neonates; one / space was elevated into the ritual sphere, with loom materials
and inhabit but never un-habit always borne
b. new forms include rounded angles, rectilinear walls, and walls plastered with lime / the courtyard, a liminal space where the outdoors is brought within the walls of / the ‘otherness’ of foreign objects / of both claymaking style and decoration / suggests that God must be entirely alienated from / the Etruscan amphorae in the area were often used for storing cremated remains instead of wine / layers of imitation
born or dwell, thimble over thumb
c. instilled with domesticity or / loom weights, spools, and spindle-whorls / intersections of kinship / translated from a temple / hand-modeled urns with covers / in which domestic consumption underpins ritual / “came as a witness to testify to the light” / of how the peristyle structure brings an outdoor space into the private sphere / hearth, and feminine fertility)
OCTOBER 21, 2016
LIST 10/21 – 27 22
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22 – 23
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MESH 16 Art & Performance Celebration @ Granoff Center, Brown University (5-10pm)
March & Rally to Support Harvard Dining Hall Workers on Strike @ Cambridge Commons Park (3-6pm)
52nd Head of the Charles Regatta @ Cambridge, MA (8am-5pm)
Runway for Mom Boston 2016 @ Lombardo’s, Boston (710pm)
An evening with Brown & RISD’s craziest & cutest creative MINDS. Come for the wine stay for the fine [art].
After four months of harrowing contract negotiations, Harvard’s Food Service workers have been striking for the past two weeks demanding higher wages and the right to maintain their current health care plan.
Within striking distance of the march & rally... a good opportunity to think about class in America.
mom jeans, mom blouses, mom shoes, etc. tres chic.
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Global Initiative Presents: EAT the WORLD 2016 @ Benefit Street, Providence (2:30-5:30)
Food in RI: A Panel for Students @ Social Enterprise Greenhouse (5:30-7:30)
A gathering of all the world’s foods:
A panel discussion featuring a diverse assortment of people who spend a lot of time thinking about food and sustainability in the Ocean State.
Commissary Kitchen: My Infamous Prison Cookbook @ Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, Cambridge MA (4-6pm)
Patriots Cheerleader and Mascot Appearance @ Papa Gino’s in East Providence (57pm)
Dim sum pizza rice Curry haggis hotdog ham Vegan Schnitzel pie
Although… you know what’s fun than a panel discussion: Mobb Deep’s Prodigy wrote a cookbook. “While we was gone for a moment, y’all kept the crowd goin now / Move over bacon, time for somthin meatier.”
Lists recommends the Cinnamon Swirl Pizza.
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Pet CPR and First Aid Certification class @ Five Rings Pet Resort, Hanson MA (6:30-9:30pm)
Meet the Doulas Night @ Cranston Public Library (6:30pm)
The People’s Fight for Water, Power & Light! @ 1 Empire St. Providence (6-8pm)
The Dickies @ The Cafe at Parlor Newport (8pm)
You gonna let fido croak because you don’t know how to pump little puppy air into her little puppy lungs???
This event is hosted by Doulas of RI, and hopes to raise awareness about the amazing work that doulas do. Go if you’re interested in becoming a doula, or creating life.
Rhode Island Center for Justice hosts panel which will speak about utility shut offs in America’s low-income communities.
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Brown Bag Lunch w/ David Cicilline @ Temple Beth-El, Providence (12-1pm)
The Universe is Rad! @ Met High School (6-8:30pm)
Former mayor of Providence and current representative for Rhode Island’s 1st congressional district, Cicilline is sitting down with his constituents to answer questions. Spent like 30 minutes looking for something bad he’s done in Washington but he seem’s like a pretty cool guy. Email the List if you know of some particularly juicy misdeeds.
Los Angeles punks from the 70s, supposedly they make bubble-gum punk. I think that means Ramones covering Katy Perry more than Maroon 5 covering Bad Brains… Wouldn’t it be cool if the lady from those Orbit commercials was in a Minor Threat coverband? 21+chic.
Like Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar except with less intergalactic Love and more science. Featuring an inflatable Plantarium, Microsoft Hololens, Oculus Rift, astronomy experts and telescope.
27 Magic Lantern Presents: Criminal Queers @ Cable Car (8pm) This film imagines what spaces might be opened up if crowbars, wigs, and metal files become tools for transformation. Queer insurrection on the screen and in the prisons!
FIND THIS AND SEND A PHOTO OF IT TO LISTTHEINDY@GMAIL.COM
This week, the designer of the list would like to thank the Amazon seller “qpothole2,” who sent him a book of Charles Olson poems wrapped in the above clipping from Whales and Dolphins: a 1989 Calendar. According to their bio, “qtpothole2” sells at low prices from the inventory of “the late DUANE JOHNSON BOOKSELLER Fargo, ND,” a specialist in theological bibliography who “liked to call himself the ‘QUINTESSENTIAL POTHOLE ON THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY.’” – AMF