The College Hill Independent V.28 N.02

VOLUME 28 // ISSUE 2

news 2 Week in Review

sebastian clark, sam rosen & emma wohl

3 Eminent Domain alex sammon

METRO 4 Number One Spot megan hauptman

5 Ted Nesi rick salamé

FEATURES 16 Fill in the Spank

david adler, doreen st. félix & ellora vikin

ARTS 9 Fuck That Noise greg nissan

12 Pete Seeger lisa borst

managing editors Julieta Cárdenas, Simon Engler, Tristan Rodman news Sebastian Clark, Alex Sammon, Emma Wohl metro Megan Hauptman, Rick Salamé, Kat Thornton arts Greg Nissan, Maya Sorabjee features Kyle Giddon, Lili Rosenkranz, Josh Schenkkan TECHNOLOGY Houston Davidson SPORTS Zeve Sanderson interviews Drew Dickerson FOOD John White literary Eli Pitegoff EPHEMERA Molly Landis, Matthew Marsico OCCULT Addie Mitchell, Eli Petzold X Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan, Pierie Korostoff list Claudia Norton, Diane Zhou design + illustration Mark Benz, Polina Godz, Casey Friedman, Kim Sarnoff ART DIRECTOR Aaron Harris Cover Editor Polina Godz Senior editors David Adler, Grace Dunham, Sam Rosen, Doreen St. Félix, Ellora Vilkin Staff WriterS Lisa Borst, Vera Carothers, Sophie Kasakove, Becca Millstein, Abigail Savitch-Lew, Carly West, Sara Winnick STAFF ILLUSTRATORs Andres Chang, Amy Chen, Jack Mernin web Edward Friedman, Patrick McMenamin COPY Mary Frances Gallagher, Paige Morris BUSINESS Haley Adams Cover Art Polina Godz MvP Matthew Marsico

EPHEMERA 15 The Same River Twice matthew marsico

INTERVIEWS 13 Sheila Heti drew dickerson

OCCULT 7 Less Than Three

addie mitchell & eli petzold

fROM THE EDITOR S Providence is the least biblically-minded city in the country, according to the American Bible Society, which defines Bible-mindedness as how often one reads the Bible and how accurate they find it to be. Time magazine translated this into the “least godly city” in America.

Providence—a city named for divine guidance and care— is reduced to a godless caricature by statistics.

Perhaps we’re not orthodox enough in our biblical interpretations. Same-sex couples have been marrying in raucous celebration in the many religious spaces that welcome them. Providence’s Bishop Tobin would like Pope Francis to talk more about abortion and damnation.

But church steeples still rise high in the skyline and history of this city. The expanse of the Bay visible from any high point reflects divinity for those who see God in large bodies of horizonless water. We are living in a blessed place. -MH

SPORTS 11 Win Forever zeve sanderson

LIT 17 Zucchini Loaf john white

X 18 Ruffin It

layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

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

THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN STOCKPILES

by Sebastian Clark, Sam Rosen & Emma Wohl illustration by Maya Sorabjee

Stuff your cheeks and fill up your pockets. More is always better, right?

A BONE TO PICK

TUSK, TUSK, TUSK

SLEEPLESS IN SOCHI

“I kind of regret that everything sort of went the way it went,” said Peter Chernecki at his sentencing this week.

Peter and his wife Judith had built what they considered a comfortable canine conservatory. The Gull Lake, Michigan residents hoarded—or as they claim, “rescued”—64 apparently stray dogs, only to keep them in a 672 square-foot windowless annex. Their project was found out by provincial animal protection officers who were distributing leaflets to warn against feeding local bears in July 2010. The couple has now been found guilty of violating the Animal Care Act. The best of us make the worst mistakes. It all started when the Cherneckis visited a local landfill to leave bread and bones for roaming bears. After a couple visits, they soon realized the site also harbored a community of stray dogs.

Peter and Judith saw an opportunity to do good. “If they were at the garbage dump they’d be dead or they’d be wild now,” Peter explained to the Global Winnipeg. “Then you’d have a pack of wild dogs running around... .What am I supposed to do, leave them in the elements?”

While Peter later expressed remorse, Judith was bewildered by the accusations of mistreatment. “This really hurts me, because we did the best with the situation we had at the time,” she said. “The dogs ate better than some people eat, they had garlic sausages, they had smokies.” Sausages and “smokies,” of course, do not constitute a dog’s healthy diet.

Although many people in the area picked up on the never ending orchestra of barks, and often the overwhelming smell of urine, no one intervened. Lindor Reynolds, a journalist at the Winnipeg Free Press, wrote a damning editorial questioning the lack of responsibility shown by neighbors. Most thought there were no more than twenty dogs––a restrained amount for an animal hoarder––and, as Reynolds found, most neighbors, when pressed, responded with the same answer: “We keep to ourselves.”

Along with fines and a possible jail sentence, the couple faces a five-year prohibition from owning animals. It will surely prove to be a sad case of cold turkey. Except, of course, there will be no turkey this time.

This would also bring an end to Judith’s side project in cat collecting. Forty-two were found when the Chernecki house was inspected. Judith said that the cats give her “meaning and purpose.” Such a sentiment makes it hard to believe the couple will ever give up their hobby. According to The Humane Society of the United States, animal hoarding has nearly a 100 percent recidivism rate. – SC

The world’s largest stockpiles of ivory are going up in smoke.

Or rather, in the case of the United States, they’re going up in dust. On November 15, 2013, President Obama ordered 5.4 tons of US government ivory, seized from illegal smuggling and sales in the past 25 years, into a rock-crushing machine at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge in Colorado.

The Philippines destroyed its five-ton ivory stockpile last June, and China followed suit in January. Kenya burned large piles twice in the 1980s and 1990s; Zambia and Gabon did the same in the '90s. Hong Kong, the main portal to Asia for the ivory trade, has vowed to take the plunge and will likely be the latest country to destroy its stores; government officials told CNN that its 28 tons will be destroyed in threeton batches over the next few years. The risks of such stores around the world became apparent in June 2012 when, in a matter of days, three tons of tusks were seized from Zambia’s Wildlife Authority and 26 tusks were stolen from a vault in Botswana.

The main purpose of destroying the stockpiles is to send a message to poachers that black-market ivory will never make them a profit. In the past few years, calls for this message have grown, as preservationist groups uncovered that profits from the ivory trade fund para-military and terrorist groups, including Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. The Somali terrorist organization al-Shabaab—most notorious for the four-day siege on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi last year—derives about 40 percent of its funding from poaching and trading in ivory.

As much as policy makers hope, the smoke and dust from the United States and Asia probably won’t carry to the eastern coast of Africa. Meanwhile, on the ground in Kenya and Somalia, the returns for killing an elephant and stripping its tusks remain huge, between 50 and 100 dollars per kilo, though that pales in comparison with the $3000 netted for the final sale, 70 percent of which happened in China in 2013.

Any country’s action to curb the ivory trade will have worldwide reverberations, and the countries where the most ivory is harvested and sold are realizing the need for coordination. On February 13, 50 state leaders from around the world will gather in London to discuss ways to curb the illegal international wildlife trade. At the top of their docket will be the ivory tusks of African elephants.

Elephants keep dying, people need a way to feed their families, and the cycle continues. Destroying one’s own reserves doesn’t logically make the rest of any resource worth less. But with each pyre that is pulverized or incinerated, the shock of destroying ivory stockpiles subsides and such behavior seems like the norm. – EW

When a massive sporting event comes to town, they say, the locals try to get out of Dodge. The residents of Sochi, Russia, however, may want to stick around to prevent their homes from being burglarized by the staff of the upcoming Winter Olympics. Sochi, it appears, doesn’t have enough pillows for all its athletes, and is attempting to remedy the situation by stealing them from local homes.

Normally, this would be understandable—the Olympics are a big production and Sochi has undoubtedly spent a great deal of its resources double-checking that the coast is entirely clear of homosexuals before the opening ceremony on February 7. (You think Mitt Romney wasn’t frantically stealing margarine and top sheets from Utah families in '02?) The real mistake was not keeping it a secret. The pillow shortage has been so disastrous that Sochi’s hospitality team has taken to Instagram to alert staff of the situation. Olympic caterer Luiza Baybakova recently posted a message notifying the community, using rhetoric that would make politicians from any country proud. Citing “an extreme shortage of pillows for athletes who unexpectedly arrived” in Sochi, Ms. Baybakova announced “a transfer of pillows from all apartments to the [Olympic] storehouse.”

But if Baybakova’s Instagram followers were too busy chortling at the idea that Olympians could arrive “unexpectedly” to the Olympic Village or marveling at the euphemism jiu-jitsu that turns ransacking homes into a “transfer,” they missed some incredible hashtags. “#Sochi2014 #Olympics #OlympicCamp #OlympicVillage #ManyAthletes #PillowForEveryone #TakingPillows #CantSleepWithNoPillow,” Baybakova posted, possibly missing the irony that the last hashtag describes precisely what the people of Sochi will have to do while the athletes are in town.

Later Baybakova posted a picture of a pillow with the hashtags #TheyreTakingOurPillows #OlympicPillow #WhereDoAthletesComeFrom #PlzDontTake. It’s unclear what’s happening there. Baybakova could be mocking the soon-to-be pillowless residents or the post could be an attempt at empathy featuring things she imagines people might say while Olympic officials steal things from their bedrooms.

The question #WhereDoAthletesComeFrom is complicated, and maybe one of the only questions to which “hard work,” “85 countries,” and “wombs” are all acceptable answers. Not everyone in Sochi shares Baybakova’s irreverence, though: “Fuck…,” one commenter posted under the pillow picture, “and now the whole world laughs…” – SR

FEBRUARY 7 2014

NEWS

□ 02

DIGITAL BOOM the coming Internet land grab

by Alex Sammon illustration by Diane Zhou

America has forged many frontiers. British colonists initially considered their fledgling communities in New England to be nestled in frontier land. As colonial populations grew, the frontier pushed westward, from Connecticut to Ohio and Illinois. Forced military evictions of Native American populations and rival colonial powers in the 19th century pushed the frontier westward still, into Oklahoma, Oregon, and California. By the mid 20th century, Alaska had officially branded itself as “the last frontier,” wearing the badge on its license plates.

Frontier is bound up with mythological embellishment and grim reality. Despite the Oregon Trail-inspired rendering of a land of boundless opportunity for the hardworking American, the frontier has always carried with it practices of exclusion, accumulation, and consolidation.

Major capitalists and titans of industry gobbled up much of the frontier for pennies on the dollar. California was largely “settled” by private, corporate interests, as were Michigan, Alaska, and even parts of the moon. Speculators bought up massive plots and flipped subdivisions at inflationary prices to the westward bound, churning huge profits in the process. History glosses over this unpleasant set of facts, but it remains true. The frontier is inextricably linked to the land grab.

Advocates for this auction (largely industry affiliates) say that it provides a unique opportunity for small businesses to carve out web presences. With the saturation of the .com gTLD, neophyte contributors to the web are finding that everything is already taken. Want an eponymously titled website for your blog of niche cat photos? Forget it. You’re looking at a cumbersome domain like catsintraditionalgermanattirereadingclassicsbythefireplace.com, deep in the Internet boonies.

The average domain name has lengthened significantly as shorter names have been summarily snatched up. The median second-level domain is now over 14 characters long, up drastically from the four or five typical in the early days of the web.

The current Internet has run out of room. The opening up of .kitty, .lol, or .koolkats represents a previously nonexistent opportunity for growth.

Though vocal opposition has been sparse, a handful of

+++ The Internet is the new frontier. In the prophetic words of The Social Network’s Sean Parker: “First we lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and we’re going to live on the Internet!” So, on February 4, when the biggest sale of website space in Internet history opened, the outcome was already predictable.

The sale focuses on generic top-level domains, or gTLDs in industry shorthand. A top-level domain is the suffix of a website—the .com or .net. (The text that comes before the TLD, the "facebook" in facebook.com, is called the second-level domain).

The group orchestrating the gTLD sale is called ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN was created in 1998 to perform Internet-related tasks previously performed by the US government. ICANN is a private non-profit, and it maintains quasi-governmental status. The selling of gTLDs is expected to generate hundreds of millions of dollars, though it is unclear where that money will go.

In the current Internet landscape, there are only 22 gTLDs. Right now, .com is far and away the most popular.

There are over 111 million registered .com domains, trailed distantly by 15 million .net sites. Countries get their own TLD, which is why .co.uk (United Kingdom) and .de (Germany) may seem familiar. New gTLDs used to trickle onto the web: seven with the creation of the web, seven in 2000, and eight in 2004. This is going to change. Approximately 1,000 gTLDs are slated for purchase.

03

□

NEWS

The owner of a gTLD can sell unique addresses on that domain, like selling a parcel of land within a neighborhood.

If purchasing a website like lolcats.video is akin to buying a house in Providence, buying up .video itself is akin to buying up the entire county. The gTLD sales traffic exclusively in the latter register, meaning that Google has its eyes on over a hundred counties, all with infinite subdivisions. These subdivisions are sold for a much higher price. And the tenure of a second-level domain purchase is just one year, meaning that that purchase will be generating incoming at an annual rate.

Online buzz predicts that certain domains are likely to be far more popular, and thus more lucrative, than others.

There have been roughly 1,900 applications for 1,400 unique domains to date. Contested domains will be settled the old fashioned way—purchase power. The highest bidder takes all.

Hot items include major generic domains like .news or .app. Daniel Negari, a 28-year-old American who made a fortune on physical real estate speculation, told Quartz he believes that the .xyz domain will prove to be a gold mine. He plans to sell sites at .xyz to the public for $10 a pop, which is relatively cheap compared to the galling $800 proposed entry fee at .luxury. Still, Negari expects to sell a million second-level domains in the first year alone, generating $10 million annually.

At that rate, .luxury stands to generate $800 million a year. Major owners like Amazon and Google will be raking it in at a rate hundreds of times higher. +++

bloggers have taken issue with this system. This critical minority cautions that this firesale has not been commissioned on behalf of intrepid young upstarts looking to strike out and make a name. Rather, the sale seems to cater to existing tech giants, facilitating their accumulation of virtual territory.

Upon closer inspection, these criticisms seem valid. +++ The application fee for gTLD acquisition is a cool $185,000.

But the cost of lawyers, research, and travelling to conferences brings the effective cost up to around $1 million. That’s just to get your foot in the door—the cost of the gTLD itself is determined at auction. Because of this extreme barrier to entry, the only possible contenders are exceedingly endowed corporate behemoths. Google has applied for 101 gTLDs thus far; Amazon for 76.

If you’re feeling bitter over the fact that you weren’t informed of the sale, don’t take it personally. It wasn’t a mistake—you weren’t invited. Until March 6, gTLD retail will be open only to privileged speculators and corporate interest. These auctions will not be made available to the public until after this period concludes.

ICANN calls it the “landrush period.”

The frenzy underscores the tension between privatization and open online use. To people like GoDaddy’s Mike McLaughlin, the Internet is a libertarian utopia, an infinite frontier run by an open market. Yet given the profound inequality of access brought to light by the TLD landgrab, the web has exposed itself as more of a gated development than a commons. The realization cuts both ways: digital real estate is not even bound by finitude, but major corporations have found a way to purchase this infinity anyway.

As you surf the web in the coming weeks, you will likely come upon some of these new developments. “Cool!” you might think, while chancing upon videos at video.cool. While many people will be singing the praises of the abundant potential of the web, others will be mourning its seemingly sudden privatization. Yet, neither of these reactions seems entirely appropriate. The digital frontier isn’t closed—it was never really open.

ALEX SAMMON B’15.luxury

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WHAT IS PROVIDENCE? a list

by Megan Hauptman Illustration by Layla Ehsan Lists are everywhere. Bullet point number two of a New Yorker list about lists calls lists the “signature form of our time.” Lists are reductive, but that could also be called getting at the crux of things. They forgive a lack of coherency by imposing a logic through form alone. Providence is a lot of things, according to list-makers. Most of these lists, compiled by outsiders to the city, tell us more about the people making them than about the city itself. But just so you can judge for yourself, here’s a short list:

FOOD

PEOPLE

THE CITY ITSELF

1. No. 1 for Least Biblically-Minded (American Bible Society)

1. No. 3 for Most Underrated Cities (BuzzFeed)

“The study defines ‘Bible-mindedness’ as a combination of how often respondents read the Bible and how accurate they think the Bible is.”

1. No. 1 for Best Burgers (Travel and Leisure) When asking for recommendations on a specific burger make sure the waiter/waitress isn’t a vegetarian (see No. 5).

Providence would probably do better on a list of how frequently the name of the city appears in the Bible.

2. No. 2 for Most Attractive People (Travel and Leisure)

2. No. 2 for Best City for Ice Cream (Travel and Leisure) I really like ice cream. One summer I went to Eastside Creamery at least twice every week—even more often the week I got my wisdom teeth removed. That is all to say: take this analysis with a grain of salt. I think we forget all the other ice creams we’ve ever eaten when confronted with a fresh bowl of deliciousness, making this ranking utterly impossible to calculate through comparison trials.

3. No. 4 on Best Coffee Cities (Huffington Post) “How seriously do Rhode Islanders take their coffee? In 1993, the state legislature declared coffee milk the official state drink.”

That gondola ride will be accompanied by the soothing sounds of Enya and torch-lit bonfires floating in the formerly flammably toxic Providence River. But really, WaterFire is so strangely, ethereally magical that you can almost ignore the eddying crowds, co-mingling food odors, and the PDA of the couple in the gondola next to you.

“Here’s proof that the nerd factor can translate into sex appeal.

The locals in this college and arts town—which readers loved for both its fine dining and pizza—also scored well this year for being sophisticated.”

3. No. 4 for Best City for Hipsters (Travel and Leisure) The word hipster is constantly being questioned and redefined by pretty much anyone who’s ever used it. Travel and Leisure’s definition of hipster is a little amorphous; for them, a city is a hipster haven when “you can order vegan cuisine at The Grange, hear concerts at the Columbus Theatre (with a clever 1492 seats), or browse the vintage fashions, ceramic poodles, and kitschy kitchenware at Rocket to Mars.”

Narragansett Brewery and Autocrat Coffee recently took the state’s love for coffee milk to a new level with their Coffee Milk Stout, which ’Gansett proudly promotes as a “delightful beer that is more Rhode Island than Roger Williams himself.”

2. No. 5 for Best Cities for Summer Travel (Travel and Leisure) However, we ranked pretty poorly on T+L’s “Best Spring Break Getaways” list. I’d recommend visiting Providence in the first few days of May—after April showers flood the sunken sidewalks and before college graduations book up all the hotels and restaurants in the city.

3. No. 24 for Best Cities in New England (GoLocalProv)

4. No. 21 for Smuttiest Cities (Men’s Health)

4. No. 8 for Best Beer Cities (Travel and Leisure)

“In the last decade, Providence is one city that’s truly been reborn. It may not be Venice, but you can enjoy a stunning gondola ride through the heart of downtown.”

What this really means: Providence watches a lot of porn. Men’s Health “peered through a statistical peephole” and came up with this rating by calculating the number of adult DVDS purchased, adult stores, and internet searches for pornography. This feels kind of intrusive, but I guess we all knew Google was keeping tabs on our dirty search terms already.

Providence doesn’t stack up as well on lists made by natives to the city. GoLocalProv.com rated it 24 out of 30 New England cities, using quality of life indices such as median income, crime rates, sunshine, number of public libraries, and WiFi hotspots to calculate what New England city is the most pleasant to live in.

Cambridge, Massachusetts came in first. Ouch.

5. No. 9 for Vegetarian-Friendly Small Cities (PETA) This does not mean that the vegetarians themselves are friendly— we were also ranked 8th by Travel and Leisure for Snobbiest City.

5. No. 24 for America’s Manliest Cities (COMBOS) COMBOS—the pretzel and cheese snack manufacturers—want men in America to know how they stack up with their neighbors in terms of testosterone. They update this list each year using a complicated per-capita algorithm that takes into account the number of steak houses; hardware stores; pickup trucks; as well as the popularity of manly occupations—fire fighters, police officers, and construction workers. The only thing missing seems to be a straight up dick-measuring contest.

FEBRUARY 7 2014

METRO

□ 04

CITY & STATE

A CONVERSATION WITH TED NESI

by Rick Salamé Illustration by Felipe Di Poi The prolific Ted Nesi is a reporter, journalist, and blogger for WPRI, maintaining one of the most widely read blogs in the state—Nesi’s Notes. His writing on Rhode Island’s economy and politics is regularly cited by major national media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. In 2011 Politico named him one of four top bloggers to watch.

That year Nesi made a name for himself with his analyses of General Treasurer Gina Raimondo’s highly controversial cuts in pension benefits for public-sector workers and investment of state money in hedge funds, which can carry high risks. Nesi garnered both positive attention and criticism: Ted Seidle at Forbes called him “a reporter friendly to [Raimondo’s] cause.” Since then he’s won praise for his coverage of the collapse of former athlete Curt Schilling’s video game company, 38 Studios, which received a $75 million loan guarantee from the state. We met on February 1, a few hours after he finished his 5AM blog post, to talk about the state of the media, the economy, politics, and his career. In person Nesi is energetic and talkative. He posted a tweet less than five minutes after we said goodbye.

compensate them for the risk that went with the bond. “Here’s the risk, it went bust, we’re not going to pay you, sorry.” Maybe these people saying to pay it are just crying wolf, and they’re either blindly scared of Wall Street or worse, protecting these bond holders.

Those are the two sides of the equation. It’s very hard to nail down what would happen if we defaulted.

The College Hill Independent: It’s been a little less than two years since 38 Studios went bankrupt. But the state’s lawsuit against the company is still ongoing, and it was only two days ago that the Senate approved legislation to encourage an out-of-court settlement. Are we still feeling the economic effects of the loan guarantee debacle?

TN: When I wrote about Brown, it was before the most recent deal with the city. There’s no doubt that Brown has stepped up, as have the other institutions. But it’s a very big policy question. Why are these places tax-exempt? Well, because the government made a decision that these places have a special status and therefore should not be subject to taxation in the same way as other places. The struggle is that when those strategies were put in place, the expectation was that they would be a relatively small percentage of the overall tax base. Brown was smaller, RISD was smaller, the hospitals were smaller.

I would say the issue for the city is not so much on the property taxes that are or aren’t paid by Brown, or the colleges and hospitals, but that they might be missing the bigger issue. I’ve written a lot about “eds and meds,” which the city has been talking about for ages as the engine of growth. I think that’s going to be a challenging thing for the next ten, twenty years. There’s so much pressure on colleges and hospitals to hold down costs.

So on the one hand we really want to hold down costs at the colleges and hospitals, and at the same time gallop forward with more growth. I don’t see how they do both. They either bring in more money so they can invest it in that kind of growth, or they hold down costs, and stay more affordable—which means they don’t grow as much. If that’s Providence’s whole plan—that Brown and the hospitals are going to gallop forward and drive growth—I’m not sure that’s really in the cards right now.

Ted Nesi: Economically, not directly. Some people lost their jobs, which is very unfortunate, but 38 Studios was not CVS-Caremark with 5,000 jobs or Lifespan with 10,000. It was a fairly small enterprise. And in terms of the amount of money coming out of the state, so far we’ve only shelled out $2.5 million. So I don’t think economically the effects have been that huge directly.

Indirectly, I would say the impact of 38 Studios has been pretty devastating for Rhode Island, because of the extraordinary damage it did to public trust in public officials. It’s really frozen economic policy in Rhode Island in place for two years.

Everything is a reaction to 38 Studios. Every possible idea is another 38 Studios for its opponents. No one wants to do anything too crazy. The state government is not trusted to do big things, to think big. I think that’s very troublesome. I don’t think it’s going to change so long as people feel that there’s still something being hidden about what happened.

I think, at this point, we know that what happened with 38 Studios was mostly incompetence. It’s possible that if you have a change-over in leaders and you get a bunch of people in who aren’t close to the deal at all, maybe public trust will be restored. There will be a new governor next year. No one in the campaign was a strong supporter of it.

But the Assembly still is run by two leaders who backed the deal, [Gordon] Fox and [M. Teresa] Paiva-Weed.

The Indy: How exactly is 38 Studios going to play out in the gubernatorial campaign? It’s not like one of the candidates is on one side of the issue and another is on the other side.

TN: Where you’ll see it is on the question of paying back the bonds. We’re already seeing it a little with Gina Raimondo in the Democratic primary. Raimondo and [Angel] Taveras have both said, “I hate it but we have to pay it.” Clay Pell said, “No, I wouldn’t put the money in the budget. I don’t think we’ve seen why we have to pay it.” I think that’s going to be a live issue. I think the average Rhode Islander would like to not pay that $90 million back.

It’s been interesting that the Republican Party in Rhode Island has been strongly against paying it. In a caricature of politics, you’d expect the conservative party to be the one that’s looking out for financial interests, and that’s clearly not the case here. It’s a live issue. It could have impacts further down the ballot.

The General Assembly is going to be asked in June or so to vote on whether to put $12.5 million in taxpayer money and send it out the door to pay those bonds. Their opponents can go out there and say, “Your state lawmaker just voted $12.5 million to pay for their mistake on 38 Studios, I would never have done that.” I don’t know how it will play out. I try not to make too many predictions as a reporter because they’re always wrong. But I do think it is something to watch closely because it could be a live controversy all through the year.

The Indy: At the risk of asking an obvious question, why should Rhode Island pay the $90 million? What would that mean if it didn’t?

TN: I wouldn’t say it’s obvious at all. I think it’s a hotly contested question. You have a mix of people. [Lincoln] Chafee, Raimondo, Taveras, people from Wall Street saying, “Look, if you default on this bond, it will damage the state’s credit rating, it will make us look bad, it will make it more expensive for us to borrow.” What it comes down to is what will it do to the state’s credit rating? If we don’t pay the bond, will our interest rate shoot up so much that we’ll pay more than $90 million in extra interest costs?

The alternative viewpoint is that this is a special kind of bond, called a moral obligation bond, and therefore the state never promised to pay it back—the state promised to consider paying it back. These bond holders got a higher interest rate to

05

□

METRO

The Indy: The issue of public money brings to mind the fact that 40 percent of the real estate value in Providence is held by nonprofit tax exempt institutions: universities, cultural institutions, religious organizations. Some people say it puts a huge burden on the city to have such a large percentage of taxable assets off the table. You wrote once about Brown paying its fair share. What do you think needs to happen in terms of nonprofit institutions contributing to the local economy in a way that benefits Providence but also doesn’t dramatically reduce cultural or educational resources in the city?

The Indy: The last big buzzword in the economy in Rhode Island is pension funds.

Raimondo is running for governor. She’s famous for having invested a larger percentage of pension funds in private equity and hedge funds. Alternative investments— TN: Hedge funds. Private equity we’ve been in for many years. Hedge funds are what’s new.

The Indy: The category of alternative investments overall has risen. She’s drawn down the amount held in money markets and domestic and international equity. Do you think that her policies have been good for the state? I know that’s a very politically charged question.

TN: I think that would depend on how you define good for the state. If I’m a retiree who lives in the state, my view is that taking my COLA [Cost-of-Living Adjustment] away is not good for the state. But if you’re someone who thinks that the state couldn’t afford $3 billion of pension liabilities you’d say [Raimondo’s policies] have been good—or at least that we’re going in the right direction.

I think the way Raimondo manages the money is a separate issue from the question of the financial health of the pension fund, and how big benefits should be. I’ve written a few times that she could have put all that money [into hedge funds] without changing a dime in terms of benefit levels. It happens that she did both. There’s a narrative about her and her ties to Wall Street, but there’s a reason that that pension law passed so overwhelmingly. There was a very public campaign. There was a lot of pressure on lawmakers to vote for it.

The other side is Rhode Island did have one of the most underfunded pensions in the country. It has fairly high tax rates, so there’s not a lot of room to increase how much revenue was coming into the general fund. A lot of unmet needs: bridge repair, education funding, Medicaid. And so I think it’s only natural that, just as they’re always looking at how to cut back on Medicaid they looked at how to cut that down. Now, is that constitutional? Is it even allowed? That’s why there’s a court case going on, and if it’s not [legal] then the state needs to go back to plan B. But there’s not really a plan B. I don’t know what the state’s going to do at that point.

It’s especially hard because an individual plans their life expecting a certain amount of income in retirement that’s promised to them. I mean, look at the 38 Studios promise.

We take very seriously the contract with the bondholders for 38 Studios in a case where, as I’ve said, legally we don’t even have to pay. Well, we broke the promise to the pensioners. And you can make the case, as Raimondo did, that that was a serious step, but that we had to take it. But no one should dispute that it was a serious, unprecedented step.

The thing that, if nothing else, people should take out of the pension discussions in Rhode Island is how important it is to actually put money in the pension fund when you promise the benefit.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The Indy: Do you think the Democratic primary for Governor of Rhode Island could be a referendum on pension reform?

TN: To an extent, yeah. Raimondo wants it to be a referendum on pension polices if, in the end, the voters think that was the right decision. Taveras wants it to be one if they don’t like it. So everyone is okay with that if they are on the winning side of the argument.

At the time the law passed, there was roughly 60 percent support for it. Obviously there was strong opposition from the people who were going to be directly affected.

You’d expect a Democratic primary to have more people who were affected—labor union members, others. So it could be more controversial in that group than it is in the general population.

At the same time, I think there will also be a debate about Angel Taveras’s stewardship of Providence. You know the situation in the city right now. There’s a reason Providence mayors rarely are able to move up to higher office. It’s very difficult to run a city in financial crisis. There’s a lot of baggage that comes with that.

Some people will try to make it a referendum on the pension law. [But] I think you’re less likely to see it as a referendum on the law [itself ], because she can just say all the Democrats in the Assembly supported it. I think it’s more a referendum on the hedge fund thing you talked about before. The idea of her being the puppet of high finance.

You can see Angel Taveras’s campaign already pounding away on that and her campaign trying to get away from it. That, I think, is more damaging to her than a debate about the pension law cuts because she already won the debate about the pension law once, in 2011. She’s never won a debate about whether hedge funds should get a billion dollars of the pension fund.

The Indy: Last night you broke a story about $100,000 from a former Enron executive in Texas coming into Rhode Island to support Raimondo’s campaign. Ted Seidle at Forbes has said that Raimondo is leading this charge of state treasurers putting pension funds into hedge funds and the fact that she’s drawing donors from Texas, from Pennsylvania, from Florida, would seem a bit hard to explain unless it’s because of the national significance of her policy.

TN: Her celebrity nationally on this stuff has come from the law, not the investment decisions. She’s gotten so many positive write-ups in the New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal for getting that law through in a Democratic state as a Democrat. And I think a lot of these finance guys are always pushing for lower federal deficits. They’re looking for these issues of “fiscal rectitude.” She’s their kind of person. She comes out of finance, looked at the numbers, and wasn’t ideological. Said she wasn’t. She also has quite a network. Harvard, Yale, Oxford, finance. Her husband’s roommate was Corey Booker.

Of course Clay Pell’s not exactly an outsider to America’s elite either.

Excerpted from a longer interview, edited for length and clarity. For an extended version, visit www.theindy.org

FEBRUARY 7 2014

METRO

□ 06

FEMININE | DIVINE | FEMININE

notes on the second card of Tarot's Major Arcana

by Eli Petzold

We find, on the Tarot card of the High Priestess, a woman, cloaked in a blue mantle, a white cross of equal beams on her breast, a waning crescent at her feet. Her crown glows blue white. Two crescents and an orb evoke the cycle of reflected light on the moon’s surface. On her lap rests the scroll of Torah, half shrouded—a reminder that Truth or Law is sometimes explicit, and other times implied, unlocked through Understanding rather than Wisdom. She sits in equipoise flanked by twin columns, identified by Hebrew initials as Boaz and Jachin, the ornamental, freestanding pillars at the vestibule of Solomon’s Temple.

The words Boaz and Jachin have baffled biblical scholars and occultists for centuries. We find two figures in the Hebrew Bible with these names, but there appears to be no logical connection between these characters and the pillars at the Temple. With no clear referents in the Hebrew lexicon, these words probably began as proper names or foreign loanwords. It may be that their etymological opacity is precisely why they have become important in the occult sciences; in the absence of a clear explanation, we must render these relic names magical through our own study and meditation on the collected symbolism of the card. the High Priestess before the Veil, on the threshold where two become One: bride, virgin; mother, daughter; queen, servant; whore, saint. the divine Feminine, Idea of fullness of womanhood above.

Bet (‫ )ב‬and Yud (‫)י‬, the initials of Boaz and Jachin, do more than identify the columns. In Gematria, Hebrew numerology, they correspond to two and ten respectively.

These numbers have several significances in mysticism, Judaism, and the Tarot. It can be hard to sift out what is relevant from what is irrelevant. As with the occult sciences in general, anything that can be read into a Tarot card is there already: insofar as the High Priestess is associated with transcendence through a deeper understanding of Torah, the numbers suggest the two tablets of the Ten Commandments. More secretly, however, these numbers correspond to emanations of Divinity.

According to Kabbalah, God the Infinite revealed itself through 10 successive, continuous emanations.

These emanations, attributes of Divinity, are organized in a vertical diagram extending from Keter, “Crown,” incomprehensible to the human mind, to Malkuth, “Kingdom,” the created world below. According to the enumeration of Kabbalist Isaac Luria, the second and tenth enumerations are Binah, “Understanding,” and Malkuth respectively. Binah is Divine Understanding, mystical illumination bestowed upon the occult student not for

07

□

OCCULT

her active, eager pursuit of knowledge, but for her silent, diligent contemplation. Malkuth, the final emanation, is the created world. It is not worldliness, however; it is the Divine Blessedness which inhabits all created matter, reflected from Keter on high, to the kingdom below.

Empress of loaned light, Moon freely glowing with reflected radiance, effortlessly shining with a brightness that is not her own— and she is the reflected light itself. the feminine Divine, what is woman in the numinous Androgyne, female face of the hermaphroditic Godhead, who dwells in the Fullness beyond the Veil.

In the Temple of Solomon, one would have passed west through the pillars—Boaz to the north, Jachin to the south—to enter the Holy Place. A veil of blue, purple, crimson fabric and linen cordoned off the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies, the Dwelling of Divinity, center of the world below. In the days of Solomon’s Temple (from the 10th century BCE until the Babylonian siege in 586 BCE), the Holy of Holies housed the Ark of the Covenant, covered over with its golden lid, the seat for the Presence of the Divinity. As a literal locus of God’s Presence, no human could enter the Holy of Holies except the High Priest, and only on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. In the Second Temple, the construction of which began at the close of the 6th century BCE, the Holy of Holies retained its ritual function; although the Babylonians had looted the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy of Holies still remained a literal dwelling of Divinity, albeit empty.

Ministress of the Mystic Temple above— the macrocosmic Sanctum of the Incomprehensible, the manifest Mansion of the Immeasurable, whose name stretches beyond Alpha and Omega, center of the Kingdom above, where all that is two is One. A cursory look at the card, however, reveals that this is not the terrestrial Temple of Solomon. This is the Mystic Temple, celestial macrocosm, the literal, of which Solomon’s Temple is the material, mundane metaphor.

The layout is abbreviated, or altogether reimagined: a veil hangs between Boaz and Jachin; there is no Holy Place between the pillars and the Holy of Holies. The identification of Boaz and Jachin with Binah and Malkuth further complicates our spatial understanding of the card.

Traditionally conceived as part of the vertical hierarchy of the emanations, here we find them on the same horizontal plane—one is neither higher nor holier than the other.

The veil, a symbol that usually divides the higher from the lower, connects them. This is not to suggest that they are the same thing, or serve the same purpose. Whereas in the

Temple of Solomon, Boaz and Jachin were wrought from bronze, here, Boaz is black, Jachin white. They are twins, yet opposites. We are reminded that true opposites are similar, but for one defining quality or characteristic.

Divinity inactive, not passive, she fills valleys and vessels.

Shekinah, her truest name, Presence, Dwelling, Settling; Immanence of the Immanent. it is she who says: “I am the silence that is incomprehensible.”

How are we to understand the symbolic opposition of Binah and Malkuth? What is similar? What characteristic distinguishes them? The answer lies in the person of the High Priestess, in Presence, Divinity Inactive. The Understanding associated with Binah is simply present, just is. Understanding rests, fills, molds to its container and becomes its container. Malkuth, on the other hand, is the container that becomes the contained. The kingdom below, insofar as it contains the Divine Presence, becomes divine itself. Both are manifestations of the Divine Presence, but in different, and opposite modes. Binah is associated with the internal, the intellectual, ascent into heavenly realms. Binah transports the student who, in repose, has unwittingly unlocked the deepest mysteries of the unwritten Law. Malkuth is associated with the external, the physical, the descent of Divinity to the earth. Through Malkuth, the student inadvertently discovers the secrets of the universe inscribed in a blade of grass.

What are we to make of the area beyond the veil?

In Solomon’s Temple, we would expect to find the Holy of Holies. In the Mystic Temple, however, the Divine Presence is not relegated to a cube chamber, but spreads over the boundlessness of infinity. It is here, between and beyond the black and white pillars, where distinctions fall away, where Binah and Malkuth are simply Presence. It is here where opposites rest in sameness, where dualisms converge—black and white, male and female, above and below. two-personed Presence, above and below: Binah above, supernal Understanding, Acquaintance neverending, sister of Sophia, but not so curious; silent Teacher, whose lessons are reflected light.

Malkuth below, terminal pool of the overflowing Divinity, sacred seed in every heart and every quark, by which all that is below manifests what is above.

ELI PETZOLD B’14 was born on July 15 and has a black Army/Navy backpack.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

UNRESOLVED on astrological opposition

by Addie Mitchell Illustration by Layla Ehsan When replicated in dozens of directions and multiple dimensions in the natal chart, highly charged poles approximate a circulatory system. The Sun in Cancer, a person’s heart swollen with blood, momentarily surges. The twisting arteries and capillaries of its corresponding Capricorn flesh wait, empty and able to receive. Propelled by homeostasis, blood travels to where it is needed, rushes back to its source as soon as becomes much too wholly one thing, surges back yet again such that the notion of source at all, heart or flesh, is obscured. The astrological natal chart—at first glance a set of arbitrary pictograms too obtuse to be truly meaningful—finds its humanity here, in its surprisingly body-like approximation of life.

But the natal chart is more than this notion of warm, animal animation. It is precise mathematics; sharp, hard, frictive angles; delicate degrees ticked onto the rim of its circular structure.

Its biological flow is impossible without the astrological relation of opposition, denoted by a diametrical slash straight through the center of the chart, tying together two planets while holding them apart at exactly 180 degrees. Planets in opposition cannot possibly be further apart.

Planets in opposition are so far apart that they are on the cusp of coming together once again.

It is a relation blind to that which it connects. It is a plain line; it is as neutral and impersonal as an equation. The symbolic relationship between the two ends of polarity involved is that of connection and separation, the both of these things at once.

The opposition is mathematical, but in the cracks of its pristine system is room for those who crafted it to shape their system in the image of the creator. The opposition is symbolically feminine. This femininity is not softness, nor gentleness, nor curves, but rather interior complexity; not purity, nor tapered focus of idea, but rather span and breadth of that which it can hold. The opposition, the fundamental feminine relation, is described as hard, frictive, tense: Inauspicious is the native with major planets in opposition; it is a sign of irreconcilable division of the psyche, fundamental internal incompatibility, and certain difficulty. It will tear them in two.

Auspicious is the native with major planets in opposition; it is indicative of powerful energy between those two elements, a necessity to grapple with those internal incompatibilities which in turn brings external rewards. They are more beautiful for being broken.

Masculinity and femininity themselves form a symbolic opposition. We assign this malefemale relation one half of its own system in order to describe it, so fearful are we of operating in full duality. The opposition’s definition escapes itself.

FEBRUARY 7 2014

BLIND Websites addressing concerned astrological novices about the repletion of oppositions in their natal charts reassure that there are “good” and “bad” manifestations of every chart object. The “bad” opposition is the opposition that is highly polarized, flip-flopping between two extremes that cannot recognize each other even though they are inextricably related. The “good” opposition is the opposition that makes it look at itself, that can slow its crazed dance to a neutral buzzing in between the two extremes. I, too, if I manage my psychological systems properly and precisely as these sources tell me, can achieve this blessed-out middle hum. I, too, can stop the ride. This is the fundamental mistake that pop astrology makes.

Is there something broken in me that I can’t seem to reach this dull peace? Why am I not everything, in all places at once, yet nothing at all? Why can I not maximize the potential of my personality the way a horoscope chirpily asks me to? Why do I assume that the version of my personality prescribed by an astrological text is something better to become than to react to? Why can’t I quietly hold taut the circumference of my soul like a piece of wood? There is something broken in me; I am opposed to myself and I am opposed to others’ ideas just as I am opposed to my own. And here is where duality blooms—makes the chart circulate, makes the person real.

There is movement and energy between two points, though it is not necessarily visible. I can feel the beauty and utility of the irresolvable opposition, the eternal feminine as it ebbs and flows through me. It is the spike in energy when two eyes meet. It is the simple shift from one pitch to another that miraculously makes music. It is the certainty that love can be exchanged but not seized. I am travelling back and forth from here to there so fast that it seems like I am standing still. If I look carefully, I can see the underlying motion in strobe-light effect—harsh movement in disjointed parts. But this is nothing more than the limitation of the eye. It is unsettling, but I must be with it for the moment. I must be with the discomfort, be in two places at once, be in that charged chasm that blossoms between a wholeness cleaved in two.

I don’t want to merge or choose myself into wholeness, but instead to be contained in myself, and to worm myself wholly inside of the other, and to then…and again…

ADDIE MITCHELL B’15 was born July 15th and has a black Army/Navy backpack.

OCCULT

□ 08

MAY THE LOUDEST MAN WIN

by Greg Nissan Illustration by Amy Chen

It’s hard to say precisely what the event of the 56th Grammys was—the ceremony or its online afterlife. Like many, I ignored the gilded nausea of the three-and-a-half hour awards show, but I couldn’t avoid the influx of outraged opinion pieces that each refresh brought to my screen. Hyperlinks punctuated my evening and begged me to grit my teeth after white hip-pop superstar Macklemore’s The Heist defeated Kendrick Lamar’s undisputed classic good kid, m.A.A.d city for Best Rap Album. Each article invoked some shocked outrage at an awards show long recognized for being out of touch. As often happens, each piece to decry the injustice of the Grammys heaped press on the supposed culprits: “Daft Punk, Macklemore, and other white people triumph at the deceptively conservative awards;” “Was Macklemore’s apology to Lamar too little?”

I watched the actual event––well, the seven minutes in which Macklemore performed “Same Love,” his marriage equality anthem––several hours after I waded through the vitriolic responses that had piled up in my news feed. I expected to see the ever-confident Macklemore with his slice-of-bread haircut in messianic white robes on the crystal peaks of Mount Privilege, granting the gay community permission to finally accept itself.

But the disparity between the event and its outraged coverage became clear as I watched the clip. Macklemore performed his bombastic yet positive song (surely its intentions may be questionable, but can we at least grant positive?) in front of white lights depicting a wedding chapel. Queen Latifah married 33 couples in the audience.

Madonna came out in a bridal cowboy outfit, briefly imitating Madonna. It was grand, as the Grammys have always been. Still, plenty of the critiques confused me: “But the mass marriage that took place to Macklemore’s ‘Same Love’ and Madonna’s ‘Open Your Heart’ towards the end of the night Sunday wasn’t really for the people getting hitched. They were props,” writes The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber. “It says something that the real stars of the moment—the people committing to love another for eternity—were given only a few, fleeting moments on camera. It was their day, but it wasn’t their show.” I refuse to believe that anyone (including the newlyweds) thought that these couples, getting married at an awards show for pop music during a performance on national television of one the year’s biggest songs, were the stars of the show. I don’t think Kornhaber’s off in citing this performance as chance for the “academy members…to announce themselves as good people,” but it seems odd to label these people who chose to get married in a commercial semi-wedding on TV as silenced or oppressed by Macklemore or the Grammys.

Why are we shocked and outraged that an awards show made a huge deal out of a vaguely progressive, self-serving political alignment? Why do we beg the Grammys to align itself with our music taste, our supposed forward-thinkingness, when the music culture of late has built itself around “insider” knowledge of “underground” artists as the record industry languishes? Why all these surprised damnations, offended that the Grammys don’t represent our ideals? +++ These publications have turned the Grammys into a perfect microcosm for all of America’s inequalities. As the new sensationalists populate every corner of the Internet with a diatribe, or a didactic response to some other diatribe, I wonder why mine is a generation accused of too much irony. Isn’t this the exact opposite? We have no distance from any situation, no context. We are compelled to wag our fingers along with the bodiless mob, afraid to voice any nuance. When Macklemore wins Best Rap Album, we loudly lament his privilege, his self-righteousness, his haircut. At no point do we consider an alternative––that this is the Grammys, and although it’s a good thing to acknowledge and discuss, in asking the Grammys to “reform” itself, we are only begging its anachronistic view of music culture to remain relevant. It’s well documented that the Grammys is a celebration of commercial success in the industry that ignores rap, hard rock, classical music, and other genres that don’t sit in the middle of mainstream culture. Why do we want to skip hand-in-hand with the Grammys, satisfied that finally we can call the most commercial aspect of the record industry our best friend? Fader editor-in-chief Matthew Schnipper puts it best: “Rallying against the Grammys being outdated is like telling a Catholic school it’s behind the times to continue ignoring evolution. There are other schools.” It’s a certain sort of reactionary who demands the Grammys get “with it;” who wants the music industry’s most masturbatory evening to serve as music’s State of the Union?

You may ask, “What do you mean by sensationalism? Wasn’t that Grammys the evening when imperialist Macklemore robbed Kendrick Lamar of an award in plain sight? Are the Grammys not a metonym of America’s hegemonic legacy? Is it not the most important evening of the year, second only to the Superbowl?” Buzzfeed, Slate, Upworthy, Salon, Gawker, Jezebel—these are your new sensationalists. Some cater to politics, some to cat lists, but they all taste the same. Diluted liberal agendas derived of argument and set to pictures and captions, to inflammatory headlines. We hold this as a cultural axiom: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

What happens when the solution becomes problematic?

09

□

arts

Problems like appropriation and privilege are losing the earnest and necessary discourse they deserve. Publicity-pandering articles reduce anything and everything to the same noncommittal support of social issues—support that requires no more than a mouse click. Upworthy shouts from one corner, “I wonder if anyone that rich thinks, ‘Yeah, I need all this money. All. Of. It.’” Buzzfeed screams back, “17 Deplorable Examples of White Privilege,” with links to adorably annoying memes of Justin Bieber. They assume agreement on the part of their readers and therefore feel no need to evidence an argument. That’s not to say that every article to tackle white privilege or inequality need be a dissertation or a humorless account of oppression. But when such important discussions receive the same caption-picture reduction perfect for sharing kittens that look like your favorite professor or 12 reasons you and your BFF are soulmates (1. You both breathe air! 2. You’re made of carbon!), it feels like an injustice, not a conversation. +++ In such a climate, how could one comment on Macklemore? I refuse to defend or criticize him. Have I not earned my apathy, my reluctance to slip into the news cycle’s daily cacophony? Let’s instead recognize that the immediate online inflammation is a symptom of how our media functions when confronted with its immediate prey. These publications are rewriting the history of cultural appropriation in a reductive way that actual belittles some of the best, collaborative qualities of the music world. At a distance, it may seem as if the media is finally grappling with racial politics in culture. But many of these articles treat cultural appropriation so simply that they perpetuate the inequalities they purport to disrupt, such as the tokenization of black musicians.

“Daft Punk’s jam on ‘Get Lucky’ with Pharell, guitarist Nile Rodgers, and Stevie Wonder…was another peak,” Slate music editor Carl Wilson writes in “The Same Loves: white people win again at the Grammys.” “The French duo became the night’s biggest winners, taking home both Record and Album of the Year. But while this was a relatively progressive choice by Grammys standards… it still amounted to anointing a veteran white group playing retro-styled black dance music, with African-Americans as side musicians.”

Here, Wilson gets away with calling three of the most respected figures in the music industry “side musicians” under the guise of advancing a dialogue on cultural appropriation. Stevie, Pharell, and Nile become incarnations of the same point with no individual characteristics, no voices. Side musician Stevie Wonder has more Grammys than any other male solo artist. Ubiquitous hit machine Pharell won as many Grammys as Macklemore this year—yet Pharell is sidelined. Nile Rodgers helped to found the genre Daft Punk intended to evoke on 2013’s Random Access Memories, yet Wilson reduces his much-publicized impact on their album, his signature syncopated, slinky guitar lines, to his skin color—and not to the fact that he is a father of the style. Wilson’s reduction is made laughable by the fact that Rodgers and Pharell accepted the award while Daft Punk, the world’s most famous faceless robot duo, stood by in silence. Wilson is not alone in calling out Daft Punk; The Atlantic’s Kornhaber also sounded the alarm: “As more than one person pointed out on Twitter, combined with the Daft Punk win, it’s easy to come away thinking the Grammys likes black music so long as it’s made by white people.” Another backwards assumption—Rodgers and Pharell are heavily featured on the song, so why is it a song “made by white people”? The riff is signature Nile. The hook is signature Pharell. The music world increasingly emphasizes collaboration in the age of the remix, so what’s the take away here? Daft Punk, stay away from black musicians, for fear the Internet will accuse you of cultural appropriation? Record the song on your own, isolated from the musicians who influenced you? A terrifying conclusion to the year’s catchiest song.

Part of the problem lies in the way Wilson and Kornhaber take an important and underplayed issue––that African-Americans are often treated as ornaments for the white groups they support, that they are used to convince us we have rectified the wrongs of racism while their strategic deployment to comfort white society prevents a deeper discussion on race––and misapply it so tactlessly that they completely nullify the careers of these three musicians. As if that weren’t enough, these so-called music critics are making a good argument for a music industry without dialogue or cross-pollination of genres. That sounds surprisingly similar to the music world the Grammys would want.

We need a more nuanced understanding of cultural appropriation when discussing music, because to convert the term into a buzzword is a self-defeating disservice.

It’s certainly a more difficult task, but one that wouldn’t silence mega stars like Stevie Wonder to the role of side musician. The challenge is to understand not just how white culture has adopted a figure like Wonder as an easily digestible black figure, one who entertains, but also how Wonder skillfully navigated this world in order to elevate himself to a rare group of musical elites. Some may use his success to convince themselves that racism has no bearing on the entertainment industry, but can we at least give him the agency to acknowledge that he’s achieved more than almost any other musician in terms of stature, exposure, and commercial success, in an industry where the odds are stacked against him?

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

+++ Yet the cycle of outrage batters on. This is a discourse without distance, under the assumption that the Grammys are everything to music culture, and that Macklemore’s win had nothing to do with anything but race instead of a nuanced amalgamation of commercial success and industry dynamics that heavily involve race. These damnations will pour in when we give the Grammys the cultural credence it doesn’t merit, when we prioritize page views and volume over quality and conversation. It’s these reactions that in their call to arms blind us to the assumptions or misunderstandings on which they are based. When we demand that Macklemore “fix” this situation–– and we understand that Macklemore has benefitted from a racially distorted record industry in which he plays a minuscule role, in all reality––aren’t we confounding this very privilege? His popularity has undoubtedly increased thanks to this controversy, and even more so to those who demand that he fix all the problems that allow him to receive more visibility than someone like Kendrick Lamar. Let’s not give this guy the agency to save the music world. He doesn’t have it. You are wrapping him in his messianic robes. Let’s not ask that corporate culture learn to understand us, whoever we are. If the Internet has allowed for a democratization of media, let’s not demand that the traditional corporate forces such as the record industry be progressive. Give us back our distance, our eye rolls, our ability to denounce something as irrelevant.

Can we learn to discuss appropriation without giving the most press to the offenders? Kendrick Lamar lost at an awards show, and then he lost his voice, drowned out by the chorus of the Macklemoralists. And seriously, enough with the Grammys.

It’s Oscar season.

GREG NISSAN B’15 is a terrifying conclusion to the year’s catchiest song.

february 7 2013

arts

□ 10

HOW TO WIN A SUPER BOWL

by Zeve Sanderson illustration by Andres Chang

Pete Carroll's philosophy of coaching

Unanswered questions surrounded Carroll’s departure.

Did he leave to avoid the sanctions? Was he more involved than he led on? He claimed ignorance of all that happened during his tenure. “We didn’t know, the university didn’t know,” he said in a self-published YouTube video. “[It was] a clear-cut case of external forces outside of the university setting, entering in and disrupting the process of young studentathletes going to college, for their gain.”

One of the allures of USC football was the spectacle, the excess: the proximity to money, access to top agents, the ability to become a celebrity in a city full of them. As USA Today reported in 2005, Carroll invited the likes of Will Ferrell, Spike Lee, and Dr. Dre to practices and provided them with sideline passes for games. And this culture wasn’t just for the gain of external forces. It helped Carroll attract top recruiting classes for nearly a decade, which allowed him to become one of the most successful college coaches in recent history.

Even if Carroll knew nothing about the program’s violation—and it’s hard to believe Carroll knew nothing—he still would have been part of the problem. A head coach creates a culture, sets the standard for what’s acceptable. He’s the play caller on the field and in the locker room. Creating a culture that allowed, or perhaps even encouraged, breaking the rules began with Carroll.

During the summer of 2000, Pete Carroll, now the head coach of the Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks, had his coaching breakthrough. “Looking back, I had been feeling all but down and out,” he writes in the introduction to his part biographical, part motivational, part self-help book Win Forever: Live, Work, and Play Like a Champion, “Suddenly, everything…changed.” Just fired by the New England Patriots, he had turned to a book by all-time great college basketball coach John Wooden, but finished more frustrated than inspired, without any solutions for his coaching failures. What does he have that I don’t? Carroll soul-searched and decided he lacked a guiding philosophy, a system of winning, an M.O. He got right to work.

His new philosophy would be driven by intense competition, attention to detail, and high performance. He was given a chance later that year with the University of Southern California, and the results since have been irrefutable: two college national championships and now a Super Bowl victory. He’s only the third coach to win championships on both levels. +++ Carroll is no Wooden. Wooden had a way of transcending basketball. Yes, he wanted to win, but he had a bigger picture in mind. At the top of his famed pyramid of success—a chart he authored that looks like the food pyramid but with building blocks for sports teams instead of food groups––is not a championship, but a personal best. Wooden once wrote, “Success is a peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.” Nowhere does he reference winning.

And his teachings weren’t just empty coaching aphorisms.

They defined team culture. “[Wooden] wanted to win, but not more than anything... The consummate teacher, he taught us that the best you are capable of is victory enough,” said UCLA center and future NBA hall of famer Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Maybe it’s easy for a coach who won seven straight national championships and 88 straight games to see winning as ancillary to personal growth. But Wooden’s brilliance, his legacy, is a radical redefinition of what it means to be successful in something that is, after all, just a game.

Carroll sets different stakes: Win Forever. Later in the book’s introduction, after briefly summarizing his philosophy, Carroll enumerates his achievements: the championships, the Heisman trophy winners, the records. Now, we’re supposed to listen to him, because he’s a winner and is going to teach us how to become one, too. Wooden’s personal success seems peripheral, Carroll’s essential. +++ USC and Carroll were a perfect match in 2000. Once a perennial powerhouse, USC neared irrelevance. They were looking to recover from a disappointing decade, one in which they’d won only one Rose Bowl. They had failed to make a single bowl game—one of 34 post-season, invitation-only games—in the previous two years. Carroll held two NFL head coaching positions throughout the latter half of the '90s, first with the Jets and then with the Patriots, but he didn’t win quickly enough to stick around in an impatient league. They both needed a fresh start.

11

□

SPORTS

+++ Invigorated by a renovated and clearly articulated coaching philosophy, Carroll needed only one year to turn USC around. After a mediocre 6-6 record in the 2000––2001 season, the Trojans went on to seven straight bowl games and won two national championships. He became the talk of the sports world. Everyone loved him—the fans, the press, and, most importantly, the players. He “bounce[d] around with more energy than his soon-to-be-NFL stars who were technically young enough to be his grandkids. He threw passes in practice. He convinced celebrities to pull pranks on his players. He organized and played in pickup basketball games,” wrote USC sports reporter Adam Rose.

But Carroll’s carefree attitude did not affect the intense competition that was at the core of his philosophy. He instituted Competition Tuesdays, where drills and scrimmages offered every USC player an opportunity to compete for a starting spot. This was unheard of in a college football culture that often promised playing time to top recruits, but everyone got behind it because he won. In a profession that delivers unambiguous results, his philosophy was immediately affirmed. +++ “[The NCAA] didn’t quite understand how you could have this much fun playing football,” Carroll said in a press conference in 2012, three years into his new coaching job with the Seattle Seahawks. “They could not figure it out and thought something must be wrong.” Carroll left USC in 2009, following an NCAA investigation into possible infractions that running back Reggie Bush, among others, had taken money from agents, something forbidden by the NCAA. Five months later, the NCAA delivered one of its most severe punishments ever on USC’s football program: a three-year bowl game ban and the forfeiture of thirty scholarships over the same period.

By then, Carroll was a thousand miles north in Seattle.

Carroll keeps similar control over the Seahawks that he held at USC. He is both the head coach and the ultimate decision maker on all personnel decisions. He calls the plays and hand picks who runs them. But what he’s really been touted for is not just creating a winning team, but also a winning culture.

Seahawks linebacker Bruce Irvin said of Carroll, “You go in the team meeting room, you got basketball hoops, you got rap music playing. He’s a team player. In this society, players like people who are real with them. That’s what Pete is and that’s why I respect him and play for him so hard.” And this is why he’s been so successful: players like playing for him. It makes sense, because, as Rose and Irvin indicate, he’s one of them.

But Carroll’s coaching style has led to a similar lack of control in Seattle as it did in Los Angeles. Since Carroll’s arrival in 2010, the Seahawks have had more performance enhancing drug suspensions than any other team, and that’s not including the reversal of cornerback Richard Sherman’s suspension due to a testing technicality.

Wooden’s culture had a foundation in his five base building blocks: friendship, loyalty, cooperation, enthusiasm, and industriousness. Carroll created his own pyramid of success, and it outlines three rules at the pyramid’s base, the first of which is “always protect the team” (the other two are “no excuses” and “be early”). Like at USC, Carroll may not be directly implicated in the actual problem. He presumably isn’t buying or injecting drugs for his players. But he’s the culture setter, and he’s valued protection more than accountability. “Something’s off with the culture,” former Seahawks linebacker Chad Brown said to the Seattle Times. “Something is off in the locker room and somewhere in the organization.

When these things keep cropping up, it’s an indicator that something’s not right.”

ZEVE SANDERSON B’15 regularly finishes second.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LAST THOUGHTS ON PETE SEEGER

by Lisa Borst Illustration by Sarah Green

The dynastic folk family has maintained a curious presence throughout the genre’s rich history. There’s Woody and Arlo, Bob and Jakob, the Carter Family, the Avett Brothers. Willie Nelson’s son has a band, as does Jeff Tweedy’s. Folk music, it seems, is a family affair.

Pete Seeger, who died on January 27 at age 94, first encountered the five-string banjo—which would become his main instrument over the course of a 75-year career as an icon of American folk music—at a square-dance festival that he attended in 1935 with his father, the ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger. His mother was a composer and taught at Juilliard.

Mike Seeger, Pete’s half-brother, was an accomplished folk musician himself, as are his sister and his grandson.

I remember watching Seeger on television with my own decidedly non-musical family as he performed “This Land Is Your Land” with Bruce Springsteen at Obama’s first inauguration in 2009. Although written by Woody Guthrie, Seeger’s friend and former bandmate, the song belongs in the same canon of quintessential folk anthems as many of Seeger’s bestknown numbers: “If I Had a Hammer,” “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” “We Shall Overcome.”

These aren’t songs we know simply from the radio, or from movies, or from reading music blogs. These songs are deeply entrenched in the American consciousness. For many of us, their basic messages—act decently toward others, act decently toward your country—have been ingrained since elementary school, where “This Land is Your Land” is taught alongside the national anthem. These songs are simple and catchy and somehow fundamental, and they implore singing along—which I remember watching the attendees of the 2009 inauguration do, by the hundreds of thousands.

Perhaps it’s folk music’s elemental simplicity, or its implicit need to be shared and sung along to, that’s caused it to leap so easily across generations of Seegers and Guthries and Dylans. I feel “This Land Is Your Land” in my bones, and I learned it in a grimy elementary school classroom. I can only imagine how fundamental those few chords would feel if my own father had written them. +++ Popularized by Seeger in the late 1940s, “We Shall Overcome” was one of the first songs to unite politics with folk music—a tradition that Seeger would uphold throughout his life. Like many early folk songs, it was adapted from a murky lineage of traditional spirituals. But the song is unique among the fourchord incunabula of American folk music in its simplicity, in its direct, basal appeal to a vague sense of shared struggle. The straightforwardness and versatility of “We Shall Overcome” has led to its appropriation by countless protest groups since it was first recorded by Seeger, nearly 75 years ago, in its current iteration: most notably by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, but also by Catholics seeking equal rights in Northern Ireland, political activists during the Bangladesh Liberation War, and the Occupy movement (with which Seeger, then in his 90s, was heavily involved, as a performer and protester).

FEBRUARY 7 2014

Jeff Titon, author of Early Downhome Blues, wrote this week that “few knew that it was Pete Seeger who was responsible for taking an old, African-American gospel song, ‘I Will Overcome,’ and transforming it into what became the Civil Rights anthem, ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Transformation from ‘I’ to ‘We’ is pure Pete Seeger.”

As Titon suggests, throughout Seeger’s work runs an emphasis on the communal. Long before Bob Dylan sang about civil rights, before charity records and Farm Aid and celebritystudded presidential inaugurations, Pete Seeger was infusing his music with politics in a wholly unprecedented way. He performed and marched in protest of racial segregation; he recorded an album with Woody Guthrie in 1942 in support of the American war effort. He wrote songs about labor unions, equal rights, environmentalism. During the first years of the Cold War, however, his leftist affiliations—including a brief membership in the Communist Party—nearly led to the end of his career. In 1955 he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee and questioned about his performances at several leftist events. The transcripts of his trial, in which he refused to discuss his politics, are available online. They point to his unique sense of patriotism during an era of exceptional bureaucratic absurdity.

Seeger’s refusal to discuss the political implications of his music resulted in a conviction by federal jury of contempt of Congress. Blacklisted from American television, Seeger fell from the public eye for several years. But as folk rock gained prominence in the mid-1960s and as artists began incorporating explicitly anti-war and pro-civil rights messages into their songs, Seeger’s music—and its subversive political power— saw a resurgence in popularity. Covered by The Byrds in 1965, his song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” became an international hit, and Seeger found himself a mentor figure for politically minded folk musicians like Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary. “He was a bridge between traditional and contemporary,” said Steve Kotler, owner of Round Again Records in Providence’s Fox Point. “He’s just the whole story in one person.” +++ Later in his life, Seeger began to focus his political energy on environmental advocacy, with a particular concern for pollution in the Hudson River—next to which he lived with his wife, modestly and accessibly, from 1949 until last week. I spoke over the phone with Mederick Bellaire, Vice Chair and Archivist of the Rhode Island Music Hall of Fame, about Seeger’s commitment to the river. Bellaire and his band, FolksTogether, worked with Seeger for several years in the late 1980s as part of the Clearwater Festival, a Hudson River cleanup effort and music festival Seeger founded nearly 50 years ago. The festival takes place every June in Seeger’s hometown of Beacon, New York, and seeks to raise awareness of river pollution.

Bellaire recalled the first time FolksTogether played the festival: “I was hoping to meet Pete Seeger at some point, and sure enough, the minute I pulled in, there was Pete Seeger in his old beat-up pickup truck with the wrong tailgate on it— he had this old, cobbled-together truck—taking trash barrels out of his pickup and moving them all over the place. We said hello and he said, ‘Welcome, thanks for coming, make sure you get a free t-shirt.’” Bellaire laughed suddenly over the phone. “They were used t-shirts, by the way.”

After Bellaire and his band performed that evening, he was approached by Seeger, who had been particularly moved by a FolksTogether song about struggling American farmers.

Seeger asked Bellaire if he would be interested in continuing to work with the Clearwater Festival, and Bellaire did, for several years—including a performance with Seeger to celebrate his 80th birthday in 1989. “Seeger put his money where his mouth was,” Bellaire told me. “When I pulled up that first day…the first sight I had of him was unloading those garbage cans off that truck. The last sight I had of him, three years after that, was him reloading those garbage cans onto his truck.” +++ That it’s so easy to find individuals who knew or worked with or sang with Seeger is a testament to his accessibility, his enormous commitment to seemingly small issues. On his blog, Jeff Titon recalls apportioning National Endowment of the Arts grant money to folk arts organizations with Seeger. My own grandfather, who worked for the Bureau of Land Management for many years, told me once about working with a gracious, humble Seeger as part of an anti-litter campaign in the 1970s.

“One of the greatest things that’s ever happened to me,” said Mederick Bellaire, “was to get to know Pete Seeger and to find out that he was exactly what you would have thought he might be. What was there was what you got.” Bellaire’s voice rose as he spoke to me. “Pete looked about the same from the time he was 50 to the time he died last week at 94,” he said. “He lived the life that everyone should live. He lived in his home that he built by hand in Beacon, New York, and he heated it with firewood—he was still chopping wood and picking up garbage off the banks of the Hudson into his 90s.

There was no fooling around with Pete Seeger.”

Indeed, Seeger’s life, by all accounts, forms a tidy narrative. Born into an exceptionally musical family, he personified, through his music and his private life, both the easy humility and the enormous subversive power of folk music throughout its 20th-century trajectory—from its origins in traditional gospel to its widespread appropriation by modern political movements and campaigns. You can see it in videos of Obama’s first inauguration: Seeger, grinning, commanding a jubilant crowd of citizens and senators and a newly minted president as easily as if he were addressing a few dozen union workers or his wife and children in their modest home on the Hudson.

LISA BORST B’17 acts decently towards others.

ARTS

□ 12

UNDERSTAND THE PEOPLE, UNDERSTAND OURSELVES

by Drew Dickerson Illustration by Casey Friedman

Sheila Heti is a writer working across various forms, but it feels relatively safe to say that the conversation is her central artistic concern. She worked for a time as Interviews Editor of The Believer (and is now credited on the masthead as Contributing Editor). Her work The Chairs are Where the People Go is a book of applied philosophy written from transcribed conversation with improviser and friend Misha Glouberman (with whom Heti co-founded the Trampoline Hall Lectures series, where speakers extemporize on topics about which they are inexpert). Her book How Should a Person Be? is described on its jacket as “a novel from life,” with Heti drawing from e-mail, telephone, and face-to-face conversations in order to reconstruct some version of her own lived experience. She and I talk here about her recent n+1 essay “From My Diaries (2006-10) in Alphabetical Order,” how it is that a conversation comes together in the editing, and throwing I-Ching.

The College Hill Independent: I was hoping to start off with a question about form. I know that you were formerly the Interviews Editor for The Believer and your work features a strong transcribed element. Does that alter your perception at all of what it means to be an interviewed subject?

Sheila Heti: No. I do a lot of interviews and I just figure the more you do the less careful you have to be. If you only do one interview in your life then you have to be very, very careful.

If you have many, then you’re more free to sort of contradict yourself and be stupid—it just becomes part of life, like having a conversation with a friend does. The stakes aren’t really that high, and they shouldn’t be that high anyway because you don’t have any obligation in an interview to be anything but yourself.

The Indy: I know in your novel How Should a Person Be? There’s the character Margaux’s anxiety towards the voice recorder, but in your own case, it seems like volume works as a corrective.

SH: That’s actually an idea that I think I learned from Margaux. That was kind of her idea, that the more representations there are of one person in the world the freer one is. That’s nothing that would have ever occurred to me before. Ever since she said it, I think it’s really true.

Especially in the internet world where nothing disappears. Even when I started out, when I was doing interviews for The Middle Stories, which was 2001, something would be in the newspaper one day and then the next day no one would see it. Now that everything’s online—not only that, but things like your Twitter feed, Facebook and everything— you can’t really control things.

The Indy: What does a successful characterization by interview look like?

SH: I like things where it really feels like the person is present, where the person is responding to your questions, isn’t guarded, where their personality comes across. I think a lot of the success of an interview is in the editing. I’m not a fan of interviews where every “um” and “ah” is transcribed. I think there is an art to making people sound more intelligent than they are, and I kind of feel like that’s my responsibility. Transcribed, a person should still sound like themselves, but a better version of themselves.

The idea is not to make people better, but to make people maybe more clear than they are.

I kind of feel like we go to literature—and I consider interviews part of that—in order to un-

13

□

Interviews

derstand the people around us and to understand ourselves. So to leave an interview unedited doesn’t help at all with that, doesn’t help somebody who’s reading through something. There’s something to be said for mystifying humans, but for myself at this point in my life that’s just not what I’m interested in. Things seem mysterious enough. To me, writing is closer to some kind of clarity. But, obviously, in the process of getting there, you go into deeper and deeper confusion and things become more and more mysterious. But, hopefully, at a certain point you come to some clarity about some things, even if it’s only temporary.

The Indy: I’ve been thinking about different strategies of how to animate a person’s life through non-fiction materials. I spoke in October with Miranda July about the “We Think Alone” project, in which you took part, and that seems to me an interesting synthesis of techniques and themes that you yourself are concerned with. There’s the social aspect of art-making, as well as specifically disclosed elements of autobiography. What is the allure of using such pedestrian materials in the making of art or literature?

SH: I think that one thing that we turn to art for is to see our own materials reflected, and most of our experiences are actually quite banal. One reason to use that kind of material was because, when you look at it, you do see something transformed into art that doesn’t look as though it’s obviously being transformed into art. I feel like that illusion is important, unless you’re going all the way and actually writing fables or something that’s meant to be much more in the imaginative realm. If you’re trying to write something that has a relation to realism, there’s no reason not to use that kind of material.

I also feel like most of us writers, we spend more of our day writing emails than we do writing our books. So if you can somehow incorporate the writing that you’re doing already— which is an honest expression of yourself—into your art, that’s just really resourceful. If it’s there, why not use it? When you’re a kid I think you have this tremendous imagination, but I do think that, as you get older, that kind of wild imagination might be less present to you on a day-to-day basis than the e-mails that you write or the conversations that you’re having with other people. So why privilege the imagination over that real matter? If you’re working with words, you have so much material at your disposal. Why not transform that rather than the fantasies in your head?

The Indy: That calls to mind your piece “From My Diaries” in the most recent issue of n+1.

What went behind the decision to alphabetize those entries?

SH: I can’t remember how I came up with that idea, but I have probably hundreds and thousands of pages of writing that I just did for myself in those journals that I never intended to publish and that I don’t intend to publish. When I put this together, it wasn’t really with the thought of publishing it, it was really just a curiosity for myself. I have five years of writing where I’m writing to myself and some of it would be like: “What’s the date today? The 29th of January? What was I thinking on the 29th of January four years ago?” And—not that I wrote every day, but if I did have one from the 29th of January four years ago or even if it was a week earlier—I would be so curious to see what I was thinking then. And I would go and I would be like: “That’s exactly the same thing that I’m thinking today!” There would be this great sense of disappointment—“I haven’t changed, I haven’t evolved, I still have the same problems.” I might write something yesterday that said “my life has completely changed” and I’d see something from four years ago that said “my life has completely changed today”.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

an interview with Sheila Heti I kind of wanted to look at the journals in a more kind of scientific way. Like, what were in fact the repetitions? How many times do I say “nothing will ever be the same”? How many sentences start that way? How many sentences start with that idea? By alphabetizing them— which I did in Excel—it just gave me more sense of my preoccupations and my formal ticks in terms of writing sentences than it could have, had I just reread all of it, which also I would never do because there’s just too much there. It’s too depressing to reread all those old journals.

I think the idea always of applying science to something that’s not scientific is so compelling.

My parents both were kind of scientists, and I love the idea of an objective eye on the world. I think bringing that objective eye to something as not-objective, as personal or as subjective as a diary—I just wanted to see what would happen if I did that.

The Indy: The character Sheila—to whatever degree she’s distinct from yourself—in your novel has a sort of mistrust in speaking for women in general. This seems like a good work-around.

The Indy: I saw on Twitter that you’re editing a collection from Penguin called Women in Clothes.

SH: I don’t know what I was thinking about. I’ve been working on kind of an adaptation of the I-Ching, which is sort of about change. “I-Ching” is translated “the book of change” or “the book of changes.” The idea is that life is constant change. I might have been thinking then about that, but I don’t know.

This is my adaptation of the I-Ching which I’m doing with this artist, Ted Mineo. It’s another translation—I mean there are thousands of them. This is my own perspective on what each of those sixty four states means. The way that I do it is I have dozens of translations, and I can’t read Chinese or Ancient Chinese for that matter. But if I’m working on Hexagram One I’ll read all the interpretations that I can find of Hexagram One, and from that you get a very good sense of what it is about. And then I write my own version of it, which is speaking more directly to the concerns that I have at the moment that I’m writing it. So for instance, the way you use the book is that you ask it a question like “What should I do with this problem that I have?” Each of those sixty four Hexagrams addresses how you can contend with that problem in a different way. What I write is trying to help myself through that, help myself think about that problem in a different way. I’m trying to write it as a direct helper for what’s going on in my life or my attitudes.

SH: Yeah. It’s more like an oral history or something than an anthology. What we did was we wrote these surveys. Between five and six hundred (mostly) women have filled out these surveys, and the surveys ask questions about why they wear what they wear, how they make decisions in terms of dressing, and the book is sort of being built up from all the material that we built up in those surveys. We also commission some things—Miranda did a project for us and Cindy Sherman had a conversation with Molly Ringwald. We commissioned things from artists, but most of it is women speaking for themselves. I’m really fascinated with plagiarism. I have always found that there’s an excitement to me in the idea of plagiarism, like it’s the worst thing you can do as a writer. So to make a book based on the words of these women can feel exiting and dangerous and I just like working with other people’s voices. That’s formally why the book exists in that way.

I mean, when you read a book of fiction what you know is how that writer sees the world.

I didn’t think there was anything in the world already where you could open up a book and see why women put on what they put on. All you see in terms of women in clothes are fashion magazines, which have nothing to do with a human being. It has everything to do with selling things to people. I kind of see the book as a balance of that. We just talked directly about this thing. I don’t even think it’s the most important thing, but I also don’t think it matters particularly what you talk about, it just matters how you talk about it. If you talk about clothes in an interesting way you can get deep into the psyche of a population. You can talk about people’s relationship to God. You just have to start somewhere.

SH: It’s nice because I’m not speaking for anyone. People are just speaking for themselves. Obviously there’s selection that goes into it. In terms of what I chose to put in the book—I don’t think we put just the best stuff in the book, everything is great—I think the stuff that’s in the book is valuable. It’s certainly been valuable to me.

The Indy: In a previous interview for the Indy you talk about how you’re working on a theory of change. Do you remember at all what that was?

The Indy: That seems to resonate well with what you were saying about science. Here it looks like you’ve put a question to the world and then had a very real return on empirical results coming back in.

SH: Yeah, exactly. That’s a good way of thinking about it. I guess I thought that I was going to learn something, like I was going to have some sort of conclusions based on reading all these surveys. The kind of conclusions that I got are not scientific at all, but they taught me a lot. I just feel so differently about clothes than I used to, which is nice for me because I’m not somebody who thinks about that sort of thing. I don’t usually think about the physical world that much. It’s nice to be brought into the physical world and think about objects, how they’re as real as things like character. I’m more interested in the things that you can’t really touch, but it’s interesting to think about the things you can touch.

FEBRUARY 7 2014

Interviews

□ 14

The third movement or “place” of Charles Ives’ Three Places in New England, “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” was not a piece of music I found immediately beautiful.

Legend has it that when Charles Ives was a child, his father, a band director, marched two brass bands playing different songs at different tempos past his bedroom window. When you listen to “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” this makes sense. The harmony he was attempting to convey was not a harmony we were, or are, accustomed to. Look at the end, now (fig. 2): quadruple forte, now, and check out how many notes Ives is stuffing into one place! It feels frightening, chaotic, unstable—completely unexpected.

Fig. 1 shows an excerpt from the opening of “Housatonic at Stockbridge.” The marking pppp next to the first violin part indicates the instruments are to be played at a volume of quadruple piano, or almost inaudibly quietly, and the notes they’re playing are bunched into groups of ten and nine. This is weird, unexpected stuff.

A cursory glance at the number of sharps and flats, each representing a deviation from the tonic or home key, illustrate that this will not be conventionally pretty or tonal music. And yet, underneath (around? above?) the eccentric ornamentation, a chorus sings or strings play (depending on which version you’re listening to) what sounds like a very typical, stirring, old-fashioned church hymn. Look at the end: quadruple forte, the opposite of where we started from. Just look at how many notes Ives is stuffing into one place! It feels

The lyrics sung to the hymn-melody are taken from Robert Underwood Johnson’s poem “The Housatonic at Stockbridge.” In addition to being a poet, Johnson was a journalist and political figure: friends with John Muir, he was instrumental in the creation of Yosemite National Park.

Though Ives’ piece omits this stanza, in his poem Johnson asks of the river: “Art thou disquieted—still uncontent/With praise from thy Homeric bard, who lent/The world the placidness thou gavest him?”

The river, according to Johnson, is not merely a peaceful, “placid” place. It’s something else: “Ah! There’s a restive ripple, and the swift/Red leaves—September’s firstlings—faster drift;//Wouldst thou away! . . . . .”

Johnson, and Ives, locate the power of the river not in its tranquility, but in its ability to take us somewhere new, to unsettle us, to rush with us into the unknown. “I also of much resting have a fear./Let me thy companion be,/by fall and shallow to the adventurous sea!”

Music, and poetry—and politics, too, for that matter—all deal with the question of harmony, in the question of the possibility of reconciling seemingly disparate elements.

Personally, I find the world a relentlessly, bottomlessly surprising place, comprised as it is of things and people that happen not to be myself.

Often, it seems not to take what I want from it into account at all, which gives me serious pause, until I realize—and I am realizing this constantly—that it’s my responsibility to take it into account: to cast off the comfort of predetermined certainty, of solidified, reified taste; to listen and see properly.

Figure 3 is a picture of the river.

Over the course of listening, the piece grew on me. “Grow on you”­—it’s a common turn of phrase, and a revealing one.

I think it describes the process of becoming accustomed to a work of art’s hitherto-incomprehensible harmonies. In the experience of acclimatizing to difference, of growing to actually enjoy something previously distasteful, the perimeter and the parameters of one’s self expand. More possibilities are incorporated into our sensibility. Put simply, we are taught by others how to apprehend.

Three Places in New England is still a difficult piece for me to listen to. Especially the end, which, when I am listening closely, still feels shocking, violent, unnatural. But, for a while this past summer, listening to this piece of music felt more important than listening to something pleasant did: it felt somehow nutritious.

I would go for long walks after midnight, after my parents had gone to bed, listening to it on headphones, occasionally stepping on neighbors’ lawns.

Six months later, on the next-to-last day of winter break, I went for an afternoon walk in a neighborhood across from mine, one I don’t usually go to, and I found a path I hadn’t seen before that led to a pond I didn’t know was there. Living here for seventeen years, I thought, and I didn’t know there was a pond back here?

The sky was overcast, and the Canada geese were so overbearingly, obnoxiously loud that I had to turn my headphones off. I had not been listening to Charles Ives, and then, all of a sudden, I was. Let me thy companion be, by fall and shallow to the adventurous sea.

Fig. 3 is a picture of the river.

MAD-LIBidinous Preparing Your Valentine’s Day Speech

by Désirée Illustration by Sara Khan To my baby, I am one lucky ___________. It’s hard to believe it’s been fourteen days since we met. endearing expletive, eg biatch, mofo...

When I think of your ____________________________________ I cannot but feel my item of their clothing/body part that always looks dirty or gross, which you pretend to like anyway

_________________ __________. I’m_______________________________ to say this, body part people always compliment you on

verb you don’t do in public

adjectival variant of “ashamed,” depending on how badly you wanna get laid tonight

but it’s been a while since I could share Valentine’s Day with someone I actually want to __________ next to. Last time was back in ___________________with two _________ verb

destination your recently divorced aunt wants to go to

creature you would like to cuddle

I’d just met. But they were no good at ______________________, baby, not like you. I loving activity that only humans can engage in, eg pillow talk even told my mom about the time that we ______________________. But here we are you definitely shouldn’t have told your mom about this verb -waist deep in ______—not yet sure what the future will bring. You’re sitting there looking textured noun like (forgive me) a _________________. And I’m the fool thinking, what do you give noun phrase that is also a Katy Perry song title

the ______ who has everything? In the last fortnight, I have already shown you so much: my endearing expletive

favorite ______________, my childhood ____________________, the depths of my soul. item that you keep deep in your closet

noun you wish you didn’t own but you totally do own

So I went to_______, closed my eyes, and whispered your name as I walked blindly through retail establishment

the aisles, letting your essence guide me. I came to in the ______________ aisle. And this is aisle appropriate to the store you chose what I found, what I hope will secure my place in your heart: _______________________. item purchasable for between $15 and $50 dollars, that is partially

(if not entirely) edible, with indoor/outdoor functionality. the item should, eventually, have sentimental import, although this depends I can’t wait for tonight, sugar. entirely on how you use it. no pinks or purples.

Love, __________ your name (you’re welcome)

february 7 2013

features

□ 16

Here, Here, Here

by John White

I l l u s t ra t i o n b y P i e r i e Ko ro s tof f The first night we saw each other, I was wearing red shorts. Someone told me that he was from England and that he was doing an artist residency program. He was going to be in town for the rest of the summer, like I was.

The first time we spoke, I think I was wearing the red shorts again. He threw a housewarming party, and I danced until I was one of the last ones there. My friend Lucie was the only person to join me for a while, but eventually he started dancing, too. He danced against walls and in jerks and thrashes, but he danced well.

One day I told him I was going to get my hair cut, and he took a “before” picture. On my birthday, he gave me a card that he’d made out of cardboard and images and duct tape and paint. On the front was the picture from before: me, a year younger, pouting about my too-long hair.

I made him zucchini bread when a co-worker gave me a bunch of zucchini. But he turned out to be a vegan, and I’d used eggs. I gave the bread to someone else.

We talked at my kitchen table one day for a project he was doing. Over strawberries that he’d brought and the carrots and hummus that were just about the only things in my fridge, we talked about my job, what had brought me there, the books we were reading. As I was rinsing a dish, he called out to ask if he could take a look at my bedroom. I replied yes, thinking of his card that was sitting upright on my bedside table.

On one of my days off, I went to Big Bend National Park with him. We hiked along Devil’s Den and up Emery Peak. We hiked for a long time but turned around before reaching the top. On the way back down, we encountered a rattlesnake. He got scary-close to it and took a picture of the rattle right before it slipped away underneath a rock.

He asked me to be part of another project he was doing. We spent sixteen hours together over three days working on a short film. Driving to the first filming location, he talked about the people in his life with whom he’d had fascinations: co-workers, friends, people who he didn’t know at all.

“Sometimes I have fascinations with men,” he said just as we drove up to a Border Patrol station. As the disinterested cop glanced at my ID, I mulled over the word “fascinations.” Back in town at the end of the day, he and I hugged goodbye.

I’d known pretty much the whole time that he had a girlfriend of eleven and a half years. He’d told me a lot about her, and I knew she was coming to visit at the end of the summer. When she got there, I avoided meeting her for as long as possible. “Have you met Louise yet?” people asked me.

“She’s really beautiful.” On her third day in town, I ran into the couple during my lunch break.

She was beautiful. I wanted to tell her that I knew how guilty he felt about all the years that he'd spent away from her, going to school, not being with her. I wanted to tell her that I knew about the fascinations that he’d had with people outside of their relationship. I wanted to tell her that I knew the feeling of his eyes on me from across crowded rooms. But instead I told her that I liked her blouse.

The day I left, I woke up early. My coworker played a Tracy Chapman CD as we sped through the desert toward the airport. On the plane, I tried unsuccessfully to sleep. The plane landed in Providence, and I got a taxi. The driver and I rode in silence for about ten minutes, and then we rounded a corner of the highway. I could see the lights of downtown. “You been here before?” the taxi driver asked. “Yes,” I said. “I go to school here.” “Where are you coming from?” he asked.

“Where’s home?” “I’m coming from Texas,” I responded. “But that’s not home.”

Back in Texas, I had left him a card with a Virginia Woolf quote written on it. Clarissa had a theory in those days—they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not “here, here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places.

18

□

literary

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Jessica Lamb-Shapiro reads from Promise Land: My Journey Through America's SelfHelp Culture

5:30-6:30PM // Brown Bookstore, 244 Thayer St., Providence Jessica Lamb-Shapiro B’99 was raised by a child psychologist who is the author of numerous self-help books. A funny, poignant, and intelligent history of a uniquely American industry, this book is an intensely personal account of Lamb-Shapiro reckoning with her mother’s early death and the years of complicit silence on which she and her father subsequently built their lives.

Performance of Magic Hour

8-10PM // Leeds Theatre, 77 Waterman St., Providence This play is part of a larger festival of new works by the Theatre Arts and Performance Studies grad students. Magic Hour is a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the relationships that make up a film’s cast and crew. They live in a bubble; captive for long days of forced intimacy, they alternate between drama, boredom, stress, and camaraderie, all in the service of creating an imagined world. This play was written

by Laura Colella and co-directed by Colella and Aaron Jungels. To reserve free tickets, Google “Writing is Live 2014.”

Southlight

Grace Church Cemetery, Elmwood Avenue and Broad St., Providence This is a lighting installation project by RISD students in collaboration with Social Light Movement.

Come attend the very first community lighting event in South Providence. Bring your friends and family for a night of lights, music and FREE REFRESHMENTS!

Contemplative Pedagogy and the Transformation of Education 11-12AM // Watson Institute, Brown University, 111 Thayer St., Providence

There is no such category as extra-curricular; each each action shapes our character and environment.

Higher education can create environments for us to inquire and challenge what is most deeply meaningful so that we integrate our learning into meaningful action. Don’t you want that? In this workshop you can discover the ways that first-person critical inquiry can cultivate better discernment in students, deepen their understanding of the material, and foster environments to live meaningfully.

NIGHTMOM, DUMMER, JOE DE GEORGE SAX MACHINE 7-10PM // Louis Family Restaurant, 286 Brook St., Providence // $3

unique future. The results are disturbing, and not at all appropriate for young kids. was written by Rick Burkhardt and directed D. Palmer. To reserve free tickets, google Live 2014.

exciting, The Panels

by James Writing is

Cello Recital: Local High School Students

1-2:30PM // RISD Museum, Grand Gallery 224 Benefit St., Providence High school cello students perform a recital including concertos, sonatas, and other solo pieces.

Snow Jams

11AM-7PM // Analog Underground, 504 Broadway St., Providence OCCASIONAL SLOW JAMS in between AMBIENT NEW AGE + MASTERPIECE SNOW JAMS i.e. there will be fresh djs, hot cocoa from nick’s on broadway, buddies. SALE: 10% off every record in store; all $5 records are now $3; all $3 records are now $1; all $1 records are now 25 cents.

This conference will explore the remarkable ways that animals have been afforded space in human societies.

The speakers will discuss this theme with regard to the home and the menagerie (or zoo). Roel Sterckx, from the University of Cambridge, will give a talk called “Watching Humans Watching Animals in Early China.” Jeffrey Hyson of St. Joseph’s University will speak on “Making Pets at American Zoos.” Search for “Menageries and the Giving and Costly Pet” for the full conference schedule.

Writing is Live: The Panels

12-2PM // Leeds Theatre, 77 Waterman St., Providence This play is also part of a larger festival of new works made by the Theatre Arts and Performance Studies grad students that I’ve been talking about. The Panels addresses what a sex ed class might look like in the future. In a series of panel discussions, convened for political purposes, a group of fellow students fondly reconstructs a shared memory of their

12-1PM // dence

Brown RISD Hillel, 80 Brown St., Provi-

Kathy Moren, RN, Healthy Babies, Happy Moms Inc. will talk about helpful tips and detailed information on pumps, pumping to build a supply to return to work, bottle introduction, storing expressed milk, infant intake needs, and other common concerns.

5:30-7PM // 201 Smith-Buonanno, Brown University, 95 Cushing St., Providence

Someone Talked

7PM // Email email silenttangram@gmail.com for location // suggested donation $5 Chris Colohan and Joseph Sulier reading from Negative Space and A House full of Broken Instruments with additional readings by: Cybele Collins, V Manuscript, and Velvet von Offal. I’m pretty sure this is gunna be great so you should email that person and go.

Work in Process: Metalsmithing

1:30-3:30PM // Chace Center Gallery, RISD Museum, 20 North Main St., Providence Caleb Colpitts (RISD, BFA Jewelry and Metalsmithing ‘14) shares his perspective and techniques on the art of metalsmithing in relation to historical examples on view.

Waiting for Godot

8-10:30PM // TF Green, Production Workshop Downspace, 17-23 Cooke St., Providence Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot will run Friday, February 7th @8, Saturday, February 8th @6 and @10, Sunday, February 9th @8, Monday, February 10th @8. Remaining tickets released at WaitingForGodot. eventbrite.com, an hour before each show.

Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind 9:30AM-6:30PM // 108 Rhode Island Hall, Brown University, 60 George St., Providence

Breastfeeding and Returning to Work

The Impact of Meditation on Emotions

WOW LOUIS IS OPEN IS IT LOUIS OR LOUI’S????

Menageries & the Giving and Costly Pet

her. It might be just the thing you’ve been needing.

Faudree will discuss the conflicting meanings people bring to their engagement with salvia, and suggest how the emergence of a global salvia trade might have implications for such issues as drug policy and race, the ethics of ethnic markets, and the politics of indigenous knowledge. Space is limited. Please RSVP to csrea@brown.edu.

4PM // MacMillan 117, Brown University, 167 Thayer St., Providence Osagie Obasogie is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings with a joint appointment at UCSF Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Genetics and Society (www.geneticsandsociety.org). He will be speaking about his research and recent book Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind. Reception and book signing to follow in the lobby. Please contact SEAS@brown.edu or call 401-863-9588 to request additional access or accommodations.

Postcards from the Land of Magic Plants: Psychedelic Tourism and Indigenous Commodities 4PM // Meeting Room (2nd Floor), Brown RISD Hillel, 80 Brown St., Providence

Professor Paja Faudree will talk about her new work on global trade in Salvia divinorum, one of the world’s newest “drugs.” Faudree seriously changed my life— she’s extremely smart. I think you should go to her talk and see what it’s like to be around someone like

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction has been shown to be highly effective for reducing stress as well as for lessening symptoms associated with numerous psychopathologies. In this talk Sara Lazar of Harvard Medical School will discuss the impact of meditation on amygdala structure and function, both in healthy individuals and in patients with anxiety disorders.

She will then present data on the impact of meditation on the insula in relation to pain and depression. (I know this is a ‘hot topic’ right now, but I still think it’s good to know about because it seems pretty well supported by evidence.)

Discovery, Diagnosis and Dignity: Interpreting Narratives of Health and Justice 5:30-7PM // 305 Pembroke Hall, Brown University, 172 Meeting St., Providence

Doctors and lawyers both engage in a process of discovery, diagnosis, and retelling of the patient or client’s story in order to interpret the “truth” and promote health and justice. The professional interpretive process results in fitting the patient’s or the client’s story into the universalized narrative of the diagnosis or legal claim. But often the patient or client’s own narrative is lost through this narrow technical translation. Liz Tobin Tyler, JD will be speaking about this—she is a Clinical Assistant Professor of both Family Medicine and Health Services, Policy and Practice. And she is also the co-director of the Scholarly concentration in Advocacy at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

Providence Childrens' Film Festival: Opening Night Party

6- 9PM, Metcalf Auditorium, Chace Center, RISD, 20 North Main St., Providence // $15 Adult, $10 Kid This night is the opening night of the Providence Children’s Film Festival. There will be a reception and special screening of The Zig Zag Kid at 7PM.

ry: Liste n i r ou Week 4 – F

Thisary

99 al 12, 1 he Nation Febru ak into t and steal re y men b Norwa paint ry of ’s iconic e l Gal h c n d Mu Edvar ream. he Sc T g n i