The College Hill Independent Vol. 32 Issue 7

the college hill independent Volume 32

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a Brown/RISD weekly

April 8, 2016

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Issue 07

the

NEWS 02 Week in Campaigning Jack Brook, Hannah Maier-Katkin, & Will Tavlin

Volume 32 No. 7

03 Sinful Saint Jane Argodale METRO 05 SWAP Team PVD Colin Kent-Daggett 07 Square One Sophie Kasakove ARTS 04 What Happened, Miss Saldana?

Kelton Ellis 09 Ambien 5mg Alec Mapes-Frances

From the editors: leonel salanmanka <leonelsalanmanka@gmail.com> Mar. 24 to jem, info, cindy, mikec, thope, bwolfe, Lazzaro, magazine, me, advertising Hello, I WILL LIKE TO PLACE A PET AD IN YOUR NEWSPAPER BOTH ONLINE AND IN PRINT. I WILL WANT YOU TO SEE MY TEXT AD BELOW.

FEATURES 13 Meditations in an Emergency Room Joseph Frankel 16 Puzzled Gabrielle Hick, Patrick McMenamin, & Dominique Pariso

TEXT AD: MALE AND FEMALE BULL DOG A KC registered free to a good home EMAIL.. ( s******8@gmail.com ) I WILL LIKE YOU TO HELP ME RUN MY ADVERT FOR FREE,JUST TO RUN FOR 3DAYS.I WILL REALLY APPRECIATE IF MY REQUEST IS BEEN GRANTED

SPORTS 11 MARCH MADNESS TECH 10 try { babel } Liz Cory LITERARY 17 Disintegration Hannah Smith EPHEMERA 15 Ridin’ the Rails Mark Benz X 18 Bloom Jenice Kim

Managing Editors Camera Ford Alec Mapes-Frances Francis Torres News Jane Argodale Piper French Julia Tompkins Metro Sophie Kasakove Jamie Packs Shane Potts Arts Lisa Borst Jonah Max Eli Neuman-Hammond Features Gabrielle Hick Patrick McMenamin Dominique Pariso Science Fatima Husain Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa Tech Kamille Johnson

Occult Lance Gloss Literary Marcus Mamourian Metabolics Sam Samore Ephemera Mark Benz Jake Brodsky India Ennenga X Layla Ehsan Sara Khan Pierie Korostoff List Polina Godz Rick Salamé Cover Pierie Korostoff Design & Illustration Polina Godz Celeste Matsui Alexa Terfloth Zak Ziebell

Interviews Elias Bresnick P.O Box 1930 Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

theindy.org

Staff Writers Ben Berke Jack Brook Liz Cory Kelton Ellis Liby Hays Corey Hébert Hannah Maier-Katkin Madeleine Matsui Kimberley Meilun Ryan Rosenberg Will Tavlin Staff Illustrators Frans van Hoek Gabriel Matesanz Teri Minogue Yuko Okabe Ivan Rios-Fetchko Web Charlie Windolf Senior Editors Sebastian Clark Rick Salamé Kim Sarnoff Maya Sorabjee Special Projects Yousef Hilmy Maya Sorabjee Henry Staley

@theindy_tweets

WEEK IN CAMPAIGNING

by Will Tavlin, Hannah Maier-Katkin, & Jack Brook illustration by Grace Zhang

Getting Colder Rhode Island kicked off its new tourism campaign last week only to face immediate international ridicule, accusations of financial mismanagement, and calls for officials’ resignations. The brouhaha erupted after Governor Gina Raimondo tweeted the campaign’s official video out to her followers last Tuesday. Users on Twitter quickly pointed out that the video ad—which asks the viewer to “imagine a place that feels like home” and praises Rhode Island’s “uniqueness”— shows footage of a skateboarder outside of the Harpa concert hall in Reykjavik, Iceland. Faced with media scrutiny, irate Rhode Islanders, and questions as to how $120,000 went into such a project, Rhode Island Commerce Corporation marketing director Betsy Wall resigned shortly thereafter.

The video is just one of many headaches in what has quickly become a sea of migraines for the state’s $5 million dollar campaign to attract tourism and business: the newly launched tourism website (www.visitrhodeisland. com) cited Rhode Island as home to 20% of the United State’s historic landmarks (it’s actually two percent); two restaurants listed were in fact out of business (the chef of one, George Germon, died last year); a quick reverse Google image search revealed many of the website’s photos were purchased from stock photo websites. GoLocalProv estimates that there were nearly 100 errors on the website upon its release.

Raimondo later tweeted that the Rhode Island will recoup the $120,000 it spent on the tourism ad—but the state has bigger issues on its hands. The marketing campaign’s slogan, “Cooler & Warmer,” was also pulled after residents and lawmakers lambasted its clarity and questioned what “Cooler & Warmer” means on a syntax level. “‘Cooler & Warmer’ is not a tagline Rhode Islanders like,” the governor announced at an April 1 press conference.

“We’re going to work hard to get this right for Rhode Island because this is important. This campaign matters.

It’s going to create jobs.”

But critics aren’t pleased yet; Raimondo also stated in her press conference that the equally controversial ‘Cooler & Warmer’ logo—a square made by three blue-grey, redorange, and orange-yellow convex masses that also form the image of a sail—will remain. “Any marketing major would have known that those colors are not calming, they’re not inviting—nothing,” one Providence resident told NBC 10. Raimondo defended the logo, and with good reason. The concept, crafted by Milton Glaser, the designer behind New York’s iconic “I Love New York” identity, cost taxpayers $550,000—not including the nearly $1.5 million already spent on promoting it.

A number of Rhode Islanders, taking matters into their own hands, designed new logos that circulated around the web last week—the most popular, done by graphic designer Missy Hardesty, titled: “Sea To Believe.”

It looks like Hardesty’s efforts might just get acknowledged. Raimondo told reporters that the state will accept submissions for a new slogan to surround the sail logo.

“Make it great, make it fun,” she said. “Most of all, make it your Rhode Island story.”

Just remember to keep it local. -WT

April 8, 2016

It’s Not EU, it’s Me “Brexit,” the celebrity couple name-style portmanteau of ‘British’ and ‘exit’ heralding a national departure from the European Union, is making waves across the Atlantic. At the forefront of this political discourse is the Leave.EU campaign. Supported by the Eurosceptic, populist United Kingdom Independence Party, the Leave.EU platform states, “As the world’s fifth largest economy, the UK is well placed to supply its own labour.” This desire to leave the EU is primarily framed in terms of Britain’s ability to implement greater border restrictions, which Leave.EU insists would allow Britain to “welcome the right talent… rather than having to accept all EU migrants regardless of skill level.”

It turns out that letting in the ‘wrong’ talent isn’t really an issue for Britain: Contrary to the fear that lowskill EU immigrants are stealing British jobs en masse, the majority of those who do come from the EU—according to the research organization UK in a Changing Europe— already have white-collar jobs waiting for them. While the 2015 UKIP manifesto calls for Britain to split from the EU in order to “take back our border,” UK government statistics show that the majority of immigrants to the country fall under the category of “non-EU citizens,” who are already subject to strict border controls. While UKIP is equally resistant toward non-EU immigrants, their current rationale for leaving the EU misrepresents the geographical reality of immigration to the UK. Ironically, it appears that the Leave.EU campaign relies partially upon immigrants to spread its message of exclusionary politics. Reporters for The Guardian discovered last week that Leave.EU employs four staffers who are immigrants from EU countries—including Rudolph Svat of Slovakia. Svat, despite being a foreign national whose migration to Britain was made possible by decreased border restrictions between EU countries, says that, after his time working at Leave.EU, he believes the “Brexit” is “a good thing for this country.”

Brexit is gaining momentum in the lead up to the June 23 referendum. Even if Britons avoid the nasty breakup, the xenophobic rhetoric of Leave.EU and UKIP will doubtlessly continue to fester. The UK needs only to look across the pond to see how crazy such politics can get. - HMK

Delegate Drama The fine plainsfolk of North Dakota have found a way to capture mainstream media attention in a way not seen since Fargo won best picture twenty-years ago. Formerly best known for having the highest number of churches per capita, the “Roughrider State” has found itself a political powerhouse in the 2016 Republican primary elections.

The 25 North Dakota Republican delegates (not including three super delegates) are entirely unbound to any candidate. Each of the delegates is essentially a free agent going into the GOP convention. Normally, the presidential candidate would already have been decided by then; however, unless Trump can attain a majority of delegates through state primaries—an increasingly unlikely possibility—there will be a contested convention. In such a scenario, every delegate that is still up for grabs would become a hot commodity.

The lucky North Dakota delegates can expect to find themselves treated as VIPs by the GOP presidential candidates. The state will join American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, Guam, and Puerto Rico in the ranks of often forgotten regions that have garnered attention all of a sudden due to the independence of their delegates. Why didn’t we think of this, South Dakota mutters enviously.

In addition to being courted by Cruz, the North Dakotan delegates were treated to private meetings with Trump’s newest friend, Ben Carson. “I’m really…advocating for America” Carson said, during a “heartfelt” pitch for Trump. He rallied the delegates at the convention with a speech focused on the importance of faith and his efforts to “teach Trump religion.” (“He is a person who…thinks deeply, and does have, uh, some openness to spiritual things,”).

The North Dakota delegate debacle foreshadows the behind-the-scenes squabbling that will only become more pronounced in the weeks prior to the convention. Cruz has already been laying the groundwork for a delegate heist, playing the cutthroat game like a seasoned Washington insider. Indeed, his team managed to get most of their preferred delegates on the slate for North Dakota, leading Cruz to claim “victory.” Not one to be outdone, Trump informed his supporters, in a refreshing reassurance of the integrity of our political system, that he has “a guy going around trying to steal people’s delegates.”

It’s anyone’s guess what will happen two months down the road. But if there’s one political winner at the moment, it’s probably those North Dakota delegates who will be getting more than a few phone calls from groveling politicians in an effort to buddy-up.

A private tour of Trump tower. A Texas BBQ lunch with Ted. A manipedi with Ivanka. As a North Dakota delegate, the electoral world is your oyster. -JB

NEWS

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A GIFT OF GOD

Mother Teresa's Canonization and Her Complicated Legacy

by Jane Argodale illustration by Gabriel Matesanz In December, Pope Francis approved a second miracle attributed to the Albanian-born nun Mother Teresa.

A Brazilian man claimed that in 2008 his brain tumor had been cured by her intercession. The Pope’s acceptance of the cure as a miracle paves the way for Mother Teresa’s canonization, which is expected to take place in September of this year. The process for Mother Teresa to become a saint has been unusually expedited—her beatification took place a year after her death in 1997. Beatification, a ceremony in which the Pope acknowledges that a dead person can intercede on behalf of those who pray in their name, is the first step in the process of becoming a saint, and generally must take place after a minimum five-year waiting period after the person’s death. According to a study published by Harvard University, the average time between a saint’s death and canonization since the year 1588 has been 181 years. That Mother Teresa will be canonized within 20 years of her death is a testament to how celebrated she was in her lifetime, and continues to be today.

To many in the church, Mother Teresa was always destined for canonization. Known as the “Saint of the Gutters,” Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, India in 1950.

To this day, her congregation runs soup kitchens, orphanages, hospices for the terminally ill, and schools in over 100 countries. Mother Teresa’s reputation extends outside of the Catholic Church as well. Throughout her lifetime, she was praised by numerous world leaders, and in 1979 she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her selfless work in helping the world’s poorest people—the Poorest of the Poor, as she called them, capitalized as one would capitalize God. From childhood, Mother Teresa, born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, had known she wanted to be a nun, and was particularly inspired by missionaries in Bengal. At the age of 18, she left her home in Skopje in modern-day Macedonia to join the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland, where she learned English. After a year she left for Bengal, teaching at a school in Darjeeling as she underwent training with the Sisters of Loreto. She took her religious vows in 1931, and took on the name Teresa, from Thérèse de Lisieux, the patron saint of missionaries. She taught at the Loreto school in Kolkata, and would go on to become headmistress. In 1946, after 18 years with the Sisters of Loreto, Mother Teresa suddenly experienced a calling from God to “help the poor while living among them.” She left her convent, learned basic medical training, and began her missionary work in Kolkata, slowly gaining a following of fellow nuns.

Early on, without the security and comfort of a convent, she herself often resorted to begging for food.

Perhaps it would be more shocking if such a figure went unrecognized. Mother Teresa dedicated nearly 50 years of her life to a charity that spread across the world. The fact that her service was religiously inspired serves only to bolster her status as a hero in the public imagination. In his speech presenting Mother Teresa with her Nobel Prize, the Nobel Committee Chairman Josh Sanness said of her work, “The loneliest and the most wretched, the dying destitute, the abandoned lepers, have been received by her and her Sisters with warm compassion devoid of condescension, based on this reverence for Christ in Man.” Yet her legacy was far from perfect, and many of its flaws originated in the religious nature of her work. Though her canonization only officially matters within the Church, it will also solidify a narrative in the secular public imagination that ignores the harmful aspects of her work. +++ Though claiming to be without political views, in her Nobel lecture, Mother Teresa framed her charity’s adoption work as part of the fight against abortion, which she called “the greatest destroyer of peace” and “a direct war, a direct killing—direct murder by the mother herself.” Just last October, the Missionaries of Charity announced it would shut down adoption

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services in 30 orphanages in India, after the Indian government’s overhaul of the country’s outdated adoption system. New laws introduced during the overhaul would require the orphanages to allow adoptions to hopeful parents who are divorced or single, which runs counter to the mission's philosophy. Mother Teresa also publicly decried the use of contraception throughout her career, and in the 1990s she campaigned against an Irish referendum to end the country’s decades-long ban on divorce. In this regard, Mother Teresa and her order represent a hardline Catholicism that often seeks to enshrine itself in the law.

Also in spite of her supposedly apolitical ethos, she maintained ties to a number of unsavory world leaders, including repressive dictators Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti and Enver Hoxha of Albania. In fact, Mother Teresa accepted money from Duvalier, who made millions of dollars off the illegal drug and organ trade while his country remained impoverished, and had dissidents killed and tortured under his brutal regime.

In 1985, Mother Teresa accepted the Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan, who provided arms to anti-communist militaries in Central America and fanned the flames of violent conflict. Mother Teresa had little to say about the US-backed political violence in the region. On a visit to Guatemala she remarked, “Everything was peaceful in the parts we’d visited.” At the same time in Latin America, many clergy were proponents of Liberation Theology, a movement that forth the idea that poverty was the result of systematic sin—often perpetrated by the powerful leaders Mother Teresa praised. In his 1994 documentary “Mother Teresa: Hell’s Angel,” the writer Christopher Hitchens, a vocal critic of organized religion, condemned these ties: “She may or may not comfort the afflicted, but she has certainly never been known to afflict the comfortable.” +++ Whether Mother Teresa and her followers truly comforted the afflicted is also questionable. In a 1991 article for medical journal The Lancet, its editor Robin Fox described his visit to her Home for Dying Destitutes in Kolkata. Fox witnessed nuns and volunteers reusing needles between patients, and a lack of doctors and medication, in spite of the millions of dollars in donations that the Missionaries of Charity received. In 2005, journalist Donal MacIntyre visited the Missionaries’ Daya Dan orphanage in Kolkata. In the New Statesman, MacIntyre described volunteers “drunk on their own philanthropy” and unconcerned with the inhumane conditions around them. “I saw children with their mouths gagged open to be given medicine, their hands flaying [sic] in distress, visible testimony to the pain they were in. Tiny babies were bound with cloths at feeding time. Rough hands wrenched heads into position for feeding. Some of the children retched and coughed as rushed staff crammed food into their mouths,” MacIntyre wrote. That such treatment was routine and accepted by staff is alarming, and indicative of a widespread problem with the orphanage’s culture—and perhaps even the larger culture of Mother Teresa’s order. Though such abuse doesn’t exist in every facility run by the Missionaries of Charity, much of the work done by the order was of dubious merit. In “Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict,” Indian-born physician Aroup Chatterjee wrote that a number of the Missionaries’ facilities simply existed to convert the local population to Christianity. In fact, eight of the Missionaries’ homes in Papua New Guinea didn’t have residents at all, and simply engaged in conversion work.

Mother Teresa’s philosophy suggests that her charities were never intended to provide as much assistance as possible to the populations they served.

At a 1981 press conference, she said "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people." In his 2002 essay “Mother Teresa as the

Mirror of Bourgeois Guilt,” historian and Kolkata native Vijay Prashad wrote that Mother Teresa and Princess Diana both “provided easy symbols of charity rather than social change as they promoted forms of altruism well suited to privatized social action rather than to substantial social change.” That is to say, what Mother Teresa did is less important than how she made her admirers feel. Ending poverty and disease was not Mother Teresa’s goal. In fact, poverty and disease were unavoidable in her view. Her work did, however, play into “the colonial notion that white peoples are somehow especially endowed with the capacity to create social change,” according to Prashad. At the heart of Mother Teresa’s appeal is a relief of white and western guilt. Deeply enshrined in her philosophy is the idea that the suffering of others makes us better people. At an event for the release of one her biographies in 1988, Mother Teresa said “Leprosy is not a punishment, it can be a very beautiful gift of God if we make good use of it.

Through it we can learn to love the unloved.” Writing in The New York Review of Books in 1996, Murray Kempton responded, “Such is the spirit that breathes so incessantly as to make loud the undertones of an insistence that the poor have been placed among us for the primary purpose of affording the comfortable a chance to discover how virtuous they are.” Mother Teresa's elevation to the status of a saint, both religiously and culturally, means elevating a symbol of charity more than it means elevating charity itself.

The soon-to-be newest saint in the Catholic Church was not a champion of the poor, but a champion of the powerful. That her work in the Missionaries of Charity has been flipped into a hegemonic narrative of selflessness and service erases the many who only continued to suffer under her watch, and the watch of a world more willing to embrace its own generosity than examine its demons.

Her canonization is practically a formality at this point: her life’s work has long been sanctified inside and outside of the church. To some, Mother Teresa was the Saint of the Gutters. To many more who will never get to voice their own narrative, she was the saint of the empty gesture.

JANE ARGODALE B’18 can be a very beautiful gift of God if we make use of her.

The College Hill Independent

BLACK IS THE COLOR Colorism in Nina Simone’s Biopic

by Kelton Ellis illustration by Amelia White

Watch the trailer for the upcoming biopic Nina, out April 22, and you might think Zoe Saldana inhabits the role well.

There’s Nina, “a complicated lady” in the words of one of the film’s characters, throwing a champagne bottle at her manager; Nina brandishing a handgun; Nina with the dismissive laughter; scowling Nina of the headdress and theatrically large earrings who stares her astonished audience down as if she were a furious African queen and they her disrespectful subjects. She was notoriously angry, volatile as a volcano, after all. Saldana’s clear-toned singing doesn’t quite match Nina Simone’s distinctively brassy, baritonal voice, but it goes deep enough to sound like a somewhat faithful representation, and she gets Simone’s dignified, righteously-condescending manner of speech about right. One problem, though: Saldana herself looks nothing like the legendary singer. The actress conceals her wavy hair and caramel complexion with layer upon layer of dark-brown makeup, topped off by an Afrotextured wig and complimented by a prosthetic nose.

Biopics are a unique film genre in that they operate somewhere between documentary and drama, a nebulous, frustrating cinematic space where reality and fiction are nearly interchangeable. On one hand, there exists a need to generate a 90-minute Hollywood narrative arc from the raw materials of history; Nina will, for example, feature a love affair that, according to Simone’s daughter, never happened. The drama must necessarily, however, have a strong basis in fact, or the movie merely devolves into an elaborate scam run on the unwitting spectator by cast and crew. It is rare to find an actor who can so completely morph into another notable figure that it seems no such change ever took place, and it pleases our need for watching films that feel sincere, whether they be fiction, half-fiction, or an earnest attempt to display things as they happened. Watching Jamie Foxx in Ray more than a decade ago gave me a deep satisfaction that I understand only now—he looked, sounded, and moved just like I imagined Ray Charles from the records and pictures, which made an otherwise mediocre movie a thrill to watch.

We go into most films anticipating surprise, avoiding spoilers even if it means swearing off all social media in the days before a trip to the theater, as some of my friends did before seeing Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But the biographical film appeals to different impulses; we watch biopics to be told, with fabulous shock and intrigue, what we already know. In most cases, that would be the familiar narrative of the acclaimed and tortured genius—Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Alan Turing, John Forbes Nash, Steve Jobs, and so forth. Any deviation from ‘real life’ provokes anger, even over miniscule contrivances that get tacked on to these pop histories. Nina has accumulated detractors, including the late singer’s estate, for these very reasons.

The outrage, however, is about much more than that.

It is about blackface, colorism, and diversity. Nina, which has been stalled for years, probably couldn’t be released at a more fortuitous time for discussing these issues. It comes

April 8, 2016

right after fierce criticism of Hollywood’s unspoken racism at this year’s Oscars, amid Black Lives Matter’s eponymous declaration of self-worth, and not so far behind Rachel Dolezal’s humbling exposure as a Caucasian-playing-Black.

Dolezal’s appropriation game was offensive for obvious reasons, but it also posited something that registers a more questionable discomfort: that the essentialist racial identities Americans hold tight are easily modifiable with a change in hairstyle, who we call family, or appointment to lead a local NAACP chapter. She did it for years with no one noticing, even though her skin tone had remained almost the same.

“Dolezal’s unwavering certainty that she was black was a measure of how seriously she believed in integration,” Wesley Morris wrote provocatively in the New York Times Magazine last year, “It was as if she had arrived in a future that hadn’t yet caught up to her.” Saldana finds herself in a position not unlike Dolezal’s.

Nina’s directors (almost all white) likely had reasons for casting Saldana that seemed innocent. As big-budget filmmakers do, they probably thought of the film’s economic viability when they cast Saldana and her noted co-star David Oyelowo, who played Martin Luther King, Jr. in last year’s Selma. Saldana in particular has become a more profitable human resource than most actresses of color dream of. She starred in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, that year’s highestgrossing superhero film, not to mention 2009’s Avatar, the highest-grossing film of all time. Those were films where Saldana’s ambiguous racial identity—she identifies as Black, Latina, and “colorless,” all at once—gave her a space in which to portray, respectively, a green alien warrior and a blue alien warrior. What’s any different, the crew may have asked themselves, if she wears brown makeup this time around? And is there such a thing a Black person doing blackface anyway?

They may have thought they were doing the popularlymisunderstood Simone a favor by casting a high-profile actress to tell her story. Then again, that could be a projection of high social consciousness onto people who probably did not consider it anyway, and may have had no pressing, personal need to do so.

Yet notable Black actors, such as Queen Latifah, have also defended Saldana’s casting. BET co-founder Robert L. Johnson, whose media company is distributing the biopic, denounced the film’s critics: “You hear people saying that a light-skinned woman can’t play a dark-skinned woman when they’re both clearly of African descent. To say ... I’ve gotta hold a brown paper bag up to the actresses and say, ‘Oh sorry, you can’t play her.’ Who’s to decide when you’re black enough?” Johnson’s point can seem scoff-worthy to anyone who knows Nina Simone’s story. In Liz Garbus’ excellent documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?, Lisa Simone Kelly, the singer’s daughter, mentions that her mother had been told that “her nose was too big, her lips were too full, her skin was too dark” during childhood. Her entire career then proceeded with that in mind, as Simone turned

from classically-trained pianist to a Black Panther Partyinspired revolutionary singer who once told Martin Luther King, “I am not nonviolent.” So much of her music was an unapologetic repudiation of America’s crimes against Black people; the mostly white crowd’s discomfort must have been almost tangible when she performed “Mississippi Goddam” at Carnegie Hall in 1964, protesting Medgar Evers’ assasination and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham much more boldly than most Black musicians of the time. It is a grand and tragic irony, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has already written, that the woman cast as Simone embodies the vision of Black womanhood that Simone railed against her entire life. “A young Nina Simone would have a hard time being cast in her own biopic,” Coates noted, because when filmmakers do cast the rare Black actress, she tends to be like Halle Berry, or like Kerry Washington. Black, yes, but palatably so, with the light skin and narrow features Simone suffered for not having. That the filmmakers merely covered those features up with makeup and prosthetics is no consolation.

Johnson has a point, though. The criticism that Nina has attracted is entirely warranted, given the prevalence of colorism against dark-skinned Black women in our national media. It rests, however, on the assumption that there is a such thing as racial authenticity and that it is easily performed by hair, skin color, and face shape, which is something we all know to be problematic; that says to Saldana that she isn’t Black enough, despite her proud self-identification with her African ancestry. This is not to say that reverse colorism, or reverse racism, are real systems at work in society. They aren’t.

But who can decide whether a portrayal is racially authentic, or when costuming is more like blackface? Discussing the controversy around Saldana’s casting, Latinx Studies scholar Isabel Molina-Guzmán wrote for the journal Flow in 2013: “Ironically, the same notions of racial authenticity that inform calls for the recasting of Nina Simone also constrain casting directors from hiring ethnic and racial minorities to play roles designated for white characters.” I do worry that dark-skinned Black actors will be typecast into the roles set for them by Hollywood due to these notions of racial authenticity. Far too many gifted actors are still left to play civil rights figures or slaves, an antiquated filmic representation of Blackness that moviegoers can’t get enough of, judging by the success of Twelve Years A Slave and The Butler. Nonetheless, a proudly dark-colored icon like Simone deserves an actress who looks like her without painting on an artificial shade of Black. I can think of several who have the chops.

KELTON ELLIS B’18 is a blue alien warrior.

ARTS

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THE POWER OF A HOME Preserving Affordable Housing in South Providence

Despite the pre-recession levels of unemployment touted in headlines across the country this week, the affordable housing crisis rages on across the United States. According to a report published by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there were only 55 affordable units available for every 100 renters with extremely low income in 2011—a gap that grows every year. John Prince—a Providence resident for over 45 years, a community organizer at Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), and a board member at Stop Wasting Abandoned Property (SWAP)—put the current crisis in somber context for the College Hill Independent: “It reminds me of the 1940s, when my family fought in the war for their country, and then after the war they tried to get housing, and there were only certain areas where they could get housing because of segregation… that’s what I feel right now.”

Despite the rising tide of unaffordable housing in Providence, organizations like SWAP have emerged to fight for their communities. SWAP was created in 1975 by a group of concerned South Providence neighbors and has since expanded to become one of the most prolific developers in the city. The organization purchases, refurbishes, and resells abandoned properties as affordable housing to Providence residents. SWAP develops the property, and then uses government grants and subsidies in order to offer the housing unit to residents who earn a certain percentage of the area’s median income and whose applications are accepted by SWAP. Though other forms of affordable housing exist, such as Section 8 and public housing, SWAP has operated with great success. Carla DeStefano, the Executive Director of SWAP, estimated to the Independent that SWAP has built or refurbished approximately 1,500 homes and 400 rental units in Providence since its inception.

In the 1970s and 80s, SWAP capitalized on the supply of cheap, abandoned properties in South Providence: entire lots could be as cheap as $1. “SWAP refurbished a lot of abandoned houses that were crack houses, or houses that had already been demolished.” Prince added: “back then housing was affordable for the people who most needed the safety and security of a home.” SWAP made community education central to its founding philosophy. Neighborhood workshops—including a Homebuyer Education Class, a Landlord/Tenant Education Class, a Good Tenant Workshop, and a Neighborhood Contractor Mentoring Program—continue to this day as a way for the organization to work with homeowners, landlords, and tenants on an individual level. SWAP’s original focus on individual properties and residents resulted in an intimate relationship with the South Providence community. More recently, SWAP’s focus has shifted to larger developments in South Providence and elsewhere in the city. +++ SWAP’s larger projects began in the 1990s and are a driving force in the organization’s shift towards a bigger development agency. These developments have ranged from the restoration of the Tanner Block in 1996 to the mixed-use Southside Gateways development in 2008. In contrast to individual houses, Southside Gateways is a large, 50-unit development on Broad Street that includes commercial space on the ground floor. SWAP still refurbishes many individual homes, but the number of rental units from developments like Southside Gateways has grown proportionally over time. Expanding the organization’s focus beyond individual houses has resulted in projects on a scale that would have been unimaginable for SWAP in the 1970s. Funding for such projects simply didn’t exist during Providence’s poorest years. But higher per capita income, stable levels of population, and increased federal funds from the city’s “Renaissance” of the 1980s and early 90s created a demand for denser and larger developments.

SWAP’s expansion to bigger projects has forced the organization to balance the different needs of large and small developments, something it has not always done successfully. In late 1999, the Providence City Council placed SWAP under a 90-day moratorium that was supported by the Rhode Island House of Representatives. The City Council cited how SWAP had distanced “itself and the organization away from the various communities in the City of Providence,” was not following the City’s plan, and was “swallowing up all the land it could” without informing the communities it served. Neither the City Council’s initial moratorium nor the House of Representatives’ resolution of support specified any incidents that precipitated the moratorium, however the language used indicated an ongoing problem. More recently, SWAP planned to build 40 rental units in Providence’s Manton neighborhood but faced strong opposition from its residents. Fearing an influx of transient residents, neighbors responded to the proposal with a lawsuit. Again, SWAP faced criticism because of a perceived lack of public outreach. Raymond Hull, a State Representative from Manton’s district, complained that “the extent of community outreach consisted of one meeting that was canceled due to the sickness of a SWAP representative and a second that was held without adequate notice,” as quoted in the Providence Journal in 2014.

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DeStefano disagreed with claims of a shift in SWAP’s developments, citing that “the great majority of what SWAP has done is smaller individual homes.” While this proportion is true historically, the organization has certainly undertaken larger developments as time has gone on. Though DeStefano called the 1999 moratorium “an aberration” that the organization has since overcome, it remains a testament to the difficulty of balancing large-scale development and the community-based practices on which SWAP was founded. +++ As increased development has raised housing prices and brought on gentrification in South Providence, SWAP’s interpretation of ‘affordable’ has drifted away from the needs of the original community. In response to a statement of the number of affordable units boasted by SWAP, John Prince asked the simple question: “Affordable to whom?” Additionally, he believes that SWAP should loosen its criteria, particularly in regards to criminal records, in order to serve those most in need. Though categories of affordability are defined at the federal level (for example, low-income is defined as between 50% and 80% of the county’s median income), local agencies have flexibility in choosing what categories to develop and in defining their acceptance criteria. Thus, as an area grows, wealthier organizations like SWAP can profit from more expensive developments, despite a lack of housing for those who remain in extreme poverty.

Despite these complaints, Prince holds SWAP in relatively high esteem—especially compared to other affordable housing organizations in Providence. West Elmwood Housing Development Corporation, Local Initiatives Support Coalition (LISC), Providence Housing Authority (PHA), ONE Neighborhood Builders, Omni Development Corporation and Rhode Island Housing all develop or manage affordable housing in Providence, though John considered SWAP and LISC among the best.

According to Prince, “the others are so hard to get into” because of both availability and more rigid application criteria. All of these organizations have developed in South Providence and they have all faced similar issues as SWAP—staying focused on the needs of the community as the organization develops more property.

The consequences of not serving all residents are steep, as South

The College Hill Independent

by Colin Kent-Daggett illustration by Peggy Shi

Providence has seen an increase in families going to shelters, according to Prince. Though the number of homeless people in Rhode Island has fallen since 2012, per the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless, numbers surged in the wake of the recession and are not grouped according to neighborhood. Within a radius of a few blocks from his office in South Providence, where we spoke, Prince could point out several developments where an application with his level of income would be treated “as a joke.”

In contrast to the truly low-cost houses of previous decades, it’s now “hard to find affordable housing, especially if [residents] are looking for two or three bedrooms.” While large rental developments have covered previously abandoned property, they do not replace the vibrant and affordable houses that once stood in their place. +++ The balance between development and affordability in Providence has received more attention lately due to Mayor Jorge Elorza’s focus on abandoned property. The Mayor has implemented multiple policies to rid Providence of abandoned property, the first of which was a receivership program launched in 2014. Under this program, the city offers a revolving $3 million loan pool to those who wish to rehabilitate abandoned properties. But Elorza’s strategy involves the state taking on risk. SWAP has criticized the policy, stating in a 2014 GoLocalProv article that Elorza’s plan is “a risky venture” lacking “a lot of [the] safeguards” that SWAP and other affordable housing agencies use to avoid house flipping. House flipping is the practice of buying a house that is undervalued due to its condition or its location in a rising neighborhood, quickly renovating various portions of the property, and selling it for a profit. House flipping can quickly price existing residents out of a neighborhood and create instability in the housing market. Organizations like SWAP desire applicants who will gain stability from a longer tenure in a home and try to minimize future upkeep costs when renovating, however, beneficiaries of the receivership program may not have similar intentions.

Elorza also launched his EveryHome initiative in 2015, which aims to rehabilitate or demolish hundreds of abandoned properties. As discussed in a February 19 article in the Independent, many local residents are concerned that this initiative will encourage gentrification. Prince holds similar worries that the program will “force people to move out of the neighborhood” and that “a lot of the homes that [Elorza] wants to rehab are not going to be affordable for the community.”

SWAP will benefit from Mayor Elorza’s focus on abandoned property.

City Council President Luis Aponte told the Independent how the city funds community development organizations through the distribution of federal grants, in addition to tax breaks when organizations acquire derelict and abandoned properties. These strategies align directly with the operations of SWAP - which is partially funded by the city government - making it a prime candidate to capitalize on Elorza’s supplementary funding initiatives. Additionally, an organization that focuses on individual homes and tenants would make an ideal foil to the receivership and EveryHome programs, as gentrification could be rebuffed by a community-oriented approach to affordable housing. Destefano addressed this gap in EveryHome, stating that SWAP was actively working with the city to “bring receivership into low income brackets and develop more affordable housing.” Council President Aponte similarly expressed that EveryHome “is not a complete answer,” citing the City Council’s concerns about “long-term affordability” in Providence. However, SWAP must prioritize its historical focus on smaller developments in order to best fulfill this community role.

Beyond SWAP’s specific operations, its evolution remains an interesting case study on top-down and bottom-up approaches to neighborhood revitalization. SWAP’s growth allowed it to redevelop enormous amounts of abandoned housing, but it has also caused problems for the organization and the neighborhoods it seeks to serve. Somewhere between those extremes—large developments and moratoriums on one end, workshops and individual homes on the other—lies the key to SWAP’s impact on South Providence and, ultimately, its success. SWAP and other community organizations can continue to improve South Providence if they maintain their roots in community relationships, seek to serve the residents most in need, and positively reshape Elorza’s efforts to combat abandoned property in Providence. Community organizations like SWAP must act promptly because, in the words of John Prince, “it’s still a mess, the little people are still getting shuffled around.” And it’s those people for whom “a second chance and a home are even more powerful.”

COLIN KENT-DAGGETT B’19 has renewed appreciation for his Morriss dorm room.

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06

A CLEAR SITE

Urban Renewal in Cathedral Square There are four parking lots within a two block radius, but parking on the empty cement plaza of Cathedral Square is free. Save for a few cars and a skateboarder sliding down the fountain’s dry slopes, the Square is empty. The Church of Saints Peter and Paul is a towering reminder of the abandoned plaza’s grander origins.

For the first few decades of the 19th century, Providence’s 1,600-person Catholic population—most of whom were Irish immigrant railroad and factory workers—had conducted religious services in the Old Town House or in Mechanic’s Hall on Market Square. In 1837, the first permanent Roman Catholic church in Providence held its inaugural mass, led by pastor John Corry in the still unfinished Church of Saints Peter and Paul.

tions as an office center, a Convention and Sports Center (which was to make “Downtown Providence the Convention and Sports capital of southeastern New England,”) and a heliport (Providence’s “link to the future”).

In its 1963 report, the PRA made an optimistic promise about the Plan’s potential: “By all indications, the ‘new face of Providence’… will become a reality much in evidence during 1964 and succeeding years.” Indeed, the city moved fast: by the end of the year the Urban Renewal Association (URA) had authorized the PRA to undertake a survey to determine the relocation needs of the approximately 300 businesses that were scheduled for project acquisition. At the same time, the URA was busy relocating the highway to the city’s interior to make downtown more accessible to suburbanites.

To turn the aspirations of the Master Plan into a reality, the city of Providence called upon the world-renowned Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei—who would later go on to design such acclaimed works as the National Gallery East Building in Washington D.C. and the glass pyramid addition to The Louvre Museum in Paris.

Central to I.M. Pei’s plan (released in 1962) was the revitalization of Cathedral Square.

Inspired by European plaza models, Pei intended to replace small, old city blocks with large scale development centered around pedestrian passages— “superblocks.”

By 1872, a massive influx of Irish immigrants increased the Catholic population of Providence to 200,000, and the small church building could no longer accommodate the congregants. Bishop Hendricken ordered the destruction of the old church and commissioned the design of a new, larger cathedral from Patrick Keely. The cathedral served as a central cross-section of the shops and businesses along Westminster, Cranston, and Weybosset streets.

According to Pei’s plan: Today, that space is a funnel through which pours the traffic of five streets. In the plan, the rerouting of automobiles to other local streets permits the formation of a pedestrian oasis, attractively paved and embellished with sculptures, a fountain, tree, and special lighting standards… Thus Cathedral Square will become the heart of the Weybosset Community; the crossing point of Westminster Mall and Jackson walkway, a lively meeting place of community activities. A well-ordered center, it will serve the multiple purposes of urban life in the proven manner of so many similar urban spaces and church squares of the cities of Europe.

Cathedral Square continued to thrive as the major intersection of the Weybosset Hill neighborhood through the early 1940s. However, the decline of the textile industry left the city without the necessary funds to restore the crumbling facades of the 18th and 19th century buildings of Weybosset Hill. After World War II, the popularity of the automobile led to the development of a vast urban sprawl that spread into the outer reaches of the Providence municipality and its suburbs. From 1940 to 1950, Providence’s population declined 2.3 percent; from 1950 to 1960 the loss was much heavier—17 percent, the highest rate of attrition in the country at that time. Business moved out of downtown as shopping centers emerged on the edges of the city. By 1960, the Providence Redevelopment Agency (PRA) had—using federal funds made available through the Federal Housing Act of 1947—surveyed the area around Cathedral Square, ultimately identifying it as a “deteriorated blighted area.”

In 1961, the PRA released a ten-year Providence Master Plan, which called for a massive overhaul of the “old and worn out” Downtown Providence. The plan exclaimed: “What will the character of that future world be if the cities of today’s America remain unchanged? The central city of today is a blighted and obsolescent nucleus of everexpanding suburban rings that house the city’s self-exiled upper-and middle-income families…” This language echoed the many apocalyptic urban analyses that emerged in the post-war period: books and articles with titles such as “The Exploding Metropolis,” “The Unloved City,” “Can Downtown Survive,” and “What’s Wrong with Our Community” heralded a nationwide urban crisis.

In its effort to save the city center, the Downtown Master Plan suggested such addi-

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The plan seemed to echo the earlier modernism of architects such as Le Corbusier, who wrote in 1929: “WE MUST BUILD ON A CLEAR SITE!... Statistics show us that business is conducted in the centre. This means that wide avenues must be driven through the centres of our towns. Therefore the existing centres must come down. To save itself, every great city must rebuild its centre.” In the 1950s and 60s, urban renewal meant the destruction of the past to make way for a future that arrived slowly, if it arrived at all. In urbanist Peter Hall’s estimation, in just its first few years the national urban renewal program had destroyed four times as many units as had been built. “Since the average scheme took twelve years to complete,” Hall added. “Land was left vacant.”

The Weybosset Hill project was launched officially in May 1964 and Cathedral Square was dedicated in 1974. A year later, an Evening Bulletin article lamented that Pei’s “most exciting design opportunity” was desolate. Thomas E. Deller, Providence’s planning and development director, called Cathedral Sqaure “a failure,” while David Brussat, design critic of the Providence Journal, called it a “dead zone.” A lifeless collection of 800 apartments surrounded the empty, concrete square. The lights in the

The College Hill Independent

by Sophie Kasakove

square had bulbs in need of replacing, the fountain didn’t work. Visual connections were broken by buildings and by significant grade differences between Empire Street, Greene Street, and the Square. The open space of the square was often used by the residents as a free parking lot.

insufficient funding had saved the city from the fate of nearby Hartford and New Haven—cities that had been “devastated because they did exactly as their planners advised in the 1960’s and 1970’s.”

In 2007, the City of Providence Department of Planning and Development released the Cathedral Square Feasibility Study. After addressing the toll Pei’s plan took on the square, the report suggests a range of projects to restore the Square to its former vibrancy. The plan is an effort to turn back time, to reconstruct the Square that existed before urban renewal: restoring the Cathedral’s dominance as a neighborhood landmark, re-extending Westminster street to transect the large open plaza, rebuilding shops and cafes along the plaza. All of this comes, of course, at a cost: the entire project budget is estimated between $6.6 to $10.8 million, and the funds have not yet been secured. Pei’s enthusiasm for destruction and its promise of a better future is entirely absent from this plan: the projected $2 million cost of demolishing the Bishop McVinney Auditorium, a dysfunctional 1970s structure interfering with any potential reconstruction of the former street pattern, is anticipated only as a nuisance.

SOPHIE KASAKOVE B’17.5 is also inordinately afraid of traffic. The images are not her own.

Vacant lots scattered the surrounding area, where houses were demolished to make room for never-completed projects. Rather than steer drivers towards the city center as intended, the highway cut deep into the urban fabric, resulting in circuitous pedestrian and vehicular routes. Westminster Street traffic was diverted away from Cathedral Square. The Square appears very much the same today. +++ Pei’s modernizing influence extended beyond Providence: 50 miles north, Pei was responsible for the plans for the Boston Government Center complex and for the Christian Science church complex—described by Boston-area architectural historian Maureen Meister as “two wastelands.” A year later, Pei concocted a comprehensive redevelopment plan for downtown Oklahoma City. The plan was governed by many of the same ideologies of urban renewal that shaped the 1961 Providence Master Plan, calling for the demolition of hundreds of historic downtown structures to make room for “superblocks,” parking lots, office buildings and retail developments, in addition to public projects such as the Myriad Convention Center and Botanical Gardens. An advertisement video for the redesign plan released by the Oklahoma City government in 1964, titled “A Tale of Two Cities,” offers a frightening warning: The disease called blight—deadly mold—has settled on our downtown and is killing it.

The symptoms are obsolete structures, congested traffic, too little parking, worn-out hotels and low-grade businesses. Since few people come here and business costs are up, many merchants have thrown up their hands in disgust and left… Our city’s vitality relies on eliminating the malignant tumor that now exists in downtown before it spreads. This tumor can be removed through a dramatic renewal plan that is designed to guarantee downtown’s rebirth.

The demolition was carried out swiftly, but few of the other plan’s goals were achieved: dwindling support for urban renewal under the Nixon administration forced redevelopment activity to a halt by 1980. The plan met with so much resistance from the community, who bemoaned the loss of the historic structures, that it would be another two decades before Oklahoma City’s leadership dared commission any other large-scale urban planning for downtown.

The defects of these plans were not merely aesthetic, but had profound impacts on the social and economic fabric of these cities. A 1964 study of Providence identified 350 firms displaced by renewal or highway projects between 1954 and 1959. The study found that one-third of the companies had gone out of business; of those that survived, six of ten reported a decline in income; only one in ten showed an increase. One-fifth of the business owners became unemployed, one-fifth retired; the rest found work but 90 percent earned less income. Despite clearly disastrous results, urban planners continued to trust in a set of one-size-fits-all faux-scientific rules of urban renewal, which tended to blame cities’ problems on a narrow set of specific design flaws that were each approached as if in a vacuum. In addition to a concern about deteriorating and obsolete structures, these rules were governed by an inordinate fear of traffic. As Jane Jacobs wrote in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities: Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities… But the destructive effects of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building. Of course planners, including the highwaymen with fabulous sums of money and enormous powers at their disposal are at a loss to make automobiles and cities compatible with one another. They do not know what to do with automobiles in cities because they do not now how to plan for workable and vital cities anyhow—with or without automobiles.

Luckily, though, these plans were also defined by overly zealous ambition and, ultimately, infeasibility. The Cathedral Square redesign is one of the only parts of the Pei plan to come to fruition. Visiting Cathedral Square 1994, the architect Andres Duany called it “a disgrace,” but advised Providence planners and officials to be grateful that

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08

SPACES WE MIGHT NOT HAVE INHABITED Fragments on Ambient Media

by Alec Mapes-Frances illustration by Heini Korhonen “This which yields or fills / All space, the ambient air wide interfus’d” –John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667) The term ‘ambient media’ seems to have been first used in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, at least in writing. The scientific literature of the Early Modern period in Europe picked up ‘ambient’ from the Greek , ‘around,’ which in Latin, French, English, and related languages merged with ire (‘to go’), inventing an enigmatic sense of movement. Ambio; ambiens; ambiance; ambient. Going around, encircling, circulating.

At the time, the primary ambient medium in question wasn’t sound, image, or text, music or advertising or signage, but aether. Particularly in the debates surrounding the possibility or impossibility of a vacuum, physicists, philosophers, and theologians conceived of aether as an indifferent and possibly immaterial—though this point was controversial—element filling and flowing throughout the entirety of space, below the threshold of perception.

Robert Fludd, borrowing from the Greek philosopher Plotinus, believed, as he wrote in 1659, that aether, or “the Etheriall sperm, or Astralicall, are of a far subtler condition, than is the vehicle of visible light…they are so thin, so mobile, so penetrating, and so lively, that they are able, and also do continually penetrate, and that without any manifest obstacle or resistance.”

Such instances of ambient media abound in contemporaneous speculations and experiments, mostly those dealing with fluids, gases, light, and so on. A section of Newton’s Optics, for instance, is devoted to the theorization of the “ambient Medium” through which colors and their rays pass. Newton’s “ambient Medium” is simply whatever “pervades the Interstices” of bodies.

“The thickness of a Plate requisite to produce any Colour, depends only on the density of the plate, and not on that of the ambient Medium.” A dialogue in Galileo’s Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences, in its earliest English translation, imagines what it would mean for one air to be enclosed or immersed within another air. “And I know not how to discern any Difference between the two Constitutions of the Inclosed and Ambient, because in this the Ambient does no-ways press the Inclosed, and in that the Inclosed doth not in the least oppose the Ambient.” +++ The Muzak company began in 1922 as Wired Radio.

Founded by a U.S. Signal Corps officer named General Owen Squier, Wired Radio was a service that ‘piped’ music to paid subscribers using multiplexing—a brand new method at the time. Wired competed with the nascent radio industry and eventually retreated to focus on corporate customers, who began installing the company’s systems in their workplaces and stores. Wired was renamed Muzak in 1934 (following the model of the Kodak name), and developed a number of pseudo-scientific methods including its “Stimulus Progression,” whose tempomodulating, 15-minute blocks of soundtracks and silences were intended to regulate worker activity and maximize productivity. From 1940 to around 1970, Muzak was ubiquitous in American architectures of consumption, production, leisure, and hospitality. A soundtrack of late capitalism.

Muzak was the direct impetus for Brian Eno’s conception of “Ambient Music.” Whereas Muzak dissolved difference, regularizing environments and controlling flows, Eno wanted a different kind of ambience that would instead “tint” and “enhance” irregularities and disjunctions.

His 1978 Music for Airports / Ambient 1 is, in his own words, “intended to induce calm and a space to think.”

Its primary function is “to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

Beyond Eno and Muzak, ambience—or something like it—has a long and variegated history in modern music, from Erik Satie’s 19th and early 20th-century "furniture music," to John Cage's Zen-inflected musings

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on silence and contingency, to La Monte Young’s extended minimalism and drone music. And, more recently, there are R. Murray Schafer's environmentalist "soundscapes," Pauline Oliveros' "deep listening” practices, a plethora of New Age relaxation, easy listening, and mood musics, the avant-garde field recordings of sound artists like Francisco Lopez, Luc Ferrari, and Chris Watson, the new music compositions of people like Michael Pisaro and the Wandelweiser group—not to mention the various microgenres of late 20th and 21st-century ambient pop music (dub, chillout, downtempo, vaporwave). These forms of sounding and listening, all involving ambience in some way, are often mutually contradictory: some will embrace difficulty and displeasure, others attend to sonic materiality, still others intoxicate and narcotize, or adorn and decorate. But Eno’s music remains prototypical and useful because it foregrounds ambience’s principal problems: its apparent lack of interest in the political, its exhausted, boring, or narcoleptic composition, its indistinguishability from mood music and meditation aids. And it simultaneously presents critical possibilities, through what might be called ironic mimicry or false complicity. Eno represents ambient poetics’ Janus-face— his music silences the social and “induces calm,” yet at the same time redistributes receptivity and contests selectivity. +++ On some level, the ambient has always been a poetic concept, even in its Early Modern scientific, philosophical, and theological manifestations. The subtlety of aether, the softness of light, the lightness of air: all effectively “background noise” for the human sensorium, background noise to be listened to and rendered in a writing for which there was, or is, no language and no concepts. Ambience is like affect or atmosphere—it precedes the linguisticconceptual, which has to (de)form itself and (re)invent itself in poetry (or science). Ambience, in other words, is the murmur that suffuses every conversation, a hushed voice that speaks alongside the others. Its yields, or it fills, or it does both at once, withdrawing as it becomes what it is.

The English Romantic scholar Timothy Morton has put forth an idea of “ambient poetics,” which he sees substantiated in various kinds of poetry, from Wordsworth and Coleridge to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Ambient poetics, simply, points out the medium or environment in which communication and activity take place. It elaborates on the hum of a room, the touch of a breeze, the glow of a street. It’s incredibly banal. And yet for Morton, ambient poetics also addresses a fundamental crisis—namely, ecological crisis, the crisis of the so-called Anthropocene (or Capitalocene). Ambience, when one begins to look at it more closely, is almost always ecological, referring to lawns, parking lots, airwaves, urban infrastructures, airport concourses, even nuclear radiation or global warming itself. “Ambience,” as Morton defines it in a 2002 essay called “Why Ambient Poetics?” “is a poetic enactment of a state of nondual awareness that collapses the subjectobject division, upon which depends the aggressive territorialization that precipitates ecological destruction.”

According to Morton, it’s by writing ambience and reading for ambience that we might move toward what he calls a “depthless ecology.” Not a “deep ecology” invested in cultural guilt, natural purity, and individual responsibility, but a surface (or a bottomless) ecology that perhaps integrates, following theorists Felix Guattari and Gregory Bateson, the pre-individual ecologies of the psychical, the social, and the environmental. This is to say that ambience doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with “the great outdoors,” per se, an outside or primordial Nature untouched by its opposite, Culture. Ambience is simply the ambience of the spaces we are already inhabiting—on the one hand, the intimate spaces of dwelling, and on the other, the most inhuman or alien of spaces, even those spaces that are intolerable. And this is its politics, in the abstract: to imagine what spaces we might (not) inhabit, or might inhabit otherwise.

+++ Self-styled ambient music is well-established and even singularly pervasive today, but what about ambient literature? Morton’s literary references are 19th-century examples from Romanticism and Symbolism, while his extra-literary references are Eno and 20th-century music.

What forms do ambient literatures take today?

It could be a matter of ekphrasis, of merely imitating music—translation of one medium to another—but this would subordinate literature to auditory sensation, and ambience is clearly about more than audio. There is visual ambience, haptic ambience, olfactory ambience, perhaps even non-sensory ambience. The American poet Tan Lin has made these multimedia, multisensory, or nonsensory potentialities his starting point. Lin is one of the most interesting writers working in ambient literature, a field for which Lin has also used the names “ambient writing” and “ambient stylistics.” His 2007 book, Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking, would be something of a manifesto if it weren’t so diffuse and boring. The book’s first section, “A Field Guide to American Painting,” begins with a brief piece called “5:27 35º,” whose distracted, almost machine-like flow is characteristic of Lin’s writing: What are the forms of non-reading and what are the non-forms a reading might take? Poetry = wallpaper.

Novel = design object. Text as ambient soundtrack?

Dew-champ wanted to create works of art that were non-retinal. It would be nice to create works of literature that didn’t have to be read but could be looked at, like placemats. The most exasperating thing at a poetry reading is always the sound of a poet reading.

This paragraph, which repeats itself throughout the book in variations and permutations, contains the main thematics of Lin’s intentionally anodyne and pseudocomputational writing. The topics are buildings and food, landscapes and containment, painting and film, pharmaceuticals and the architecture of the book. There is writing on cookbooks, airports, television, Wal-Mart, barcodes, and fluorescent open weather low service structures ("Fowls"). Lin’s writing induces and transduces a number of resonances among these various media and materials in a strange kind of (non-)ekphrasis that refuses to observe and de-scribe objects, artifacts or monuments, but which instead attempts to both translate and annotate a whole field of contemporary consumer atmospherics.

Lin’s approach, similar but divergent from Eno’s and Morton’s, is to immerse writing in the coercive, soothing, and seamless ambience of culture under neoliberalism.

It rarely ironizes plain and simple; instead, like the best critical art practices, it leaves its own complicity as an open question, and politicizes habitation. Its stated task: to analyze the “spaces we might not have inhabited had we lived less [coercive lives], eaten more organic vegetables or taken Xanax at night before retiring.” Continuing, in one of his most potent statements, Lin writes: The [words] like the buildings of our era are utterly indiscriminate and by indiscriminate I mean already forgotten. Like us they have been reflected back to us by other more efficient modes of relaxation such as the shopping mall, the television, abandoned lots, landscapes that have been photographed, interactive e-billboards, backs of books, the disco, electronic signatures, and fast food.

And, ambivalently: “All labeling schemes shall be as nondescriptive as possible.”

ALEC MAPES-FRANCES B'17 is ignorable, or, interesting.

The College Hill Independent

GET Coding: the WITH New Global Language?

THE PROGRAM

by Liz Cory illustration by Juan Tang Hon What’s in a name?

Most schools in the United States only offer computer science courses as electives, if at all. This February, Florida senators overwhelmingly passed a bill that would allow high school students to count computer-coding classes toward the two foreign language credits necessary for graduation. Democratic senator and former Yahoo! executive Jeremy Ring, the bill’s creator, argued that coding “is a global language, more global than French or German or Spanish, or for that matter even English.” The bill’s proponents added that knowing how to code is an essential part of being a digitally literate citizen. This bill, they suggested, is one way to expand digital literacy, to allow more students to engage critically with our computer-oriented world.

Furthermore, Ring’s supporters said this bill would do more than just enrich Florida students’ high school educations, preparing them for the even more important pursuit of finding a job. Republican senator Jeff Brandes told the Miami Herald, “If we simply set the goal post as a degree, then we fail in our responsibilities. The ultimate goal post is a job, is a career.” Lawmakers who agree with Brandes often assert that there is a shortage of skilled workers to fill the nation’s increasing number of computing jobs.

A few weeks ago, the bill failed in Florida’s house of representatives—but not without igniting debate across the country.

The sheer premise of the bill, equating “constructed languages” such as Java and Python with what some linguists would call “natural languages,” such as Spanish and German, is ridden with problems. Programming languages like Java are made to communicate instructions to control a machine. Yes, Java has syntax, grammar, and unique vocabulary, but it lacks the richness of ambiguity, cultural and situational context, as well as the basic capacity to help people communicate with one another. In casual speech, it’s permissible to use the same word to describe Java and Spanish, but it’s clear that they don’t do the same things.

Cameron Wilson, Vice President of Government Affairs at Code.org, called the comparison a “fundamental misunderstanding.” Suggesting one course shouldn’t displace another, the nonprofit is fighting for computer science classes to become part of core science and math curricula alongside STEM staples like physics, geometry, and chemistry.

Many others felt the bill would lead to a stunted sense of empathy. Miami-Dade County Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho cited “educational, intellectual…and emotional development—as well as long-term economic development—in an increasingly bilingual and biliterate community” as some of the things at stake. Studies backing up Carvalho’s concerns abound. In the New York Times just a few weeks ago, Katherine Kinzler, Cornell University psychology and human development professor, shared her findings that multilingual children are better than monolingual children at adopting another person’s perspective.

Kinzler explains, “Children in multilingual environments have social experiences that provide routine practice in considering the perspectives of others: They have to think about who speaks which language to whom, who understands which content, and the times and places in which different languages are spoken.”

Regardless of the varied stances on the now-dead Florida bill, one belief lives on: coding know-how, much like foreign language acquisition, is a skill that everyone should have.

This idea is gaining traction nationwide, especially in light of President Obama’s announcement this January of his Computer Science for All initiative. The initiative allocates $4 billion of the upcoming budget to states and $100 million to districts for computer science development, accompanied by an additional $135 million beginning this year for training computer science teachers, courtesy of

April 8, 2016

the National Science Foundation and the Corporation for National and Community Service.

President Obama says the initiative’s goal is “to empower all American students from kindergarten through high school to learn computer science and be equipped… to be active citizens in our technology-driven world.”

This initiative echoes the government’s resounding call for a “21st century education,” made available to as many Americans as possible. The call emphasizes progress and values tangible results: raising test scores, securing jobs, strengthening the economy.

The President also mentioned that the plan seeks to lessen the shortage of tech workers, citing 600,000 “highpaying tech jobs” that were unfilled last year. However, if there is actually a shortage of tech and computing workers, there isn’t clear evidence to support it. Many sources, including a 2014 Congressional Research Service report on the science and engineering workforce by John F. Sargent Jr., Specialist in Science and Technology Policy, find that “there are varying perspectives about whether a shortage of scientists and engineers exists in the United States,” but people generally agree on the importance of scientists and engineers to our nation’s workforce. In this way, the initiative’s real strength isn’t connecting kindergarteners to future careers, but rather its attempt to expose thousands more kids to computer science.

Providing access and breaking stereotypes In many respects, expansion of computer science education is long overdue. Access to well-supported computer science curricula below the university level is poor across the country, largely due to the costly resources needed to maintain computer science classes and train enough teachers. Although the first AP Computer Science course was launched in 1984, the College Board reports that less than one percent of the AP exams given in 2015 were in Computer Science.

And of the 2015 test takers—students who went to a school offering the course, had the resources to learn the material, and could pay to sit for the test—males outnumbered females by a factor of almost four to one. In 23 states, fewer than ten African American students took the exam; and while the exact states varied, there were also 23 states with fewer than ten Hispanic students who took the exam. Although it is true that some schools offer Computer Science outside of the College Board’s jurisdiction, and that the amount of test takers from 2014 to 2015 rose by 25 percent, the numbers are representative of a larger diversity problem within the tech world.

Many people just don’t have access to computer science education—or feel shunned from a community where they aren’t represented. The Computer Science for All initiative, which aims to get kids coding as early as five years old, could be one way to introduce more students to the subject before they feel the full weight of stereotypes that might drive them away. With enough time and luck recruiting a more diverse pool of beginners, some argue, the field of computer science itself could become more diverse and welcoming. Nonetheless, increasing the number of underrepresented programmers qualified and excited to compete for jobs will only do so much. Effecting real change in the tech workforce will take considerable, conscious effort by the predominantly white, male Silicon Valley executives, who often continue the cycle of hiring other white males in their social networks.

Learning devoid of context One approach to tackling the problem of unequal opportunity that the public education system can’t match can be found online for free. Many third-party programs are expanding coding education access to millions of people worldwide. Codecademy is one of the many third-party

programs offering online courses in C++, Python, Java, Javascript and many more programming languages for all skill levels. The nonprofit has also worked alongside the White House to actively reach out to underrepresented minorities and women through special programs.

Organizations like Codecademy offer a new way of looking at computer science by providing open-source coding knowledge to anyone who wants it. Coding in this way could be “for everyone,” a sort of hobby or supplement to enhance something else you’re interested in. Codecademy solves the problem of learning to code easily without displacing essential classroom experiences.

However, its pedagogy promotes a sort of learning devoid of context, marketing free and easy skill-mastering without regard for the richness of computer science as a complete discipline.

According to Codecademy’s founder and CEO, Zach Sims, the organization’s goal is, in many cases, employment: to get any user without previous coding knowledge employed in 3 months. It seems that what often lurks behind the push for coding education is the pursuit of filling tech jobs. But how do you fill tech jobs with good programmers when most of the accessible coding education just churns out people who are “code literate”—able to grasp the coding basics but lacking the ability to code creatively? Casual coding can no doubt enhance the lives and careers of many people, but training to be a successful programmer takes thousands of committed hours.

There’s an important distinction to be made between ensuring students have equal access to computer science education and pushing for “all students to learn computer science.” Perhaps not everyone needs to be a “creator” in the digital economy.

Maybe not everyone needs to code.

Software engineer Chase Felker asserts in an article for Slate, “the fact is that no matter how pervasive a technology is, we don’t need to understand how it works…To justify everyone learning about programming, you would need to show that most jobs will actually require this.”

That’s right: we don’t need everyone to know how to code to have a thriving society, or a country that maintains its own technological clout in relation to the rest of the world.

Exposing more kids to computer science is a wonderful, necessary thing. Expecting coding literacy to become uniform is not only untenable but quite probably harmful.

Particularly if pushing for that standard of digital literacy displaces cross-cultural interaction and achievement of higher general literacy levels. The reality is that progress doesn’t move at the same pace for people in disadvantaged circumstances. As Jathan Sadowski wrote for Wired, “It will be the gap between the coding haves and have-nots.”

If we assume that knowing how to code, like learning a foreign language, is integral to one’s professional success, the question becomes: where do we draw the line? What is the goal of encouraging kids to cultivate these skills? If it really is to fill jobs, we must consider both the amount of infrastructure needed to provide equal opportunities for students to gain these skills and the cost of what is displaced by many hours of immersive practice. Coding and learning foreign languages are only comparable insofar as they are both and hyped up as essential 21st century skills that will make a person more employable. However, what seems to be most essential right now is achieving equal educational opportunities for all kids in this country. This includes increasing computer science exposure, teaching skills in context so students can think for themselves rather than just follow instructions—and it sure doesn’t leave out the ABCs. LIZ CORY B’18 was born in the simpler times of the 20th century.

TECH

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Hillary Clinton

Lady Macbeth the Orient

Palo Alto critique

Pol Pot dry humping

waterboarding Apple Watch

SmarterChild Daesh

High School Musical chocolate fountain

Iron Curtain Y2K

hit this kk microagressions

macroagressions compost

eating everything ISIS

almond milk Grindr

loose leaf tea white guilt

the Cloud vaping

minions JSwipe

Birthright Panopticon

peep show

Martin Shkreli

Ghostface Killa ISIL

'chella Christina Paxson

fun Piezoni's

jogger pants candy crush saga

human sacrifice Panama Papers

Chipotle gift card Canada Goose

humility Xanax

socialism white people

spices Trump's hands

Nuremberg Trials millenials

content Angela Merkel

Hugh Hefner fisting

antiquing God

Elon Musk the G -spot

Eat Pray Love open relationships

open relationships

MY OWN GHOSTS What We Talk About When We Talk About Empathy

by Joseph Frankel illustration by Yuko Okabe

In a nightmarish story called A Country Doctor, Kafka writes about a night when the titular character has to ride miles away to a patient dying from a terrible wound.

The doctor’s horses have suddenly died, and he must borrow someone else’s. A groomsman offers to lend the doctor his own. As the doctor prepares to leave, the groomsman bites the doctor’s maidservant, Rosa, on the face and chases her into the doctor’s house. Time is running out. The doctor, momentarily conflicted, leaves with the horses and is haunted by his choice.

He arrives at his patient’s home and finds the source of illness: a bright red gash on the boy’s side that blooms like a rose, full of tiny white worms that wriggle and spread. The doctor is unable to help. The horses huddle around the windows, poking their heads in and reminding him of what he gave up and of what the groomsman will do to Rosa. He is unable to focus. Bystanders appear, strip the doctor naked, and throw him into the bed with the patient, who openly questions the doctor’s ability to do anything.

Lying next to him, the doctor replies that the patient’s wound is not so bad.

The doctor has seen far worse. “My young friend,” he says to his patient, who is probably dying, “your mistake is this: you lack perspective.” +++ I stand bleary-eyed in the narrow hallway of the ward, heart beating fast from adrenaline and the iced coffee I’d downed before leaving for the overnight shift.

There is a constant hum of keyboards and groans from the overcrowded triage area, where patients wait on stretchers to be assigned to rooms as needed. The sliding doors to the ambulance bay open and shut as new patients are wheeled in, sometimes heralded by an overhead announcement if the incoming patient is in severe danger and will need a medical team’s attention as soon as possible.

My partner—another student in my class—and I were told to wear street clothes so no one would mistake us in the chaos of the E.R. for a nurse or doctor.

That was all the instruction we were given before showing up at the hospital.

When we arrived, we tried to explain ourselves in our best professional voices—here were our names, here was the information about the course we were taking; maybe we were on some sort of list? The nurse at the reception desk stared at us for a few seconds as if we were selling magazine subscriptions, then waved us through into the ward. There, we were stopped and questioned again by an attending physician who gave us blank nametags. The shift begins, the patients enter, and we watch. I take on small tasks when offered, grateful for the chance to do something. I hold a patient’s hand to keep her arm still while a nurse finds a vein for an IV and fold the sheets of a woman with dementia who’d been left, fallen out of bed, for hours. I clean the dried blood off the faces of two men whose motorcycles sent them flying into a ravine.

They had been drinking. I ask, perhaps too eagerly, if there was anything I could do to help once the two have been stabilized. I talk with them about the music video for Rihanna’s “Pour it Up” as I wipe their foreheads with hydrogen peroxide. They seem nonplussed and somehow sober. I ask, as my hands move around eyes and noses, if I’m hurting them.

Otherwise my partner and I hover in the background, grabbing gloves and gauze and gauges when asked. But mostly, we spend the night behind the glass partition with the emergency room scribes, or flush against a wall, trying to take up as little space as possible, watching the orchestral response of finding and fixing wounds. +++ There are norms and rituals. A surprising and necessary lack of fanfare for the patient who is brought in already dead. That’s how we’ve been told to think of those who need CPR—already dead. If a patient needs CPR, they have no pulse, are considered clinically dead, and are unlikely to survive. For a caregiver, people with a chance need the attention more now.

The chest compressions must have started soon after the man collapsed, then continued in the ambulance and into the hospital room until the resident directing the code says gently, “If it’s alright with everyone, I’m going to pronounce.” No one protests, and the room empties as quickly as it filled.

I do not look at the man’s face. I have the time, and I’m not forced by necessity to keep tending to patients. But I don’t enter his room. Maybe that would have affected me more. I don’t want to look at him as an object or a curiosity, but from this perspective, that’s how I am looking at them all.

I remember speaking to a classmate who’d observed the weekend before. “It was awesome,” she said the next day. “I saw, like, two cardiac arrests and a femur fracture.”

In speech, patients become their ailments. That’s what we are there to learn about, and in theory fix to the limited degree that we can. As students, this is supposed to be our focus—taking in the information of these pains, naming them, and turning them into solvable problems. And in care that sometimes calls for a degree of detachment, it makes more sense to think like the doctor who kills

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the worm and sutures the side than the one who fixates on the patient’s lack of perspective. Sitting and stewing with a notebook doesn’t fix fractures.

“Did anyone die?” I had no idea how I’d react if I saw it happen, and I wanted to know. Some part of me thought her answer would prepare me.

“Yeah,” she said. “We lost this kid who OD’d. Fifteen years old. It was really sad.”

After going over this anecdote with my shift partner she told me this detail was wrong—there was no one who died of an overdose that night. “But that’s part of it, and so understandable even if it’s unsettling,” she said. “There are so many of them and it’s so hard to keep it straight.” I keep moving. I ask if there are warm blankets I can fetch, a patient’s cellphone I can set aside for safekeeping, some small detail I can look after. +++ A few hours in, one of the nurses calls us over and asks us to wait with a patient while she finds rooms for new arrivals. Smiling, she thanks us and says to come get her if anything happens.

Inside there’s a man lying silent on a hospital bed. Sitting next to him is a woman in a gray coat, hands folded on her lap.

It is just the four of us in the room.

We have spent so much of the night trying to stay out of the way as patients are sped through on stretchers and crash teams fill up the rooms that the largeness of our presence now feels strange and unjustified.

“You guys are students,” she says, smiling as if she’s guessed right at charades.

We nod.

I try to find something to do with my hands. The person in the bed groans now and again, moving his hand to his forehead, feeling over the bruise where he must have landed.

By now it’s around 5:00 in the morning. The woman in the coat will have to be at work in a couple of hours, she says, as if it’s almost time to buy another carton of milk.

Maybe this has happened before. Maybe she wasn’t as calm the first time. The patient groans again. The blanket heaves and billows with the squirming of his legs.

I notice for the first time he’s slurring his words.

My next memory is of him sitting bolt upright, wide awake.

“Don’t tell her anything,” he says, his voice just below a yell, “don’t tell her a thing.”

The woman in the coat promises that she won’t.

I find a chair and sit down across from her. We have been taught that getting on the same level as a patient is good practice. She speaks softly and holds my gaze.

She talks about her daughter. She will have to drive her to school in the morning on her way to work.

I don’t ask what happened because I have no reason for doing so. I cannot judge what help they need and I can’t provide them with it.

I ask if there’s someone she can call to take her daughter instead, hoping the answer is yes and that the thought just hasn’t occurred to her.

“No, that’s alright,” she says, looking over at her husband—they’re married, aren’t they?—who is now dozing again under the covers. “I’ll take her myself.”

I picture the two men thrown off their motorcycles as I imagine this woman driving her daughter down the highway after a sleepless night. But to have someone drive her daughter she would have to tell someone what happened. Tell them something, which she said she won’t do. At some point the nurse comes back in and we slink back into the hallway, floating from room to room like ghosts, waiting for someone’s pain to teach us something. +++ After I leave in the morning, I wonder about the man in the bed and the woman in the chair. No one ever told us why they were there. In my mind their story is a sketch—an outline to be filled in. There are many narratives that could fit, and the one I’m drawn to suggests the two are a couple and they’ve been through this before. He’ll be back in the hospital, and she’ll continue to bring him in, and then drive herself to work and their daughter to school on not enough sleep.

I read a lot that year about empathy—it’s a word that continues to come up again and again when it comes to medicine. As psychologist Paul Bloom wrote, it’s a value sometimes seen as beyond justification, an idea that is obvious in its goodness. It has sparked books like Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. It pops up in think pieces and debates (the Boston Review published a 13-piece spread on Paul Bloom’s claims about empathy in 2014) and is lauded by some as a moral gift, one of the main benefits of literature in the classroom. It’s one of the ideals of narrative medicine, a movement in medical education that encourages caregivers to develop narrative competence and engage with the stories of their patients in order to deliver better care.

As someone predisposed to value story and empathy (or the set of values it’s

The College Hill Independent

sometimes used to describe) I’ve found myself playing devil’s advocate after my night of shadowing. I want to interrogate the value in being able to identify with someone else, and that means breaking open a more specific, literal definition of empathy: to share and imagine the feelings of another. To recognize one’s pain in another verges on projecting more than understanding or sharing. To empathize, we recall our own experiences and stories as reference. Past pain teaches us that the stove is hot, the knife is sharp, and rejection stings, and we trust it is the same for everyone.

This raises the question of how to understand someone else’s pain, how to empathize with another without having felt the same thing, or fear of the same emotion. If it’s possible to successfully imagine someone’s pain, the only way seems to be to imagine our pain as theirs.

The outline of this empathy becomes a Rorschach blot. +++ A Country Doctor is sometimes taught to medical students. I’ve been told this is to try to teach the feeling of vulnerability of being a patient. The same professor who introduced the story to me said most doctors he taught were horrified by the thought of being in the position of Kafka’s doctor. Underneath that initial horror, Kafka’s doctor shows something of this dark side of empathy. The doctor is laid low and put in the same sickbed; he understands on some level how the patient feels. He too is injured. The roseate wound on the boy’s side is a double, a surrogate

April 8, 2016

for Rosa’s rape. The doctor’s own wound bleeds out its edges, coloring his world and obscuring the need and means to help his patient. Too much of a good thing renders him helpless.

As expected, I was of no use to the people I saw that night. But weeks and years after these charades I find myself returning to my own ghosts. To those I’ve loved and continue to love who became ill, went to the hospital, and died or came close to it. To those I’ve loved who drank themselves into harm’s way—sometimes in grand, terrifying, one-off acts (still none that rival flipping off road on a motorcycle), sometimes in ways more chronic, invisible, and insidious. It might be hyperbole to say those experiences left me wounded. And yet these are the ones that braid themselves into these memories and encounters. These are the ones that color my vision, that bend and fill in the outlines, transforming a man in a bed and a woman in a chair into a saga that I may have very well invented. My position that night as a privileged kind of spectator was a safeguard: calling on these memories would not keep me from delivering the kind of care that requires a healthy distance—something empathy’s greatest advocates in medicine repeatedly name as a necessity. I do believe empathy offers good, though I don’t claim to understand it fully. But I do know that, like Kafka’s doctor, my empathy is shaped by what I can draw from my own ghosts.

JOSEPH FRANKEL ’16 changed and omitted identifying information in this piece.

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by Hannah Smith There was a tree, and from its bare branches hung bells, wine glasses, chandelier crystals, whistles, and lanterns.

The hunched tree, with knots in its back, bent onto the busiest highway in the state. The cars, with whining children and cups in holders and sore legs, would crash into the ornaments. Shards of glass exploded onto the side of the road. Unable to stop, unwilling to look up, the drivers would continue: car after car passed, a disease in movement. Time passed, a single lantern hung in the darkness. A man walked to an early shift at a butcher shop and noticed the world reflecting out in screams contained in the lantern.

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+++ There was a swollen body at the bottom of a drying riverbed. In the early morning with memories of deer and rabbits, he would crawl with the river and emptied clouds.

He would move over waterfalls, under docks, in between boats and fishing lines and find himself in the ocean, dissolving into sand, prisoner to warming tides. +++ The shells of invertebrates will dissolve. Snails, clams, mussels will be left raw. The vulnerability of their soft interiors will be on display. The creatures will find the rigidity of an exoskeleton in beer bottles, boots, and plastic trucks. The grayness, the heavy heat will obstruct sight. And oceans will flood gardens and will sweep away letters and watches. Droughts will carve bodies into willowy shapes. Bones will be ivory chipped and disease will carry through telephone wires. Sounds of others will arrive with hurricanesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and the laughter of the sky will startle us when we canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t open our windows.

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The College Hill Independent

This year’s themes are “Create, Innovate, and Play.” There’s an after party at Ogie’s Trailer Park—which is a restaurant/ bar, and not a trailer park.

It’s unclear whether you have to pay for the after party, or whether you have to have attended TEDx first.

04.09

04.08 04.08 friday 04.08

Ghee Tasting Event The Olive Tap, 485 Angell St // 6–8pm // $10 A tasting event where you can try all sorts of dishes that feature ghee, a form of clarified butter originally from South Asia. The dishes being offered aren’t South Asian, but they sound really, really good. There’s even Homemade Ghee, Banana and Peanut Brittle Ice Cream. To be honest I don’t know how this is $10, unless the portions are really, really small. Call 2728200 to save yourself a spot.

04.08

High Functioning Flesh, Body of Light, DJ Richard, Nick Klein, Wilted Woman, Sekret-DJ Aurora // 9pm DJ, 10pm live acts // $8

04.09 saturday 04.09 04.09

Profligate, Valise, Boy Harsher Tommy’s Place, 144 Westminster St // 9pm // $7

TEDxProvidence Columbus Theatre // 9am–5pm // $25–50 DarkMatter, benefit for Black and Pink Danger!Awesome, 645 Mass Ave, Central Square, Cambridge // 9pm // $5–$25 sliding scale donation Trans South Asian performance art duo DarkMatter will be performing a benefit show for Blank and Pink, a support group for queer people experiencing incarceration.

The event is all ages, and wheelchair accessible.

04.09

04.09

Rhode Rhode IslandIsland Fact Fact of of the Week: the Week: the area the is area is served by 450 served by 450 taxis.taxis.

04.10 sunday 04.10 04.10 Modern Movements Festival 2016 AS220, 95 Empire St // 4pm // $15 per event, unless you buy a pass for multiple events

04.08

Hard electropunk, synthpop, and post-industrial music show.

The festival starts today at 4pm. Performances by The Bill Evans Rhythm Tap Dance Ensemble, Ronald Kevin Lewis, Grant Jacoby and Dancers, Ashley Ferro-Murray, Betsy Miller and Matthew Cumbie, Farah Saleh, Alison Cook Beatty Dance, and others. There will also be workshops. I’m particularly excited for Farah Saleh, a Palestinian dancer and choreographer currently in residence at Brown U. Her current work explores gestures and movements as archival texts.

04.10

Laura Gibson and Sianna Plavin Columbus Theatre // 9pm // $10–$12 New York-based singer-songwriter Laura Gibson will be touring in support of her new album “Empire Builder”

Pool, Coteries, Scant, Dave Public, FONE, Worth Psychic Readings // 9pm // ???

04.08

Wham City Comedy Tour w/ Cricket Arrison, Gentle Leader, Joe DeGeorge Sax Machine Aurora // 8.30pm // free

This event has a very mysterious title. It’s a concert featuring Brown U bands Now Hiring, Young Hummus, and Daudalaggio’s Traveling Spacetime Band. The trademark in the name is very suspicious…

Baltimore-based Wham City Comedy is a comedy and video collective co-founded by comedian Alan Resnick. Wham City’s and Resnick’s surreal videos have been aired by Adult Swim, and used as music videos

by Dan Deacon and Beach House. They’re supported at this show by some other funny cats. I don’t know all of them, but I can confirm Joe DeGeorge is a cool dude and has a hilarious saxophone set.

04.11

04.14 04.14

An Evening of Czech Music Grant Recital Hall, 105 Benevolent St. 7.30–9.30pm // free “Music by Smetana, Dvořák, Janáček, Ernst, Martinů, and Czech Gyspy jazz. Performed by students in the Brown Applied Music Program (coached by Lois Finkel), musicians from the RI community and the Czech-Roma jazz pianist-composer Tomáš Kačo.”

04.14

Noise show. Contemplate Monday morning on Sunday night with soothing tones.

04.10

04.11 04.11 04.11 monday

The RF™ Watermyn Co-op, 166 Waterman St // 9pm // $5

04.14 thursday

Electronic and industrial music, performance, and video.

Parquet Courts and Soda at the Met The Met, 1005 Main St, Pawtucket // Doors 8pm, Show 9pm // $15–$17

04.14

Indie rock show. Get your indie rock show.

Yeah, yeah, yeah New York.

04.12 04.12 tuesday 04.12 Providence is Not Our Playground 85 Waterman Street // 6.30pm // free This event is directed mostly at Brown U students. It is, however, free and open to the public. There will be free food from Kabob and Curry.

The event promises “A workshop centered on the history of Brown’s power in Providence // A space for exploring our own power because of our position within Brown, using an intersectional framework.” Is it ironic that the University’s Swearer Center is hosting this?

04.12