The College Hill Independent V.28 N.08

VOL 28 ISSUE 8 APR 11 / 2014 BROWN//RISD WEEKLY

VOLUME 28 // ISSUE 8

NEWS 2 Week in Review

sebastian clark, connor mcguigan & alex sammon

3 Famous Potatoes kat thornton

METRO 6 Prov Shots sarah wang

7 Real Crime

megan hauptman

ARTS 15 Memory Wound gabrielle hick

TECHNOLOGY 9 Rounding Off lisa borst

LIT 17 We R

maru pabón

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 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, Abigail Savitch-Lew, Carly West, Sara Winnick STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Andres Chang, Amy Chen, Aaron Harris WEB Edward Friedman, Patrick McMenamin COPY Mary Frances Gallagher, Paige Morris BUSINESS Haley Adams COVER ART Emma Wohl MVP Kat Thornton

SPORTS 7 Just Kiddin

casey friedman, edward friedman, molly landis, tristan rodman & zeve sanderson

FEATURES 5 Still Standing estelle berger

FOOD

FROM THE EDITOR S Dear the Indy Hiring Manager, I am writing to apply for a post at your company’s corporate office, an opening I learned of through a personal contact at your organization (he works in accounts receivable). I’m currently a student and all around stand-up guy hoping to work for your publication upon graduation in May 2014. I am also remarkably nice. Ask anyone at all.

I am a strong writer with a firm grasp on your general M.O. More importantly, landing this would really help me out of a few personal jams. Thank you very much for your time and attention. Headshots enclosed.

With a firm handshake, -DLD

11 Mixers

natalie posever & john white

OCCULT 13 Famous Last Words eel burn

EPHEMERA 16 Stuck On You molly landis

X 18 Word 2 the Herd adriana gallo

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

START UP YOUR WEEK

by Sebastian Clark, Connor McGuigan & Alex Sammon illustration by Tristan Rodman

Late April means one thing: startup season. As DisruptNY, the area’s most prestigious startup showcase, approaches, the excitement is palpable. And for good reason: the tech giants of tomorrow are often the fledging ideas of today. But getting in on the hottest new startups is not easy. Tickets to DisruptNY go for $2,000, and the thirty hottest startups, on display at the event’s Startup Alley, are kept confidential.

Remember: the lifespan of a startup is spectral. Venture capital can pump millions into companies even before the product launch.

Profitable firms can disappear in an instant. In the startup world, reality is fractured and existence is transient. Welcome to the technological hall of mirrors.

Below, three new companies. Two have been invented; one is real. Figure out what’s true and what’s not.

And remember: the tech giants of tomorrow are often the fledgling ideas of today.

GOING GAGA The older you get, the more babies begin to dominate your social network. From abortive attempts at walking, to incoherent babbling, videos of babies are taking over. Some say that babies will have infiltrated your news feed as early as your mid-20s. And they’re monopolizing all the likes.

Now, Gunnar Wold, part time Facebook fiend and fulltime father, is calling for an end to the madness. Fed up with the excess of progeny polluting his Instagram, Wold decided to take action. The result: Oogababy.

Oogababy is poised to disrupt the troubled landscape of the newsfeed. This is an app that understands discretion.

There is a time and a place for fawning over your offspring, and Wold, the company’s maverick CEO, has provided it.

Proud parents can upload videos to Oogababy’s news feed in unlimited quantity. But parenting is more than just amateur videography, which is why Oogababy offers many other features. Users can register the growth of their child at weekly intervals, while identifying the most important moments in their infancy. Parents can even set up milestones for unknowing children, while setting up live ticker to publicly document the expanding circumference of their child’s head (17 cm and counting!). The best part? Oogababy’s silky smooth interface is so intuitive, a baby could use it! Or something.

The result is a rare win-win for social networkers everywhere. Sanctimony is restored to Facebook and Instagram, while progenitors finally have a space to call their own.

Ooagababy debuted at 2013’s Disrupt San Francisco conference with resounding support. Time called it “one of five apps that you’re going to want to keep your eye on,” as it plans to orchestrate a grand opening at this year’s DisruptNY Let’s just hope that grandma can keep up. –AS

TITLE ME PLZ Is that omelet going down easy just because those eggs were locally reared in a cage-free environment? Nah, mate. It isn’t.

I’m guessing you bought those eggs from Whole Foods.

They answered your questions, told you it was all good. You shrugged, took their word for it. But much still goes unanswered. What hen, through painstaking agony, bore those glowing white orbs? What is—or was—the hen’s name? What were her hopes for the egg, had we brutes let it hatch? Don’t bother looking on the back of your recycled-material egg carton. The answers aren’t there. The local food movement, until now, has been a facade, a charade of feel-goodery neatly packaged to distract us from the true animal-rights issues of our time. +++

LOST AND FOUND On Tuesday, I Skyped with Oren Blitz to discuss Moneylocatr, the 36-year-old serial entrepreneur’s latest venture. Blitz wore a red collarless button-down and wireless headphones.

Behind him I spotted stained glass windows and rusty steel countertops—not the typical décor of a startup CEO’s corner office. He was Skyping me on his iPad from a teahouse in San Francisco’s Mission District.

The startup’s website, moneyloca.tr, went live two days before our interview. On the homepage is a photograph of an attractive brunette wading knee-deep in the San Francisco Bay, one hand hoisting a wad of damp cash in the air, the other clutching her iPhone. Rendered in 128-point Helvetica over her triumphant smile is the startup’s slogan: “We help your money, find you.”

Moneyloca.tr’s “About” page describes the product as a “location-based” app that “utilizes advanced satellite rendering” to keep track of your cash and notify you when you’ve misplaced it. Once it informs you that you’ve lost your money, the user has the option to pinpoint its precise location. Users that recover the most of their own money receive “badges” and are ranked on a local leaderboard.

I asked Blitz why he was videochatting me from a teahouse. “I like to come here when I lose focus at work. It’s noisy as fuck over there,” he said, pointing down the street towards Moneylocatr’s new office space.

As he methodically steeped his third bag of loose-leaf onscreen, Blitz explained his “a-ha” moment for Moneylocatr.

Jack Dorsey’s yacht was anchored half a mile off the shore of St. Bart’s, and Blitz decided to take a swim. He jumped in the water, and with him went $600 he had stuffed in his swimtrunk pockets. He realized he had lost the cash a few hours later, but failed to find it floating in the waves. “I now know that it probably sunk to about 22 feet, a depth at which our app could easily locate cash,” Blitz explained.

“I’m an idealist. I think the world will be a better place with less money floating around,” Blitz said, shortly before he signed off.

At least we can agree on that. –CM

APRIL 11 2014

World, meet iEggducate. The app takes its name from Eggducate, a charitable organization that seeks to reunite your AAA extra-large eggs with the AAA extra-large chicken that bore them. What it does is simple.

You type in the exact parameters of your egg, your current location and the company from which you bought it.

Your web-enabled device does the rest. Although the processing time is a bit long—it takes Eggducation a full day to locate the chicken in question—its well worth the wait. You will be sent the name, age, and current location of your egg’s progenitor, alive or dead. If the chicken is resting in a comfy coop with underfloor heating, they send you the requisite packaging for its return. If the chicken is sitting frozen in a grocery store, the company offers home-delivery—perhaps, one day, by drone. To help you make the most of your new found match, the app provides various holistic cooking techniques that allow the egg and mother to be prepared in tandem. E. Gary Goldberg, the company’s CEO, spoke eloquently about his start-up’s philosophy at last year’s Disrupt. “Slide the egg into the chicken, returning it from whence it came. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Chicken to chicken, at last.” +++ Rumor has it that the start-up is pairing with Lauryn Hill on a collaborative album in celebration of the app’s release. It will supposedly be named Lauryn Hill: Reeggducated. Not only is this proof that bankruptcy knows no bounds to dignity, but that the ignorance surrounding our feathered friends is drawing to a close. The movement already has its own Facebook page and there are reports of a grassroots campaign gaining followers in Vermont. The rallying cry? “Match before they hatch!” –SC

NEWS

□ 02

answer key: Oogababy (real), Moneylocatr (false), Eggducate (false)

BIG BUSINESS Idaho’s last legislative session

In the late 1970s, Richard G. Butler, founder of Aryan Nations, established the neo-Nazi world headquarters on 20 acres of land in Hayden Lake, Idaho. In the two-and-a-half decades that followed, members would gather in this small town, with a population that hovers around 500, for annual congresses. Neighbors complained of burning crosses, loud music, and gunshots. The property, surrounded by the immense Coeur D’Alene National Forest and dozens of lakes, was filled with guard towers and barracks.

One night a woman and her son were driving near the compound when their car backfired. Two drunk guards followed the pair for two miles until they drove them into a ditch, fired shots into their car, and accosted them. The Aryan Nations now faced a lawsuit. The woman successfully sued Butler, thereby bankrupting the Aryan Nations, gaining ownership of the property, and stripping the group of the right to its name.

While it was the court case that ultimately pushed the Aryan Nations out of Idaho, the media and political rhetoric that justified its removal over twenty years was focused primarily on the business disadvantages of such a group’s influence on Idaho’s reputation outside the state. For Idahoans, the problem of the Aryan Nations was above all a problem of business. Hewlett-Packard and Boise Cascade, two major state employers, expressed their concern that Idaho’s reputation for intolerance would affect their job applicant pool. People didn’t want to move to Idaho because of its reputation for hate groups. In 1998, there was a Christian Science Monitor article devoted entirely to the problems facing Idaho’s image: “For all its natural beauty, Idaho's income from tourism is far less than that of most other states. And as it moves from a resource economy based on timber and mining to high-tech, companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Micron are finding it difficult to recruit and retain minority employees,” it reads. And in a 2012 article by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, a longtime Hayden Lake resident reacted to the news that a protégé of Butler had bought a large piece of property in Northern Idaho in similar terms, saying, “[this is] not good for this region. It will cost us business.” He sighed. “We definitely need to have people notified of what’s going on.”

It makes sense to appeal to a larger cause, like the state economy, when pushing for causes based in human rights. In Idaho, this is especially the case—and it’s just as prevalent a tactic today as it was in the twenty-plus year struggle over the Aryan Nations’s headquarters. Business has become more than an influencer—it is central to the workings of the legislature, to the way that the media talks about the statehouse goings-on, to the treatment of each controversy in Idaho politics.

And now, it’s stifling state-wide debate on progressive legislation for LGBTQ rights—just as it’s pushing big agriculture and gun-rights bills through the statehouse, often times going against what the public has clearly demanded.

Illegal post-it notes Idaho produced its first Human Rights Act in 1969. Its purpose was—and still is—“to secure for all individuals within the state freedom from discrimination because of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age (40 and over) and disability.” What this first declaration omitted—and continues to omit—is protection for gender identity and sexual orientation.

03

□

NEWS

Now, activists in Idaho are pushing for an amendment. “Add the Words” is the name of a group and a petition to add language for gender and sexuality protection to Idaho’s human rights act. The wording exists in several cities, including the capitol, Boise, but is not a statewide policy. As it stands, it is technically legal to evict someone from their house or deny them a job on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. As several recent news reports have suggested, this is not good for business. The media has been filled with references to studies that show how having LGBTQ-friendly laws promote economic growth. As a result, Idaho Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter has been able to focus his remarks on contesting the notion that an “anti-gay reputation” is bad for the economy, rather than responding to criticism that lacking legal protection for the LGBTQ community is unjust. The media follows in the cycle. A recent Idaho Statesman article explained that the governor has a point: “While recent protests at the Legislature received national coverage, there is no polling available to measure outsiders' perceptions of how Idaho treats lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people.”

Former Democratic state senator Nicole LeFavour, Idaho’s first openly gay legislator, has become the most prominent leader of Add the Words. The first year the proposal came to the state house, in 2005, LeFavour was the sponsor, but she couldn’t push it past the chairman for a committee hearing. The next year, and in the six years that followed, LeFavour sought co-sponsors but found it increasingly difficult.

LeFavour said she does not know why it became more difficult to find a cosponsor for this bill. During this same time, however, the legislative agenda came to be increasingly inflexible to public demands. Tim Corder, a legislator from 2004–2012, said the majority Republican party has become more right-leaning, and has made more efforts to rid the party of moderates. Idaho has entered the national news several times in these years for the times that the statehouse considered bills that would outlaw abortions, force ultrasounds on women considering abortions, reduce health and welfare benefits, and keep taxes at the same level while taking away education funding. This story is not abnormal—it’s part of the same national trend that produced the Tea Party and polarized national politics.

Corder suggested that in Idaho, this has to do with prioritizing commitment to the party line over other factors that inform legislative decisions, like personal values or input from constituents. Money, in many instances, was a “smokescreen” for maintaining the party line, he said.

This year, Add the Words organizers turned to civil disobedience—a rare instance in Idaho history—to make their voices heard. In February, protestors of different ages, sexual identities, and faiths wore matching black shirts with white letters that read, “Add the Words.” They stood in silence with their hands in front of their mouths—to symbolize how legislators have silenced their efforts—in front of the doors to the capitol’s entrance, hallways, and voting floors. Fortyfour protestors were arrested, and a local TV news station reported that each arrest would cost taxpayers anywhere from $3,000 to $6,000.

2014 was not the first year that Add the Words worked outside the system to make a statement. Two years ago, organizers pasted the walls of the state house with post-it notes reading “Add the 4 Words.” The image became a symbol for the movement. Legislators and police reacted by insisting that placement of the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BIG PROBLEMS

by Kat Thornton illustration by Casey Friedman

notes was illegal, taking the time (and money) to remove the post-it notes. In addition, legislators introduced a bill in direct opposition that would have made it illegal to add gender and sexuality protection clauses to Idaho’s Human Rights Act (this bill was unsuccessful). In the Idaho legislature, there seems to be no time only for certain issues.

74 days Idaho’s last legislative session, which lasted 74 days, was the second shortest on record. Its legislature, like many across the country, is part-time, and counts each day in session as an unnecessary bill for the state. A recent Spokesman Review article reports that each day of the legislative session costs about $30,000.

The main goal for legislators, particularly in a primary year like 2014, is to get in, set a budget, and get out. In a state where the primary counts for more than the general election, legislators were eager to “get on with the business of politicking because they’re up against people in their own party,” says George Prentice, a blogger and longtime reporter for the Boise Weekly, an alternative news source. The primary for the Republican Party, the majority representation in Idaho, recently changed its rules to include only affiliated voters, thereby cutting out Democrats (a minority of voters) and the unaffiliated (a sizeable portion of the state). Excluding non-affiliated voters from the primary has pushed Idaho Republicans further and further to the right.

Legislators did not hold a hearing for Add the Words because it was against party lines. “The legislature is not always driven by public opinion,” Corder told the Independent. In the last few years, the public has been clear on several issues that were settled in direct opposition to these demands. For example, in 2012, Idaho voters repealed every single piece of an unpopular, yet successful, education reform package that would have restricted teachers’ unionization rights, given every student a laptop, and required students to take at least one online course.

“But were legislators chastised?” Corder asked, rhetorically. “Not so much.”

He blames “the powers that be” inside the Republican Party, which he sees as a radically different entity than the one he entered. Like many recently outgoing Republican legislators, Corder considered himself one of the most conservative freshman legislators but left as a moderate. Corder told me in a low voice that one of the most damaging words being thrown around the Idaho Republican Party these days is “R.I.N.O” (pronounced like the horned animal), Republican In Name Only.

While legislators didn’t have time to address the number one stated goal of the pre-legislative period (the state education budget, which remains at pre-recession levels) there was time to pass a few significant pieces of legislation. Both reflect Idaho’s commitment to big business interests— specifically, to agriculture companies and the National Rifle Association. “Almost every session there's some ‘red meat’ for the gun lobby and the agriculture,” Dan Popkey, a political reporter of 27 years for the Idaho Statesman, told the Independent.

One, known as the “Ag-gag” law, outlawed undisclosed filming at agriculture processing plants. Its passage was a direct result of undercover filming that exposed animal abuse at a local dairy plant. The law has clear consequences for journalists. “If that law had been in effect [a few years ago], I personally would have gone to jail,” said Prentice, who wrote an article exposing the destruction

APRIL 11 2014

of evidence of secret state antibiotics testing in dairy cows. The punishment now ranges from a $5,000 fine to up to a year behind bars. The law punishes critical eyes, and keeps producers safe from skepticism (and potentially fines) that would result from documented infractions.

Another bill that became law this session allows individuals to carry concealed weapons on university campuses. The law was passed despite objections from all of Idaho’s university presidents and several state police chiefs. The bill was drafted by the NRA, and presented to the first Senate committee hearing by an NRA lobbyist. Those in opposition were banned from speaking at the public Senate hearing, but were allowed to speak in the House committee hearing, where testimony lasted seven hours, mostly from opponents. “Who does this legislature represent?” a Spokesman Review article reported a leader of the Student Association of the College of Western Idaho as saying. “The answer is clear: Lobbyists, and apparently, themselves.”

The legislation passed the House 50-19, with six Republicans going against party lines to vote with the House’s 13 Democrats. University officials pleaded with fiscal conservatives by pointing out that the bill will actually cost state universities millions, with the need for added security once anyone who passes an eight-hour training session are allowed to carry concealed weapons on campus.

The rest of the state doesn’t want you here The trailer for a documentary currently in production about Add the Words captures a scene between LeFavour and an angry statehouse visitor. The visitor— a man—stands in front of LeFavour, who leans against a marble statehouse pillar and keeps her hands over her mouth for their entire interaction.

“The rest of the state doesn’t want you around here,” he yells. “That’s why there aren’t those words and there won’t be those words. Because your foundation is violence. Your heart is in violence.” A cop stands behind them in a silence starker than LeFavour’s. She defends both herself and the movement, tries to convince the man that her actions are rooted in love. She apologizes for anything that has taught him otherwise, but he continues: “If I punched you in the face, you wouldn’t take that. A fist somewhere else would be fine, huh?” She says she would take the punch. He raises his voice: “THERE IS NO PEACE AND LOVE IN YOUR HEART ANYWHERE. IT CANNOT EXIST IN YOU.” At this point, the cop steps in and moves him away.

The opposition to Add the Words rests in the moral objections of the ultraconservative and the silence of legislators who face no consequences by toeing the party line. Protestors, and by extension the media, have sought to reframe the argument in terms of fiscal benefit. While fiscal arguments have won the hearts and minds of influential Idahoans in the past, it has failed in the case of Add the Words. The same arguments continue to motivate the passage of bills like “Ag-gag” and guns on campus, “Fear casts a pretty long shadow in an election year,” Prentice told the Independent. And fear of losing party allegiance in a party shifting further to the right is obscuring Idaho’s minority voices.

KAT THORNTON B’14 will bring the ‘red meat’ next session.

NEWS

□ 04

STEEL-FRAMED HISTORY the Barbizon Hotel for women still stands

by Estelle Berger illustration by Casey Friedman High, arched windows define the The Barbizon's second floor, each opening bound by a twisted iron railing marked with a cursive B. The building shifts from rose to green to black in 23 stories. The Barbizon, which was completed in 1928, is a work full of detail: the mid-section’s trellis moldings and Gothic arcades, the 18th story tower, the pyramidal roof.

In 1982, 140 East 63rd Street was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and in April 2012, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) granted protection to the exterior of The Barbizon Hotel for Women.

Because the former residential hotel “has special historical, cultural, or aesthetic value to the City of New York,” any physical change to the building must be approved in advance by the LPC. The Barbizon was originally intended for educated and ambitious working women who could not afford single New York apartments during a post-World War I housing shortage. According to the LPC, the Allerton House Company, a leading force in residential hotel development, commissioned the building’s construction in an effort to appeal to the actress, the model, and the writer. There were music rooms, well-lit art studios on the top floors, an auditorium, and a solarium on the 18th floor. Now, only the steel-caged, brick and stone façade survives.

For my grandmother, Sally Diamond, who found The Barbizon in 1961, the structure, as it stands, is simply a frame.

While the LPC has chosen to preserve The Barbizon’s exterior, the clatter of heels and elevator bells that my grandmother knew are gone.

After a trail of different owners and a $40 million renovation in 2001, The Barbizon was renamed The Melrose and became a regular commercial hotel in 2002. It was later converted to luxury condominiums in 2006. Although the building is again called The Barbizon, or Barbizon/63, there is little that remains of the original interior configuration. There were over 700 rooms in the original floor plan, and now there are only 65. My grandmother lived in a nine by twelve foot space with a sink and a desk and a bed. Now, the smallest single apartment is 680 square feet with a bathroom and a kitchen and a parlor. The ceilings are high and the walls are painted ivory. The kitchen floors are limestone and the living space is laid with Bolivian rosewood. Although the outward architecture is a notable midtown fixture, the communal intention of the lobby, the studios, and the hall bathrooms is lost to a hollow marble entryway and a digitally integrated concierge. +++ It was July 1961 and the city was empty and suffocating. My grandmother had just arrived from Tennessee at a friend’s apartment building on Gay Street, a narrow block of painted brick town houses and vines, in the West Village. She had recently broken off an engagement, and she had no expectations. The room she found was smaller than her mother’s closet, filled with female things and bodies. Sticky stagnant air hovered above the half-swept floor. She hailed a taxi. Undefined and slightly rumpled, she arrived at the opposite end of the city at the front desk of The Barbizon Hotel for Women.

That same summer, Mayor Robert Wagner instituted the Committee for the Preservation of Structures of Historic and Aesthetic Importance, which would later become the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. After the demolition of Pennsylvania Station in 1963, anxiety rippled throughout the city: culturally significant properties were being destroyed and it seemed would continue disappearing. But after Wagner helped pass the Landmarks Law in April 1965, the Commission gained authority to protect the exteriors of individual landmarks, interior landmarks, scenic landmarks, and historic districts.

Today, there are 11 appointed Commissioners in the municipal agency. Yet the qualifications for a building or designated area to receive the Commission’s protection are alarmingly vague. The proposed landmark must be at least 30 years old. And that is the only concrete criterion.

According to the New York Preservation Archive Project, the Commission has fallen under scrutiny in recent years as residents question the agency’s adherence to the spirit of Wagner’s initial intent. 652 properties per year were preserved

05

□

FEATURES

during the Commission’s first 29 years, but under the Bloomberg administration, only 183 spaces were landmarked each year. The Preservation Archive Project specifically cites the Commission’s failure to protect 2 Columbus Circle, a modernist white-marble tower nicknamed the Lollipop Building, in spite of appeals by authors, architectural historians, and urban theorists. Due to the LPC’s inaction, the Museum of Arts and Design modernized both the interior and exterior of the building. The arbitrary nature of the Commission allows it to have flexibility under the Landmarks Law. But where does its power stop and end? Why protect The Barbizon and not the Lollipop Building? Architecture critic Witold Rybczynski, writes that 2 Columbus Circle represented an “unusual moment” in architectural history. But measured against The Barbizon’s full and living narrative, an unusual moment does not seem to deserve equal tribute. +++ For my grandmother, there was life in the lobby. “I remember green and yellow,” plush chairs, two-seaters. It was where the girls waited for their mail, picked up their phone messages, flirted with the staff, doled out a chaste goodbye kiss on Thursday, Friday, Saturday night. No men were allowed above the first floor. You’ll have a single room, they told her, and no men. And when a guy “slipped up there,” as my grandmother tells it, “all hell broke out…It was the talk of the hotel.” Eileen Ford, who founded Ford Modeling Agency in 1946 with her husband, told Vanity Fair that she chose to house her models at The Barbizon because “it was safe, it was a good location, and they couldn’t get out.” My grandmother called it her “dormitory.” She paid 65 dollars each month, and didn’t want to leave. “Why would I want that?” she asks. “I didn’t want to defrost refrigerators. I didn’t want to cook and clean.” Her room was simple and loud, three floors above the Lexington traffic, “the buses going back and forth.” And it was hers.

The Barbizon Hotel for Women caught the part of life that is in between. My grandmother was girl and woman; alone with her future, and it was exciting. “I felt special being there,” she said, tossing her hair. “I left home and I was the first to really go there. My dad was overwhelmed with pride that I could go and do this. I got a job, didn’t know anybody, I knew the subway system really well.” She befriended Suzy Parker, a Ford model and a Texan who gravitated towards my grandmother’s familiar southern demeanor. In the lobby café, my grandmother watched the Katy Gibbs girls, the Parsons School of Design crowd, the aspiring actresses. “I would see girls when I first came,” she said, “and then I’d see them again and they had their nose done…or their eyes.” Together, they were swallowed in pursuit of a new identity. +++ The LPC’s decision to protect The Barbizon was unanimous.

Underneath the heading of their official announcement, the Commission commemorates the people who defined the place. Centered and italicized, the memo points to the women, “Noted Barbizon Denizens…Grace Kelly, Sylvia Plath, Nancy Reagan and Joan Didion, and Many Others.” Robert B. Tierney, the Commission Chairman, explains The Barbizon’s importance: “The hotel over time,” he writes, “has been celebrated as much for its artful brickwork, masterful setbacks and eclectic ornament as the artists, writers and actors who lived there.” While its insides have been tangled, reimagined and converted, something of the stardust past endures.

The summer of 1961 was silent in the city. My grandmother, tall and blonde and dark from a week in Daytona Beach, sat unaccompanied on a stool at the diner counter, pretending to read something, eating a hamburger with cottage cheese. That day, she sweat through her stockings and black-wool dress and her heels blistered in her leather pumps.

But she had been hired. The first job on the list at the placement office wanted her. She was alone. And she was free, the corner of her world tucked into her room, on the third floor of The Barbizon Hotel.

ESTELLE BERGER B’16 needs a byline.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH THIS ENCOUNTER

by Sarah Wang

APRIL 11 2014

METRO

□ 06

Grit, Grime & Graft an interview with crime writer Bruce De Silva

by Megan Hauptman illustration by Casey Friedman

Bruce deSilva now lives in New Jersey, but he’s definitely Rhode Island’s crime writerlaureate. His three novels—Rogue Island, Cliff Walk, and Providence Rag—all take place in Rhode Island, where deSilva worked as a reporter for the Providence Journal for over a decade. The downtown dive bars, pot-holed streets and mob-connected politicians of deSilva’s novels are fictionalized, but the veneer of invention is thin. DeSilva’s crime novels grew out of his experience reporting on Providence’s seedy underbellies; the city’s grit, graft and rainy weather feature prominently in all his books. We talk here about his time reporting at the Providence Journal, good graft vs. bad graft, and the dilemmas of fictionalizing true crime stories.

The College Hill Independent: How did you transition from journalism into writing crime fiction?

Bruce deSilva: Many people say that journalism is a great training ground for fiction, and I always tell them that it’s not. It does certainly provide me with a lot of experiences and interesting characters and stories to draw on. But anyone who’s lived a life that’s interesting and remained relatively conscious should be able to say that.

The problem with journalism and making the transition to fiction is the way journalism is written, which is, with rare exceptions, abysmal. In journalism, there’s very little study in the way of characters; people in newspaper stories are just stick figures.

What passes for setting in journalism is usually a street address rather than any attempt to create setting. Most journalism still is written in that horrible inverted pyramid form that may be the single worst way any one has ever devised to communicate. And journalism typically doesn’t produce a story—there’s no beginning, middle or end. No plot.

Journalists call what they write stories, but most of it doesn’t resemble stories in any way.

I spent most of my journalism career fighting against those conventions, trying to do real storytelling in journalism. And I’m certainly not the only one—the Providence Journal back in the day was one of the pioneers in bringing this kind of writing to journalism.

But it’s always been a battle—storytelling versus journalism conventions. The main thing that journalism did teach me that was important and useful in the transition to fiction is that writing is a job. So you don’t wait for your muse, you don’t wait to be inspired, you put your butt in the chair and you write every day. Because that’s what writers do.

You certainly don’t get to have writer’s block. Journalists don’t get writer’s block. Former journalists get writer’s block.

The Indy: You were talking about the type of writing that was happening at the Providence Journal when you were there [in the 1970s]— BdS: The writing was pretty dull. It tended to be kind of an official mouthpiece for politicians in the state. But very quickly after I arrived, there was an internal revolution that radically changed that—that greatly broadened the definition of news and made the paper extremely aggressive in the pursuit of corruption. All kinds of great investigative

07

□

METRO

reporting and a real revolution in the way the newspaper told the stories.

The Journal—certainly not exclusively, certainly not everyone participated in it— became a place where people started really telling stories, with beginning and middles and ends and characters. Really fine, creative nonfiction, trying to tell the stories of what was happening in the state that was important. It wasn’t the only place it was happening, but the Journal was one of the national newspapers that started bringing storytelling—good writing—into journalism. It was a really exciting place to be.

The Indy: Is that why you chose to have Liam Mulligan [the journalist character and investigator in all of deSilva’s books] work at the Providence Journal?

BdS: Actually, it’s not really the Providence Journal. It’s the Providence Dispatch.

The Indy: Sorry, I just instinctively read it as the Providence Journal.

BdS: Well, it’s always smart to write about what you know. If you’re going to write crime novels, you have a couple of possibilities. You can make your character a cop, or you can make him a private detective, or you can make him an amateur sleuth. There are a lot of amateur sleuths in crime novels. I’ve never been a fan of amateur sleuths. I will never write nor will I ever read a book in which crime is solved by a hairdresser or a cat. There is a whole genre of books in which crimes are solved by cats, by the way. I think that’s just silly. That’s not something that happens in life. Cats and hairdressers don’t solve crimes.

As a former journalist I’m concerned enough about reality to not be able to go that way. For the same reason, I couldn’t make my characters private detectives. In real life, private detectives are pretty boring. They do background research for job candidates, that kind of thing. They don’t investigate corruption or serious violent crime. So my option was either to make Mulligan some variety of cop or have him be an investigative reporter.

I chose Providence as a setting because it’s an amazing place, in many respects.

Providence is a theme park for investigative reporters. There is so much that’s going on, so much corruption and graft.

This isn’t recent. It goes all the way back to the founders; very early on in the Narragansett Bay there were real pirates. And there’s a long history of city involvement in the slave trade, in political corruption, in organized crime. And that corruption continues on and off til this day. On the other hand, the state was founded by this saintly figure, Roger Williams. All through the state’s history there have been a lot of really good and decent people. That tension between those two things—the good and the evil—is part of what makes life interesting. So I never really considered setting my books anywhere else.

Rhode Island clearly was the place to set crime books.

Providence is not a typical kind of place for crime novels to be set. Most are set in New York, LA, Miami. But Providence is different because it’s a small city but it’s big enough to have the usual array of urban problems. But it’s small enough that it’s almost claustrophobic. So many of the people you meet on the street know your name. It makes it a place where it’s hard to keep a secret. And that’s different from a big city.

I also made my main character, Mulligan, a native—he grew up in the neighborhood

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

where the crimes are taking place. He is very much of the place, not coming in from the outside. Mulligan has an attitude towards corruption that I think is a very Rhode Island attitude. Mulligan’s job is to report on corruption, but he is not necessarily that critical of corruption. He pays off a state employee in order to get an inspection sticker for his beat-up car, because that’s how things work. Mulligan actually says in the first book that graft is like cholesterol. There’s a good kind and a bad kind. The good kind is for average people, who need an inspection sticker for their car because they can’t afford a new car.

That attitude is part of what I like about Rhode Island, and setting stories in Rhode Island. The lines about right and wrong are a little more blurred, a little more unclear.

And good guys aren’t all good and bad guys aren’t all bad.

The Indy: Your most recent novel—Providence Rag—is based off the true story of Craig Price, who is infamous as the youngest serial killer in US history. Can you talk about the process and ethics of writing a novel about a true crime story?

BdS: The story it is based on is about a serial killer, and I had always sworn that I wouldn’t write a serial killer book. For one thing, there are so many of them out there, and for another thing, writers are falling over each other to make each serial killer more creepy and bizarre than the last. Serial killers who cut their victims up and make puzzle pieces out of them, serial killers who kill people by burying them in their cars—it just gets weirder and weirder. I didn’t want to be a part of that. But a couple years ago, in the late ’80s, I was involved in covering the Craig Price case—Craig Price was the youngest serial killer in US history. He started killing his female neighbors in Warwick when he was 13 years old, and he wasn’t caught until he was 16, in part because of his age. No one thought someone that young could be doing this.

And when he was caught, Price, despite the fact that he had killed four people, was facing only six years in prison. Because the state juvenile justice statutes hadn’t been updated in many years, and when they were written no one had envisioned a child like him, someone who was capable of that. So the law required that any juvenile convicted of a felony had to be released at age 21, given a fresh start. So the state of RI was faced with this psychopathic killer being released into the public again, so that was what the reality was back in 1989.

Today, Craig Price is still in prison. He’s never been released. He’s been charged and suspected of a number of offenses that he supposedly committed in prison—assaults on guards, that kind of thing. I have long suspected that some of the charges may have been fabricated, and I’m certainly not the only one who thinks that’s a possibility. But what is definitely weird is that he’s been wildly over-sentenced for some of these things he supposedly did on the inside. For example, he was given 30 years in prison for refusing to submit to a court-ordered psychiatric exam. So even though it appears that Price’s rights may be violated—or at least they’re playing a game with him—no one seems to be concerned about that. No one is raising a cry about protecting his rights—he is obviously way too dangerous to let out. But for the purposes of the novel I want to explore this question.

What happens in the book—it’s a very unusual serial killer book—is that the

APRIL 11 2014

murders are all committed in the first 75 pages. And what happens in the rest of the book is that the main character and his friends are contending with this ethical question: if you let this killer out, then more people, they die. On the other hand, if you allow officials to fabricate charges to keep him in, that’s wrong too. They’re abusing their power, and if they get away with that, they could do the same thing to anybody. So the rest of the book involves all of the characters dealing with this question of what the right thing to do is here. Whether its to report the truth of fabricated charges, and the bad guy would get out, or to ignore that and let him stay in prison. And both the main character in my book Mulligan, and his best friend, Mason, come down on opposite sides of this question. So you get this intense suspense over whether the truth is going to come out. And a very strong argument between friends and one that comes to encompass most of the state over where justice really lies.

I did find basing a novel on a true case to be difficult and somewhat nerve-wracking.

You might think it would be easier because part of the plot is already laid out for you in real life, but in fictionalizing it, it has to be clear that the story you’re telling isn’t the story of Craig Price or the other people who’ve been involved in the case in some way. That’s tricky. When I wrote my first two novels, they sprang entirely from my imagination. And nevertheless there were people who tried to figure who I was really writing about. People thought the mayor of Providence in the books was based off of Buddy Cianci. I even have a couple of journalism friends who are convinced that my main character is them. He’s not.

Having those experiences makes me concerned that people will be tempted to view this new novel as contemporary history instead of fiction. But when I created this serial killer character in the book, I gave him all kinds of attributes that are invented. I’ve never met Craig Price. I don’t know much about how he grew up. I don’t know much about his family background, I don’t know how he thinks. So I gave him a very distinctive voice in the book. I gave him a family background. I gave him a past. I tell stories about his childhood, all of which are completely made up. The story is inspired by his case, rather than based on it. But I think that it’s really important that people understand that the book is in no way an attempt to tell the true story of Craig Price, about him or anyone else who was involved in the case. It’s taking his story as a starting point and creating something.

METRO

□ 08

Ditching the Frame user interface and the blurring of digital boundaries

by Lisa Borst illustration by Pierie Korostoff

Art has always favored the rectangle. Since humans began moving our paintings off of cave walls and onto formal and constructed surfaces—essentially, since we began framing our art—we have, by and large, framed it in rectangles. A Romanian study from 1999 analyzed several hundred of the West’s most famous paintings, from Caravaggio to Cézanne, and found that the bulk of paintings made since the Renaissance have aspect ratios between 1:1.1 and 1:1.5. Your camera, whether it’s your mom’s old Nikon or built into your iPhone, likely makes photographs of similar proportions.

There’s a material reason for this. Canvas, like many fabrics, is woven from warp and weft threads at right angles; stretching a blank canvas onto a rectangular frame, therefore, puts equal tension on all of the threads. But there’s also the fact that the rectangle feels like an aesthetically natural way to frame images. Windows, by and large, have always been rectangular; computer, television, and cell phone screens have followed suit. Some scholars argue that images whose sides conform to the Golden Ratio—the 1:1.618 proportion that can be found anywhere from seashells to credit cards—are naturally pleasing to look at.

In light of the historical predominance of the rectangle, there is little that feels natural about images framed in circles. Circular images have maintained a limited role throughout the history of art: Botticelli was famous for his tondi—round paintings that can first be found on ancient Greco-Roman vases and wine glasses—and domed ceilings have long been a surface for framing pictures in non-rectangular modes. In the 1960s, several New York-based artists, including Frank Stella and Richard Tuttle, began experimenting with alternative canvas shapes. Walk through any art museum, though, and count the number of round picture frames: it won’t be high.

But share pictures of your museum visit through platforms like Instagram, Facebook Messenger, or even a group text on an iPhone, and you’ll notice an entirely different landscape of shapes: on an increasing number of social media platforms, our profile pictures are framed in circles.

The use of round imagery in graphic design is nothing new, but recent years have seen an explosion in the use of circles in deliberately minimalistic logo redesigns (USA Today, Pitchfork, even the Indy), ad campaigns (the circle-framed sunrise of Obama 2012), and especially album artwork (a selection of 2013’s circle-heavy artwork, among countless others: Yeezus, Reflektor, Chvrches’ The Bones of What You Believe; Tycho’s Awake, released just a few weeks ago, has on its cover a single circle, filled in with a gradient reminiscent of iOS 7’s bright color scheme).

In his 2013 novel The Circle, Dave Eggers uses the titular shape to signify a utopian inclusivity through his descriptions of a sinister Facebook-like social media corporation called—pretty directly—The Circle. In eerie parallel to the novel’s futuristic tech-campus setting, Apple’s new real-life Cupertino headquarters, scheduled for completion in 2016, is an enormous ring of glass and brushed metal; nearly every recent news article on the circular building’s construction has described it with the epithet “space-age.” The circle allows information to be presented as efficiently as possible, with no wasted pixel space or extraneous content at its corners. It feels sleek, modern, forward-thinking: an efficient departure from traditional ways of seeing and framing.

We can read the rise of the circle, in fact, as representative of a larger trend in user interface design away from the long-perceived need to frame content at all. A square or a rectangle shows us an image in grid-like context; by framing information—picture the metallic windows that likely enclose your desktop web browser or music library—rectangles imitate and reiterate the right-angled boundaries of our screens and picture frames.

Circles simply float, frameless, imitating nothing. As technology becomes increasingly mobile and integrated into our physical world, circles are becoming more ubiquitous across our devices in the same instant at which the boundaries of those devices seem to be disintegrating.

+++

+++

In September 2013, shortly after Apple released iOS 7, Instagram responded with a largescale redesign, updating its graphics to appear more in keeping with iOS 7’s flat, clean aesthetic. Updates included larger images and higher resolutions, but perhaps the most jarring change was the app’s introduction of the circular profile picture—the purpose of which, according to a statement on the app’s blog, was to make Instagram “feel more at home on your phone.” iOS 7 certainly seems to emphasize the circle, replacing squares on its lock screens, contacts pages, and numerous other places around the iPhone with sleek round icons. The icon at the top of your screen that signifies cellular strength signal, formerly a tiny escalator of rectangles, has been replaced by a slick row of circles; so have the grid on Apple’s built-in calendar and the formerly pseudo-three-dimensional buttons on its calculator and lock screen. In keeping with this Apple-led trend, numerous social media platforms have introduced circular profile pictures since iOS 7’s inception half a year ago. Along with Instagram, Facebook Messenger and Tinder have been quick to jump on the bandwagon, and Google+, with its assertively sleek—if slow to catch on—emphasis on “circles” of friends and acquaintances, is phasing in round profile pictures as well.

The shift away from graphics that replicate analog reality is not limited to the smoothing of rectangles into circles. In the past year and a half, new operating systems like iOS 7 and Windows 8 have largely ditched the design trend known as skeuomorphism, a term that refers to the mimicry of real-life, physical experiences by digital technologies: iOS 6-era icons made to look three-dimensional through the casting of pixilated shadows and reflections, for example, are skeuomorphic, as are the simulated shutter sounds made by your phone when you snap a picture and the notepad aesthetic and faux-handwriting fonts that characterize many note-taking apps.

Skeuomorphism was for a long time heralded as a convenient means of introducing new technologies to the uninitiated. If you had never used Apple’s Game Center before, the traditional thinking dictated, its skeuomorphic faux-leather graphics, mimicking the aesthetic of a real casino, would put you at ease with the unfamiliar technology.

Since 2012, however, when Microsoft introduced its flat, colorful new Windows 8 operating system, skeuomorphism has largely fallen out of fashion—a trend that became fully apparent with Apple’s unveiling of iOS 7 last September. Across both competing companies’ new operating systems, skeuomorphic aesthetics have been replaced by flatter,

9

□

TECHNOLOGY

+++

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

cleaner, less realistic graphics. Text messages and icons are no longer rendered reflectively three-dimensional; gone are the faux-leather stitching of the digital calendar and the Game Center’s imitation pool-table felt. Even the corny faux-handwriting font on the iPhone’s Notes app has (mercifully) been replaced with a more approachable sans-serif.

The shift away from skeuomorphism is framed by a rhetoric of “intuition,” of clarity and cleanliness and technologies that feel natural. “Simplicity is often equated with minimalism,” says a statement on Apple’s website about the introduction of iOS 7. “Yet true simplicity is so much more than just the absence of clutter or the removal of decoration.

It’s about offering up the right things, in the right place, right when you need them. And it’s about making something that always seems to ‘just work.’ When you pick something up for the first time and already know how to do the things you want to do, that’s simplicity.”

The recent move toward this new “simplicity” poses questions about the nature of intuition and digital accessibility. Has our culture grown more knowledgeable and techsavvy since the inception of technologies like the smartphone, such that we no longer need to call upon reality as a visual metaphor to translate the digital? Was that ever, in fact, necessary? Does a distinction between the “real” and the “digital” really hold up in an era in which the mechanical minutiae of daily life are increasingly mediated and made virtual? Is this a concern shared by other people, and why, with my iPhone at my fingertips, does it still feel so hard to tell?

Finally, and in sum: is what we consider “intuition” in the technological sphere— that is, the ability to use a piece of technology for the first time and “already know how to do the things you want to do”—a shared, natural, or universal power, or is it the privileged product of several years of initiation into the world of Apple’s products—an initiation that was necessarily grounded in skeuomorphism? +++ Skeuomorphism, as aesthetically backwards as it could appear, had at its roots a politics of inclusion, of making technology accessible for new and unfamiliar users. With its decline, trends in user interface design need to balance the sleek and modern aesthetics that seasoned users have come to expect with a maintenance of accessibility for new users (and there are a lot of them: as of December 2013, one in five people in the world owns a smartphone—a number that is growing rapidly).

In late March, Facebook rolled out a minor redesign of their desktop newsfeed, decreasing the size of posts and photos. In doing so, the company effectively negated many of the changes introduced with last year’s drastic redesign, which, when unveiled in March 2013, was hailed as “clean,” “beautiful,” and “intuitive.” Viewing the new newsfeed on a MacBook, the redesign feels like a bit of an aesthetic downgrade. But in a blog post written two weeks ago, Julie Zhou, Facebook’s Product Design Director, discussed the politics of inclusion inherent in the redesign. “It turns out, while I (and maybe you as well) have sharp, stunning super high-resolution 27-inch monitors, many more people in the world do not,” she wrote, her text set beneath a circle-framed photo of herself. “Low-res, small screens are more common across the world than hi-res Apple or Dell monitors. And the old design we tested didn’t work very well on a 10-inch Netbook. A single story might not even fit on the viewport. Not to mention, many people who access the website every day

APRIL 11 2014

only use Facebook through their PC—no mobile phones or tablets.”

Zhou’s post reveals a continued concern among many behemoths of social media for accessibility, for context valued over content. If the way in which information is framed by hardware—be it a sleek new iPad or a “10-inch Netbook”—precludes its ability to be read and accessed by users, it’s the content, not the context, that can be more readily adjusted, even at the expense of a degree of sleekness in user interface design. Still, it is difficult to compare Facebook—free, universally accessible—with Apple, whose products, it goes without saying, are not everywhere as ubiquitous as they may seem on campuses or elsewhere in the US. Both companies have discussed at length the ways in which their newest products are accessible, easy to use, intuitive, but of the two, only Facebook seems to be addressing the obvious question: intuitive for whom? +++ On Tuesday, Microsoft announced the end of the company’s support for its Windows XP operating system. The thirteen-year-old operating system will no longer receive security updates or technical assistance from Microsoft, as Microsoft pushes users to adopt Windows 8—the flat, bright aesthetic of which was seen by many as the impetus for Apple’s leap away from skeuomorphism a year later.

This announcement has proved controversial, with much media attention being directed at the numerous businesses and consumers around the world who still use XP and who are now, in the absence of support, faced with security threats and increased risk of crashing. If a PC is more than five years old, said an NPR piece published on Monday, “chances are it’s running XP.” This accounts for roughly 30 percent of computers worldwide, a statistic that points to the expenses inherent in moving to a new operating system—especially when enacted on a large scale, such as by companies or school systems.

Unlike Facebook, Microsoft is systemically ignoring the many users who can’t afford to replace their hardware in order to support the company’s sleek new software. Like Apple’s rhetoric of intuition and simplicity, this move signifies the company’s value of content over context: an assumption that the information on our screens is more important—or perhaps detached from—the screens that frame it.

For many, with the widespread proliferation of screens across our pockets, vehicles, even eyeglasses, it is easy to feel as if the distinction between onscreen and off is blurring.

Hence the recent popularity of the circle as a way of framing information within the boundaries of those screens: circles, unlike rectangles or squares, feel untethered to the geometric edges of computers and phones. If you’re using a new and up-to-date piece of technology, an interface that privileges the circle will fully “feel at home on your phone,” as Instagram suggests. It’s the people who aren’t, though, for whom the recent rise of the circle may not quite translate.

LISA BORST B’17 floats, frameless, imitating nothing.

TECHNOLOGY

□ 10

CHILD’S PLAY

by Five Big Babies illustration by Amy Chen

Kids like exerting energy. Kids also like making shit up. Basketball, soccer, tetherball, kickball—sure, they’re fun, but why does someone else get to decide the rules?

NO RULEZ Calvinball, taken from the comic Calvin and Hobbes, is the essential game of my childhood. It took sports, and then removed the three things I hated most about them: teamwork, hierarchy, and organization. This left the things I liked, the things that annoyed every real sports coach I ever had: running around erratically, making up stuff, and generally not caring if I was doing it right.

The rules of Calvinball are pretty simple—you invent them as you go along.

Grab whatever is in your garage, and create a game. As a kid though, the anticipation of playing Calvinball was almost always more fun than actually playing Calvinball, which usually ended in fights over the rules we had made up. As certain as I was that landing the hula hoop perfectly on the roof of my mom’s car was worth five points, my opponent was just as certain it was worth two, and we would spend the next hour fighting. Come to think about it, in the end maybe fighting was the most fun game of all. –CF HOME HOME RUN People who live in glass houses, the proverb goes, shouldn’t throw stones. For a baseball-crazed seven-year-old, this is a tough concept to grasp.

The house I grew up in was shaped like a trapezoid, each leg a wall-sized glass pane. Its long side overlooked terraced orange trees, and its short side looked out over the city of Los Angeles. An interior hallway ran through the second floor, tethering each peripheral room to house’s center. A wooden staircase emerged from the empty space inside the loop, hovering above “the pit”—the heavily landscaped stone garden my parents installed on the first floor. With this hole in the middle, the second floor plan looked roughly like a trapezoidal nut through which the bolt of the staircase protruded.

On weekend mornings, I would stand in the living room, my back facing the city, and bend the trapezoid into a baseball diamond. My mom lobbed me tennis balls from the living room sofa. If I could hit it over her head and into “the pit,” it counted as a home run. I would make my celebratory trot around the inner loop, making sure to touch all the bases: first base at the intersection of the living room and my parents’ bedroom, second base where the bathroom hit the hallway, third base where the loop intersected with the kitchen, home plate as I made my way fully around. Some mornings, the dog would chase me as I ran. –TR HIGHBALL There was a time when Foursquare wasn’t a social networking site. We played without phones. We spelled it with a space. On spring and summer evenings when I was wee, my father and I played something like it. A variation of the classical Four Square, Two Square involved two squares, for which we utilized the giant concrete sections (square) that, in a line, formed our driveway (rectangular).

Rules were similar to those of Four Square, though instead of rotating through squares one, two, three, and four with the attendant metaphor of medieval court, we competed simply to maintain the upper square. When the player in the upper square lost a point, he would be relegated to the lower square, and his opponent would take his place. The lower square matched the small slope from our yard to the sidewalk. Though the slope was not steep, it facilitated less predictable, faster bounces, so we designated it the less desirable position.

APRIL 11 2014

As we became more adept two-squarers, we innovated our strategies to include high arcing bounces. These were defensive maneuvers with the aim of tempting the opponent into an ill-advised, miscalculated smash, which would hopefully miss the square entirely and lose him the point. One day, I was in the bottom square and placed, expertly, one of these lob shots into the high right back corner of my dad's square. He had to back up quickly and forcefully to gain a good returning position and smashed into the back of his deep purple VW Passat with his bottom. When he came away from the car, a dad-butt-size crater remained.

Embarrassed, grimacing in the April twilight, he said we should go inside. Then we got a basketball hoop, and for a decade I would never again beat my father in physical competition. –EF BETWEEN BASES In elementary school, Jake, Jonah, and I were inseparable. We met on a park and rec basketball team and bonded over our mutual love of Pacific Cooler Capri Sun. Often having play dates as a trio, we quickly found out that sports aren’t made for odd numbers. We were desperate to find games fit for a threesome.

Our favorite was “pickle,” an entire game dedicated to the unusual occurrence in baseball when a runner is stuck scampering between two bases. The fielders throw the ball back and forth in the hopes of tagging the runner before he reaches base safely. Jake’s playroom was long and narrow, which mimicked the path between bases and made for a perfect pickle set-up. In our game, one of the two fielders would throw the ball to the other, and the chase began.

For years, Jake’s playroom felt ninety feet long, the actual length between bases in the majors. But as we grew older and our legs grew longer, the room shrank.

A space that felt endless could suddenly be taken in four or five strides. One day, Jake, the tallest of us three, bounded towards one of the walls, Jonah trailing close behind. Jake, not yet accustomed to his leg-length, couldn’t slow himself and ran head first into the plaster. After a doctor ruled him concussed, his mom sat us down for a stern talk. “You’re all too old to play in that room,” she said. “It’s time to take the games outside.” Outside? We all stared at each other, feeling, for the first time, old. –ZS SWINGBALL What’s the coolest kid on the playground to do when confronted with the ultimate dilemma: kickball or swings?

The solution was simple and beautiful: swingball. The kicker swung higher and higher until the infield agreed that maximum flight was possible, the pitcher lobbed, and things flew. The playground was sand, which was a nice landing but stayed with you—until you poured out your sneakers on the classroom carpet, that is. A rounding of the bases took you from swing to rusty fire pole to the teach standing on duty to the jungle gym, back home.

The next year they replaced our rusty swing set with one for babies. –ML

SPORTS

□ 12

Unfinished Time passes differently when you’re dead. An investigation into the temporality of death would make a great documentary, but until we can reliably communicate with deceased cameramen, East Asian genre films provide a pretty good place to start.

In the late 1980s, the population of Hong Kong—a territory then imminently to be transferred from British to Chinese control—largely consisted of people who perceived themselves as transitional residents, even if their families had been living there for generations. The effect of this was a culture of perpetual transition and disappearance. The eventual accession of the city to Chinese control, codified in a Sino-British declaration in 1984, sparked a panicked rush to locate and preserve “Hong Kong culture” to protect it from an alien identity imposed by China. But how does one preserve an absent culture?

The emergent nostalgia was not for things long gone, but their absence. This peculiar feeling was immediately and articulately expressed in cinema, one of Hong Kong’s most important cultural products. As Fleur, protagonist of 1988’s Rouge, walks around contemporary Shek Tong Tsui, in the north of the city, with her living human companions, she encounters ghostly remnants of her city’s past. When Fleur looks at a building, she sees instead a fleeting image of what used to lie in its place. As she travels through her old neighborhood, every street is encountered as an expression of vanishing life.

Her flickering gaze erases the contemporary and gives the viewer glimpses of the past she’s stuck on.

If the conditions for a culture of disappearance are a history of colonization and subjugation, then a culture of disappearance can also be applicable to women in the context of sexuality. All of the female ghost films are punctuated with environmentally-triggered flashbacks. These ghosts—like the buildings in Fleur’s Shek Tong Tsuei—attempt to defy disappearance by acting out violently, by refusing to be erased. They transgress temporality by ceasing to exist in their designated passivity. Their presence is physically explosive—like an unburied corpse. Hiding reminders of death allows people to continue living according to the arbitrary schedule of empty, homogeneous time. When death lingers, however, this temporality is disturbed and forward-motion is replaced by decay.

The time is out of joint. +++ Point a video camera out your window. Put in a VHS tape.

Record a real-time feed of an intersection in Shek Tong Tsui.

Watch pedestrians, cars, noise, moving in the present.

Press pause. Rewind. Press play.

Watch as temporality begins to split in two. The delay

er m a c n o ghost s between the immediate past and the present will grow flexible. You can watch pedestrian traffic unfold in real time via live feed—and then, you can rewind the tape: suddenly, the present is in the past. This temporal anxiety spawned two of the most famous Japanese horror films of the turn of the 21st century, Ringu (1998), which was centered around a lethal home video, and the Ju-On films, whose ghosts used technological disruption to get to their victims.

Each character who enters the haunted house in Ju-

On: The Grudge (2002) follows a similar path, “reading” its archives—torn up family photos, paralyzed grandmas, and spectral stalkers—in the same order. In the first sequence, Rika encounters the house as a palimpsest—a document whose original contents, though erased, still show through in traces. As she wanders through this space without discrete time, Rika finds herself drawn upstairs towards—where else?—to the attic (a sight that soon grows eerily familiar to the viewer, as each victim of the house draws closer and closer to the origin of the curse), the vertex of this space of recollection. Interestingly, ghosts are surrounded in a fog of static

a

when captured on VHS. Does their passed presence negate homogeneous time to create this static, or is it composed of sediment-like artifacts, like the ghosts themselves, stirred up by the clash of concurrent yet incompatible times?

The known past, that which is understood and recorded in memory or documentation, is typically thought of as safe, stable, and terminal—in other words, as dead. However, as the static of Ju-On’s ghosts demonstrates, this space of recollection is in fact still active and therefore dangerous, particularly in its failure to be recorded. When Rika watches her building’s guard investigate the haunted bathroom on the security camera, she is horrified and terrified to see him overtaken by a static-swathed creature—not just because the ghost is terrifying, but because while she cannot truly see it, she feels it penetrating its recorded confinement and staring at her.

Broadcasted video imposes a specific kind of distance—it presents images to be looked at. When the ghost suddenly turns her head and looks at Rika, she undermines the temporal and spatial realities that constitute Rika’s life.

In the film’s prequel, Ju-On: The Curse, the original resident of the haunted house, Takeo, murders Kayako, his wife, and her son, Toshio, after discovering that Kayako was fixated on Toshio’s elementary school teacher. For Toshio— the spawn of Kayako’s womb—to go on living could have represented the continued life of Kayako as well. Instead, they both become ghosts who ensure that the lives of anyone they encounter continue only as destructive specters of the house.

With each new visitor to the haunted house, the cycle of haunting and killing begins again. This is the temporal pattern of an unbreakable, parasitic curse. Victims become perpetrators. When Rika, who has somehow managed to stay alive throughout the film finally returns to the house, Kayako’s ghost enters her consciousness and establishes her as the new bearer of the curse. Rika, born at the start of the film, has temporal intercourse with Kayako, after which Kayako’s spirit passes and Rika dies as her ghost is born. Boo. +++ If the haunted house is a space of temporalized recollection, so too is the female body historically a space charged with affect. As a subject rarely given permission to speak, it is unknown, and carries the same threatening and often tragic characteristics of the haunted house. The body is as much a record of trauma as the cursed space.

Spoiler Alert: They die in the end ROUGE (HONG KONG, 1988, SPOOKY HISTORICAL DRAMA): the hottest courtesan in shek tong tsui makes a suicide pact with her forbidden love, an opium-smoking playboy and aspiring actor called the 12th master. when she can’t find him in hell, she returns to the world of the living 50 years later for answers.

JU-ON: THE GRUDGE (JAPAN, 2002, HAUNTED HORROR): haunted house’s resident specters, an emaciated woman & her adorable/creepy toddler child, possess and destroy everyone they touch. chances are you’ve seen the hollywood remake.

13

□

OCCULT

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Business by eel burn When the eponymous protagonist of Mee Pok Man (1996) takes the prostitute Bunny into his home, she is barely conscious and can hardly speak. In her absence, Bunny’s brother reads through Bunny’s diaries in reverse-chronological order. Not only does the brother grow closer to Bunny both in her absence and through a record of the past: he navigates this record in a direction contradictory to conventional temporality. Bunny deteriorates in the mee pok man’s stagnant apartment just as she moves backwards in time in her brother’s diary readings. She begins, through this disruption of temporality, to become a ghost. She slowly starts to communicate with the mee pok man, and even reciprocates some of his affections, but his sexual desire for her ultimately proves fatal for Bunny in the most literal way: she mysteriously dies during their first intercourse, cutting their bizarre romance short. Unable to cope with Bunny’s death, the mee pok man grooms her, feeds her, and talks to her corpse as if it were still alive as his house— already haunted by the spirit of his dead father—becomes a space of decaying temporality itself.

At first glance, it seems that the body-space differs from the local-space in its eroticism. Yet this, too, is a point of convergence. The disjointed temporality that makes a house haunted is rooted in a death that refuses to exist solely in the past. It is a death that the living into a subject, even in between its apparitions. This spectral presence renders the haunted house, sight of unspoken horrors, taboo, much like death itself.

Eroticism, on the other hand, is not just motivation for conception of life, but a primal tool for exploring one’s own taboo relationship to death. The sexual transgression of Bunny violates this system of taboos. Therefore, it can only end in violence, mirrored by the transgressive space in which this violation takes place. Through her diaries, Bunny moves towards birth and death at the same time. +++ At the beginning of Bedevilled (2010), Hae-Won, the film’s Seoul-dwelling protagonist, is forced by her boss to take a vacation after violently snapping at a co-worker. She returns to the small rural island she where grew up to visit a childhood friend, Bok-Nam, whose letters she’d ignored for several years.

As Hae-Won learns, Bok-Nam has been living under constant violent sexual and psychological abuse from her husband— and the entire community. Bok-Nam begs Hae-Won to help

her and her daughter leave the island, but Hae-Won is unsympathetic. When Bok-Nam’s attempted escape results in her daughter’s death, she brutally murders everyone on the island and chases Hae-Won back to Seoul to complete her revenge.

Bok-Nam’s island is an attractive vacation destination for those like Hae-Won, one that she can take what she needs from then leave; similarly, Bok-Nam is taken advantage of

them. In Rouge, the onryō-like ghost is not explicitly vengeful but returns to the living world to find the lover she expected to die with her (who is effectively rendered a living ghost). In Bedevilled, the vengeful woman is only spiritually dead, having lost most of her life to grueling captivity on a small island.

What is a ghost but a spirit, after all? The onryō is so fearsome because she is not an exceptional figure—as the offspring of one who is powerless in life, she could come from any woman.

She is terrifying in that she is transformed from passive prey to a supernaturally forceful source of violence. Hell hath no fury like a dead woman scorned.

EEL BURN B’16 is in fact still active and therefore dangerous.

by everyone around her and abandoned in times of her own need. Bok-Nam and the island share physicality, much like the other female ghosts. Their physicality is taken advantage of by others who entrap them and refuse to let them go. Bok-Nam and her island exist in tandem. +++ The onryō is a Japanese mythological figure of a vengeful, typically female ghost, yet permutations of this model appear in films from many countries across the East Asian region.

The onryō gives wronged women, like the murderous ghost of Ju-On, a means to come back even more powerful than men: they can transcend the artificial systems, embedded in temporalities, spatial divisions, and labor roles, that oppressed

MEE POK MAN (SINGAPORE/USA, (1996, INDIE DRAMA W/ WTF ENDING): xxtremely quiet fish noodle cook falls in love with an ambitious prostitute. he lovingly abducts her after a car accident and nurses her back to health while she hides from gangster pimps. she dies mid-coitus then her body decays while the dude treats her like a dead living doll.

BEDEVILLED (SOUTH KOREA, 2010, REVENGE THRILLER): city slicker hae won visits her childhood friend bok nam on a remote island where all the other residents abuse bok nam sexually, physically, and laboriously. bok nam begs hae won to at least save her child, but hae won is super cold and mean. when shit hits the fan, bok nam goes into terminator mode.

APRIL 11 2014

OCCULT

□ 14

CUT LOSSES

designing memory in Norway

by Gabrielle Hick illustration by Julieta Cárdenas Memorials are mnemonic devices: built in order not to forget things lost, people loved. Memorials, however, frequently have a political function. Often governments commission memorials as a way to negotiate the idea of negative heritage, events that are a wound on a place’s history.

On a July afternoon in 2011, the Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik went on shooting spree on the island of Utøya, about 25 miles north of Oslo. Two hours earlier, Breivik had set off a bomb in government buildings in Oslo, and had released online a 1500 word manifesto entitled “2083 – A European Declaration of Independence,” in which he attacked Europe’s multiculturalism, decried feminism, and advocated for Islamophobia and far-right Zionism. In the afternoon, dressed as a policeman, Breivik took a ferry to Utøya, the location of a Norwegian Labour Party Youth League summer camp. When he opened fire, the people on the island— mainly teenagers—leapt into the water or climbed trees in an attempt to save themselves. Breivik shot them anyway; he only spared the life of one eleven-year-old boy who said he was too young to die, and who’d just watched his father be shot and killed.

In a normal year in Norway, there are thirty murders.

In one afternoon, Breivik was responsible for seventy-seven deaths. Eight of his victims died from the bombing, and the rest in the massacre on Utøya. Fifty-five of the latter victims were under twenty. +++ Almost three years later, Public Art Norway (KORO), the government’s professional body for art in public spaces, has unveiled the designs for a memorial for the victims of the bombing in Oslo and those killed on Utøya. 27 million Norwegian kroner, approximately 4.5 million dollars, have been allocated for the completion of the projects.

The proposed memorial, conceptualized by Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg, will take the form of a small channel cut through the end of a peninsula on an island near Utøya.

“My concept for the Memorial Sørbråten proposes a wound or cut within nature itself,” Dahlberg said, on the design and architecture website Bustler. “The cut will be a three-and-ahalf-meters-wide excavation. Across this channel, on the flat vertical stone surface of the other side, the names of those who died will be visibly inscribed in the stone.” The material excavated from the site during the construction process will be used to build a second memorial in Oslo, to commemorate the bombing victims. A rendering of the urban memorial has yet to be released.

Dahlberg describes the concept of the memorial as a kind of “memory wound,” the riven landscape a physical representation of tragic history that must not be forgotten. With Dahlberg’s design dividing the island, visitors will not be able to reach the end of the headland. They will only be able to read—but not touch—the names of the dead. Dahlberg says the cut is “an acknowledgement of what is forever irreplaceable.” His design was chosen by a jury made up of members of KORO, government representatives, and representatives from the Norwegian Labour Party Youth League. “It is capable of conveying and confronting the trauma and loss that the July 22 events resulted in in a daring way,” the Jury wrote in a press release available on KORO’s website. “The proposal is radical and brave, and evokes the tragic events in a physical and direct manner.” While this memorial is not the first to present its design as radical, it justifies this assertion by offering a new kind of memorialization—negative heritage remains a constant presence, but the design still honors the dead.

+++ Dahlberg’s proposed memorial elicits a comparison to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in Washington, D.C. Lin’s memorial, likewise a visual scar on its landscape, was reviled by many when it was unveiled. The a v-shaped, sunken wall of reflective black stone upon which the names of those lost are engraved was criticized for its minimalism, color, and unconventionality. Tom Cahart, a Pentagon civil lawyer and veteran of the war, called the wall “a black gash of shame and sorrow, hacked into the national visage that is the Mall.”

The Vietnam War remains a negative inheritance for the United States. Yet visitors to the memorial can see their faces in reflective granite. They can take a piece of paper and place it over a name inscribed into the wall, and then, rubbing a pencil over it, they can create a copy of the name for them to keep. Perhaps this is a small, quiet action of taking back, a gesture of defiance against how much was taken away. The collective scar of the memorial—driven into Washington’s landscape—is irrevocable, but through the memorial’s accessibility, those who remember are able to reclaim the past. +++ Dahlberg’s design does not attempt to process the deaths it tries to honor. It does not teach. It does not strengthen. It grieves, but by doing so it becomes a mnemonic only for pain.

“I wanted to make actual loss,” Dahlberg says. “It’s just a cut through the peninsula.” The design does not attempt to neatly stitch this terrible event into Norway’s past, which suggests the impossibility of integrating the past with the present. The design of the memorial is a symbolic representation of lack of closure: it prevents visitors from being able to touch the stone upon which is inscribed the names of the dead, and prevents any kind of crossing over to the other end of the peninsula.

The memorial may also face geological problems. “To create this monument would be like cutting through a mound of soft gravel,” Hans Erik Foss Amundsen, a geologist, told The Telegraph. “[It] might crumble immediately.” If it breaks down almost as soon as it is built, the memorial will not be the kind of never-healing wound Dahlberg intends.

Jonas Dahlberg’s design focuses on what was taken away and remains irretrievable. Perhaps his design signals a new kind of memorialization, in which closure plays no part, in which tragedies cannot be integrated. Dahlberg’s “memory wound” is one that can never heal.

GABRIELLE HICK B’16 doesn’t know the proper way to grieve.

15

□

ARTS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

We R

by Maru Pabรณn You roll an idea between two fingers, see it curl into a cylinder of ignited ammunition.

I roll my hips toward the smoke, watch it curl into the shapes of childhood imaginary friends.

The night sky blinks a Morse code of caution, and the fact of knowing this language should mean something other than a mistranslation rolling off my tongue and onto yours.

16

โ ก

LITERARY

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Pick Your Poison

by Natalie Posever & John White

Dear friend, it’s five o’clock (somewhere). Give your car keys to a friend, and go to your pantry. We’ve got you covered.

Below are seven drinks —some simple, some more adventurous. Start from the top, and see how many you can work your way through. We dare you.

Take a shot.

Choose your booze.

Vodka

Gin

Rum

Whiskey

Tequila Muddled Blackberries

Triple Sec

Lemon Juice

Champagne

Maraschino Liqueur

Grand Marnier

Muddled Sage Leaves

Pineapple Juice

Ginger Liqueur

Brown Sugar Cube

Lime Juice

Maple Syrup Jasmine Tea Simple Syrup

Grenadine Agave

Egg White

Angostura Bitters

Benedictine

Seltzer

Lemon Jasmine Fizz

17

□

FOOD

Maple Whiskey Sour

Mary Pickford

Singapore Sling

Blackberry Smash

Ginger Margarita

Champagne Cocktail

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

This Wee List k in ery: Apri l

The 11, B Prot enevol 1876 e of E ective nt and lks Orde i r nize s orga d.

The List Friday, April 11

Monday, April 14

Eyes on Amphibians

The Politics of Tax Evasion

5:30-7PM // 583 Third Beach Road, Middletown // $8

12-1PM // Taubman Center, Brown University, Seminar room of 67 George St., Providence

This will be an evening of nature exploration where you can learn all about the natural history of amphibians. After you leave you will know which species can be found in Rhode Island. You will also have met some frog and toad animal ambassadors, and you also might be tired from having hiked out to Red Maple Pond to listen for frog calls and search for egg masses.

A Royal Feast

7-11PM // 14 Olneyville Square Providence // $10-20 Suggested donation Dirt Palace is having a Night Brunch benefit. Regal attire is encouraged and you can arrive at any point between 7 and 11. There’ll also be guest chefs, guest djs, and some new candles.

Music Show

9PM-1AM // AS220, 115 Empire Street, Providence // $7 It’s Math the Band, Dirty Fences, Huge Face, and Nightmom. It’s also free ice cream floats.

27 Sims Ave., Providence

Have you been looking for a great way to contribute to the Steel Yard’s community of makers while meeting new people in a creative environment? They told me that they need your help getting their indoor foundry classroom in working order for the spring. Maybe you could stop by?

Spring Tree ID Walk

2-3 PM // Norman Bird Sanctuary, 583 Third Beach Road, Middletown // $8 Certified arborist Jacqui Mitchell will help you learn how to identify deciduous trees in the summer by observing buds, twigs, bark, branching patterns, and form.

FIRST there will be a brief indoor section with a PowerPoint, THEN you can hike the trails of the Norman Bird Sanctuary identifying trees.

Mt. Pleasant Branch Library, 315 Academy Ave., Providence

Hardcovers: $1 each or 7 for $5. Paperbacks, children’s books, and graphic novels: .25 each or 5 for $1. They’re piled up and ready to go.

Music Show

Doors@8 Music @10PM // Machines with Magnets,

400 Main St., Pawtucket // $8

Boyfrndz, Owlfood, Working, Feeds

7PM // The Vets, 83 Park St., Providence 421-2787

Tuesday, April 15 Trivia Night

Wednesday, April 16 Making Hyperbolic Space Workshop

4-6PM // Brown University, Leeds Theatre, 83 Waterman St., Providence Margaret Wertheim will help you construct gorgeously colored paper models of hyperbolic space. In the process we’ll explore the foundations of geometry and learn about the difference between Euclidean, spherical and hyperbolic space. Materials will be supplied including coffee and snacks.This event is open to the public and registration is required at www.brown.edu/go/wertheimschedule.

Screening: The Unknown Known

Errol Morris does Donald Rumsfeld. This movie is a ‘thematic sequel’ to The Fog of War. In it, former United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, discusses his career in Washington D.C. from his days as a congressman in the early 1960s to planning the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Thursday, April 17 Joseph Rodriguez

Sunday, April 13 Kathy Griffin

This isn’t the one you saw a few weeks ago. This is a NEW one.

4:30 & 6:45 // Cable Car Cinema, 204 South Main St., Providence // $8.25-9.75

Mt. Pleasant Library Book Sale //

10AM-5PM // Woods-Gerry Gallery, 62 Prospect St., Providence

Compete in teams of up to six answering questions concerning a smorgasbord of topics.

You may get prizes.

Second Saturday Volunteer Day

10AM-2PM

2nd RISD Painting Senior Exhibition

8PM // Hercules Mulligan’s, 272 Thayer St., Providence

Saturday, April 12 11AM-3PM // The Steel Yard,

Ebonya Washington is Professor of Economics at Yale University and she wants to talk to you about the link between county residents’ government disapproval and their level of tax evasion. The IRS has been accused of targeting the tax returns of ideological nonprofits -- particularly those who criticize the current administration -- for extra scrutiny. While many decry the practice as purely partisan, Washington will provide suggestive evidence of a more substantive justification for this practice.

5-7PM // AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence

// $49.50 - $59.50 tickets, call

(401)

She has been making audiences laugh for years discussing Hollywood gossip and celebrity blunders.

Art Shots: Who is the Enemy (and who decides)?

2:30-3PM // RISD Museum, 20 North Main St., Providence

Joseph Rodriguez is a documentarian and he will discuss his work, including the books East Side Stories and Juvenile, as well as a recent project on Muslim youth culture in Sweden. Many of Rodriguez’ photos show people who are in – or who have passed through – the criminal justice system. While these images stand as psychological portraits, they also reflect the institutional violence that American society exacts on disempowered and marginalized people. He writes, “My interest in California began with street gangs in the early 1990s. My aim was to get close to the core of violence in America—not just the physical violence, but the quiet violence of letting families fall apart, of unemployment, of our failed education system, the violence of segregation and isolation.”

Caitlin Meuser (Brown University BA ‘16, Art History and Literary Arts) as she investigates how the idea of “Us versus Them” is complicated as we enter the modern era.

See how artists from Ancient Rome up to the 20th century portray this evolving idea.

Music Show

8PM // The News Cafe, 43 Broad St., Pawtucket // $5 Yeesh (Chicago), 14 Foot 1, Lame Genie, Oakli Boys

In the know? E-mail listtheindy@gmail.com.