The College Hill Independent V.27 N.6

the college hill independent October 25, 2013 : Volume 27 Issue 6 a Brown-RISD weekly

managing editors David Adler, Doreen St. Félix, Ellora Vilkin news Simon Engler, Joe de Jonge, Emma Wohl metro Megan Hauptman, Rick Salamé, Kat Thornton arts Becca Millstein, Grier Stockman, John White features Lili Rosenkranz, Josh Schenkkan science Golnoosh Mahdavi, Jehane Samaha SPORTS Tristan Rodman interviews Drew Dickerson literary Edward Friedman EPHEMERA Molly Landis,

THE indy volume 27 #6

Katia Zorich OCCULT Julieta Cárdenas X Lizzie Davis list Claudia Norton, Diane Zhou design & illustration Mark Benz, Casey Friedman, Kim Sarnoff Cover Robert Sandler Senior editors Grace Dunham, Alex Ronan, Sam Rosen, Robert Sandler Staff Writer Alex Sammon STAFF ILLUSTRATORs Andres Chang, Aaron Harris web Houston Davidson COPY Mary Frances Gallagher, Paige Morris Cover Art Robert Sandler MvP Kim Sarnoff P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 & theindy@gmail.com & @theindy_tweets & theindy.org 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. The Independent receives support from Generation Progress/Center for American Progress. Generation Progress works to help young people make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at GenProgress.org.

news fROM THE EDITORS There are a couple of places I would go every once in a while. These places included New Haven, Connecticut; Brookline, Massachusetts; and Frankfurt, Germany. I would go to visit family. I would take the train or a plane to visit these places. At the time, this was very mysterious. You see, I never chose the routes to these places myself. Conductors and pilots chose the routes for me. More importantly, conductors and pilots never let me know how they figured the directions out—and I never tried, on my own, to discover their secrets. This meant that my knowledge of how travel worked was extremely limited. On the way to New Haven, for example, I knew that my destination was about 400 miles north of Washington, DC, where I usually came from, and that the Amtrak line ran through Philadelphia and New York. Apart from that, I didn’t know how the train started in one place and ended up in another. Did it have to take any turns? Was it a straight shot? And when I flew, did the airplane really move at all, or did they just let it sit on the runway, project illusions onto the windows, and then have stagehands change the scene outside? Traveling was like teleporting, but bumpier. - SPE

2 Week in Review simon engler, joe de jonge & alex sammon

9 Wanna Be On Top emma wohl

METRO 3 Olneyville vera carothers

5 Portug-Eats xhesi hysi

SCIENCE 6 Space Jam jehane samaha

FEATURES 13 Overpass anna rotman

ARTS 14 Citibanksy maya sorabjee

13 Bonnie “Prince” Billy lisa borst

OCCULT 11 White Crystal Aura julieta cárdenas

SPORTS 15 $hredding eli pitegoff

LITERARY 17 Unmoored eli petzold

X 18 Nime Chow jack mernin

EPHEMERA

WEEK IN PESTS

by Simon Engler, Joe de Jonge & Alex Sammon Illustration by Casey Friedman Careful—they’re in the floorboards and behind the walls and there are billions of them. Just turn on the shower: the head will fall off, and instead of water, lit’rally thousands of cockroaches will pour out. That was gross, right? Here’s the week in pests. Enjoy.

THE DANGER OF RATS IN SCIENCE

CROW’S FEAT

this time around the rat-maze was special.

This rat-maze, you see, was divided into two sides. At the end of one side were treats and at the end of the other were bores. So: on one side of the maze there were Oreos, or, alternatively, cocaine and morphine; on the other side there were rice cakes, or, alternatively, saline solution. Above the whole mess stood associate professor Joseph Schroeder and some undergraduates. The bunch of ‘em were conducting an intensive experiment on Rat Pleasure at Connecticut College.

Preliminary findings were released last week.

Here’s what they found: the rats, obviously, tended to choose the pleasurable sides of the maze. They spent much more time looking for Oreos and drugs than they did for rice cakes and saline. Not only that: among the pleasure-seeking rats, brain scans indicated that eating Oreos was actually more pleasurable than doing drugs. Rats prefer cookies to cocaine.

It’s no surprise that rats are hedonists, that they have no scruples, and that they love snacks.

Here’s the catch. This study, like most studies about rats, was not actually about rats. This study was actually a study about humans—about us.

And Schroeder thinks the implications could be serious.

He told CNN that his rat-based discovery “may help us to understand why individuals who have trouble controlling their food intake, especially when food options are limited to high fat/sugar options, are more susceptible to obesity.”

Sure—this study might help us understand how junk food and drugs affect the brain in similar ways. And this could be really useful, for doctors and for patients alike.

But it seems that there could also be a much bigger risk at play here. It seems that if this experiment is really to help us understand the joy of junk food, we have to begin to understand the world through the prism of Rat Pleasure.

“Oh, alright,” readers of Schroeder’s findings are meant to respond. “Oreos are a little more pleasurable than cocaine is for a rat. Based on my knowledge of rodents, I now know how pleasurable Oreos are.”

Unfortunately, this rat-centric approach is all too common in science. Most experiments with rats as their subjects demand that we understand the world from the perspective of rats. Want to know how human addiction works? Think like a rat. Want to learn how hereditary diseases are passed on? Look at rat genes. Want to try for a new vaccine? You must cure the rats first.

Rats are coopting experiments for their own purposes. Yes: rodents are infiltrating the Temple of Knowledge, and pleasure is their reward. This is the way to a speedy descent. So please, press the “Emergency Stop” button on the elevator. I would like to get out before we reach the throne hall of the Mole King. – SPE

steve crow, new zealand native, is something of a Renaissance man. His CV reads like a telenovela. Known first and foremost as the Kiwi porn kingpin (owner of Eden Media, Vixen TV, and Erotica Expo, among others), Crow finds it admittedly “unfortunate” that he is pigeonholed as such. “I do so many other good things for the community,” he laments, “I’m disappointed that the public associates me only with the sex industry.” As he himself is quick to point out, Crow is a man of many persuasions.

His contributions: Politics: In 2009, Crow ran a failed campaign to become the president of New Zealand’s Veterans Association, the RSA. Philanthropy: Out of the goodness of his own heart, Crow once gave out over a quarter of a million dollars worth of online porn subscriptions.

Innovation: Crow pioneered the Boobs on Bikes promotion event in Auckland, which, true to nomenclature, is a parade of topless female cyclists.

Perhaps the only common thread uniting these activities is their middling success. But Crow has never been one to get discouraged. This week, he was back in the headlines, this time taking his never-say-die attitude and penchant for horizontality on an underwater killing spree. With a renewed sense of purpose, Crow has decided to tackle the problem of an invasive marine species in New Zealand, promising to eradicate the Mediterranean Fanworm.

The fanworm is a marine animal that looks something like a Truffula Tree from Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax. Its central orange stalk can grow up to 40 cm, with fronds that fan out from its top. It reproduces at an astounding rate, and will readily grow on every available surface. Its presence has become a nuisance for watersport enthusiasts throughout New Zealand, who have to been forced into perpetual scraping to remove the fanworm from boats and boogie boards.

Believe it or not, Crow has a master’s degree in marine biology from the University of Auckland. He claims to take issues of the marine ecosystem very seriously. “This is hugely exciting to me and it will be fantastic for the ecosystem if we can kill the Mediterranean fanworm,” he proclaimed in a recent press release. He is certainly more alarmed by the fanworm’s presence than the rest of the scientific community, which seems more inclined towards observation rather than action.

Armed with an ultrasonic anti-fouling machine, which shatters the insides of the aquatic pests and prevents them from latching onto docks, wakeboards, and other marine life, he believes this technology to be the ideal and ethical solution.

Swimming around the harbor with his new purchase, Crow has every intention of blasting the ecosystem to safety.

Crow has sworn that he will not rest until he has killed each and every last one of these fanworms. If all else fails— and, given his track record and the lack of scientific evidence surrounding the efficacy of this technology, this is abundantly possible—at least he’ll be able to add a new title to his resume.

Steve Crow, Exterminator. - AS

OCTOBER 25 2013

LA CUCARACHA La cucaracha, la cucaracha, ya no puede caminar porque le falta, porque no tiene marihuana pa’ fumar. i don’t know when i first learned that tune, but I am pretty sure I had known it a few years before figuring out what la cucaracha was. Cockroaches scare the shit out of me; it’s just how I was raised. A cockroach losing its ability to walk would be cause for celebration in my house. Turns out I shouldn’t have been singing. +++ Cockroach farming is booming in China. Periplaneta Americana, the American cockroach is the breed of choice. In 2010, a pound of the dry critters sold for 2$; today, it goes for $20.

Plus the overhead is very low, as Wang Fuming, China’s roach kingpin, told the Los Angeles Times, “I thought about raising pigs, but with traditional farming, the profit margins are very low. With cockroaches, you can invest 20 yuan and get back 150 yuan.” The dry cockroaches are ground into a powder and used in traditional Chinese medicine as a cure for bone Tuberculosis, baldness, AIDS, cancer, and as a vitamin supplement. Cosmetics companies are the second largest buyer, using the bugs as cheap protein source and for material coating cockroach wings.

As it turns out, not all American cockroaches are the same. The National Cockroach Project, run by Rockefeller University in New York has been enlisting “high school students and other citizen scientists” to help collect specimens for DNA Barcoding. Their findings have shown that the cockroaches I grew up killing on the Upper West Side are genetically distinct from those on the Upper East Side and those on Roosevelt Island. So far, despite the title, they have not received enough samples to make inferences on the genetic diversity of cockroaches across the country. Mark Stoekle, lead Scientist of the project told the National Geographic, “The diversity was a surprise to us, and the fact that they’re not just all mixed together—it’s not a random assortment. So they must be staying close to home, and they have their own neighborhoods.” - JJ

NEWS █ 02

HIGH WATER MARK a history of Olneyville

by Vera Carothers

THE RIVER the river, 18 miles long, scrawls a child’s shaky letter “U” through the heart of Olneyville, running parallel to Manton Avenue then turning north to follow Valley Street out to the harbor. At its bend, it comes within feet of the chaotic traffic junction of Olneyville Square, where Plainfield, Hartford, Manton, Broadway, and Westminster streets converge.

The Woonasquatucket River flows into the Narragansett Bay flows into the Atlantic. The history of the area we call Olneyville today begins with the river. The Narragansett Indians were the first to settle there, building a trade center around the river and giving it its name, Algonquian for “As Far as the Salt Water Flows.”

Local entrepreneurs became interested in the Woonasquatucket at the turn of the 19th century after the success of Samuel Slater’s textile mill, built on the nearby Blackstone River in Pawtucket. Narrow and swift, the river was ideal for building dams and water wheels that could power the new paper and textile mills. These factories joined smaller ones built a few years before, such as Christopher Olney’s woolen mill, which became the namesake of the town.

Olney Ville was soon shortened to Olneyville.

THE MILL immigrants of many backgrounds came to work in the mills. A new railroad juncture brought the Polish, German, Italian, and French Canadian to what had become an established English, Scottish, and Irish neighborhood. A yellowed image of Olneyville Square in a newspaper clipping from 1937 shows a bustling center of commerce that rivaled Providence’s downtown. Newly waxed automobiles line the curb outside the shops. An electric trolley snakes up Manton Ave to the Atlantic Mill, the neighborhood’s largest employer.

Middle class families bustle about doing their weekend shopping at Grand Central Market, Kennedy Butter, and Sans Souci five and ten store. There is a line around the block for a matinee at the grand Olympia Theatre. DRUGS/CANDY/ FILMS/ SODA, the sign reads.

Rick Mancuso was born and raised on Barstow Street by Valley St. in Olneyville, where his mother was born and still lives. Like many of the neighbors, his family had emigrated from Italy in his grandparents’ generation. He remembers the rotten smell of rubber that hung over the mills in the late Depression era, and the whistle that called the workers to the mill each morning at seven AM. Growing up as an only child under the tight grip of his mother, the river was a refuge and a companion. “The river,” he says, “it’s kind of in my blood, it’s where I used to escape to be by myself.”

The neighborhood kids called the falls across the park the Bare Ass Paradise. At twilight, teenage boys and a few adventurous girls would peel off their clothes and swim in the water. Rick would peer at them from behind the grass, bound by fear of severe punishment from Mother not to touch the water, rife with industrial waste pollution. During the same time, he remembers hearing about a man who washed over the falls and raked his back open. Later, Rick found out that

03 █ METRO

the man had died from the poison that got into his wound from the water.

Though damned and contaminated, the river was sacred to Rick. He watched in terror as his schoolmates shot bullfrogs with BB guns and caught snapping turtles with pitchforks thrust through their shells, once torturing one with cherry bombs on the baseball diamond behind the school. “It was a horrible thing,” he said, “you see I developed compassion because I wanted to fight them all and say, ‘Stop it, stop that.’”

Rick still lives near the river and near his mother, who is 90 years old. In the stories he tells, he calls her “Mother,” as if he were still very small and she very big. When I call him to arrange an interview about the neighborhood, he tells me I should talk to his mother. If I reach her, he asks, could I tell her to call him? She has been ignoring him, he said. I laugh nervously at the suggestion of my interference. They don’t speak easily or often to one another, necessary words caught in the slow eddy of years.

THE FLOOD in 1954, salt water came up the bay and spilled into the streets. After three days of rain from Hurricane Carol, the Woonasquatucket’s narrow sides opened in awesome swelling.

Workers left the factories in boats. Rick Mancuso remembers seeing Valley Street Park underwater.

For the neighborhood as it was, the flood came at the beginning of the end. World War II had pushed textile giants, whose fortunes largely declined after the war, to the American South for cheaper manufacturing. In Olneyville, thousands of jobs were lost and never replaced, devastating the working class neighborhood. Houses were boarded up as people moved out. In the 1950s, US Routes 6 and 10 merged to create a highway bypass of Olneyville, directing cars away from the Square and sucking its commercial lifeblood. In the following decades, the neighborhood became the site of property destructions, absentee landlordism, and crime. The river became a dumping ground for chemical and large solid debris.

THE FRONTIER in 1998, president clinton named the Woonasquatucket River an American Heritage River, pledging government support to help the community clean up pollution and revitalize the waterfront. Today, community organizations and nonprofits such as the Olneyville Homeowners Association, the Nickerson House, and the Olneyville Housing Corporation work actively to improve living standards, health, and job services in the neighborhood.

Despite the stabilizing changes, a feeling of frontier persists in Olneyville. Three hundred years after its settlement, there remains an unsteady promise of possibility for new residents. There is also the compelling appeal of “cheap, big, plentiful space,” as Dan Schliefer, a member of the What Cheer? Brigade who has lived in Olneyville for eight years, puts it. “Cheap,” “big,” “plentiful”—these could be the words

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Flooding in the ’80s, Olneyville

of pioneers at the frontier. The band practices at Building 16, one of many old factory or mill spaces turned artist studios.

Where else, Dan points out, could the What Cheer? Brigade, a raucous 19-piece brass band, play without deafening neighbors?

In the 1990s, a few artist collectives moved into former mill buildings and warehouses, most prominently the legendary Fort Thunder collective near Eagle Square. The raucous culture of Fort Thunder, where artists’ living spaces and studios also became the venue for noise rock shows and events like costumed wrestling matches, attracted more artists to the neighborhood. Today, too, some artists choose Olneyville overtly for its “wildness,” Dan says, and the freedom to live with minimal consequences.

At the same time, a flood of Hispanic immigrants largely effected the repopulation of Olneyville. As several waves of immigrants from Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and other parts of Central America arrived in Olneyville, the Hispanic population jumped from 34.9 percent in 1990 to 57.4 percent in 2012. Neighborhood associations such as the Olneyville Homeowner’s Association (OHA) are comprised of mainly Hispanic residents who want to work to build the community. Alvaro Morales, who helped found OHA, remembers Olneyville as desolate and damaged when he first arrived from Guatemala in the 1980s. Homeownership, he argues, places the responsibility to control the neighborhood in the hands of residents and “that is how everything will change,” he says.

The different populations in the neighborhood, Xander Marro, co-founder of the Dirt Palace, a women’s art collective in Olneyville Square, argues, are “brought together by everyone’s shared sense of vulnerability, whether it is artists living illegally in warehouses [or] immigrants living without papers.” The equation of the vulnerability of the artist population to that of the immigrant population is problematic, however. While the artist community is familiar with sudden evictions and displacements (this December, Building 16, a hub for artists in Olneyville, will be shut down

OCTOBER 25 2013

to make way for new development), they are in no small part the catalyst for the neighborhood’s gentrification, which continues to push up the price of rent for both populations.

RESURGE in 2010, rick watched 1954 wash over him. He remembered being 11 years old then and seeing Valley Street Park blank with water. This time, it was the water from upstream that came down. Two monster rainstorms back-to-back flooded the neighborhood. In the basement of Cathedral Art jewelry factory, which sits near the river’s crossing at Manton Avenue, a five-foot wall of water threatened to go over the cyanidecoated top of the jewelry plating tanks, almost causing an environmental catastrophe.

Three years after the 2010 flood, Dan is afraid that in the future, Olneyville will be swept away. “It is a fairly low-lying area,” he says. “We saw it a couple of years ago,” he tells me, “and with climate change there is every reason to think we’ll see flooding again the next few years. If it seems doomed, people may give up on the neighborhood.” +++ a current is formed by waves that build to constancy.

When Rick Mancuso was little, the neighborhood was mostly Italian; now it is mostly Hispanic. Since its founding, Olneyville has been home to periodic waves of immigrants: in Rick’s day Western European, later Eastern European, now Central American. “In some ways, it is relatively unchanged,” Rick says. “Olneyville has always been a place for working class people, and it still is.”

The river flows on; it is the blood of the community.

Before white settlers came, Native Americans farmed the land and fished in the river. In mill times, the river powered industry through waterwheels and dams. Now, at Riverside Park, a rehabilitated industrial site, families and neighbors congregate by the river and the nearby falls.

METRO █ 04

CAMPINO

A restaurant in East Providence

by Xhesi Hysi Illustration by Jack Mernin just after exiting I-95 onto Warren Avenue in East Providence, a sign stands tall above the street: Campino: Portuguese and American Cuisine, it reads, decorated with a wine glass on top and a bunch of grapes below. The building itself lies deeper into the street side with ample parking space in front for patrons. American and Portuguese flags line the glass façade on either side of the entrance. I am here with a former professor, Onesimo Almeida, who offered to drive me and introduce me to the owners.

This is a quiet time for the restaurant, a little before the lunch rush hour. A couple of men sit nursing their drinks and watching the news on the flat screen TV. One of the men is owner David Mathias. Our conversation lasts only a couple of minutes, but during that time David greets more than five people that walk in and settle down at the bar. “Many of the regulars will swing by just to sit there, sipping on the occasional drink and watching TV,” he says. “They know that if they come by, people they know will be here.” It gets quite busy at around 2:00 PM, as small parties of three or four arrive and settle down in the main dining room.

After asking David if I can take a couple of pictures, I walk outside to discover a group of five or six men sitting at the table near the entrance. All have drinks in front of them and are chatting loudly in Portuguese. “How about a picture of the regulars?” “Absolutely.” After the picture, I linger to ask them a couple of questions. They tell me that hanging out at Campino is very much like hanging out at a friend’s dorm room. “That’s why we come here and sit here, outside.

To talk to friends, relax, have a drink.”

Over lunch, I ask Onesimo, himself originally from the former Portuguese colony of Azores, why he comes to Campino.“The food, of course. It’s as Portuguese as it gets and I miss it.

So, I come here often with my wife and we enjoy a little slice of home.”

Today he is having Bacalhau na Braza, a grilled codfish dish with olive oil in a garlic sauce. I went with the Alentejana, a stew made up of potatoes, pork chunks, and littlenecks in a thick sauce.

Sitting at the bar, David tells me that the restaurant was not always the busy hub that it is today. “When we first opened in 2004, we were struggling to make a profit. That was mainly why I invited Umberto to come cook for me. He was a bartender at Sol Mar, another Portuguese restaurant on the East Side.” As he tells me this, he points to a small photograph above the liquor shelf. It’s a picture of a very young Umberto, sporting a full head of black hair, behind the bar at Sol Mar. “See if you look closely, you can see me sitting at the bar. That’s how we met.” Umberto’s cooking was the main reason for Campino’s big break.

their location. When Cape Verde gained independence from Portugal in 1975, many Cape Verdeans were wary of breaking away from Portugal. “Being part of the empire for so long, they considered themselves to be bona fide Portuguese, a lot of them still do, actually. They could not fathom a life outside the framework of the Portuguese state,” Onesimo tells me.

Before they immigrated to the United States, there was little contact between the Portuguese in Portugal and the Portuguese in the colonies. “When they came to the US they ran into one another in a country at a time where racial issues were extremely salient,” Onesimo says. Cape Verde has an estimated population of 500,000 people, most of whom are creoles, people born in Cape Verde of mixed Portuguese and African descent; most Cape Verdeans speak a creole that combines Portuguese and West African languages rather than the country’s official Portuguese. Many white Portuguese immigrants interacted with Cape Verdean creoles for the first

+++

time when they came to the US. “Living in America in the ’60s and ’70s they began to see the differences between one another. A distinction grew immediately between the Portuguese of color from Cape Verde and the white Portuguese from Portugal.”

Not long after my visit to Campino, I found myself working alongside a Cape Verdean woman named Guadalete in the Brown Dining Services Bakeshop, cutting bread into little cubes for an event on campus. I ask her how much of the divide Onesimo mentioned is still present. “It’s still very much true. A lot of white Portuguese see us black and different from them. There are times when they’ll avoid brushing past you in the street.” The hostility is not confined to the US, however. Guadalete’s brother visited Portugal with his family about a year ago on his way to Cape Verde. “His son’s skin is very dark, darker than mine. They were taking a walk and this Portuguese woman was sitting on the porch of her house.

My brother heard her say, ‘Look at that black monkey’ as they

“i don’t live around here, but I knew that the neighborhood would appreciate a Portuguese restaurant, and I was right,” David tells me. Rhode Island is home to the third largest Portuguese-American community in the US, a large part of which is Cape Verdean. The mid-20th century marked the biggest wave of immigration, bringing many Portuguesespeaking populations to America from countries like Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique. The clientele at Campino is a mixture of Portuguese and Cape Verdean.

As Onesimo cleans his codfish with habitual ease, I ask about the dynamics between the Portuguese and Cape Verdean communities in Providence. “I wouldn’t say there’s pronounced animosity, but there are some old tensions.”

The previously uninhabited islands of Cape Verde were discovered and colonized by the Portuguese in the 15th century, and became important in the Atlantic slave trade for

05█ metro

walked by. She was talking about his son.”

Back at the restaurant, not much time has passed since my conversation with Onesimo on this very conflict, when three construction workers from a site nearby, walk in to have their lunch break. The party is made up of one Portuguese man and two Cape Verdeans. They chat fast and loud in Portuguese. Their voices are full of laughter and the kind of temporary relief that comes with being on one’s lunch break.

The trio leaves the restaurant amidst a flurry of shaking hands and greetings being shouted by the men at the bar. This is not the first time they have come here for their break. +++ umberto, the cook, is a shy man. I ask him for a picture when he was sitting outside, having joined the regulars for an afternoon drink. His friends don’t miss the opportunity to pick on him a little, throwing around jokes about how handsome and photogenic he is, as he gets ready to pose. Umberto immigrated from Cape Verde to the United States in 1983 when he was 21 years old.

Umberto lived in New Jersey at first, but came to Providence after a friend of his opened Sol Mar and invited him to work there as a bartender. He met his wife and cooking partner, Lucia, when she was dishwasher at the restaurant. At the time Umberto met David, he was struggling to keep Campino open. “He had changed so many managers already and couldn’t figure out what wasn’t working. I had never cooked before except for myself, and then I learned by working with some excellent chefs at Sol Mar. After that I went to Johnson and Wales for culinary arts and there I learned even more.”

Umberto tells me that one of his favorite dishes to cook is the Alentejana I had for lunch. “It is a little different from how you would have it in Portugal. There they don’t have any sauce. In America we have to add the sauce ‘cause people here like it like that.”

I ask Umberto about Portuguese-Cape Verdean relations, and he speaks deliberately and carefully. “I think the relationships are good, I think there is a lot of respect. The Portuguese couldn’t take much from Cape Verde, but what they gave us was good for us. We speak their language and that’s why we get along very well. They respect us, we respect them.” He does not get the chance to cook Cape Verdean food often, although sometimes clients will call in to make a specific order. “Portuguese food and Cape Verdean food are very different, here we only make Portuguese. Cape Verdean food is very heavy with spices and meat.”

After my interview with Umberto, David offers to give me a tour of the rest of the restaurant. Adjacent to the bar is a medium-sized dining room, beautifully lit, with a single dining table that might sit ten people comfortably. “What’s that?”

I ask pointing to a mosaic tile hanging on the far wall. “Oh that’s the Campino. It’s a piece we bought in Portugal.” The mosaic depicts a medieval Portuguese farmer on horseback standing in a cornfield. “It’s a funny story, I was initially told that Campino meant ‘a small piece of land’ in Portuguese,” David says. As it turns out, a Campino is a cattle herder in the Portuguese region of Ribatejo, or as David puts it, “the man in charge of the small piece of land.”

David’s small piece of land stands amidst a considerable number of Portuguese restaurants on the East Side. It is a space of coming together for part of the community. Umberto takes his food very seriously and this is reflected in the restaurant’s success. Campino does not try to be the place, but rather, a place. A small slice of land where you can witness a small slice of life.

XHESI HYSI B’16 felt at home.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SPACE LAW

by Jehane Samaha Illustration by Andres Chang jason juren, a recent graduate of the University of Houston Law Center, wants to be a space lawyer. Specifically, a lawyer on the frontier of the asteroid mining field. Science fiction, this is not. Space law straddles the gap between precedent and prediction: How have humans dealt with exploration, colonization, and resource division on earth, and how will these earth-values be applied to future situations in space? As a field, space law became globally relevant amidst tensions leading up to the 1957 Sputnik launch—if the US or the Soviets reached space first, what rights would they acquire? Do nations have the right to use space for military purposes (such as missile-armed bases)? Better to get laws on the books up front, setting space aside for peaceful purposes and designating its celestial bodies as the “Common Heritage of Man.” As a result of this era of treaty-making, the moon does not belong to the US, despite Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moon landing.

Juren earned his Juris Doctorate after completing his senior paper, titled “Livin’ on the Edge...of Space,” which dealt with topics of space law relevant to enabling and supporting an extraterrestrial US civilian population. His paper looks at everything from the nitty-gritty (how are orbiting space objects registered to avoid collision? Are nations liable for the actions of their space personnel or the rescue of citizens in space?) to the philosophical (what rights do human individuals and nations hold to the vast resources of space?). While his earth-bound peers may chuckle outright at the mention of “Space Law,” Juren believes that the smooth running of future space exploration depends on this field of scholarship. I found Juren while browsing the Heinlein Prize Trust website, which encourages commercial space activity in memory of Robert A. Heinlein, renowned American science fiction writer. Though at first glance space law may raise eyebrows, it becomes all the more fascinating for the tension it explores between the fantastical hypothetical and legal scholarship. +++ The College Hill Independent: Your paper focuses on the concerns of a US colonization of space. Do you think the US is the nation closest to achieving the establishment of extraterrestrial settlements?

Jason Juren: This is a hard one. Political winds can change in an instant, and some new breakthrough could catapult another nation ahead in the space game. As it stands, the US is probably the closest just by virtue of its technological and industrial might, but that could easily change. The real key is to watch how space privatizes. If low cost launches are a reality, the highest bidder could be the one to colonize another place. It also depends upon the scope of what we mean by “extraterrestrial.” If the moon counts, we’ll probably see a moon base with a semi-permanent population of a few dozen within 50 years. If we mean Mars or another solar system, it could be centuries depending on how much of a jerk the light-barrier feels like being and whether or not we can break it with manned craft. If companies like Planetary Resources, Excalibur Explorations, and Deep Space Industries succeed in mining asteroids within the next few decades, that should open up a huge door to commercial space travel, which can only foster the odds that we’ll colonize something.

An interview with Jason Juren happening between a handful of scholars over whether or not a person can privately own space resources). In my opinion, it is vital that individualism and industry take root in space law. As my paper discusses, there is a huge body of thought that feels that every person has an equal share in the resources of space and that private activities must share their fruits with the rest of the world in a redistributive manner. As for why that’s bad, I point to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The UNCLOS embraces the idea that minerals found on the sea floor in international waters belong to everyone and any such resources retrieved are taxed heavily and redistributed with the miner getting more of a “finders fee” than profits from the venture. The UNCLOS is decades old and the technology to mine the sea floor is just as old, but to date there has not been a single commercial mining operation because the UNCLOS has made it economically unattractive. Should a similar scheme be adopted for space, I fear that industry will be stifled and that meaningful development will cease.

The Indy: On a similar note, I’m concerned about the field of space law as being very “earth-centric” and particularly “human-centric.” I am struck by the 1979 Moon Treaty’s declaration of celestial bodies except earth as the “Common Heritage of Man,” (CHM) requiring that resources extracted from outer space be distributed across human society. I suppose I find it interesting, on a cultural level, that earth is not considered the common heritage of man, and that other objects, which man has never visited, are. What do you think is behind this ideology?

JJ: Ostensibly, the common heritage doctrine is a show of unity, utopian aspirations, and world harmony. Everyone gets along and shares everything, but my personal take is quite a bit darker. I suspect that much of the CHM and similar language was put in place specifically to slow down the expansion of other nations. History has shown that nations are rarely altruistic. There’s almost always some other interest at play. The Soviet Union had a lot of influence on the CHM concepts and their reasons were to check the spread of western ideals from becoming entrenched in space law. In effect, every nation at the time was trying to freeze the space race to buy more time to jockey for position until such a time they had a competitive advantage, at which time they’d abandon the doctrine. Of course, the Soviet Union collapsed, and I find it endlessly ironic that the CHM ideals took root with a lot of western thinkers in the absence of the group that first proposed it.

The Indy: In the case of contact with other civilizations, how do you think this “earth-centric” ideology (seeing humans and earth as the “center of the universe”) will hold up?

JJ: Regarding another civilization, this touches the topic of Metalaw. I think the first thing another civilization would

do if we told them “Hands off the universe! It’s our common heritage, not yours,” is that they’d look at us funny and then either nuke us or just laugh at us. If we do manage to make contact, I think the theological, social, and other ramifications will be so great that space law will kind of be disregarded as society reshuffles itself. If nothing else, I think that eventually the existence of another race would force humanity to recognize that the whole universe isn’t just ours and that we’d stop treating space property different than terrestrial property.

The Indy: Thinking about settlements that are too deep in space to maintain communication, what are the implications for enforcing law in these colonies? What rights do space colonies have?

JJ: Governing colonies is a huge deal, and my personal take is that a proper foundation of control is built only upon respect and mutual gain. For example, each of the 50 states would lose more than it gains by leaving the US. We accept federal control because it is in our overall interests to do so.

Early colonies will likely be dependent on earth for supplies, so I don’t see too many early rebellions, but as they become autonomous this will be a huge concern. I think the answer to this lies in history. The Roman, British, and other empires can teach us a whole lot about what not to do with wayward colonies. I’m a huge fan of the BattleTech universe wherein earth established many extra-solar colonies and lost control over most of them because they couldn’t meaningfully extend their reach to the frontier. Just as the British empire had trouble extending its might to certain frontiers, the fictional government in BattleTech lost control. I wanted to have a section of the paper that detailed several constitutional amendments that dealt with annexing and governing new colonies in space.

In the paper, given more time, I wanted to propose that each new colony be treated as a state (or something similar) that was fully capable of governing itself and that secession be built into the legal framework.

The Indy: Now that you have graduated, what is next for you?

Are you incorporating this thinking into your next profession?

Do jobs in the field of space law exist?

JJ: Well, the next thing I’m trying to do is get involved in the burgeoning asteroid mining field. I’ve been doing some legal clerking for one of the companies that hopes to launch a mining operation within the next decade, and I’ve also been assisting an Art Dula with the International Academy of Astronautics Study Group 3.17 on Space Mineral Resources.

Because the field is so new, any job I get long term I’ll have to create myself or shake out of a tree, but I’ll keep at it. It’s something that I love, it has the potential for a lot of revenue, but most importantly it helps bring us closer to the stars. By these efforts, humanity can continue its exploration into the incredible vastness so that we may marvel more closely at the glory of creation, and that is the most exciting thing of all.

Jehane Samaha B’13.5 is intergalactic.

The Indy: To what extent will laws derived from the legal precedents of very specific nations/schools of thought (for example, western capitalism) be relevant or appropriate on global (or even “universal,”) levels?

JJ: This is a big one. In fact, most of the fight is here. (Of course by “fight” I’m referring to the academic slap-fight that’s

OCTOBER 25 2013

SCIENCE █ 06

B RID G E S

by Anna Rotman

07 █ features

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OCTOBER 25 2013

features █ 08

by Emma Wohl Illustration by Casey Friedman

on june 28, 2009, soldiers stormed into the bedroom of the presidential residence in Tegucigalpa, Honduras and forced Manuel Zelaya to leave the country. Still wearing his pajamas, the now-ex-president fled to Costa Rica. His wife, Xiomara Castro, went with him into exile.

The coup was orchestrated by the military and legitimized by the Supreme Court, angry over the president’s recent attempts to convene a National Constituent Assembly to rewrite the constitution in order to extend his term in office. While Zelaya was at the time a member of the center-right Liberal Party, in the years since his election he had been moving farther to the left, allying himself with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

A month after the coup, in August 2009, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya was back in Honduras. She stood on the bed of a truck, waving a Honduran flag and speaking through a megaphone to crowds of supporters, expressing her sympathy for those who had been injured in fighting with the military in the streets of Tegucigalpa. According to her husband, she slept in the street alongside his supporters.

On May 22, 2011, after living for almost two years in exile, Manuel Zelaya returned to Honduras, where he now serves as a deputy of the Central American Parliament. On the fourth anniversary of the coup in June, he appeared in front of a crowd of thousands in Tegucigalpa, but he did not seem to be advancing his own political position. Rather, he was speaking about the brave actions of his wife, who is now one of the leading candidates in the upcoming November 24th presidential election. Castro, who is running with the brand-new party LIBRE, has the chance to be the first female president in Honduran history. +++ in a straw poll held in mid-September, Castro came out ahead of the eight other contenders with somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the popular vote, a small lead over Juan Orlando Hérnandez of the dominant National Party. She needs only the most votes, not the majority, to win.

But corruption and distrust of the government are widespread. In the last presidential election, less than a quarter of the population voted. This July, the polling agency Paradigma reported that more than thirty percent of the population chose “None of the above” in a choice among presidential candidates.

Honduras has five political parties with representatives in its unicameral legislature—Castro’s party LIBRE, which was only established in 2011, is not among them—but has essentially been a two-party system since 1920. Since then, only candidates from the center-right Liberal Party and rightwing National Party have been elected president. That LIBRE can put

forward a viable candidate at all is, then, the news of the century.

Almost all of LIBRE’s success can be attributed to the actions of its founder, Manuel Zelaya, and the first candidate to run under its auspices, Xiomara Castro. “We deserve a better Honduras, and because of this when they lay the presidential sash on me, my first words will be, ‘I convene a National Constituent Assembly, we are moving towards a new Constitution,’ ’’ Castro said in an public appearance in Cortés, the most northwestern region of Honduras, in August. “There are men willing to give up their lives if it is necessary to achieve this.”

The Constituent Assembly was originally Zelaya’s idea, one of the attempts at consolidating power that gained him the most criticism in the weeks before the coup. Generally, Castro has combined the most effective, popular planks of her husband’s campaign—such as building infrastructure—with practical ways to increase Honduras’s economic growth and international competitiveness. This is a fairly moderate platform for someone commonly painted as a socialist. Yet Castro’s support does not come from the areas that have traditionally supported the Liberal and National Parties—big business and the military.

In July she announced that under her plan the military would no longer police the streets and would be replaced by a stronger National Civilian Police.

Castro’s base of support is found among rural and urban workers, due to her vows to extend low-interest credit to farmers and small businesses. She has held major campaign events outside the two largest cities, Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, including in centers of rural organizing. She is also a favorite among Honduras’s small cultural sector, which faced repression from the government after the coup. In September, more than 100 artists banded together to support her in the remote city of Siguatepeque, after she announced her plan to create a National Council on Culture.

Staying out of the capital and rejecting overtures from business interests has earned Castro criticism. Opponents tend to ridicule LIBRE for being rebellious, associating it with the coup and blaming the masses for the lack of stability in the aftermath of the military takeover. Earlier this month, the National Party capitalized on this fear, running a fake piece of literature for Castro’s campaign. It promised, “In memory of the Heroic Commander Chávez, we will be part of the great Bolivarian nation and we will change our national symbols to those of our sister Bolivarian republic of Venezuela.”

The idea of a political figure out in the countryside, appealing directly to the people, still makes many in Central America uncomfortable. For Castro’s right-wing opponents, her events evoke Che and Fidel in the mountains, waiting to march on Havana, or the Nicaraguan Sandinistas seeking help from the rural poor to overthrow the Somoza regime. The fact that Xiomara is a woman just suggests further destabilization of the status quo. +++ when foreign sources cover honduras, they rarely focus on electoral politics. Most of the attention the country has received in recent years has been due to its high murder rate: In the country of only eight million people, it is estimated over 20 people a day are killed. The country’s largest gangs commonly collude with police to avoid prosecution for murders and drug-related crimes committed by its members. Murder has become a tool to intimidate any who stand in their way. Migdonia Ayestas, who works in the Violence Observatory at the Autonomous University in Tegucigalpa, blames the Honduran government for failing to police its own borders, and for consistently declaring states of

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

emergency. “We are on the brink of becoming a failed state,” she told NPR in June.

In particular, femicide—murder targeting women—has skyrocketed in the last four years. In Honduras, one woman is killed every 18 hours, and less than 20 percent of femicide cases are investigated. In part, that is because women are afraid to report violence to the same police who are often involved in the attacks. Gladys Lanza of the Women’s Tribunal Against Femicide, a Honduran NGO, condemned the government for supporting this institutionalized impunity, which in turn perpetuates deeper hatred of women and a sense of impunity for killing them: “The government of Honduras says one thing and does another. Although it talks about its concern for the levels of violence in the country in general, it doesn’t even mention violence against women.”

Many sympathetic observers think Castro will make a change in this system. She has spoken out against violence towards women before; in the military suppression of protests after the coup, sexual assault and torture of female protesters became common tactics, according to the Women’s Studies Center of Honduras. In response, Castro commended the show of support from the protesters but said, “It’s hard to see people in the demonstrations repressed so brutally.” However, in her campaign platform, she has not spoken specifically about issues of women’s rights and safety. Those who think her presidency will mark a major change generally base that assertion on the fact that she is a woman, rather than specific policies she supports.

In a paper prepared for the Global Institute for Gender Research in 2010, Mala Htun and Jennifer Pispoco note that women in Latin America are still considerably underrepresented in positions with control over budgets, whether on a local, regional, or national level.

In part, this is because such jobs, with the potential to enrich oneself, are more in-demand, but it also reflects a lag in these countries’ willingness to give up the reigns of power to women. Furthermore, they argue, more elected women officials in Latin America does not necessarily reflect steps towards gender equality.

Rather, “policies have changed when domestic and international actors worked together to hold political leaders—male and female— accountable for advancing women’s rights.”

+++ francisco morazán is honduras’s national hero. In the 1820s, he united the Central American republics into the Central American Federation in order to maintain autonomy from the Republic of Mexico and fight against European encroachment. Morazán led the Federation for 10 years, until Rafael Carrera, an illiterate swineherd turned highwayman turned charismatic popular leader, led an uprising against the repressive measures of the central army and eventually had Morazán driven out. Morazán’s return to Honduras in 1841 was ill-fated; after fighting off a band of insurgents with a guard of 40 men, he was captured and executed. José Martí, the great Cuban revolutionary of the 19th century, called Morazán “a true statesman, perhaps the only one Central America has ever produced.”

Up to a point, Manuel Zelaya has followed in Morazán’s footsteps. The colors of the party that got him elected, the Liberal Party of Honduras, are red and white, a tribute to the flag Morazán carried in most of his military campaigns. Zelaya is a bit of a maverick, like Morazán—after successfully campaigning as a pro-business, centerright candidate in 2005, he moved to the left, calling for state-funded infrastructure, a new constitution, and forging an alliance with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. When his term was coming to an end, he clashed with the Supreme Court in attempting to extend it. Like Morazán, he did not go quietly into exile, but stormed through a series of leftist countries that gave him sanctuary.

Unlike his role model, he has learned the risk of putting himself forward so publically in years since the coup.

The history of governance in Honduras is all but devoid of female figures. Xiomara’s only role models are the quiet wives of influential men.

Francisco Morazán had a wife—Maria Lastiri Lozano, a wealthy Salvadorian divorcée who poured her money into her husband’s political ambition. But she does not figure in the apotheosis of her husband in Honduran historical records.

For Xiomara Castro, distinguishing herself as an independent figure is a matter of political expediency as much as reform. If elected, she will first and foremost have to fight to assert herself as a discrete entity from her husband if she wishes to move past the pitfalls that saw him removed from power.

Meanwhile,Castro adopts as her own the policies that got her husband forced out of office, counting on popular loyalty to protect her from the forces that conspired against him.

+++ the first female presidents in Latin America were both elected in Central American countries; both were widows of prominent political figures. Violeta Chamorro, elected president of Nicaragua in 1990, opposed the left-wing Sandinistas and the dictator they overthrew. She portrayed herself as a maternal figure, an antidote to the machista violence of Daniel Ortega’s socialist regime and the civil war he had faced while in office.

Panama’s Mireya Moscoso de Arias followed her husband Arnulfo, a three-time president, into exile and returned only to run under the Arnulfista Party after his death in 1988. Her older sister served as her first lady.

Zelaya is very much alive and speaking with pride about his wife’s plans. “Xiomara,” he told The Post, “is going to give Honduran women a place in society that has always been denied to them.” Meanwhile, Castro adopts as her own the policies that got her husband forced out of office, counting on popular loyalty to protect her from the forces that conspired against him.

The critiques voiced by her opposition are essentially sexist. They eschew complaints about her platform, instead arguing that her campaign is a dirty trick by her husband to reinsert himself into the nation’s politics. A leader in the National Party described Zelaya as “out for revenge.” The Honduran news site Proceso Digital called Castro “almost anonymous” last month, saying that her husband runs the campaign while she stays out of the spotlight. They cast Castro as a puppet guided by her husband. The United States press is not exempt from this trend. The Washington Post headline from July reads, “In Honduras, Manuel Zelaya in the running again with wife’s candidacy.” Another article from the Huffington Post asks, “Xiomara Zelaya: Puppet of a Power-Hungry Husband?”

It’s hard to imagine that if a man followed his wife into politics, he would be viewed exclusively as an extension of her. That, though, is not yet the trend in Central American politics. Marco Cáceres, author of The Good Coup: The Overthrow of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, pointed out the cultural barrier to Castro’s chances of independence. “A machista man in a machista society…taking orders from his wife? Not a chance,” he said.

Even if it is all for show, Zelaya is already bucking the male-centric trend. In July, he told The Washington Post if his wife is elected, “I will do whatever she tells me.”

OCTOBER 25 2013

+++ on monday, paradigma released its October results. They show Nationalist Party candidate Juan Orlando Hernández pulling ahead of Castro to carry just over a quarter of the popular vote. These results have fluctuated month to month, and poll to poll, by well over the five percent difference currently between the two. But in polling, perceptive leads can easily multiply.

Castro still deserves attention. She is asserting herself, with her husband’s blessing, in a country with a high rate of spousal violence and femicide. She was able to stir fears of socialist revolution in the hearts of the country’s elite—admittedly no great feat—just by speaking to rural farmers. But in studying her example, it is important not to lose sight of the ways the Honduran government remains limited—from violence, to drug trafficking, to the lack of confidence of its citizens. A female candidate can bring a new perspective to the job and be a powerful symbol. But her impact will remain limited in a country where the frontrunner in the presidential election, with a third of the vote, remains “None of the above.”

EMMA WOHL B’14 is puppet to no man.

NEWS █ 10

NOTES FROM DOWN BELOW The Occult Humanities Conference 2013

by Julieta Cárdenas the next stop is wall street. 8:45AM, Saturday, October 19. MTA construction work means the 4 is running local, which works favorably as I need some time to sit quietly with myself. I am headed to St. Mark’s Place for the Occult Humanities Conference. I am coming from a friend’s place near the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and have woken up with enough time to get to the pre-conference reception on the dot at 9:00AM. One cappuccino, four glasses of water, and the city morning chill have taken care of what would have been a champagne hangover. I try not to think about time. I pull my sleeve, covering my watch. I will get there five minutes early, because I hate being late. I like it here on the subway. I pace my reading according to the number of stops I have left. I pace my thoughts to this as well.

I notice that I am worried. I want to fit in at the conference and I am not quite sure what to expect. I sit down, take out my paper and make notes. This is what my handwriting should always look like; as if it were always beyond my control. Automatism; a quick hand, a lucky draw. I feel fast in my head too. I have a pen and I make notes.

I note that there is a woman across from me at an angle with ruby all over. Ruby lips, ruby in her ears, ruby is her wool coat, but her hair is grey and short. I woke up in the apartment aware of the colors slipping into grey morning. The first talk of the morning is on the British-born painter, Leonora Carrington. I am invested in her work, having seen it as a child in Mexico City before developing the biases of an art history student. That said, it is an art history professor delivering the talk. Susan Aberth of Bard has titled her talk, “Like A Messenger to the Deep: Deciphering the Occult in Leonora Carrington.”

It’s a quick trip, and I am moving in perfect time, the tunnels carrying me in rocking tempo. I feel awake. I am nearly at Astor. The truth is-I confess-I didn’t manage to get a ticket before they all sold out, but I have a feeling in my gut that because I want it so bad, I will get in. The sky and city atoms take me up the stairs to the street. I turn past the Cooper Union kids and my ankles swivel my feet towards 34 Stuyvesant St. Stuyvesant St. is one leg of a triangularly shaped mass of land. The Occult Humanities Conference is sponsored by NYU’s Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions; Observatory, an art space in Gowanus that brings together art, magic and science; and Phantasmaphile, a blog of the esoteric. The conference description reads: “Though there are as many ways into this material as there are cultural—and personal— perspectives, universal occult concerns often include a belief in some sort of magic; a longing to connect with an immaterial or trans-personal realm; and a striving for inner-knowledge, refinement of the self, and transformation of one’s consciousness—if not one’s physical circumstances.”

Have You Any Dreams You’d Like to Sell? i bet someone here can see my aura. Julieta, your aura is white crystal, said my high school’s valedictorian. This means that I can absorb all light. I can take on other people’s energy and if I have cleansed my own energy that day, I can heal them. I can also be polluted, although I am not sure if today I am. I feel selfish, not having a ticket but knowing that I will get in. My cousins say my sweat smells like a small child’s and so I will always have someone try to take care of me, as a reflex. I talk to a mother of two boys about gendered bathrooms in schools and we agree that Sailor Moon is for everyone, and that her son should not worry about liking the show. A man with a ponytail looks at me; I later learn he is an alchemist.

We use the word “occult” casually, but we do not say “magic.” The words have different meanings; “magic,” is what causes something to happen and it is an internal power. “Occult” is the syllogism placed over the magic. We can speak of the Occult as a way into calling forth the magic. The Occult Humanities puts magic in a translatable cultural matrix, within which there are artifacts, writings, and histories that parallel the texts and objects that non-Occult humanists engage with. The difference is a marked change of how these histories are approached. The Occult humanist allows gut-intuition to build their relationship with history. Gut-intuition is a tool encouraged here. The nonOccult humanist may do the same thing, but is certainly less upfront about it.

The British woman in cashmere comes back from having a cigarette; she puts in a good word. I get in. I knew I would but don’t know who to credit for that wishfulfillment. The British woman and I walk together toward the lecture hall. I tell her I am going to London for Thanksgiving to look at schools, she says she studied in London at the same curatorial program I am looking at. A good sign, a good sign that I will get what I want. I forgot to take off my mother’s pearls last night, but I did remember to shower. I am less self-conscious next to this woman. I am wearing grey, she is wearing navy and is very beautiful. We go into the lecture hall. It is time for Susan Aberth’s talk.

The Occult humanist allows gutintuition to build their relationship with history. Gut-intuition is a tool encouraged here. The non-Occult humanist may do the same thing, but is certainly less upfront about it.

+++ Can I tell you that today I am living a poem?

People are longing to connect with something more. Beyond.

I push the red doors. Politely, in a kind manner, with a stack of badges before her, a girl tells me that they have sold out of tickets, but I should feel welcome to have coffee with the lecturers before the talk. I do as she says and walk into the wooden room.

I talk, with coffee, we talk; who are you, how did you get here? It is a new thing, this, the Occult Humanities. It is new to me.

There are no real questions when you already have a sense of someone’s answer. However, in conversation there are formalities, so I answer and smile with twitching legs.

I write, I am still a student. +++ everyone looks like someone i have met before. I have a good feeling in my stomach and I am still smiling. I register a man with a ponytail, young booksellers, two French men, two British women, one British man who is a Pisces with a Virgo rising sign-as am I. We agree, the British man and I, that it is hard being at two extremes; living in a creative head but having to vacuum and clean every day. Neurotic, watery, emotional, well put-together clean bodies. His name is Robert Ansell and he is the art editor and publisher of Abraxas Journal, the literary holding ground for labored inquiry into the occult and esoteric. He is handsome, I think.

With coffee, we talk in graveled morning voices. I learn from the speaker biographies and from mingling that many people here have university affiliations; Bard, RISD, Golden Gate University, Cornell, and I suppose I count as well. There are others like Gary Lachlan, a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who played in Blondie. Mitch Horowitz, vice-president of Tarcher/Penguin books. William Kiesel, the founder of the International Esoteric Book Conference. We drink coffee, and I am beginning to feel strange, like I am falling into a rhythm I had forgotten but that the subway scribble put back into my head.

But I still don’t have a ticket.

11 █ OCCULT

Like a heartbeat drives you mad leonora carrington’s dna contained irish ancestry that brought Celtic rites to the symbolism of her work. What woven pattern of her unique double-helix calls forth ancestral knowledge of magic? When I was a child, I would see her paintings next to those of Remedios Varo. Two women, best friends.

In The Hearing Trumpet, a novel Leonora wrote in 1950, the narrator is an old man who says, “Beauty is a responsibility like anything else. Beautiful women have special lives like prime ministers but I don’t want that.”

André Breton, the self-imposed founder of Surrealism said, Leonora, I like your style.

Leonora said, Shut the fuck up. I am more of a surrealist than you will ever be. Leonora had fallen in love with Max Ernst at mortal age 19. He was mortal age 46. She left her home and country and lived in Paris with Max and the Surrealists. She had her own thing going on. Dear André, just because I am naked at this party doesn’t mean that you can tell me what to do, that you can tell me what my art means. Deal with it. Leonora was still in love with Max when they moved to Saint Martin D’Ardeche in the south of France after his wife, Marie-Berthe Aurenche, became too fed up. Max was taken to an internment camp in September 1939.

Leonora tried to give him paintbrushes. She vomited to try to purify herself. The vineyard on their grounds ... I wonder what the grapes taste like now. Her friends took her away from France; she ended up in Madrid at the British Consulate having the experience referred to as a breakdown. Parents, convulsive therapy, pentylenetetrazol.

Induced seizures. Beautiful women have special lives.

Leonora was then taken to Lisbon, Portugal, and escaped while under the care of a private nurse. Like many Europeans, she sought refuge in Latin America and found it through the Mexican Embassy. She lived with Frida Kahlo in the Blue House. I remember the Blue House, and the fountain of Coyoacán with coyotes howling in Aztec Nahautl.

Calling, something, calling.

Susan Arbeth says, “Leonora could write with both hands at the same time, doing different things with both.” I can write with two hands. How is Leonora’s brain? Are the hemispheres melted unto one another or are they completely separate? I keep getting a pain between vertebrae C1 and C8, the nerves in the nape of my neck. This is where those actions that are truly unconscious get their direction from: breathing, heart rate, hands and fingers. Leonora said, Remember that we are only one species amongst many animals.

Remember that we are animals. My neck-base is where the basic animal gets instructions.

I think that is where my intuition comes from as well. Fuck you André Breton, I am more of a surrealist than you will ever be.

Leonora had a hard time in boarding school. She painted herself without breasts. In the Casa Azul they say she was a lover to Frida Kahlo. “Our approach to the unknown is tied to our origin, our birth.” Leonora was convinced that she inherited Celtic ritual.

Leonora lived in Mexico for a long while. In refuge you adapt, so will this mean your magical powers adapt as well? Recessive genes will arise circumstantially. I have not yet gotten my DNA mapped out. I do not know whose rituals are within me. Do I have

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

magic? I cry, my neck hurts. I am looking at Leonora on the projector screen. She is sitting in a chair with a rocking horse behind her, floating above her. This was 1936, at mortal age 21. If I go uptown I can see this painting, which she painted with her handswith her skin-while she was still with Max in Saint Martin D’Ardeche before he was taken away. The painting is at the Metropolitan. But fuck that place, it will make me too sad to see this painting on those walls. The man next to me in the lecture hall doesn’t mind that I am there crying, listening to Susan Aberth talk about Leonora Carrington.

Maybe they think I have magic and so I am forgiven these capricious tendencies.

There are two French men behind me. One of them will speak later about the special collection of Occult books he directs at Cornell. (I was not able to focus during that talk—I make a note instead, to visit the collection.) To my right there is a young man who looks like my brother; his sweater is not as soft and his eyes are more tired. I am not tired. I cry. You know, I don’t actually have a brother, I lied but I want one really bad. If I want something bad enough … Leonora drew herself at 16. Leonora was placed in an institution in Portugal. Leonora, Leonora. I cannot imagine her crying. Leonora believed she was magical and this granted her floating freedom. She knew she had enough magic to say, Fuck You to male authority. How much power does the Occult give back to the Witch? André Breton, I always close your eyelids in my textbooks. You annoy me.

Susan Aberth says that in the mid-’90s Leonora and her work were looked to as examples and the products of A Beautiful Muse. I do not know how many people still think this way about creativity, insanity, and beauty. Is it romantic to be a hysteric, to paint floating saints? In dreams I would jump up and a gust of wind would carry me through the hallways and up the stairs. The men in the Surrealist circles, they took her seriously. In her paintings she has no breasts. There is a photo of her and Max: Look at their work together. I think they are still in love. They re-met in 1942 but had both married different people out of necessity. She had married a Mexican ambassador and he had married Peggy Guggenheim. What happens to refugees who find it easy to adopt the symbols of cultures that they do not have in their blood? Leonora painted the Mexican Jaguar. The Jaguar changes from animal to human. His name is Tezcatllipoca and he slinks through the night winds and looks at himself in smoking mirrors. His muscles are the silk of volcanic obsidian. I have to touch my neck and pull my ears. Vertebrae, please calm down.

In the Stillness of Remembering What You Had there are secret places i need to find. There is a hidden observatory in Mexico where Leonora would go to with Remedios. It is underground and only one photo of it exists.

If I had this photo in my hand, I would be tempted to rip it. Something is violating their secret through photographic presentation. I have to trust that whoever took the photo had cleansed their spirit that day. I do not want to go inside of the observatory when I run into it only to find the putrid and aged remains of a selfish tourist. It was a secret observatory. I will find it. Remedios had to escape Franco’s Spain. There needs to be some safe underground for two strong women. I can wish it. I can wish myself into finding it.

Three women. Four, so that I can bring a friend. That place is in half my DNA at least. I will find the observatory.

I need to go outside now. I see the alchemist, my tired brother, the young booksellers, the scholars. I see the British woman. We go inside again so that I can buy two issues of Abraxas. She pushes the red door and we are outside again. I will come back later. I am tired. I like my face after it cries; this is how I clean my insides. I have the underground to look forward to on my way uptown.

P.S. Leonora wrote: “P.S. Please note, the word psychosis was created as an ego saver for the psychiatrist.”

JULIETA CÁRDENAS B’14 keeps her visions to herself.

OCTOBER 25 2013

OCCULT █ 12

BRUTE CHOIR Talking with Bonnie “Prince” Billy

by Lisa Borst Illustration by John White

Friday, October 11. 7:56 PM. The Columbus Theater.

Standing outside the Columbus before seeing Bonnie “Prince” Billy, I witness two bearded, soft-spoken dudes recognize each other from another Bonnie “Prince” Billy performance in Boston half a decade ago. When I go inside to find my seat, one is quietly lamenting the fact that he is only able to make it to two dates on this tour instead of three.

Will Oldham, the man behind the Bonnie “Prince” Billy moniker, is not a celebrity in the usual sense. Singersongwriter Jeffrey Lewis wrote a song about him; Johnny Cash covered one of his songs. He has appeared in music videos

by R. Kelly and Kanye West, but press coverage of Oldham typically revolves around his Kentucky roots and aura of backwoods mystery. His image is Southern and coarse: a Kentucky troubadour, an Appalachian alt-country mystic. People seem to either listen to him very seriously or not at all.

Oldham’s mystique is furthered by the many names under which he’s recorded over the course of his career. The Bonnie “Prince” Billy moniker—a reference to Bonnie Prince Charlie, a nobleman who attempted to claim the British throne in the 18th century—has been in rotation since the late ’90s. Before that, Oldham recorded under several variations of the “Palace” identity: Palace, Palace Songs, Palace Music. Speaking to the Independent from his workspace in Louisville, he discussed, among other things, his dynamic names, Australian noise music, and his own history at Brown, where he attended school on and off for several semesters in the early 1990s. Oldham’s speaking voice, like his singing, is articulate and slightly crackly, wavering, high.

and a couple of people in the schools—and I played music with them. And I also worked on writing songs under the guidance of—basically, I created an independent study class with the professor Jeff Titan, who was there in the music department, and wrote songs as an independent study with him as my sponsor.

So the last semester I was actually there, I worked on music a lot. That would have been the fall semester of 1992, I believe, and I just didn’t go back after that…and then there was a woman I’d met over the course of those years in and out of school and…we sort of fell in love and fell in with each other right then, when I stopped going to school. So, I was in and out of Providence for the next ten years on a regular basis, living and staying, visiting, living in Providence and Jamestown.

The College Hill Independent: I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about your history at Brown. I guess you would have been here in the late eighties, the early nineties? When did you leave, and why?

WO: The main thing was that there was a guy whose music I liked a lot and followed in my teens, his name was J.G. Thirlwell. He used the name Foetus [when recording] all these different records: Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel, You’ve Got Foetus On Your Breath. And it made sense to me, it was sort of exciting to me, to think, when you move into each thing, you don’t have to recognize a continuum. As much as any individual can, you can start from scratch. That was the idea. It became so confounding to have people bring attention to the different names that I eventually stopped that, because it was the opposite of the reason for doing it. The reason for doing it was to try to simplify things and be more clear. But it seemed like something that people latched onto, and that absolutely wasn’t the intention...So then Bonnie “Prince” Billy was born, and I’ve just stuck with that for the past fifteen, sixteen years.

Will Oldham: I left a bunch of times. I went for one semester and I didn’t really want to go to school, because it seemed like a lot of money, and I didn’t fully comprehend what I was supposed to achieve there or leave with. And after one sort of dismal first semester, I left and moved to Los Angeles and then to New York, and after a year I was back for a second semester…and then I left again, for another year. And worked, and traveled, and then I came back, sort of sober, I felt, not having found out in the world anything that could support me, and so I surrendered to the idea of finishing school. And I did three consecutive semesters, and then I got a $300 paycheck from Drag City for my first seven-inch that came out, and then I quit school.

The Indy: So, during those few semesters, when did you start making music?

WO: The first song I made up was after that first semester, out in Los Angeles, and then I made up some more songs in New York City. That would have been the fall of 1989. I mostly worked on music when I was away from Providence, in Kentucky and then in Bloomington, Indiana for a while.

And then in my last semester, there was a time when I was involved musically, and there were some people who lived in Providence—people who weren’t affiliated with any schools,

13█ arts

The Indy: So—the name-changing thing. It’s primarily, what, to reflect the dynamic nature of your lineups?

WO: Yeah, the intention was—different music was recorded in different places, and there were different people involved with recording and playing, and so it seemed significantly different and only fair to reflect that in the name.

The Indy: Did it have anything to do with, deliberately or maybe unconsciously, maybe trying to avoid making a permanent name for yourself? Your brand of fame is sort of weird; you have this sort of mysterious reputation, this aura of mystery. Was that a conscious choice? And did it have anything to do with changing your name a lot?

+++ October 11. 9:39 PM. Live, Oldham (despite his now-steady pseudonym) maintains his initial goal of being clear and simple. At his show at the Columbus, opening duo Arborea shuffles around an increasingly cute series of instruments throughout their set (a harmonium, a ukulele—by the time they brought out the banjo, it had started to feel slightly farcical). In contrast, Oldham plays, plainly and well, the same acoustic guitar all night. Onstage, he does not much resemble the dusty, earthy Kentucky image that I’ve been led to expect. In fact, he looks like somebody’s dad: mostly bald, sharply dressed in a button-down and sleek shoes. His posture is impeccable. Playing alone, he seems to deliberately break down those distinctions of where, when, and with whom his

enormous body of work was recorded. Incorporating material from up and down his 20-year career, his set at the Columbus reduces a long and varied series of radically diverse albums to their unifying essence: lovely, creaky songs written by one balding and enigmatic man. +++ The Indy: Do you still feel connected with the work you made several years ago, or under different names? Or do you feel distanced from your older work?

WO: I still definitely have a feeling of connection. I made a record about eight years ago or so, called Bonnie “Prince” Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music, and that was to reestablish a connection with some older songs that I was still performing but that were kind of transformed in their energy and significance to me and to the musicians I was playing with. There’s very little writing or singing that I’ve done that I don’t still feel a connection to, although the farther we get away, time-wise, from certain records, the more they are—you know, I observe them as distant facts as opposed to forces that are presently still to be dealt with.

The Indy: A friend was telling me recently about seeing you play a show in a barn somewhere, Pennsylvania, I think, for a really small crowd. A lot of your music is really intimate…do you feel more comfortable playing smaller shows like that?

WO: That must have been Lancaster. Well, comfort exists on multiple levels; it’s very comforting to know that you’re getting paid money, and those shows, you know, they’re free shows. They cost us money, the barn shows. But yeah, there is satisfaction that comes from playing music for a group of people that you can—if you can kind of look into the eyes, at some point during the show, of everyone in the room, I like that kind of show. Of course you make more money at shows where you can’t, where that’s an impossibility. And being paid for a show allows you to make more music. You can’t make more music if you don’t get paid. So yeah, of course I like— it’s easier to respond to the energy of an audience when the audience is smaller. Or…you can respond to the energy of a large group of people but I guess, to respond very specifically, it’s easier when the audience is smaller. +++ October 11. 10:28 PM. Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Providence show is packed, and, although Oldham may not be able to look into everyone’s eyes, he seems comfortable enough with a large audience. “Like any American, I have deep-seated abandonment issues,” he says at one point, un-self-consciously, by way of introducing a song—and, listening reverently, the audience whistles and laughs. And Oldham, standing alone on the Columbus’s big, ornate stage, and looking like someone who has spent enough time reflecting and writing about solitude to have become comfortable with it, shrugs and plays “The Brute Choir.”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BACK TO THE WALL Banksy’s October in New York graffiti has served as the humble origins for many wellknown artists. American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, famed for a prolific neo-expressionist career, used the epithet SAMO© to tag the streets of the Bowery with quick epigrams: SAMO© as an end 2 the neon fantasy called life, SAMO© 4 the so-called avant-garde. His contemporary, Keith Haring, began by drawing murals of vibrating dogs in subway stations before becoming a significant contributor to Pop Art. Street artists like Blek le Rat and JR used their work in public spaces to springboard out of obscurity, and many a hopeful graffitist dreams of following suit.

And then there’s Banksy, the most famous anonymous street artist in the world, a curious oxymoron. +++ the relationship between the elusive street artist, known to the world only by his moniker, Banksy, and the so-called art world is essentially a kindergarten romance. He pulls on her pigtails in convincing contempt, but blushes at the attention his antics attract. A 2004 stunt where a disguised Banksy visited the Metropolitan Museum in New York to covertly hang up his own painting (seen in his Oscarnominated 2011 documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop) is one of many instances where the graffitist derived pleasure from flipping off the art establishment. He tried—and briefly succeeded—to bring street art to a venue where it wasn’t welcome. Almost a decade later, he returns to the same city to do the opposite, bringing his now renowned work back to the street.

The artist’s latest endeavor, entitled Better Out Than In, is a self-described one-month residency on the streets of New York. It results from Banksy’s frustration at his sudden commercial success and the accompanying accusations of his mercenary intentions; what seems to be an urgent need to return to his clandestine, concrete roots. “I know street art can feel increasingly like the marketing wing of an art career, so I wanted to make some art without the price tag attached,” Banksy commented in a recent interview with the Village Voice about his latest endeavor. “There’s no gallery show or book or film. It’s pointless. Which hopefully means something.” +++ known for his politically-charged stenciling, Banksy began with a cult following in the early 2000s but soon caught the interest of the art world he scorned. Galleries and auction houses began to lap up the dark humor that was often at their expense, and Banksy, ever the troll, used this love-hate relationship to fuel his fire—after his painting “Space Girl and Bird” sold for a then-record $575,000 in 2007, Banksy responded with a picture depicting an auction crowd bidding on a canvas that read “I Can’t Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit.” And yet he’s considered responsible for the sudden propulsion of street art—historically considered a delinquent practice—as its own category in the contemporary art scene. Dubbed the “Banksy effect” by CNN journalist Max Foster, work that would otherwise be shrugged off as a witty instance of vandalism can now be a validated—and pricey—Work Of Art. And in a very literal sabotage of street art’s in situ spirit, gallerists eager to cash in on the trending genre have extracted and put on the market parts of walls, tanks, and houses that Banksy had used as his canvas.

OCTOBER 25 2013

by Maya Sorabjee Illustration by Katia Zorich

But the entrance of now high-value street art into the glamorous art world is inherently problematic. “Commercial success is a mark of failure for a graffiti artist. We’re not supposed to be embraced in that way,” Banksy told the Voice.

And when this embrace comes with enormous profits, it’s easy to understand why many dismiss him as a sellout (or as street artists Trustocorp put it, “citibanksy”). Despite having clarified that he gives a lot of his earnings away and uses the rest to sustain his practice, Banksy seeks to earn back respect from the thousands of anonymous vandals who declare him a nancy. This is the covert message of the project, but this is where it doesn’t quite deliver. +++ despite its claims of celebrating the organic quality of the streets, Better Out Than In purposefully draws a lot of attention to itself. The artist regularly updates his Instagram, Facebook page, and website to inform eager audiences of the location and nature of each day’s work. The daily updates have sent New Yorkers and international spectators into complete frenzy: A New York Post headline reads “GET BANKSY! NYPD HUNT ARTIST”; a man sticks a GPS tracker on a truck installation. Art collectors sit dumbfounded as they realize that Banksy set up a Central Park stall on October 12 selling his own work for a mere $60 each, around 200 times below market value. In this moment, Bansky’s stunt comes as a punch in the gut. He reveals a distressing truth, providing proof that the value of art in the contemporary world is, in truth, entirely dependent on endorsement—Sotheby’s versus sidewalk—over inherent quality.

So every day, a new piece pops up in one of the five boroughs of New York. Many of them are typical Banksy: culturally allusive, tongue-in-cheek. October 4, a modified graffiti that reads “Occupy! The Musical.” October 6, a video clip of insurgents shooting down Dumbo the flying elephant.

October 18, a makeshift “gallery for the 99 percent” smack in the middle of Manhattan’s art district displaying collaborative paintings with Brazilian graffitists Os Gêmeos. Several of the works poke fun at museum culture, accompanied by sound bites (accessed via the artist’s website) that mock the didacticism of exhibition audio guides. October 3, a stencil of a dog peeing on a fire hydrant comes with commentary that prompts, “But look again and what do you see? That’s right, a structural recontextualizing of the juxtaposition between form and surface. Welcome to the art world.”

But despite its mockery of galleries and their affectations, Better Out Than In can’t seem to shake the cooties from Banksy’s ambivalent love affair with the art world, because everything he touches generates instant hype. He has become exempt from—and now desires—the natural erasure of the street that other graffitists receive, treatment that renders the painting over or fading away of graffiti inevitable. And still, some don’t put it past him to be the mastermind behind the dog piss and crude scribbles that have defaced his own work, perhaps in an attempt to reinforce its ephemeral quality.

+++ the world is riled up by the audacity of this month-long spectacle, and a lot of this fascination has to do with the question mark of a man behind the whole thing. As a person he remains literally anonymous, but as an artist Banksy depends on his anonymity to sustain his fans’ interest. He protects his mythical origins because they are an essential part of his work and the hysteria around it. Little is known about him, giving him the unique position of being able to lampoon just about everything—including us—without suffering the consequences. And though Banksy’s month-long project is an attempt to cancel out his cashed-out reputation, it seems to be unwilling to let go of the fame and intrigue his success entails. The Banksian dilemma of proving his work genuine while making sure someone is around to hear the proverbial tree fall in the forest that is New York City necessitates the self-generated hype, but is the ultimate blow to his intention.

The irony of this is not lost on the artist. “When graffiti isn’t criminal, it loses most of its innocence,” he told the Voice.

As Better Out Than In approaches its final days, it is easy to understand why many consider Banksy a twisted genius.

He has opinions and he has a cheeky way of getting them across. The project clearly succeeds in quality, as one would expect from an artist with consistently exceptional work.

But in terms of returning to the original, priceless venue of street art, the project finds itself victim to its own dramatic presence. The paradox that plagues urban art’s entry into the contemporary art scene is that once a work becomes isolated for being good, it loses its fundamental quality—the subtlety of its immersion in a dynamic environment.

In his 2005 book Wall and Piece, Banksy remarked, “sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can’t even finish my second apple pie.” He probably never realized how accurate this would be. The one-month residency is a superb display of the strengths and limits of street art and what art in general means today, but it also demonstrates the delicate nature of its creator’s success. The world watches with delight as Banksy unveils his brazen handiwork, but the space he presents it in now seems contrived. Its subject to the censure of Mayor Bloomberg and the excited tweets of aficionados and the fervent news coverage and the purposeful spraying of young graffitists, but not the organic treatment of the street.

Banksy asks his audience to leave the galleries and museums to return to the sacred space of his profession, but the irony of it all is that he asks them to exit through the gift shop. +++ on october 2, banksy tagged a garage door in Chelsea.

“THIS IS MY NEW YORK ACCENT” he wrote in stylized graffiti script. “…normally I write like this,” it said beneath in neat cursive. A few hours later, two large words are spray painted over it in deep red lettering: “SO WHAT?” MAYA SORABJEE B’16 woz here~

ARTS █ 14

THE NEW Street League Skateboarding and the rise of ISX moments after 18-year-old nyjah huston clinched the 2012 Street League Skateboarding Super Crown, cameras swarmed. Lil Wayne rushed through the stadium stands to be the first to congratulate him, and two women in stilettos exhibited a larger than life credit card that read “$200,000.” A smirking Huston fidgeted a little bit next to a disappointed Paul Rodriguez as Rob Dyrdek commanded the microphone, “Alright Ladies and Gentlemen, this man has won $200,000. He has won a beautiful gold watch and ring filled with diamonds. He has won a Chevy Sonic. Ladies and Gentlemen, your 2012 Street League Skateboarding champion, the one and only, Nyjah Huston!” A soft, uncertain applause fills the stadium. “Lift that trophy up man. Give it up for this kid!” he added, trying to sell the crowd the allure of the prizes as much as he was trying to celebrate Huston’s victory.

Skateboard competitions have undergone a drastic transformation in recent years. Since the beginning of the 1990s, competition has been something of an afterthought for most professional skateboarders. A competition was, traditionally, a place to make a few extra bucks, not a place to make a career—the majority of the income most professional skateboarders earn comes from sponsorships. Most skateboarders make just enough money to scrape by. This has bred a skateboard culture in which people pursue professional skateboarding with a certain attitude: skateboarding first, money second. But that’s beginning to change. +++ rob dyrdek wants to give professional skateboarding big salaries, celebrity status, and primetime glamour. In 2010, Dyrdek, a former professional skater, MTV celebrity (known for his MTV shows “Rob & Big,” “Fantasy Factory,” and “Ridiculousness”), and skateboard entrepreneur launched what he suggests is the NBA of skateboarding—Street League Skateboarding.

SLS came about as a revision to the system of skateboard competitions that remained roughly unchanged since “jam” style competitions and the birth of the sport.

Jam style competitions use a score-keeping method aptly referred to as “expert impression evaluation” (EIE): People who know a lot about skateboarding watch each individual skateboarder do a 5-10 minute run and decide, at the end, which one they liked the best. As a result, the jam style competition sets few concrete guidelines for the types of tricks that garner the most points. The judges at one competition might opt for skaters that attempt more difficult maneuvers while falling a couple times; other judges might favor those who consistently land less-technically complicated tricks. Without concrete guidelines for what type of skateboarding will be most generously rewarded, competitors create their runs with more creative autonomy.

Rather than perform tricks to please the judges, they do whatever compels them personally. According to Dan Bostick, president of World Cup Skateboarding (the company that formerly ran scoring for the X-Games), the jam model/EIE system creates a contest environment, in which the judging “doesn’t dictate the skating; the skating dictates the judging.”

Jam style competitions are the product of a video-centric skateboard industry, in which professional skateboarders do not depend on competitions to earn a living. Instead, skateboarders make videos for skate companies who sponsor them. If the video is good, the skateboarder gains respect among other skateboarders, and his/her name gains social currency. The company then sells decks, shoes, clothes, wheels, etc. with their sponsored skateboarder’s name attached to it, and the skateboarder receives a monthly check. The salary one earns from these sponsor-

15 █ sports

ships varies based on the success of the company. On average, sponsors will pay skaters $1000 a month (many skaters hold multiple company sponsorships), and some more successful companies will pay up to $5000 a month. Compare this to the average NBA player, who, according to Forbes, made $5.15 million dollars in 2012, and it is easy to see why skateboarding has never been viewed as a means of getting rich. The jam style competitions did not need to have broad, mainstream appeal, because no one depended on them to bolster up a professional skateboard career.

Rob Dyrdek knew that jam style competitions were contests geared toward an insular skateboarder community. He saw that these competitions lacked the quantitative indicators (e.g. goals scored, yards gained, pins bowled over) which hold the uninformed spectator’s attention. What is compelling about watching the jam style competition is being able to see whose run most aptly and impressively combines elements of past styles of skateboarding with something new. To distinguish the different styles of skateboarding in a meaningful way is to pay close attention to the skateboard industry and skateboard history. In order to create the NBA of skateboarding, Dyrdek needed to dumb down the competition, to make skateboarding compelling, without the expectation that its audience have a deep literacy in skateboard history and culture. He needed to make a competition with, as he puts it, “a live, real-time, trick-bytrick, run-by-run scoring system that enables that ‘buzzer beater’ type of experience that keeps our fans and viewers riveted to the action.”

+++

in 2009, dyrdek’s company, Dyrdek Enterprises, developed the Instant Scoring eXperience ISX), According to ESPN’s Keith Hamm, ISX “breaks away from skateboarding’s traditional ‘overall impression’ judging technique and focuses instead on trick-by-trick performance.” This system turns the jam style EIE system on its head, creating a competitive dynamic in which the skateboarders and the audience are aware of each competitor’s position on the leaderboard from start to finish. As Dyrdek puts it, ISX is “instant scoring that makes every single trick count... at all times you’ll be at the edge of your seat, watching your favorite skateboarder chase all over the leader board for a $150,000 first prize.” The result: everyone can understand the suspense of the game as it unfolds. With early success, the scoring system was recently adopted by the X Games.

Scott Pfaff, Dyrdek’s cousin and employee, spearheaded the effort to transition the subjective value of a skateboard trick into a uniform system of quantitative evaluation. To do this, he first determined that every skateboard trick derives from some combination of 50 basic maneuvers. He then determined three normative categories for these fifty maneuvers: easiest maneuvers earning 1.0–3.0 points; intermediate maneuvers earning 2.0–4.0 points; and difficult maneuvers earning 3.0–5.0 points. Therefore if a kickflip (flipping the board) is in the intermediate category, and if a backside shuv-it (rotating the board 180 degrees) is in the easy category, then a varial flip (backside shuv-it + kickflip = varial flip) will earn an aggregate score ranging from 3.0 to 7.0 points, depending on the subjective evaluation of the panel of judges.

The systems allow for a small degree of style or “x-factor” to play a roll in the scoring process.

As Pfaff puts it, “we’re not saying, directly, a 360 flip is worth 4.5 points, no matter how well you [did it]. It ranges.” The score limit for any individual trick is 10.0 points. Even though it is conceivable that a competitor could perform a trick with a sum of basic maneuvers totaling

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EXPERIENCE

by Eli Pitegoff

Illustration by Casey Friedman

more than 10.0, the categories that Pfaff designed make earning any decimal above a 9.0 a nearmiraculous occasion.

It became clear what separates Street League Skateboarding from older skateboard competitions in the last two tricks of the 2012 Super Crown. Paul Rodriguez was 7.3 points from knocking Nyjah Huston out of first place on the leader board. Huston had one opportunity to land a trick and increase his lead over Rodriguez. He attempted a cab backside lipslide to fakie down a large rail, and caught the board with his weight too far over the rail. His board shot out from under him, and he slammed face-first into the ground. Suddenly the entire stadium stood up. The stadium announcer started in, “Can he do it? Can Paul Rodriguez clinch the championship? Put your hands together!” in a voice that echoed across the space. The fans screamed and jittered, watching a noticeably shaken Rodriguez pacing back and forth, praying into his Nike SB hat. He ran toward a massive stair set, board in hand, and the crowd exploded with excitement.

In that moment, it didn’t matter if you didn’t know what a “cab backside lipslide to fakie” was—all you needed to know in order to share in the excitement was that Nyjah’s fall made his position on the leaderboard beatable. Paul Rodriguez had the chance to come back and win the championship from behind—a classic buzzer beater moment that skateboarding had never seen on such a large scale. In this moment, Dyrdek demonstrated that one could make skateboard competitions compelling to a mainstream audience. The key to his success: quantifying a subjective performance art in an intuitive, user-friendly format. +++ street league skateboarding is only getting bigger. Now that Street League has formed a partnership with the X Games, the upcoming 2013 season will be a 7-stop world tour—the first ever world tour of a professional skateboarding competition. The total prize purse for the 2014 season has also increased from $1.2 million to over $2 million—the largest prize purse in the history of the sport.

Where skateboarding competitions used only to be televised on major networks during the X Games, competitive skateboarders are getting more screen time now than ever before. For the first time in the history of the sport, skateboard competitions are not being clumped in with other “extreme sports.” With the increasing camera time, Nyjah Huston, Paul Rodriguez, and other competitive skateboarders are gaining a celebrity status that was once reserved for athletes in the NBA, MLB, and NFL. Street League Skateboarding has created a new A-list image of the skateboard pro. No one captured that image better than Nyjah Huston in the October 2013 release of GQ’s “How to Rip the Runway”—a video and series of photos depicting Huston wearing GQ’s “six favorite fall runway looks” while demonstrating his three favorite tricks at the Venice Beach Skate park in California. One picture shows Huston doing a kickflip while wearing a fashion-forward fedora, stylish gray jacket, and black handbag (in hand). Underneath the images are quotes from Huston: “I think its true that I’ve won more prize money than anyone in skateboarding,” and “I have a Mercedes CLS 63 AMG and an Audi R8; I end up getting into street races.” This is a far cry from the torn pants, shoelace-for-belt skate rat, selling spare skate decks to get gas funds for the next skate trip. Cody McEntire, a professional skateboarder who does not participate in

OCTOBER 25 2013

Street League competitions, sums it up in an article for ESPN: “[Street League’s] the elitist one percent of skateboarders. There’s those 20 guys making all the money and getting all the crazy sponsors and then there’s the other 99 percent of us who are scraping by trying to find an apartment that’s under $300 per person.”

+++

though street league skateboard has resonated with mainstream audiences, many people in the skateboard community find the ISX system of quantification problematic. A larger proportion of points are rewarded based on the complexity of trick than the style in which the trick was performed. It is far from universally agreed within the skateboarding community that the technicality of a trick is (i.e. the number of basic maneuvers that a trick compounds) is what makes good skateboarding good.

Dyrdek claims that the ISX system “rewards competitors for taking risks and going big.”

But the system does not reward taking risks, it rewards taking specific risks—like adding an extra flip or a rotation to a trick. It doesn’t reward skateboarders who can make simple tricks just as awe-inspiring as complicated ones. It does not leave room for thinking outside of the box— like incorporating old school tricks (e.g. plants, grabs, etc) into a contemporary, technical trick crazed style. The ISX scoring system incentivizes a sloppy looking big spin flip over a smoothly executed kickflip, simply because the big spin flip combines the aggregate points of more basic maneuvers. The less beautifully executed trick in this scenario effectively receives three scores— one for each basic component—whereas the masterfully executed kickflip, a “basic” maneuver,” receives only one. +++ street league skateboarding is a bittersweet evolution. For the first time in the history of the sport, there are professional skateboarders getting paid well for the lifetime they’ve devoted to honing their skills. What’s more, In the last ten years, skateboarders have gained cultural visibility that SLS is only increases. But the monetary incentives for skateboarding that are finally surfacing strictly incentivize a generic form of skateboarding. In the way that there are often unspoken allusions to past architectural movements embedded into the structure of new buildings, jam style contest runs are filled with allusions to an abundant history of skateboard videos and past contests. The ISX scoring systems limits the ability of skateboarders to react to past styles of skateboarding. It mandates that competitors be good in a specific way.

With the prospect of skateboarding being viewed on a world stage, it is important that skateboard competitions reflect the type of skateboarding that people in the skateboard community value. It is important now, as skateboarding vies for the Olympic stamp of approval, that we ask ourselves, does ISX have skateboarding right?

ELI PITEGOFF B’15 was recently adopted by the X Games.

sports█16

EXCERPT FROM UNMOORED a one-act play by Eli Petzold

iii. history, or something [AQUARIUS on a mountaintop.]

AQUARIUS i want you to come up the mountain with me. this is where i learned and this is where i teach. but now this is just a mountain for us.

CANCER i’m on my way i brought a picnic sourdough bread fig jam goat brie and ginger ale. and i brought myself too.

AQUARIUS okay, that all sounds great, bring yourself but not your self i have something to show you it’s a beautiful day. [both on top of the mountain] CANCER when i touch you i feel...

AQUARIUS ??

CANCER your skin feels like cast iron.

CANCER you lose. new game.

AQUARIUS counting.

CANCER sheep or waterfalls?

AQUARIUS sheep.

CANCER/AQUARIUS one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one CANCER where are we now?

AQUARIUS here.

CANCER there?

AQUARIUS no, here.

AQUARIUS greasy?

CANCER there?

CANCER not exactly.

AQUARIUS no, here.

AQUARIUS hot?

CANCER there?

CANCER well yes, but more… like it needs to be cared for. steel wool, water, no soap, fire it up to let the water evaporate, then coat with a fresh layer of grease.

AQUARIUS come here.

AQUARIUS don’t let me rust!

CANCER i touch you so rarely.

AQUARIUS but that makes it better.

CANCER i miss you.

AQUARIUS we’re here right now.

CANCER but— AQUARIUS look. sunny day. sunday. standing right here affjords a stunning view of theCANCER fjord explorer will handle well on the dirt roads that line the– AQUARIUS fjord score and seven years ago...

17 █ LITERARY

CANCER i’ll try.

[CANCER tries.]

CANCER you’re too far away. come closer. you’re on the moon, or something. you’re back in time, or something. i can’t keep crossing connecticut to come to you.

AQUARIUS hello?

CANCER hello?

AQUARIUS hello?

CANCER hello? fucking phones. fucking phones.

[END SCENE.] Unmoored is featured in 3C2C, Production Workshop’s Fall Playwriting Festival.

Performances are at 8:00 PM Friday 10/25 through Monday 10/28, and at 11:00 PM on Saturday 10/26, all at the PW Downspace, 7 Young Orchard Ave. Tickets at pw.brown. edu/tickets.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THE LIST Friday, October 25

Tuesday, October 29

Free Flu Shots for Brown Students

MACABRE, FR3AK, H0RR0R, AND W3IRD0

Get one if you want, but I’m not convinced. Bring your Brown ID.

Hosted by Russian Tsarlag. Going to be good. Most things will be under 5 minutes.

Cheap, Fresh Fruit & Veg

Magic Lantern Presents: Experimental Gothic Part One: Four Films by Peggy Ahwesh

10AM-4PM // Campus Center, Lower Lobby, Brown Univer- SHORT FILMS sity, Providence 9:30PM-1AM // AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence

12PM-4PM // Park near College St. Bridge or 121 South Main St., Providence Come get discount fruit and vegetables thanks to a public-private partnership by Brown’s Institute for Community Health Promotion. If it’s raining, the market will be moved from the part to the second floor of 121 South Main. Be sure to tell the security guard you’re just there for the food. They accept cash, credit, debit, and EBT.

Saturday, October 26 Halloween Costume Workshop

10AM-5PM // Psychic Readings, 95 Empire Floor 2, 95 Empire St., Providence // $95 Let Calli and Cynthia take care of you. They’re a costume designer and a makeup artist who will teach you the techniques you need to realize your unique halloween vision. Possible topics include: creating realistic bruises, cuts and gruesome wounds, using makeup to create the illusion of age. There will be a lunch break from 1-2. Email ctdmakeupartist@ gmail.com to register. Illusion of age.

Iron Pour

6PM // The Steel Yard, 27 Sims Ave., Providence // $10

8PM // Black Box Theater @ AS220, 95 Empire St., Providence // $5 In case your nightmares have become dull and predictable lately, come gather some cinematic inspiration in the gothic vein.

Wednesday, October 30 Ghost Tour

7PM-8:30PM // Prospect Terrace Park, 60 Congdon St., Providence // $15 online, $18 in person Want your spine chilled? Go hear what happened here once.

I kind of know a guy who I think does these and he’s really charismatic.

Magic Lantern Presents: Experimental Gothic Part Two: Romantic Agonies

8PM // Cable Car Cinema, 204 S. Main St., Providence // $5 Love hurts and occasionally murders.

Thursday, October 31

déshabiller or “The Dress Show” Closing Reception

Giant sculptures of giant Easter Island inspired heads, volca7PM-9PM // List 1st floor Gallery, Brown University, noes, and other tiki themed artworks will come to life. Watch Providence it bubble.

From September 5, 2012 to September 5, 2013 Jennifer Avery wore a different dress every day. She had two rules for Animation Show of Shows acquisitions: they had to cost under ten dollars and she had to 7PM-9PM // RISD Auditorium, 17 Canal St., Providence find them aesthetically appealing. The collection is part perTake advantage of this rare opportunity to see art animation formance art, part obsession, part sculpture, part fashion line, in a theatrical setting. Ron Diamond has curated 12 animat- part thrift shop, part protest, part celebration, part material ed shorts for you. First come first served. There will be ‘adult culture. Attendees are encouraged to try on dresses. themes,’ so don’t bring young children, unless they’re ‘really cool’ little children.

Big Mysterious Halloween Show

Paper “Garage” Sale

10AM-2PM // 21 Potters Ave., Providence Come fulfill your lifelong dream of drowning in a deluge of paper goods (for a price).

9PM-12:45AM // Empire Black Box, 95 Empire St., Providence// ?

“YOU WILL CRAP” ?

Sunday, October 27 Many Food Trucks in One Place

11AM // 2 Kennedy Plaza, Providence // $6 Want to do something you couldn’t have done five years ago? lol

In the know? E-mail listtheindy@gmail.com, and watch out for axe murderers.

Monday, October 28 Meet the Doulas

7PM-8:30PM // Rochambeau Library, 708 Hope St., Providence Doulas are very important. Come learn what they do.

Informational meeting for parents-to-be where they can learn more about how a doula can help their family. There will be space for questions, meeting, and greeting. To RSVP, email meetthedoulas@doulasri.org

Songs / Bridesmaid

9PM // Machines with Magnets, 400 Main St, Pawtucket // $7 Giv ea list en

Exot ic ce of the W Prov ee iden ce, O k: Its fo h unde i o was r, Pe t move he first w ter Mano r, hit u in or p the Ma e man to der t o est umee Riv tradin ablish a er, fur g po st.

Prov

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