The College Hill Independent V.29 N.5

the college hill A BROWN/RISD WEEKLY OCTOBER 17, 2014 | V29 N5

independent

MANAGING EDITORS Alex Sammon, Lili Rosenkranz, Greg Nissan NEWS Sebastian Clark, Kyle Giddon, Elias Bresnick METRO Rick Salamé, Sophie Kasakove, Cherise Morris ARTS Lisa Borst, Eli Pitegoff, Erin Schwartz FEATURES Jackie Gu, Matt Marsico, Sara Winnick TECHNOLOGY Patrick McMenamin SPORTS Zeve Sanderson FOOD Sam Bresnick LITERARY Kim Sarnoff, Leah Steinberg EPHEMERA Mark Benz X Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan, Pierie Korostoff LIST Polina Godz, Megan Hauptman DESIGN + ILLUSTRATION Casey Friedman, Ming Zhen COVER EDITOR Jade Donaldson SENIOR EDITORS Tristan Rodman STAFF WRITERS Mika Kligler, Will Fesperman, Stephanie Hayes, Jamie Packs, Dash Elhauge STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Andres Chang, Amy Chen WEB Edward Friedman COPY Mary Frances Gallagher BUSINESS Haley Adams COVER ART Jade Donaldson MVP Rick Salamé

VOLUME 29 | ISSUE 5

NEWS 2 Week in Review

dash elhauge, kyle giddon, & jamie packs

7 Court Report rebecca mears

METRO 3 Stellaaaaa!

eli neuman-hammond

ARTS 11 Logging Jogging erin schwartz

15 Spin a Web jonah max

LIT 17 Shut-eye

athena washburn

TECH 16 Personhood

FEATURES 13 Get Smart sara winnick

9 Death & Remembrance xxx

FOOD 5 What’s up, Doc? lisa borst

SEASONS 12 Lob(autumn)y

rick salamé & jake soloff

FROM THE EDITOR S The printed word is long dead. The Providence Journal is laying off staff members of 40 years. The Providence Phoenix, Rhode Island’s largest weekly newspaper, published its final issue this week. There was a jam in the printing press and the age of mechanical reproduction finally splintered and fell apart. Hold this newspaper tight, get ink on your sweaty hands, and know that every time you throw away a half-read Indy, we lay off another staff member. We just can’t afford to keep paying everybody, ya know? Because of budget cuts, we’ve done away with our Lifestyle section and outsourced our Advertising team to a firm in central Texas. The rest of us, aware that our future careers in media are short, are hitting the gym, focusing our attention on our kickball prowess. You may have heard that we’ve gotten pretty good. We are beefy and brawny and ready for the future. We are, very suddenly, Rhode Island’s largest weekly newspaper. We beat the Herald 10-5.

-LB

EPHEMERA 8 <3 of the City mark benz

X 18 Fitting In layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

patrick mcmenamin

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

THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN BROADCASTS

by Jamie Packs, Dash Elhauge, & Kyle Giddon illustration by Caroline Brewer

VIAGRA FOR WOMEN Well, not exactly. Viagra, the maker of the world’s top selling erectile dysfunction drug, recently released an advertisement featuring a female spokesperson for the first time in the company’s history. Gone are the days of all-male boating excursions and hard-hat laden construction scenes. Instead, the company has chosen to eschew its macho image and appeal to the softer side of men struggling with their softer sides.

The ad begins with a close-up: “It’s just you and your honey,” says a blonde woman lying prostrate on a bare mattress, flanked by white curtains and tropical flowers. She speaks in a soft British accent. “Plenty of guys have this issue—not just getting an erection, but keeping it,” she says.

(The ad is also notable for being the first Viagra ad to use the word “erection” instead of “erectile dysfunction” or “ED”).

After finishing her soliloquy, she walks in slow motion along a windswept beach while a male narrator enumerates medical technicalities of the drug. Though the advertisement is certainly not as subtle or morally restrained as, say, a couple of silver foxes reading the Sunday paper, (the bedroom setting, the shimmering negligee, the excessive eye-contact), it is perhaps an improvement in its directness.

But one must not forget the intentions underlying this supposedly radical shift in character, this forgoing of a very middle school dance attitude towards sex. With Viagra’s patent set to expire in three years, there is no room for Jesus any more. Instead, there is a sense of urgency for Viagra’s executives to get all they can out of the product. The patent’s imminent expiration poses a serious threat to the drug’s sturdy monopoly, as cheaper generic versions will likely take the opportunity to seize the market. Consequently, Viagra doesn’t seem to feel the need to be elusive anymore. In short, their once only-sort-of-tasteful masquerade is now over. Viagra can finally be honest about what they are selling—sex, not a better golf swing.

While the company considers this new approach to be a tribute to a new, radical politics, Viagra executives are not quite the crusaders of feminism they seem to think they are for including a woman spokesperson for once. Rather, this bold move seems to expose their deepest insecurities about the success of the company. As a result, Viagra has reverted to the kind of blunt, pandering advertising that they had once tried so laboriously to avoid. For Viagra, the tired adage “sex sells” is now becoming vital—much more so than the organs of their loyal consumers.

And with Viagra’s product under threat, the only question is how long their empire will last; but, if I had to guess, it would probably be longer than four hours.

–JP

OCTOBER 17 2014

HIGH HOPES, LOW EXPECTATIONS This past Saturday, Fleetwood Mac played their latest stop on the “On with the Show” tour in Boston, selling the most expensive concert tickets of the coming six months at an average price of $366. Which is a lot for a band that, let’s face it, is pretty okay. It’s a sound composed almost entirely of harmonized “babys” and country guitar bends. Not to say that’s bad – just, you know.

This rise in ticket prices is due to the return of Christine McVie, lead singer, who is touring with the band for the first time in 16 years. The ticket sales aren’t exactly surprising when you consider that Rumours has held the record for the sixthbest selling album of all time since 1977, or that McVie sang and wrote many of the band’s greatest hits. But they are pretty perplexing when you consider that the acoustic guitar picking and soft crooning of Fleetwood Mac is often used for falling asleep on airplanes.

Fleetwood Mac tickets are in fact so expensive right now that they narrowly missed the record for most expensive concert tickets of all time, currently held by One Direction at $460. In fact, front row tickets climbed as high as $2,200 (or 55,000 protein biscuits for starving kids if you’re going by the outrageous claims I read off the back of the UNICEF box as a child roaming the suburbs in a Charmeleon costume). Why are people willing to pay so much for Fleetwood Mac tickets?

Who are these diehard Fleetwood Mac fans? And where are they hiding?

Concert ticket prices have climbed universally over the past couple decades. While there was a time when shows were used primarily to promote new albums, nowadays most concertgoers learn about music on the Internet and love an artist before they even set foot in the venue. Which means that the concertgoer of today is less willing to take risks, but also more devoted than ever to the bands that they do see—hence the little boys and girls with exceedingly lucrative lemonade stands who shoveled out hundreds of dollars to see One Direction this past year. But even that doesn’t quite explain the people who are willing to spend thousands to see Fleetwood Mac. And yet, at the end of the set in Boston, Christine McVie was handed two bouquets and all five members of the band locked arms to a cheering audience, McVie bidding farewell amidst the squeals and cries of devoted fans.

–DE

IT IS HAPPENING, AGAIN There once was a show on TV That filled its admirers with glee: Twin Peaks was its name, And mystique was its fame But it never did reach Season Three.

Some critics assailed it as “weird” Though that’s why it was so revered!

But the viewers declined And the network resigned— It was just as so many had feared.

But the decades had found it new lovers Who wanted the riddles uncovered: Though Laura Palmer is dead And Agent Cooper has bled There are thrills to be felt and discovered!

So this week it was said with a cheer “Twin Peaks will return just next year!”

So on premium cable Comes a forest of sable— But will Killer Bob persevere?

–KG

NEWS

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A STREETCAR NAMED PROVIDENCE

by Eli Neuman-Hammond

This September, after two rejected applications for federal funding, the City of Providence was approved for a $13 million federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant in support of a streetcar project. The proposed streetcar would begin on Thayer Street in College Hill, run over the Providence River through downtown, and then veer through the Jewelry District towards Rhode Island Hospital and Brown Medical School. The track would be 2.5 miles long, but the city has also issued a map of “potential future streetcar extensions,” apparently contingent upon the success of the initial bit.

Given the proposed route, it seems likely that tourists and college students would compose the majority of the streetcar’s rider base. The track would conveniently connect the area’s colleges—Brown, RISD, Johnson and Wales, and the Brown Medical School— with downtown Providence, and offer tourists a means to explore downtown’s various commercial options. This traffic would benefit the many businesses along the track and might even encourage new development in the Jewelry District, whose swaths of land daylighted by the removal of the I-95 highway lay largely barren. But both of these populations—the students and the tourists—are transient. The current plans for the streetcar exclude most of Providence’s communities, which reside outside of the small area the streetcar would service. The question is, then, whether this project would help the people of Providence, or just the people who least need this kind of help. +++ The streetcar would cost $114 million to build and $3 million annually to run. Posited as a public-private venture, the project’s “partners” include the City of Rhode Island, RIPTA, Brown University, and an unspecific group of “private sector leaders,” as written in a pamphlet issued by the city to promote the project. Yet the funding for the project will come mostly from taxpayers, especially since the federal TIGER grant only covers about 11 percent of the total cost. In fact, the current plan calls on new taxes to fund 47 percent of the project.

Mayor Angel Taveras, a staunch advocate of the plan, has proposed the creation of a new Tax Incremental Funding (TIF) district to help subsidize the project. Residents living in the TIF district would pay incrementally increasing taxes to help subsidize the streetcar; the increments would correspond to a projected increase in property-value in the district.

The idea behind TIF is to have the beneficiaries of public projects help pay for them by more heavily taxing the residents near the project.

Historically, TIF districts have aroused controversy for encouraging gentrification in urban spaces. As taxes go up in a certain area, landlords push the increased cost onto tenants, the rents go up, and poorer residents are pushed out of the area. In turn, a space develops that caters to wealthy residents who can afford to live there. New stores, restaurants, and services thrive on their money; small businesses are bought out.

A distinct division exists between the area through which the streetcar would run and the surrounding neighborhoods, and the streetcar development could exacerbate these socio-economic tensions. In the streetcar area resides a concentration of young, white residents: 63.1 percent of the residents along the line are white, and 57.6 percent are between the ages of 20-34. In the neighborhoods outside of the streetcar zone, the majority of the residents are minorities: 39.4 percent Hispanic, 37.5 percent White, 14.5 percent Black, 5.4 percent Asian, and 3.2 percent multiple ethnicities. Additionally, a 2009 analysis from City-Data shows that white individuals and families have the highest median income in Providence. These data paint a familiar picture of concentrated class and race in Downtown and College Hill. Spaces like the Providence Place Mall, often touted as a major attraction in Downtown, demonstrate how the space already markets itself towards this demographic. It’s the perfect compliment to the wealthy corridor on the other side of the river. The Providence streetcar would strengthen the bonds between these two regions, one primarily residential and the other commercial. The students and residents of College Hill might be more inclined to venture downtown on a streetcar, where they wouldn’t coincide with riders of the more wide-spread RIPTA bus system. (RIPTA already has numerous busses that run through the East Side Tunnel, straight from College Hill to Downtown.) A streetcar in this area, along with the attendant TIF district, could thus encourage even more stringent socio-economic divisions. +++

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"Am I against this? No. Am I for it? No,” said mayoral candidate Vincent “Buddy” Cianci with regards to the streetcar project. He continued: "My question—any prudent fiscal manager should ask—if the taxpayers are footing the rest of the bill, is this the best use of those taxpayer dollars?”

Other Providence taxpayers are asking the same question. Barry Schiller, an active member of RIPTA Riders—an organization that promotes the use of and defends funding for public transportation in Rhode Island—expressed a similar sentiment: “While much public info has been given about the streetcar, and there have been opportunities to comment, the decision to develop the plans and apply for the TIGER grant were taken without much public input.” It’s not a far cry to draw a comparison to Rhode Island’s disastrous investment in 38 Studios, a decision also made without voter input. (38 Studios was a video game company to which the state of Rhode Island lent $75 million—it subsequently went bankrupt). But, as Schiller continued, “We are not yet committed to the streetcar and public opinion can prevent it, as financing for the entire system is not assured.”

Political support is not assured either, it seems. While Mayor Taveras is an advocate of the streetcar project, two of the three mayoral candidates in the upcoming elections have expressed doubt about the development. The mayor is a big player in this project, and without full-fledged commitment there is little hope for the project’s success. “This does not support the street car proposal," said Republican candidate Dan Harrop of the $13 million federal TIGER Grant. "If RIPTA, the state, the federal government and Brown University (since this is essentially an intramodal project from Brown's medical campus to its main campus) want to build this, then great! The city under my administration will clear the permits and the zoning. But we have not one penny to put to this project." In a similar vein, Buddy Cianci noted, “It would serve two important parts of the community, but what about elsewhere?" Brown University has issued no official statements concerning the streetcar project, despite their status as a partner in the project.

Jorge Elorza is the one candidate who has shown some support for the streetcar.

Elorza wrote, "If federal TIGER grant funds are awarded to support the streetcar initiative, I will support the creation of a TIF district to provide the City’s portion of financial support for the project.” Then again, Elorza’s voter base consists of affluent East Side residents, those who would benefit most from a streetcar in its proposed location.

Can a $13 million federal award—a sum less than half of what the city applied for— really justify the investment of $100 million more? One argument on behalf of the streetcar is that, when it comes to transportation, you need to start somewhere. This line would connect some of Rhode Island’s largest employers, and were it a success, it might act as an impetus to actually expand the system throughout the city. On the other hand, by what prescription is it necessary to start with the wealthiest, whitest part of Providence? Why not connect a neighborhood like West End or Olneyville with Providence’s center? If the proposed line fails, it will be a huge waste of resources, the potential extensions will never be built, and it will set a terrible precedent for future investments in transportation, making it that much harder to push new projects through.

Similar light-rail transportation projects in other cities have had mixed success, a potential warning sign for the Providence streetcar. If one thing is clear, it’s that light rail projects have been a major trend over the past thirty years. One reason cities might invest in streetcars, as opposed to new bus routes, is that the permanence of a new track demonstrates long-term investment in a space; bus routes are more ephemeral, subject to the whim of those in power. The allure of a streetcar is also its economic and structural feasibility, in contrast to more cumbersome subway systems. Since 1980, over 640 miles of new light rail line have been built in the United States. New heavy rail subway systems, on the other hand, have not garnered new investment since 1993. Five notable cities built light rail lines in 1980: Buffalo, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, and San Jose. Like Providence, these cities hoped that their lines would better connect their populations and boost their economies. But, based on an analysis of census data conducted by the urbanist and journalist Yonah Freemark, the amount of local workers who rode transit to work declined in four out of the five cities that invested in light rail lines between 1980 and 2012.

The main positive correlation found in his study was between streetcars and cities’ core populations. But, as Freemark notes, “Whether that relative success resulted from light rail is unclear; there are plenty of other urban growth factors that come into play.”

There are other ways to augment Providence’s public transportation. Barry Schiller

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

suggests that the city could “improve frequencies of existing bus lines, some of which get quite crowded. RIPTA could also re-establish a low-cost or no-cost ‘short zone’ in central Providence, which RIPTA had until about 2002.” Another alternative investment might be short-term bike rental stations, which many cities have added to their transportation infrastructure since 2008. The open area in front of Providence Station is in ruins, and if part of the goal of Providence streetcar is to improve the city’s image, the Station might be a better place to start; it’s the portal into Providence for many travelers and visitors, and it could certainly use the renovation. +++ The main purported goal of the streetcar is economic development. The logic of transportation development is to connect people to each other and to new jobs. When a city provides public transportation to an area, it shows active investment in that area. It’s a positive sign to the people, and to potential investors of institutional belief in the region.

But a city must take its whole into account, and show investment in all of the diverse interests that constitute its urban life. In the case of the streetcar, this idea is transportation development aimed at the economic advancement of small part of Providence, incidentally dividing the city so people exist, socialize, and consume where they are “supposed to.”

This tone-deafness is not merely an aberration. Another project that exemplifies these skewed priorities is the Kennedy Plaza redevelopment, which, as put by Providence Journal columnist Dave Brussat, is “an attack on the people’s plaza.” One of the apparent motives behind the redevelopment is to create a new civic space in Providence. Yet, Kennedy Plaza already functioned as a civic space, despite its utilitarian purpose as a bus terminal. People from all walks of life gathered in Kennedy Plaza. The redesign, which destroys half of the bus berths at the plaza, siphons bus riders away from the space. Don’t these bus patrons have a right to Kennedy Plaza, just as much as any college student or tourist does?

On the surface, Providence streetcar and Kennedy Plaza are not bad projects. In fact, there are redeemable ideas embedded in both. But even the best ideas can be perverted into exclusionary tools for those in power. Public projects, if they are truly to serve the public, must be spaces of inclusion.

ELI NEUMAN-HAMMOND B’18, despite his utilitarian purpose, is a bus terminal.

OCTOBER 17 2014

METRO

□ 04

THE REAL DIRT ON THE BABY CARROT

by Lisa Borst illustration by Margaret Hu

There is a point in the early evening at my parents’ house, an hour or two before dinner, that I’m tempted to call “Baby Carrot Time.” A handful of baby carrots is the perfect 5 PM snack: mindlessly tasty, not too filling, ubiquitous in any vaguely health-conscious middle-class home. Also, they are really cute. We eat half of a weird, wet bag and are still hungry for dinner.

It’s possible that we love baby carrots because tiny things are funny—I’m thinking here about puppies and mini-cupcakes—or because it’s more appealing, somehow, to eat four ounces of baby carrots one by one than it is to confront one large and daunting four-ounce adult carrot. But baby carrots have also been engineered to be as attractive as possible, modified to increase sweetness and planted close together for optimal thinness and length.

Indeed, the vegetable you probably regard mostly as a vehicle for hummus has undergone a lengthy transformation from its original self by the time it appears, shiny and bagged, at your local grocery store. Technically a “baby-cut carrot,” it’s been grown to adulthood—in contrast to a true baby carrot, which has just been harvested prematurely—and then sliced, shaved, and polished into its familiar nubby shape and size. Baby-cut carrots originated in the 1980s as a solution to the food waste produced by throwing away blemished, deformed, or spoiled carrots: California grower Mike Yurosek, frustrated with the amount of waste he was generating, began slicing off his carrots’ ugly parts, then salvaging the remaining bits with a potato peeler.

In contrast to its utilitarian roots, though, carrot processing has become a major component of agribusiness. Baby-cuts are no longer produced just to salvage ugly or blemished carrots, but instead have turned into a hugely successful industry unto themselves—despite their need for increased packaging and the wasted carrot shavings generated during their production. According to a 2007 report by the United States Department of Agriculture, overall carrot consumption in the US has seen a dramatic upsurge since the inception of the baby carrot in the 1980s, with carrots becoming one of the most widely consumed vegetables in the country, especially among children. Consider: what does it say about our culture that, in order to sell vegetables, we have to make them appear synthetic, shaved and polished and uniform? How did we get here?

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+++ I think you will know what I mean when I say that baby carrots were, for a short time a few years ago, a trendy vegetable. Think about the degree of cultural capital currently carried by kale; consider the weird hip status that was bestowed upon the pomegranate a couple of years ago. Have you noticed an awful lot of avocado tattoos recently? I have.

Baby carrots are maybe too childish, too passé, to ever gain the sort of Whole-Foodsbourgeois cultural currency afforded to kale or avocados or, more recently, collards (“collards are the new kale!” the pricy supermarket chain tells us earnestly). But in 2010, baby carrots were catapulted into the snack-food spotlight as a result of a $25 million campaign launched by Bolthouse Farms, one of the country’s largest baby carrots producers. During the recession, Bolthouse noticed baby carrot sales decreasing and realized that consumers had started buying regular, full-sized carrots instead—they last longer, and they cost less.

Bolthouse hired a new CEO, a former executive at Coca-Cola named Jeff Dunn.

Dunn decided to revamp the baby carrot’s wholesome, relatively unbranded image to more closely resemble that of Coke or other zeitgeisty junk-food items. To do so, he hired a major Boulder-based advertising agency called Crispin Porter + Bogusky, whose clients include Burger King, Old Navy, and Microsoft. The agency proposed a total recoding of the baby carrot: instead of marketing the vegetable’s healthiness, they suggested, Bolthouse should advertise and package baby carrots as junk food, using language and imagery common to the junk-food sector: Sporty! Sexy! X-treme!

A campaign called “Eat ‘em like junk food!” debuted in September 2010. Punny billboards went up; there was a pyrotechnics-laden TV commercial. Baby carrots were placed in vending machines in schools, clad in bright, attractive packaging designed to resemble bags of potato chips. “The truth about baby carrots is they possess many of the defining characteristics of our favorite junk food. They're neon orange, they're crunchy, they're dippable, they're kind of addictive,” Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s creative director explained in an article published in Fast Company Magazine. Baby carrot sales skyrocketed.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

+++ The baby carrot, by masquerading as something closer to a Cheeto than a vegetable, is in denial of its own natural origins. As such, advertisers have effectively created for the baby carrot a sort of virgin-birth mythology, having recoded its origins in farmland, in dirt— indeed, its very status as a produce item—as purely synthetic.

Akin to Photoshopping away a person’s bellybutton, this process is evident across a wide realm of processed foods, in which “natural” food items—vegetables, meat, etc.—are reconfigured and packaged as something else entirely. Think about certain potato chips, like Pringles, in which potatoes have been deconstructed, turned into flakes, and reassembled so as to resemble actual, unsexy potatoes as little as possible; think about “veggie straws,” and try to convince me that they look or taste at all like vegetables. And think about hot dogs or salami: unlike a steak or a chicken leg, which resemble—perhaps uncomfortably—real, familiar body parts, these foods have literally been rearranged, altering our collective conceptions of what meat is and what forms it can take.

This is by no means a new trend, but its political implications have become increasingly evident throughout the last several years as the White House—with Michelle Obama as its figurehead—has attempted to alter the diets of perhaps the baby carrot’s largest target demographic: US schoolchildren. Last week, The New York Times published a comprehensive history of the political contestation of school lunches throughout the Obama administration. In the article, the competing factions of the US Department of Agriculture, the School Nutrition Association, third-party frozen-food companies, and a party designated simply as “the lunch ladies” are shown jostling for control over what foods can be served in public schools, how salty and fatty and large-portioned they can be, and what forms they can take.

A major tipping point in this multi-year power struggle, according to the article’s author, Nicholas Confessore, was “the battle over pizza sauce.” In 2011, a federal law was proposed stating that, in order to continue receiving government subsidies for school lunches, school cafeterias would have to change the amount—and the configuration—of fruits and vegetables on every plate. The proposed legislation included a re-designation of the status of pizza sauce. Because of a loophole in the pre-Obama legislation, tomato paste could be counted as a full serving of tomatoes. The justification was that, just as a Pringle was once, impossibly, a potato, the two tablespoons of tomato paste on a slice of cafeteria pizza were at one point about eight tablespoons of tomatoes.

Pizza is a major player in the school-lunch industrial complex, and the nation’s largest pizza companies carry significant political power. Suppliers of pizza and other cafeteria

OCTOBER 17 2014

foods, fearing that the proposed legislation would bring down their sales, formed a group called the Coalition for Sustainable School Lunch Programs. The Coalition allied with Republican lawmakers and created a rider that negated the legislation’s redefinition of pizza sauce.

You might remember what happened after the legislation, including the rider, passed that November. “Pizza is a vegetable!” is the perfect piece of clickbait, just quippy and attention-grabbing enough to momentarily direct our national attention toward the sources and politics of our food. The phrase circulated for a while, generating clicks and shares on editorials and political cartoons, and then interest faded.

+++ I’m not quite convinced that we find tomato sauce, sandwiched between bread and hot cheese, more appealing than raw tomatoes for the same reasons that we prefer baby carrots over regular carrots; maybe it just tastes better. But there’s a rational part of all of us, I think, that realizes that tomato sauce is not the same as a tomato, that it’s categorically less healthy, and that maybe we shouldn’t tell children that the two are equivalent.

Last year, Bolthouse Farms unveiled a product called Shakedowns. Billed as “cut & peeled baby carrots with natural seasoning,” Shakedowns are sold in crinkly, opaque plastic bags, more akin to the packaging you’d usually see in a supermarket’s junk food aisle than among the produce. Like Doritos, they’re covered in flavored powder, currently available in Chili Lime and Ranch flavors.

The product’s launch marks a critical step in the baby carrot’s transition away from the realm of vegetables and into the snack food sector. Shakedowns have reimagined not just the shape and size and production process of the carrot, but also its very ingredients.

What was once a vegetable masquerading as junk food has fully transformed itself into junk food, authentically synthetic.

Baby carrots are hardly the most insidious force among the snack-food sector, or among the agriculture industry. But they are a deeply unsettling, if frivolous, reminder of a relatively recent American aversion to dirt—to food that, in appearing ugly or gnarled or blemished, reveals its own origins. Even so, the plastic Whole Foods bags remain a fixture in refrigerators across the country. Baby Carrot Time persists.

LISA BORST B’17 is still pretty into pomegranates.

FOOD

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THE SUPREME COURT'S NONDECISION DECISION by Rebecca Mears On Monday, October 6, the first day of its new term, the United States Supreme Court declined to review seven decisions concerning state bans on same-sex marriage. By denying review, the Court quietly cleared the way for same-sex marriages in Indiana, Wisconsin, Utah, Virginia, and Oklahoma.

As a result, same-sex marriage is now legal in 30 states and the District of Columbia.

It took a campaign of thousands of phone calls and door knocks, hundreds of volunteers, and nearly 10 years to help legalize marriage equality in Rhode Island. Policy changes occurring as a result of protests, stickers, slogans, petitions, and demonstrations are familiar. So it is surprising (and perhaps even a bit unsettling) that the Supreme Court could clear the path for same-sex marriage by merely refusing to rule on several cases. In fact, the court may have paved the way for progress more quickly than years of advocacy by simply deciding to make no decision.

But what does this non-action mean? To put it into perspective, consider the way in which the court system functions in the United States. Take a deep breath; the legalese gets lengthy.

All cases start locally. If you take a complaint to court, a general district court or a local trial court will hear your case.

If you disagree with the district court’s opinion you have the option to appeal the decision to a higher court. If your case concerns a local issue, your appeal may be taken up by a state appellate court and from there it may move on to your state’s supreme court. If, however, your case involves a federal issue, (any issue involving a federal law, a dispute occurring across state lines, cases involving international concerns, intellectual property issues, or certain issues concerning the United States Constitution) your appeal may be heard by one of the 13 United States Courts of Appeals (also known as circuit courts) which hold jurisdiction over a specific geographic region.

If you are still dissatisfied with the court’s ruling, you may petition that your case be heard by United States Supreme Court by asking for the court to grant you a writ of certiorari.

Obviously, this takes some serious commitment and most cases do not make it very far up this chain. In order to grant a writ of certiorari, four of the nine Justices must vote to hear a case, which may explain why the Supreme Court accepts only 100-150 cases of the more than 7,000 cases it is asked to review each year.

If, at any time, your appeal is not taken up, or your writ of certiorari is denied, the decision of the highest court that ruled on your case is the decision that stands.

Finally, this brings us back to October 6. Seven petitions for certiorari regarding the legality of same-sex marriages were brought before the Supreme Court: Bogan v.

Baskin (Indiana); Walker v. Wolf (Wisconsin); Herbert v.

Kitchen (Utah); McQuigg v. Bostic (Virginia); Rainey v.

Bostic (Virginia); Schaefer v. Bostic (Virginia); and Smith v.

Bishop (Oklahoma). The Supreme Court declined to review any of these cases, thereby upholding the prior circuit court decisions in these cases, all of which ruled that state bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional.

Although in the immediate future this decision to deny certiorari means that same-sex marriages are now, by default, legal in Indiana, Wisconsin, Utah, Virginia, and Oklahoma, the Supreme Court’s decision carries deeper implications as well. The Fourth Circuit, Seventh Circuit, and Tenth Circuit of the United States Courts of Appeals heard the cases above.

Due to our judicial system’s reliance on precedent, decisions made by a circuit court are binding within that court’s region unless the Supreme Court rules otherwise. As the Supreme Court, in its refusal to consider these cases, conceded authority to these circuit courts, all states within these regions will have to abide by the ruling that bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional and are now obligated to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. This means that we can expect to see same-sex marriages legalized in Wyoming,

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Kansas, and South Carolina in the upcoming weeks. Already, North Carolina and West Virginia have extended marriage to same-sex couples in light of last Monday’s decision.

The ruling marks another monumental win for same-sex marriage advocates, but this method hardly elicits the feeling of resounding triumph. Taking the above states into account, this would still leave 17 states without legalized same-sex marriage. However, even this number is contested. As wedding bells ring in newly recognized marriages in these states, couples in other states are left in limbo wondering if this decision means anything in states where same-sex marriages are currently banned.

In the Ninth Circuit (which covers much of the west coast), only Arizona and Montana currently do not recognize same-sex marriage, however this too will likely soon change.

On October 7, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that same-sex marriage bans in Nevada and Idaho were unconstitutional. After a brief stay issued by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in Idaho, the Supreme Court refused Idaho’s request for a further delay of implementation, allowing the previous decision to stand and same-sex marriages to commence. Again, because of the judicial system’s insistence on precedent, Idaho’s ruling will have a domino effect on other states within the Ninth Circuit, as the circuit court and the Supreme Court are likely to treat cases in other states within this region in the same manner. If district courts in Arizona and Montana rule in favor of same-sex marriages, the Ninth Circuit is likely to uphold these rulings and the Supreme Court is unlikely to intervene. Indeed, on Sunday night, a district court in Alaska ruled that banning same-sex marriages is unconstitutional. Although this will be appealed by the state of Alaska and a temporary stay may be issued, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will likely hear the case and waive the stay. All of these formalities are to say, simply, that we can comfortably chalk up another three states in the marriage equality column.

The other 15 states, however, may take more time.

The Fifth Circuit covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, all states which currently do not recognize same-sex marriages. Proponents are hoping that a recent case in Texas may change this. However even if rulings go as planned same-sex marriage will not be legalized until this winter. On February 26, 2014, a federal judge in Texas ruled in De Leon v. Perry that prohibiting same-sex marriages is unconstitutional. This case, whose ruling, of course, the state appealed, is expected to be heard by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sometime this fall. Similarly, there have been rulings in favor of same-sex marriage within the Sixth Circuit (DeBoer v.

Snyder), the Eighth Circuit (Wright v. Arkansas) the Eleventh Circuit (Brenner v. Scott) that are also expected to be heard by courts of appeals this fall.

Although it seems likely that the Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Eleventh Circuits will rule that same-sex marriage bans are unconstitutional to ensure consistency in the application of federal law across the country, possibility remains that they may rule in favor of same-sex marriage bans. Indeed, in 2006 the Eighth Circuit upheld a same-sex marriage ban in Nebraska as constitutional in Citizens for Equal Protection et al. v. Bruning. Instances in which circuit courts have different interpretations of the same federal law are known as a “circuit split.” Often a circuit split provides grounds for the Supreme Court to hear a case in order to resolve the split, but simply because a circuit split exists does not necessitate an intervention. Thus, if a circuit split occurs regarding same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court has three options.

The Supreme Court could decide to hear a case coming out of the circuit courts. In this instance, the Supreme Court may take a stance similar to that in Loving v. Virginia and rule that banning same-sex marriage is unconstitutional as it violates the Due Process Clause (that states cannot “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of

law”) and Equal Protection Clause (that states cannot deny any person “the equal protection of the laws”) of the 14th Amendment. Such a ruling would legalize same-sex marriage in all states. The Supreme Court cannot rule against same-sex marriage by declaring that marriage is constitutionally between a man and a woman, because the United States Constitution does not define marriage, and in United States v. Windsor the Supreme Court struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), ruling that states (not the federal government) have the responsibility of regulating and defining marriages. Thus the closest the Supreme Court could come to ruling against same-sex marriage would be to deny review.

That being said, the Supreme Court could very well deny review as it did on October 6, and allow a circuit split to stand. Marriage would remain an issue under state purview, which aligns with the court’s decision in United States v.

Windsor as mentioned above. Doing so would open a Pandora’s Box of sorts, as same-sex couples in California would be able to marry, but similar couples in Texas would be forbidden from having a wedding of their own. The United States would be a country divided. In North Carolina same-sex couples could enjoy all the benefits that come with a state recognized marriage such as adoption and the right to visit a loved one in the hospital, while a few miles away same-sex couples in South Carolina would not have the same benefits. Couples would be treated unequally based on their choice of residence.

This disparate treatment may uproot some same-sex couples from their hometown roots and force a mass exodus of samesex couples from states with no legal recognition of same-sex marriage to states that do.

The third route the Supreme Court could take is to hear a case regarding the Defense of Marriage Act, and, instead of ruling directly on the issue of marriage, strike down Section 2, which holds that states do not have to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. The Supreme Court could assert this on the grounds that it violates Article IV of United States Constitution, which holds that full faith and credit of “public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings” of one state shall be upheld by all other states. Thus, if a samesex couple gets married in California, this marriage would have to be recognized as legal in North Dakota even if North Dakota itself has banned same-sex marriages. Such a ruling would essentially legalize same-sex marriages in all states, as couples living in states that have banned same-sex marriages would simply have to obtain licenses from another state and return to their home state in order to have a legal marriage.

If the Supreme Court decides to rule in this way, it can avoid ruling on the issue of marriage directly while also clearing the way for same-sex marriage to be legalized in all states.

Thus, while the Supreme Court’s decision to deny review on October 6 has directly led to the legalization of marriage in five states, it has opened the door to legalization across the country. As illustrated above, it may take longer for some states to legalize same-sex marriage based on which circuit court holds jurisdiction over the state and whether an appeal regarding a district court decision has already been filed. Yet, based on the recent swiftness by which states have legalized same-sex marriage, and the Supreme Court’s decision not to intervene in the Fourth, Seventh, and Tenth circuits, it is likely that we will see the Supreme Court continue to deny review (so long as a circuit split does not occur), meaning that same-sex marriage will be expanded to all states through the lower courts.

REBECCA MEARS B’15 believes it’s time to bring in the dancing lobsters.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LONDON 4EVER

OCTOBER 17 2014

EPHEMERA

□ 08

DISASSOCIATION A second cut on top of the first hurts more. Incision #1: They told Zeina that her sister Maha was a martyr. Incision #2: Some people from her village, or possibly from a regional Hezbollah chapter, had the fresh bodies from Khirbet Selm dug up in the government mass grave in a distant town. The bodies were driven back to Khirbet Selm and paraded through the village while a man on the back of a modified pick-up truck, decked out in green and yellow, lead the crowd in chants: “Israel, Israel, enemy of the Muslims” “When you call us, Prophet Hussein, we answer ‘Present!’”

Zeina’s son Karim was also killed by the Israeli airstrikes.

That’s the intended kicker at the end of the 2007 movie, Under the Bombs. They were hunting a ghost—or, rather, another kid wearing the dead Karim’s clothing.

It’s hard to tell what is real and what isn’t in Under the Bombs.

Director Philippe Aractingi started filming his movie about the confusing aftermath of the July War just two days after it ended. The two professional actors travel through the real landscape of destroyed South Lebanon and confront real people and scenes, relying on both scripts and improvisation to craft a fictional narrative against the backdrop of an ongoing reality. I don’t think they staged the public funeral scene. I don’t think they could have.

Finding out that Karim was dead all along is disturbing, but for me the funeral scene was the climax of the nightmare. “Let them bury her themselves,” says Zeina. “They didn’t ask her opinion. Nor mine either.” The character of Maha Noureddine was not a Hezbollah soldier. Viewers don’t even know her political opinions. Well over a thousand people were killed by the airstrikes, most of them civilians. But the Lebanese government doesn’t subdivide the death toll into combatants and noncombatants. Colloquially, they’re all called martyrs.

+++

Mleeta is a museum cum monument to The Resistance. It reads kind of like something from Herodotus or Thucydides in the way it chronicles the strength, courage, and cunning of the resistance fighters in 2006. “The first Arab fighting force to defeat the Zionists in battle.” It is at times somber, but overwhelmingly triumphant. Visitors can buy a green and yellow shirt if they’re daring enough to try to bring it through customs.

I felt a little sick on the car ride back. I couldn’t help but wonder what happened immediately before and after Hezbollah discovered the Israeli spies whose forged papers were on display. I didn’t want to think about it. Better to admire how polite the Hezbollies were—right? My friend was prodding me. She wanted me to agree that they’re not so scary. The tour guide was very formal—dressed neatly in a blue button-down and chinos, saying “God bless you” every time I sneezed. He had spent seven years living in Canada, he told us. So he was once a Lebanese person living in the West, just like I am.

Surely he wouldn’t have begrudged me my American passport?

“So do you think they’re terrorists?” she asked me.

“Akid la,” another friend interrupted, “they are protecting us from Israel.” I don’t remember what car passenger number four said. She never says anything political.

“Do you know why I’m proud of us?” asked my first friend.

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“We didn’t let them walk all over us. We refused to live in fear… This is what I would say to the Western media. I am proud of my country. The morning the Israelis bombed the bridge on the way to work, I still went to work. I went around the bridge, yaneh, I wouldn’t let them stop me from living my life.” So much of our lives are spent thinking about what we would tell the West about ourselves. Even Samir Kassir’s Being Arab had to be content with “demonstrating the possibility of conducting a debate that is both about Arabs and for Arabs.” Do the eager translators of references (aren’t I one?) realize that Americans don’t see the pleas addressed to them on LBCI? “But was it worth it?” I demanded. “It is easy for them to declare war on Israel, but the whole Lebanese people pay the price when the Israelis bomb the entire country. How many Hezbollah fighters died? And how many people who had nothing to do with them, who didn’t even support them, were killed? And look at us, we’re going to pay for the bridges, and the airport, and the power grid—not them. And they have the audacity to claim that a thousand people were martyred. It was their war, not ours. They fought it for Syria and Iran.”

“Of course they were martyred,” she said. “They died for all of us.”

“If a Lebanese dog was hit by an Israeli car,” I told her, “you’d say the dog was a martyr.”

+++

The Lebanese Culture of Death, A List: 1. Place des Martyrs 2. Martyrs’ Day 3. The statue riddled with bullet holes, an arm blown off, never repaired 4. The Al-Nahar building’s massive banner overlooking Downtown commemorating an editor who was assassinated 5. Samir Kassir square, and the statue of him 6. B018 7. Both Rafiq Harriri memorials 8. Every movie besides Caramel and Bostah 9. “Our superheroes are in black and white.” – Outpost Magazine Issue 03 10. Posters of the colorless faces of the Hezbollah dead on the stems of every streetlight between Dahieh and Saida. Martyr.

Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr.

Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr.

Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr.

Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr.

Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr.

Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr.

Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr.

Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr. Martyr…

11. The posters of the SSNP martyrs outside the party headquarters 12. Statues of the saints: Mar Cherbyl, Mar Mikhael, Mar Miriam, Mar Kassab…

13. The memorial to Pierre Gemayel in Bikfaya 14. Wheat-pasted pics of dead Amal supporters in El-Horch 15. The local news 16. The stories of a family death and what it did to everyone.

What it still does.

17. The question: What will you do when Daash invades?

by xxx

18. The answer: We will fight. We will not run.

19. The thought that I really want to believe it is true for me as well.

20. The eyes of a thousand dead men and women looking down at you while you eat, drink, smoke, talk, laugh, play, shit. The weight of 7,000 years of history preserved in an archeological dig in the heart of downtown Beirut whose signs were stolen by some perverse person. The images of people whose bodies are still warm, watching you examine ruins both ancient and recent. From what political party? What religion? Who killed them? Was it Mossad? Was it Syria?

Was it Hezbollah? CIA? Who will avenge them? The dead are waiting for an answer and no, that bombed out building won’t look much better on your way back from the trendy bar where you got drunk and talked about queer Arab liberation, and no we can’t promise you that Daash isn’t winning, and no you can’t go to Baalbeck anymore where your sister danced on the temple steps in a white keffiyah.

+++

On 27 December 2013, 16-year-old Mohammad Chaar took a selfie with three of his friends. Moments later a car bomb went off, killing its intended target, former Finance Minister Mohamad Chatah. Chaar was also killed in the blast. In the days that followed some began to mourn the “martyrs” that were killed in the terrorist attack, but others refused to call Chaar a martyr. They started a social media campaign using the hashtag “notamartyr” to protest the way that Chaar’s death was politicized. "I kept thinking to myself this isn't martyrhood, this is murder," blogger Dyala Badran told BBC News as the campaign grabbed a small slice of international media attention. “Martyrdom actually requires a kind of self-sacrifice,” Raja Farah, another blogger, told CNN. “You have to be willing to die for something.

And a lot of these bystanders that are being killed in these attacks never actually voiced any kind of interest in dying in a certain cause.”

In 10 years, how will Chaar be remembered? Will March 14 put his face on posters, despite opposition from online activists? I’ve seen his bloodied face. You can see it too if you google his name. It belongs to all of us now, all the living.

We can make him, viz. the visual or auditory referent, the object, the signifiers that represent him, what we want him to be and he cannot respond. If people care enough he’ll be a lot of things simultaneously to different people—that’s the way it is with famous dead folks. Let the never-ending cycle of historical revisionism and argument begin and never end.

It is a misfortune to die on the public radar.

+++

I was 14 when I went on a school field trip to Washington, DC, where we visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The Park Ranger kept on saying that these men and women “sacrificed their lives” for their country and I got fed up.

“How can you say that these people sacrificed their lives for anything when most of them were drafted into the army against their will?”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

OCTOBER 17 2014

FEATURES

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ON TOP OF THE WAVE

Brad Troemel's athletic aesthetics

by Erin Schwartz Before coming onstage, artist Brad Troemel hits play on a YouTube music video. It’s a song called “Bewitched” by scenester electro-pop duo Blood on the Dance Floor. The video seems to be a sort of cautionary fable about trusting (goth) girls. They’re probably witches, planning to leave their spiky-haired, YRUboot-wearing lovers to enchant normie guys who drink beer and tote guns. The girl cheats to refill a magic necklace, which is apparently powered by infusions of love from the human losers she can dupe. But the face-paint, manga hair, and videogame graphic effects are too distracting to process what the hell just really happened. After the video comes to its tragicomic conclusion, Troemel walks to the podium. “This is the world we live in,” he says, and the audience laughs.

Troemel is one of the most prolific members of a contemporary movement of net artists using online media to test the bounds of traditional artworks. Best-known as the creator of The Jogging, a Tumblr gallery, Troemel also teaches at Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts in New York. He cocreated the book ZzzZzZ with Edward Shenk, and recently opened an Etsy store selling products like a MasterLocked taco (entitled DORITOSLOCOS taco MASTER LOCKED shut (Key Sold Separately) Highly Significant (Consider The Consequences of Tardiness)) and vacuum-sealed bags containing issues of Semiotext(e) and Bitcoins. Though his brand is built on his online presence, Troemel also shows at galleries.

His most recent piece, LIVE/WORK at Tomorrow Gallery in New York, features three Plexiglass ant farms full of an edible gel. Tinted layers of gel bleed into each other like colored sand sculptures, each color representing one of three charities. The ants that displace the most of a certain gel color by the end of the exhibit will earn 10 percent of the proceeds for that color’s sponsor charity.

Troemel doesn’t start with any of this—he opens his lecture, bizarrely, with a list of tips for art students. “Find good people while you’re here… if art is a conspiracy, you need good conspirators,” he advises the audience. “Keep your eye on the prize beyond Providence.” The audience filling Martinos Auditorium doesn’t quite know what to make of this. Some RISD sophomores in front of me are snickering. It’s hard not to wonder if this isn’t a performance, too: a calculated overshoot of the tropes of college advice, like the Etsy store overshooting a certain DIY sensibility and ZzzZzZ exaggerating the imagery of right-wing memes. But something tells me that Troemel, 26, needs to do this. There’s an earnestness with which he dispenses the wisdom of an established artist to his audience of students, some of whom are barely younger than he. +++ Troemel moves on to speak about his work, focusing on The Jogging and ZzzZzZ. He gets another laugh when he shows a piece called “MacBath,” a deadpan photo of a laptop submerged in a bathtub that went viral on Tumblr. He follows with a Bin-Laden death truther meme featuring a photo, inexplicably, of Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson. Troemel presents his images in a sort of anti-slideshow of MS Paint screenshots successively layered on top of one another with Times New Roman captions. He references Gatorade and Jerry Saltz, rapper Lil B, Baudrillard, and Livestrong bracelets. His intentionally artless Web 1.0 vibe walks the same line as much of his work: it could be mistaken as nonsense by someone who doesn’t get it, and it feels great to be in on the joke.

Troemel builds much of his lecture on a theory he calls "athletic aesthetics," first laid out in a 2013 essay for The New

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Inquiry. In its opening paragraph, he declares, “The longderided notion of the 'masterpiece' has reached its logical antithesis with the aesthlete: a cultural producer who trumps craft and contemplative brooding with immediacy and rapid production.” The athletic artist or “aesthelete” and their audience exist in a feedback loop where patterns of output matter more than any individual work, and the image’s dissemination by the “accidental audience” alone elevates it to the status of art. Unlike traditional art spaces—galleries, the page, a record or CD—the Internet is a boundless archive where mass of content supersedes content itself. Individual craft is dead because it has a small payoff in the attention market; the new artist builds a personal brand through ubiquity instead of elusiveness. Honestly, the essay reads like an Adderall-fueled rehashing of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message.

But that isn’t a mistake. The essay itself is a product of what Troemel calls “aesthleticism;” it’s simply a prosaic version of its theory of image hyperbolism.

Brad Troemel’s art concerns itself with dividing lines— most obviously, the line between what is art and what is not art. Understandings of space, audience, intention, and content espoused by critics and galleries are subverted. The Jogging is consumed by fans at both ends of a wide spectrum of inthe-know-ness, and pumps out content that often is low on technical difficulty but high on cultural reference. The images are intentionally easy to divorce from their original context as art works. One of the faux anti-Obama memes from ZzzZzZ was redistributed by a right-wing Facebook page, and a photo of bacon cooking in a straightening iron by artist Aaron Graham was uploaded on Failblog equivalent “There, I fixed it.”

Troemel’s work comes right up to this line and doesn’t cross it, but pushes, bends, refracts it in order to see—and to show us—what its rules are.

And we care about this line because it has something to do with the separation between the artist and capital. In his lecture, Troemel mentions David Joselit’s theory of image neoliberalism—the position that art is a commodity on the free market that can be bought and sold, removed from its original context without losing anything vital. Much of Troemel’s art pushes image neoliberalism to its extreme, with its obsessive focus on output over craft, crowd-sourced editing, and the insistence that anyone can be an artist-entrepreneur as long as they know how to self-promote. His work is polemic: it shows us that, on some level, we still want Emily Dickinson in the attic, Van Gogh dying poor and anonymous. There is something that we don’t want to hear about the artist’s entrapment by society, and especially their complicity in the relations of capitalism.

Troemel’s athletic aesthetic theory responds to this with

what is essentially a form of accelerationism. If there’s something that feels sleazy about privileging the perpetual sprinter who generates 10 Tumblr posts per day over the isolated craftsman, that’s good. Underlying accelerationist projects is the idea that art that distances itself from the structures of capital is too easily integrated into a counterculture market.

The strategy is to instead engage with the structure, play the game too well, and speed towards depleting the possibility of more things-for-sale. This deep engagement with Doritos and Gatorade, personal branding and neoliberal narcissism, is meant to make the viewer uncomfortable. But it also makes art like Troemel’s fascinating to pick apart. Athletic aesthetics exist against a backdrop of markets that grow more abstract— algorithms for automated high-frequency stock trading, large-scale data sales, affect economies, rapid regeneration of saleable identities. The Jogging holds up a mirror to these economies and generates, on a massive scale, new art, artists, and art critics. But the mirror is skewed to show us how the medium works. +++ Troemel exhibited a series of paintings at the Zach Feuer Gallery this June that depict a cartoon lumberjack sitting on the end of a branch, sawing away at his perch in blissful ignorance. His speech bubble reads, “At least I’ve got a job!” The image is taken from the Earth Liberation Front’s archive in exchange for what Troemel mysteriously calls a “sizeable donation,” and each print is stained with organic Whole Foods™ beet, carrot, and kale juices. The lumberjack is sawing away to his own demise, and it’s easy to understand the ELF’s hyper-didactic message. Deforestation is a dead end because someday we’ll run out of trees. But Troemel also groups him with beets and kale, juice cleanses, fashionable activism, agribusiness, ecoterrorism, and to some extent, with himself, his own practice. To Troemel, it seems that a critique of the complicity between neoliberalism and environmentalism that comes from an outside stance would fall flat. It’s the position of the “aesthlete,” the artist already-too-implicated in capitalism, that makes the art provocative. But, of course, this strategy is also accelerating to its own conclusion. It functions as long as the viewer is confused by Troemel’s polemic, and the viewer is catching up quickly. Like the ELF lumberjack and Whole Foods, the athletic aesthetic is part of an economy spinning outward faster and faster, happy to have a job.

ERIN SCHWARTZ Lil. B’15

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

IS IT FALL YET?

by Jake Soloff and Rick Salamé

Pope Gregory is dead. Participatory calendars are the future. Do you believe in astrology? Form an intentional community and operate on your own local time regime. No one can stop you. Capitalism is what you choose to let it become in your head. Neoliberalism. You might even be able to steal some members from the Brown U socialists and buy a small farmhouse in the suburbs. No parents = no rules = no need to maintain a standardized Easter observance for 16th-century Europeans.

NO

But these two Libras with Gemini rising don’t believe in astrology.

We actually don’t really get how it works. So, until we figure it out, we believe in democracy. We believe it’s up to everyone who was walking past us on Tuesday to decide what the season is. Knuckleheads couldn’t agree, though.

JAKE SOLOFF B’16 and RICK SALAMÉ B’16 have fallen.

YES

?

OCTOBER 17 2014

SEASONS

□ 12

WHAT WE MEAN WHEN WE CALL PEOPLE “SMART” A (personal) history of intelligence

by Sara Winnick Illustration by Kristine Mar

1509, Europe Etymologists trace the first known use of intelligens, past participle of intelligere, back to sixteenth century France. The noun comes from the Latin verb intellegere, which means “to understand.” Intelligens itself evolved from the Middle English legende, meaning “to gather, select, or read.” Legende is also rooted in the Greek legein, meaning “speech,” “word,” or “reason.” In its roots, “intelligence” requires a facility with language. It means and has always meant the ability to convey ideas through spoken and written Latin, French, and English. Embedded in “intelligent” is language and logic.

18th c., Europe In 1784 Emmanuel Kant pens his essay “Answering the Question: What is the Enlightenment?” He begins, “Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” It has been 147 years since Descartes wrote, “I think, therefore I am” in his “Discourse on Method” (foundation of modern philosophy). Ninety-seven years since Newton published “Principia Matematica” (foundation of modern physics). The Age of Enlightenment is an intellectual revolution spanning centuries and countries, built on man’s intellectualism and his ability to discover objective truth and scientific fact.

16th c., Europe In the year 1500 Michelangelo sculpts La Pieta and Portuguese ships land in Brazil. In 1505 Leonardo paints the Mona Lisa. 1513, Machiavelli writes The Prince. 1569, Mercator prints the world map. The Renaissance, as it is later known, is remembered as a cultural revolution emphasizing humanism, creativity, and knowledge, rooted in a resurgent interest in antiquity. Its philosophers argue that truth and knowledge can exist in human beings (their minds), not merely divine institutions (the church). For the first time on the European continent, there exists the possibility of having or acquiring personal knowledge—intelligence.

1869, England Francis Galton measures people’s heads. The British biologist uses the newly developed scientific method to test his hypothesis: the bigger your brain, the more likely you are a genius. In 1869 he publishes Hereditary Intelligence, chronicling his efforts to qualify and quantify “smart.” Galton writes, “I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary.” He coins the word “eugenics.”

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

1879, Germany Albert Einstein is born to two middle class parents in Ulm, a small city in Germany. He soon begins to study math and play the violin. In 1879, he has not yet proven that e = mc2, published the General Theory of Relativity, or won a Nobel Prize in Physics. He has not yet declared, “imagination is more important than knowledge,” or, “I have no special talents.” In 1879, Einstein’s last name is just his last name. Later it enters the dictionary as a noun synonymous with “genius.”

1908, France In 1908, psychologist Alfred Binet develops the first intelligence test. The test is a series of hundreds of questions asked by one interviewer to one French school child, one at a time.

Students follow directions, construct sentences, describe images from memory. Binet and his team want to know which questions correlate most closely with the interviewee’s success in French elementary school.

2002, Spring Glen Elementary School My third grade teacher nominates me for entry to the district’s Talented and Gifted enrichment program, which will start in two years when I begin fifth grade. TAG students get to leave their elementary schools for one day each week (school bus ride = approximately $200 taxpayer dollars per trip) for an all day curricular program. We will each pursue year-long research projects on subjects of our choice. We will take field trips to museums in New York. My two best friends are also nominated. My twin brother is not.

My parents wait two years to tell me that I’ve been accepted.

2006, Spring Glen Elementary School On Valentine’s Day, every sixth grader at Spring Glen is given a paper heart with their name written on it in black sharpie. Sixty 12-year-olds sit in a circle on the gym floor.

Every 60 seconds, I write something nice on the classmate’s heart in front of me and pass it to the left. When my heart returns, it reads: “You’re smart, you’re smart, you’re smart.”

1916, United States Intelligence testing crosses the Atlantic through American psychologist Lewis Terman, who seeks to standardize the laborious task of individual questioning to determine intelligence. Terman invents the Intelligence Quotient. To calculate IQ: divide mental age (determined by written, multiple choice version of Binet test) with chronological age (determined by US birth certificate) and multiply by 100.

2007, Hamden Middle School In middle school Talented and Gifted changes from a one-day enrichment and creativity program to a curricular track for core English, Social Studies, Algebra, and Science classes.

I shuffle through the halls of my urban/suburban public middle school with 18 other students, 15 of whom attended my Elementary School. We have nearly identical class schedules. I rarely interact with the other 985 students in the school.

1922, United States Princeton Professors Carl Bringham and Robert Yerkes administer intelligence tests to thousands of adult males enlisting in the US army throughout World War I. With the results, they publish “A Study of American Intelligence” in 1922. They assert, “The United States is made up of four racial elements, the Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean races of Europe, and the negro. If these four types blend in the future into one general American type, then it is a foregone conclusion that this future blended American will be less intelligent then the present native born American.” The text becomes a backbone of the Eugenics movement. Bringham goes on to chair the College Board and create the first SAT.

2008, Hamden Middle School Middle school science teaches me the scientific method, which is useful for proving things. In order to prove things one must control variables, take measurements, record data. Proof is related to truth and fact, though the teachers do not say how or why. I learn that pendulums with longer strings move slower. Objects with more surface area are more likely to float. There is something significant about potato proteins, but the science kits didn’t arrive in time for me to learn what. I get A’s on lab reports with check marks beside section headers “Hypothesis,” “Data Collection,” “Procedure,” and “Results.” A’s somehow mean “smart.” I don’t remember when I learned that.

1926, United States Students take Bringham’s Scholastic Aptitude Test for the first time in 1926. It is not until 1990 that the test is re-named the Scholastic Achievement Test, to indicate its intention to measure performance, not talent.

2010, Hamden High School I do remember that Jamestown was established in 1619 and that President Arthur passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. I remember this on the AP US History Exam in 2010. These things are easy to remember in part because I read about them in books; I have always liked reading. I could read quickly, which meant I could do my AP US History homework without compromising sleep, sports, or hanging out with my friends. In history, I wrote papers and was praised for my writing. According to Bloom’s taxonomy (invented by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom circa 1956), students remember the least when asked to recall information, but more when applying, analyzing or evaluating information, as one does when writing papers.

1972, United States African American psychologist Robert Williams invents the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity (BITCH). On the test, which is written in black vernacular and uses black cultural references, black Americans outscore white Americans en masse. The test asks about “playing the dozens,” “gospel birds,” and “CPT.” Williams writes, “Most of the research on intellectual differences between Blacks and whites is based on differences in test scores, or IQ. Since the tests are biased in favor of middle-class whites, all previous research comparing the intellectual abilities of Blacks and whites should be rejected completely.”

Williams later combines “ebony” and “phonics” to create the term “ebonics.” Ebonics refers to a variety of American English, referred to by linguists as African American Vernacular English, spoken largely by working- and middle-class African Americans. Linguists later illustrate that ebonics has a rigorous, complex grammatical structure distinct enough to qualify some black students as [standard] English Language Learners in school.

1994, United States Harvard Ph.D.’s Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray publish “The Bell Curve,” arguing that intelligence is a quality that can be measured on a single axis that will always result in a bell curve—few at the top and few at the bottom. Those at the bottom are, according to Herrnstern and Murray, mostly black and largely responsible for societal ills.

The book jacket reads, “Herrnstein and Murray break new ground in exploring the ways that low intelligence, independent of social, economic, or ethnic background lies at the root of many of our social problems. The authors also demonstrate the truth of another taboo fact: that intelligence levels differ among ethnic groups.”

1998, Spring Glen Elementary School In Kindergarten math I learn that 1 + 1 = 2. Later I learn to solve one side of the equation by solving the other side of the equation because the equals sign in the middle means balance. There are steps (First, Outside, Inside, Last). I find x.

I don’t remember learning that a curved line that meets a straight line and looks like “2” means that: there is one object, there is another object, and those objects are linked together in a conceptual category called “two.” Two has, in my memory, just always been 2.

1999, Spring Glen Elementary School My first grade class has 26 buckets of books. Each is marked by a letter of the alphabet.

The A books are easiest, then B, then C, all the way through Z (chapters). In the first week of class, each student reads aloud to Mrs. Jones for five minutes to determine which basket we pull from for Silent Sustained Reading. I know my letters and their corresponding phonetic sounds. I attended two years of pre-school before Kindergarten (total cost = $12,000) and have my very own bookshelf at home. I pull from bucket P. 2001, Washington DC No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is signed into law. Students take annual standardized tests in reading and math, which are scored on a scale of 1-4. 1: below basic, 2: basic, 3: proficient, 4: advanced. The lawmakers agree on 100 percent proficiency by 2014. “Failure is not an option,” says President Bush.

OCTOBER 17 2014

On the exam I get a five, which is three more than two and means that there is one object, another object, and three more objects somehow grouped into a single conceptual category. The category is represented by two straight lines and a curved line in the shape of “5.” Somehow this symbol in this setting means that I have a chance of going to Brown University (total cost = $200,000).

2011, Hamden High School I take the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity in AP psychology. The teacher leaves out the words “black” and “of cultural homogeneity” when he gives it to us. “We’re taking an IQ test,” he says. I, along with most of the class, fail; the four black students are declared geniuses.

2012, Brown University In an Education Studies classes in college, I learn about Bloom’s taxonomy. Students learn some when asked to recall or regurgitate, more when asked to analyze or apply. Students remember the most when able to create something from the information at hand—often explained as being able to teach the material to other students. The people most likely to be good teachers, therefore, are those who are already good students.

In the Education Studies class, I write an Educational Autobiography in response to the question “How did you get to Brown?” In it, I wonder if I would have gotten to college if nobody had ever called me smart. I wonder if more students will get to college if they have people in their life calling them smart. I learn about Bloom’s taxonomy. I decide to become a teacher.

2012, Providence, RI She (Ethiopian Refugee tutee) counts “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8” while I (Brown University tutor) write and point to the relevant written symbols 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. She counts “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8” when I write and point to 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. I try to explain that “2” means “2” and “7” does not mean “2.” I try to explain this in in pre-school secondlanguage level English.

July 2013; Providence, RI I (the teacher) attempt to teach first grade phonics to eight refugee students in the Brown Refugee Youth Tutoring and Enrichment Summer School. He (the student) refuses to look at the worksheets with foreign symbols and confusing directions. Instead he uses his energy to make the entire class—who share no common languages—laugh aloud. He dances on desks, drums on tables, invents “The Poop Song,” and mimics my every move.

He smiles with round cheeks and bright eyes. At 12, he understands that learning a new language is difficult and that everyone else has a head start. He does not understand why C sometimes sounds like K and sometimes sounds like S. He is in the same class as his six-year-old sister. “I’m stupid, I’m stupid, I’m stupid,” he repeats.

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E-READERS

Ben Lerner, Tao Lin, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and the net-inflected novel

by Jonah Max illustration by Ben Ross In 1997, computer scientist Michael Lesk published a paper on the size of the Internet, estimating it to be roughly two terabytes of text-based data; 16 years later, in 2013, Kenny Goldsmith attempted to print out the entirety of the web, resulting in a 10 ton pile of paper in an art gallery in New Mexico. Today, both of these gestures seem quaint, perhaps purposely so. We know the digitalization of media has inundated us with text—what else is there to be said of the vastness of the JSTOR archive, the mountains of alphanumeric code hidden behind images, or the seemingly endless list of print-on-demand books from Lulu and Scribd. And yet, these banal assertions provide the unavoidable backdrop for any current literary production. One might assume that in this climate, writing a naturalistic prose novel distributed by a major publishing house would be considered misguided if not woefully nostalgic, something akin to opening a video rental store that specializes in LaserDiscs.

And yet, some of the finest literary minds seem to be doing just that. Karl Ove Knausgaard, Tao Lin, and Ben Lerner—three of the stronger Western, male writers currently enjoying widespread popularity—have all participated in this practice, with Lerner’s 10:04, published this September, marking the most recent example. Each author maintains a distinct relationship with the web; Lin’s desperate embrace is realized through his prolific blogging and tweeting; Lerner’s high-brow cherrypicking comes in the form of Paris Review blog posts; and Knausgaard, though his writing and life can appear hermetic, seems to have developed a fashion and prose style that the Internet finds hard to resist. Despite these different approaches, no author seems truly ignorant of the web’s proliferation of text. In fact, it would be difficult to accuse these writers of being ignorant of anything. In Taipei, as protagonists Paul and Erin walk through the shopping district of Ximending, Lin writes: “[Paul] knew now would be the moment—like when a character quotes Coleridge in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as the screen shows blurry, colorful, festive images of people outside at night—to feel that the world was ‘beautiful and sad,’ which he now felt self-consciously and briefly, exerting effort to focus instead on the conversation.”

Paul’s acute awareness of affectation, often bordering on paranoia, permits him only the most oblique, mediated access to even the mildest emotions. This crippling desire to denaturalize any gesture, common ground for all three novelists, isn’t limited to just the characters. Lerner’s 10:04 is infatuated with its own construction—the novel explicitly references its origins as the New Yorker piece “Golden Vanity” Lerner wrote in 2012, going so far as to reprint the short story in its entirety within the novel. And while Lin’s fractured prose and Lerner’s incessant narratorial deconstruction are nothing new for the novel, they underscore a tacit recognition of the novel’s newfound awkwardness in the age of the Internet. +++ Perhaps what sets these books apart is the delight they take in their own awkwardness—all three derive much of their tension from stretching the roman à clef veil as thin as possible (in Knausgaard’s case, the veil may have disappeared entirely), often using fiction only to expose its own clunky artifice. In Lerner’s reprinted New Yorker story, now supposedly written by 10:04’s narrator (suspiciously also named Ben), someone asks: “Where’s Ari?” only for the story’s protagonist to respond, “She’s not in this story.” Ari, the name of Lerner’s actual wife, appears only to gleefully disrupt any residual claims of verisimilitude in an already splintered and mirrored narrative. These delights are passed on to the reader as she tries to search for the author, always dwelling just at the edge of her peripheral vision, enjoyably taking part in a game the

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postmodernists have long forbidden. As Taipei’s Paul makes reference to “working on something,” or Knausgaard’s narrator mentions attending a writers’ seminar in Biskops-Arnö, one has to wonder if she’s seeing the historical author peek through the pages.

This perpetual blending of fact and fiction leads to a highly diaristic style of narrative. Discussing his morning routine as a father of three, Knausgaard writes: “It is a question of getting through the morning, the three hours of diapers that have to be changed, clothes that have to be put on, breakfast that has to be served, faces that have to be washed, hair that has to be combed and pinned up, teeth that have to be brushed, squabbles that have to be nipped in the bud, slaps that have to be averted, rompers and booths that have to be wriggled into…”

As the narrator recounts large swaths of his life with painfully straightforward language, these lists of tedious chores become something akin to a leitmotif. It is in these overly articulate yet utterly banal moments that Knausgaard most closely approximates an Internet inflection. While Knausgaard’s interactions with the Internet are limited and his concerns more driven by abolishing overly-refined literature than adopting a specific tone, making the argument for its influence on his writing difficult, his readers maintain a dominant web presence—extensively reviewing and discussing the Norwegian author’s work on nearly every literary blog imaginable. Knausgaard may not have had the Internet in mind when he composed My Struggle, but the strength of his reception is predicated on it. When Lerner mentions how to manage the unpredictable wait times for Christian Marclay’s The Clock, or when Lin recites Paul’s incredibly detailed shopping lists, we are reminded of the long-form, personal blog posts that dominate Tumblrs and Blogspots across the Internet. These blogs grant something of a grand permission for the authors. Knausgaard can dwell on minutiae for pages, using only the most banal, unliterary language, and people find plenty of reason to continue reading. Lin can divulge highly personal information for pages on end without ever feeling too indulgent. And for Lerner, the Internet provides access to the uncanny state of being entirely informed yet completely alienated. While shopping in Whole Foods, 10:04’s narrator picks up a box of instant coffee, noting: “The seeds inside the purple fruits of coffee plants had been harvested on Andean slopes and roasted and ground and soaked and then dehydrated at a factory in Medellín and vacuum-sealed and flown to JFK and then driven upstate in bulk to Pearl River for repackaging and then transported back by truck to the store where I now stood reading the label.”

Much of this passage could have been lifted from a Wikipedia entry, and it leaves the reader, much like the narrator, lost in a maze of information pointing nowhere and everywhere at once. In many ways, these threads of thought provide the backbones for these novels. Despite this influence, or perhaps precisely because of it, a certain antagonism exists between these authors and their Internet counterparts. In a recent interview for The Believer between Lerner and Lin, Lerner states: “I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature’s ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.”

It is interesting that Lerner, who has written glowingly of Knausgaard’s child-like simplicity, finds fault with fiction’s recent anti-intellectual turn or the dominance of “the perfectly bound blog [post].” This disdain, however, can be seen most clearly in Lerner’s and Lin’s own works. In an attempt to free their novels from the "anti-intellectual" influence of blogposters and tweeters, they have fettered themselves to often outmoded concerns. Lerner’s anxieties over the death of the novel, author, and reader seem to stem from a decidedly

postmodern, Barthesian vision of the world, where one is inundated with images rather than text, where publishing is a dying industry rather than an inescapable reality, where one is wholly estranged rather than hyper-connected. In many ways, Lerner is approaching his work with a pre-digital perspective, failing to understand that it is neither prose, nor authorship, nor readership on the cultural chopping block, but rather postmodernity itself.

Much like Lerner, Lin also has a tendency to harken back to bygone eras—Taipei’s silent desperation and indecision can often read like passages from a Hemingway novel—replacing Hemingway’s laconic stoicism with an equally laconic fragility.

Lin simultaneously lets the Internet influence his sentences and preserves a sparse modernist prose while discussing MacBooks and kombucha. Although Knausgaard isn’t impelled by the same desire to distance himself from Internet writing, the subject matter and concerns of his novels can feel similarly outdated. Knausgaard’s obsession with his own childhood and the death of his father, often articulated in hundred-word sentences, seems more in line with the high modernism of Proust than contemporary fiction. At times, this type of formal nostalgia tethers Knausgaard’s work just as tightly as any of the literary niceties he avoided in composing My Struggle. While all three authors can be frighteningly lucid and illuminating, their writing is often overshadowed by these anachronisms, sparking a terrible paradox: in fearing their own irrelevance, they’ve helped assure it.

JONAH MAX B'18 recounts large swaths of his life with painfully straightforward language.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

OCTOBER 17 2014

TECHNOLOGY

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NO-SLEEP MONOLOGUE PART 1

by Athena Washburn illustration by Brielle Curvey 1:00 am January 17: Man: Well Hello Melinda and isn't it a pretty day Melinda: It sure is Man, it sure is.

Man: But I sure could use a— Melinda: I could use a a a a-Man: What?

Melinda: A part, but apart from the particles, it’s been said before, it’s a pretty day—there are yellow bits of cube on the smooth glass surface, can’t cut them up color is color, yellow is yellow, a part of yellow is yellow, can’t break! I can, though, and a year ago I was sliding inwards towards my own peach navel, my own peach mouth and (I lay on the couch she pet the cat she pet my cat and I breathed so hard I thought I would stop pumping blood except to my left breast which was hard and her hand was soft and I wanted so badly to kiss her.

I did not.) I hear the rude beep of the texting screen now and there are buttered waves in the background piping out from my cellphone's left ear, a minute. Hello?

Man: Melinda?

Melinda: Yes, it’s me! The ironie! The ironie! It repeats itself over and over, over the television screens in the dark while static eyes spark and bald guys purr in the dark. I'm a poet!

I'm a poet while she sleeps in the bedroom. I have stolen everything I have I have stolen everything I have seen hahaha— Man: Go to sleep Melinda. It’s late.

3:05 am March 11: but man you see I'm kind of spun now, my eyeballs are true spheres now, I'm blue and the kids can't possibly tell but I feel the dimensions of the space between us now, I can't touch anything! and the winter it's killing me, I need some sun.

we live in the no-touching space between fingertip and glass and from our sick vantage point we sometimes see the dark underbelly of every moment, that is to say, of the present, that is to say, of everything and every time and— the dark underbelly of the is and the is not and the bright twinkle of our own yellowish eyes gazing all around, we are overwhelmed by the darkness between the blankness and the chaos and quickly put our hands around the sides of our eyes, gaze only at our shadow selves into our multiplied jaundiced faces burnt by the sun and overwhelmed by our tininess we look to eachother and say we are large we are huge we are all that we can see we are awake and we are like the waves (or go to sleep, you don’t know what you are saying) and then we slam up into eachother believing in our power because it is truly as large as the slab of glass and the finger tip because it is equal and they are equal and we are all the same shards of the same sameness but we are different because we in fact are weaker, we in fact break in two.

4:36 am July 24: I can’t see anything darker than my red eyelids now. jitter jitter full mind in the empty house. words strung inside wired veins—companions, keep me up.

“Chained in the yard, a dead-eyed dog under the oleander tree.”

2:28 am September 12: (The brain concocts, fractures visions.

Circling ancient useless thoughts, it apes so many faces Some places too.)

2:29 am April 10:

1:23 am November 4:

when the body in full force becomes mine I will shock you with the force that is exactly equal to your force and we will stay there slammed up against eachother completely equal and the same that is what balance is two violent forces slammed up against eachother defying time and space because they are what they are and they are all the same we have been slammed up between slabs of blankness and of chaos

first useless image one: there is a park up there with lavender and rough bark and twilight light periwinkle blues a fat old man —Old Fatman— sits in the middle ankles crossed mock butterfly tight suit stretched tight across his knees, he hums a tune with a bowler hat and glasses on his head,

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literary

I blink he goes open to image two, inside now static black, image two: some red rimming my closed yellow eyes light paints the interior of the seers red read strange code they cannot decipher from out there, oh oh one oh open to scene three: Old Fatman hunched migraine wailing, in the square with dark bark and dogs and knees words thud out of lips and eyes and limbs so “oh my head, oh my god!” or “my eyes!” or “shhh, go to sleep” rocks blinks quick tries to quell the chaos up out there and the blankness up out there four eyed nomad sees glass walls across the street scene four to: dark ribs thud thud and thighs now who lie in sheets toss spin useless images one two three image five still useless: walls in the bedroom and walls in the head pound them down with hard disdain for fat lost man with tight pants and his pounding too hits hard like hard rain on pavement image six six six six six six: a man in the city a woman in the city such selves in the city no trees in the city all eyes in the city trucks run wild in the city gravel spitters in the city so many sheets in the city and wired minds in the city escape the city! can’t sleep in the city! too much to see in the city! the mind takes the shape of the city! rebel from the city! images images images in the city! I’m age six in the city and 11 in the city! I live in the city! 18 in the city! the mind crashes in the city! the mind crashes in the city! image seven!

Glory! image eight: some dreams, disappointment.

4:12 am December 1: Man: Melinda? Where are you?

Melinda: Hahahaha! Go to sleep!

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Providence Tattoo Arts Convention 1 Sabin St // 2pm – 12am // $20 day, $40 3-day-pass Live tattooing & exhibition.

Contests with tattoos as prizes. All weekend long: Sat 11am – 12am, Sun 11am – 8pm.

Beervana Fest 60 Rhodes Pl, Cranston // 6:30 – 10 pm // $50 Entry fee gets you a tasting glass and unlimited pours of 150+ craft beers. Buy a ticket ahead of time at beervanafest.com. Event planners stress: “Beware of ‘driving while intoxicated laws’ and plan accordingly. Cranston Police will be on site.”

Bellydancing workshop Nelson Gym, 225 Hope St, Studio 2 // 8 – 9 pm // $2

Girls Rock! Fundraiser Aurora, 276 Westminster // 7pm – 1am // $5

Learn bellydance basics from members of Amira Belly Dance Company at this fundraiser class.

Fundraiser for Girls Rock! summer camp. Theme: “Take Back the Mic: Good Covers of Bad Songs.”

Covers of Blink-182, Enya, Celine Dion, The Carpenters and more. Photo booth and face painting.

Open Life Drawing 115 Empire St // 6 – 8:30 pm// $6

Sunday Morning Freewrite 186 Carpenter St // 10 am – 12 pm // Free Space to write amongst ambient noise of other people typing and scribbling. Big sunny windows. Prompts if you want them. Happens every Sunday!

Eat the World Corner of Benefit and Waterman // 2 - 5 pm // 10$ for 5 tickets (food ~ 2-3 tickets) An outdoor food festival with music and performances, organized by RISD Global Initiative.

Weekly drawing class with live model. Bring your own drawing supplies.

People’s Forum: Q&A with Providence’s Mayoral Candidates Southside Cultural Center, 393 Broad St // 6 – 8:30 pm // Free

Q&A organized by local advocacy groups including DARE, PRYSM, ONA and Unite Here!: “Come out and see where the mayoral

candidates of Providence stand on issues important to Providence’s working class communities and communities of color. All three candidates will be there answering questions related to three interconnected campaigns for economic and racial justice.”