Managing Editor: I don’t understand why we always have to have four black-and-white pages.
Rogerian Psychoanalyst: Why do you feel you need to understand why you always have to have four black-andwhite pages?
ME: I guess I just wish we didn’t have to bother our illustrators for illustrations in grayscale, or our designers to design their pages with all illustrations on one side. I feel like it confuses people.
RP: Do you think you confuse people?
ME: I try not to. That’s part of editing. But sometimes I say all these things and get told it wasn’t even an argument.
RP: Why do people tell you it wasn’t an argument?
ME: Tell me about it! I got no respect. Blatantly dismissed all my thoughtful criticism of ******* ***** and I was nearly out of breath, crying, groveling on the floor. On the Conmag floor!
RP: Why were you on the Conmag floor?
ME: We found each other.
RP: What would your mother think?
ME: That I could surely do worse.
RP: How could you surely do worse?
ME: How could you surely do worse?
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The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.
While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.
The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/ or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.
c Good morning, Providence! We love when trains run on tracks. We love when they go “choo-choo!!!” Haha! We love the noises they make. We love when they go to Boston! Ah, Boston. Some call it “The Little Apple” or “The City of Great Aunt-ly Love,” but we just call it FUNNNNNNNNN <33333. From our sweet little city, you can zip up to Boston on the MBTA OR the Amtrak. A dichotomy. Many (zero) people (dogs) have (not) wondered, though, which train service is better, cuter, or more cool (no one has wondered this). We reached out to both Amtrak and MBTA by shouting loudly from a high, high place. To our surprise, both companies responded (by shouting loudly from way down low!) and agreed to a formal debate. We have included their initial statements below, and a transcript of the unexpectedly brief debate. Happy (sad) reading (eating pasta)!
Statement from AMTRAK : Well, good evening. The tide shifts inward, the Earth turns evermore, and yet one thing will always remain true: I provide a transit experience unparalleled by any other service. Dear girl, reading this, observe with envy as my chromium carriage careens across the nation, sounding the symphony of freedom, the orchestra of adventure. I can hear it, that yearning rattle in your soul as you dream of the all decadent offerings from my good, good cafe car. STOP AND SMELL THE HOT DOGS! HA! I catch myself mid-laugh. Ha! As you agonize over the pretty penny I require for a ride, drool over my plush leather seats washed nightly, I simply count the jewels that line my coffers: ruby, diamond, emerald, and one that I don’t know what it is.
My opulence knows no bounds, nor do my price tags. But I will say this: some people are just better than others, and I am like that, but in a transit sense. I am the transit that is better than others, not due to any one characteristic—though I could point to many—but due to an intrinsic rightness that probably stems from my aesthetic beauty. Before this debate begins, please let me say this: I win.
Statement from MBTA : I’m not the commuter rail you need, but I SURE AS HELL MIGHT BE the commuter rail you deserve. I, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, am the sweetest, kindest, fluffiest thing ever to be thinged in New England. Call it New Thingland, because I’M THERE! Sure, you may point to sexed-up, hatchet-job articles like, “‘Not safe, that’s for sure’: Ceiling Panel Falls at Harvard MBTA station” and politically
Week in Amtrak vs. MBTA
( TEXT ILAN BRUSSO AND KAT LOPEZ DESIGN JOLIN CHEN ILLUSTRATION MEKALA KUMAR )
MBTA : I care deeply for the people that use my service—
AMTRAK : Oh, sorry, MBTA, it seems you have a crumb on that lip of yours. Ha! Couldn’t even clean your mouth’s corners before coming to this interview!
motivated polls that fabulate shit like “70 percent have felt unsafe at least once or twice due to the condition of the trains, buses, stations, or other infrastructure.” And while those sources may be ‘true’ in the ‘real’ sense, I—emboldened by a deeper, more fundamental source of truth—see the innate subjectivity of reality, and proudly proclaim myself to be your Mom and Dad, your Angel and Demon. I am the cells in our body that at once keep us alive and yet threaten to revolt at any cancerous second. Hear that, Martha? Listening to that, Denise? People love the MBTA not because we’re goated at keeping 20 to 25 ceiling panels properly secured over passengers’ heads, but because we are goated at pretending that we are. Lying: IT’S WHAT’S FOR DINNER! Would it be nice if the country had money left over after paying the military for its bad stuff to spend on luxuries like basic infrastructure? Maybe! I like money like a biscuit loves honey. But more than anything, I love you. Your hair looks nice! You should wear it like that more often!
Take me, baby, and you can be in Boston in an hour. Or an hour and a half if deer happen. When deer happen, it makes it harder because of the deer. Amtrak tickets cost, like, a butt-bunch more, and though you may be much safer from traumatic collisions with crumbling objects and items, you are selling your soul for the famous Acela HotDogs we all love to hate to get, routinely washed seats, and a sense of a hollow superiority. Reject all of that and take the MBTA!!!!!
My Babygirl Transit Amaaaaazinngggggggggg!!!!!!
WIR: Thank you to AMTRAK and MBTA for agreeing to join us for this polite, timely discussion of which rail service is superior.
AMTRAK : Yes.
MBTA : Happy to be here.
WIR: As we enter this age of political instability, how have you each been moving to ensure your solvency as federal funds, a revenue stream you both rely upon, continue to be slashed?
AMTRAK : It’s a good question. Not a great one, but certainly a good one.
MBTA : Yes.
A twenty second pause occurs.
WIR: Right, well, we’d love to hear how you two are thinking about this issue. Sort of, what can you do, raising tickets or lowering overhead, to ensure America, AMTRAK, and Southeastern New England, MBTA, continue to enjoy your vital services?
MBTA : Ouch! Real burn. I’d ask for an apology, but I’m sure it’d come with a two-hour delay and $200 surcharge!
WiR: Ladies, please, can we just focus on the conversation—
AMTRAK : Brilliant, come back. Those words fell out of your mouth so gracefully, almost like… what’s it called…a ceiling tile—
MBTA : Real low FUCKING blow there, bud. However, game recognizes game. You know, you’re not all that bad. For, uh, classist scum. But yeah, I mean that.
AMTRAK : Why, thank you. You know, it’s not your fault that public services that everyone benefits from are routinely defunded in the name of things that no one wants. I bet if you were properly funded, damn it, I know, that you would really have the potential to turn into something that hurt less people with ceiling tiles.
MBTA : *blushes* Hey, thank you. I really appreciate that. I wanted to give you this.
MBTA lightly kisses Amtrak’s cheek. Sparks fly, and not just from friction of the train tracks. It seems, dear reader, that this has turned into a love story. They look into each other’s eyes for a moment, train to train. Their headlights flash. Their seats swivel. Mouth hits mouth, track grinds against track, the whole shebang. They start going at it, sloppy style.
Ahh, love wins! Transit companies to enemies to lovers! IF the MBTA and AMTRAK can finally admit their feelings for each other…why can’t we? This week, tell everyone you’ve ever met that you love them, and be endlessly surprised each time you find out it’s true <3. As Regina Spektor sings, “Love what you have, and you’ll have more love!”
ILAN BRUSSO B‘27 AND KAT LOPEZ B‘27 are Not Safe. That’s for sure.
CINEMA IN CAPTIVITY
A CONVERSATION WITH PHILLIP VANCE SMITH II
( TEXT LUCA SUAREZ
DESIGN SEOYEON KWEON
ILLUSTRATION ZOE GILMORE )
c When most people imagine watching movies in prison, they likely envision an environment ripped straight from the silver screen itself: a dingy rec room filled with rowdy inmates crowded around a rickety old projector, their faces illuminated by the flickering images. Prisons have often been used as dramatic backdrops for cinematic narratives, serving as sites of drama, adventure, and grueling hardship in films such as The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and even Paddington 2. But the aspects of prison life that are so intriguing to outside spectators are exactly what imprisoned moviegoers are looking to escape. Whether as a form of entertainment or a source of deeper reflection, movies offer incarcerated individuals a brief escape from a world that constantly oscillates between danger and drudgery. However, access to cinematic fantasy is heavily restrained by prison regulations and financial exploitation, transforming something as simple as watching a movie into a burden.
Recently, the communal spaces and shared experiences of prison film screenings have started to be phased out by a corporation called ViaPath, the second-largest prison communications company in the United States. Surpassed only by its competitor, Securus Technologies, ViaPath is notorious for overcharging incarcerated individuals and their families for phone and video “visitation” services. By the end of 2019, ViaPath Technologies and Securus Technologies controlled roughly 80 percent of the entire market for phone and video calls in U.S. prisons. However, in 2023, after facing pressure from prison activist groups to address the exorbitant rates of the companies’ services, the Biden administration granted the Federal Communications Commission
(FCC) the ability to limit the cost of prison calls nationwide. Less than a year later, the Fourth Circuit Court revived a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) case against both ViaPath and Securus for illegal price-fixing in the prison telecom industry. With their main source of revenue under attack, both companies have started offering tablets and digital media services to prisons in order to regain profits and avoid scrutiny from activists. While tablets are provided to inmates for free, they must purchase bundles of minutes in order to stream any films from a preselected catalog. ViaPath’s Premium App Bundle charges $10 for 500 minutes of film, which are voided if not used up within 30 days of purchase. New releases can be viewed on the Premium Access Pass, which charges $8 for 200 minutes of film and expires within 96 hours. Prisoners in North Carolina currently make between $0.05 and $0.38 per hour for their labor, ranking the state among the bottom 10 for prison wages nationwide.
It’s been over 23 years since Phillip Vance Smith II set foot in a movie theater, but that hasn’t stopped him from highlighting how the dubious business practices of corporations like ViaPath have negatively impacted the cinematic experiences of incarcerated individuals. Smith, who has been serving a life sentence without parole in North Carolina since 2002, has spent his time in prison using journalism as a tool for resistance, advocacy, and change. As a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, a Smart Justice Fellow with the ACLU of North Carolina, and the former editor of the Nash News prison newspaper, he works diligently to write and edit articles that shed light on the daily challenges incarcerated individuals face. In his 2024 article “Streaming Behind Bars,”
Smith recalls how the introduction of ViaPath tablets transformed communal film screenings into a solitary experience, criticizing the exploitative nature of the streaming economy. He lamented: “I rarely watch films on the tablet. I can’t afford to. I earn 40¢ a day as a dorm janitor. I can’t sacrifice a stick of deodorant to watch a bad miniseries called Knights of Bloodsteel.”
For the past month, I have maintained regular correspondence with Phillip to discuss some of these issues. After reading each other’s published work, we formed a sense of camaraderie that often made our conversations the highlight of my week. Our discussions typically centered around journalism, literature, cinema, and media within the carceral state, but as time went by, they began to delve into the more personal aspects of our respective lives. Like me, Phillip is balancing a college workload alongside writing his articles, and when I needed advice on writing this piece, he was the first person I asked. This week, I spoke with Phillip about his experiences with film in prison to gain some more insight into the importance and impact of cinema behind bars.
(Note: Questions marked with asterisks were flagged by the prison’s censorship algorithm as possible risks and had to be manually approved by staff. Some of Phillip’s writing has been edited for clarity.)
Luca Suarez: Do you remember your first time watching a film in prison? What was it like?*
Phillip Vance Smith II: I watched Wild Wild West [starring] Will Smith at Polk Youth Center in 1999 on a reel-to-reel projector in the gym. The sound was horrible, and so was the image. They played it on a shiny cinderblock wall. I remember thinking that it
was the worst movie I ever saw. I never went back to watch another movie at Polk.
LS: What connections or bonds have you formed with fellow inmates over cinema?*
PVS: I did bond with a good friend over American Fiction. We both had read the original book, Erasure He is white. The story is not an urban film depicting black men as hyper-masculine alphas, so most of the population hated the movie. I loved it because it showed a side of black culture that we don’t normally see on TV, which is close to how I was raised in uppermiddle-class America.
LS: What movies do your fellow inmates watch? Do they view film as a form of entertainment, escape, or something else?*
PVS: Man, we watch movies all day. There’s nothing else to do. TV is a babysitter. We have two TVs. One for sports, the other for movies. We watch whatever is on network TV because most people can’t afford to watch movies on ViaPath tablets. We watch BET, Paramount, Bounce, FX, etc. As I write this, they are watching A Quiet Place. Ma just went off. Yesterday we watched Iron Man for the 1,500,000th time. Any superhero or heist movie will get precedence. Action, drama, and comedy rule here. Where I’d like to see Citizen Kane, they want to watch Fast X. In short, we watch whatever is available… even the dreaded Lifetime network.
ViaPath offers hundreds of movies on the tablets. Most are a decade old. If you pay $8 for 200 minutes, you can watch pseudo-new releases. They posted a list of ‘new’ movies available on this package, starting March 3: Afraid, Out of my Mind, Piece by Piece, The Wild Robot, Transformers One, Venom: The Last Dance, Past Lives, The Canterville Ghost, A Love Story, and Cyrano. I’ve never heard of most of them. I might watch Cyrano That’s it. They added The Fall Guy in December. I still haven’t watched it. Not enthused at all.
I rarely have time to watch TV. I have a job, I write, and I am finishing a degree through correspondence courses. When I do, it’s for entertainment. It’s hard to escape, so to speak, because someone is always yelling or fighting. We are never away from prison.
LS: What are some movies you wish you could see?*
PVS: Offhand, I’d like to see Ong-Bak, John Wick 4, Avatar 2, and Monkey Man. I really don’t know what’s out there. I also want to watch all the Game of Thrones, Power, and The Wire. Never seen those.
LS: Are there any particular characters or stories in films that you connect with on a personal level?*
PVS: I identify most with characters fighting for a cause, like Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah, or characters that overcome hardship, like Richard Williams in King Richard
LS: If you could make a movie about life in prison, what would you want it to expose that other films often overlook?
PVS: Prison is a microcosm of the outside, with the exception that totalitarian rule in the carceral setting is accepted. If I were to make a movie about prison, I would focus on the indifference of correctional staff (officers, nurses, wardens, etc...). Many staff members are good people who just want to work a job. Many will help you, if they can. But some could[n’t] care less if you live or die. Those are the people we have to interact with if we are sick, if our elderly mother needs help walking into visitation and we aren’t allowed to get up from the table, or if we need information about our release and our case manager is having too bad of a day to cooperate. Minor problems like that weigh on us and make many [of] us react negatively. There is a caveat: years on the job may have caused this indifference, so their actions may not be born from spite, but burnout.
LS: Do you think the films about prison that you’ve seen in prison accurately reflect the reality of incarceration? What objectives do you think these films hope to achieve through their depictions?*
PVS: The two most accurate prison movies I’ve seen are Sing Sing and a British film called Starred Up Starred Up is ultra-real until act two, when it gets unrealistic. Most films either try to paint prisons as a wholly evil place where only nefarious things happen, or they focus on the characters as supposed tough guys trying to get over. While these elements exist, films often lose the human aspect of the incarcerated person. No character is more cookie-cutter than the prisoner. Prisons typically serve as a backdrop for a grander story, a situation, if you will, where the hero must overcome oppressors—guards or inmates—not necessarily oppression. Sing Sing does the best at showing the human aspect of prison. Brubaker depicts corruption in prison. And Cool Hand Luke shows how a person must overcome prison to keep his sanity. Not many films incorporate all three elements.
LS: Has there been a scene in a film that you’ve found yourself replaying in your mind over and over, almost like a mental anchor? What about it sticks with you?
PVS: At the end of 12 Years A Slave, Solomon enters his home as a broken man to see his family after returning from slavery. His apology is heartbreaking, because he couldn’t control the ordeal he endured, or how it affected his family, much like incarceration. In Sing Sing, when Coleman Domingo’s character is released and is riding home in a car, he stares out the window, taking it all in. I covet that feeling each day of my life inside.
LS: How does the carceral system use cinema as a tool to control or manipulate the prison population?
PVS: By withholding it. Films and tablets are considered privileges in prison. If they don’t want you to see something, you won’t see it. But honestly, incarcerated people are no more malleable than the average person. It’s not censorship in the sense that withholding something is deprivation. We see everything they won’t approve on tablets on cable TV, and we make up our own minds about what we see. We are not impressionable children who will randomly body slam someone because we saw The Rock do it on TV. Most of the movies we watch are on cable TV with nudity and violence. I never saw anyone fight after watching John Wick 3, Ip Man, or Black Hawk Down. It was entertainment. We want to be entertained like anyone else. Prisons know that. They censor things because they can, and it allows them to give the illusion that they are controlling everything we do. Prison systems are obsessed with the idea of control. They believe controlling every aspect of the conditions in which we live will enable them to control our conduct. But all censorship does is make us resent the censor.
In some prisons we can’t watch BET or other Black channels. The prisons say those channels show ‘gang situations.’ Yet we can watch The Town about Irish bank robbers, Yellowstone, which is smut TV at its best, or Goodfellas about the Italian mob. All of those contain ‘gang situations.’ So what’s the difference?
LS: Do you think cinema is more influential as a means of igniting social change or as a tool to placate the masses?
PVS: To placate the masses. The public knows nothing of the simple structure of films: plot points, the hero’s journey, etc… They want to be entertained.
Every movie has hidden meanings that could ignite social change, but we rarely view cinema as a vehicle for social change, unless we’re watching a Michael Moore [documentary], in which social change is its sole purpose.
Ask any bouncy, deadlocked youth serving prison time about the meaning of Scarface. They’ll say, “Tony
Montana was that dude!” They may excitedly recount his exploits in gangsterism. But few, if any, realize that, thematically, Scarface was an exposé of the failures of immigration during America’s beef with Fidel Castro. It is a depiction of how ‘some’ immigrants built the glories of Miami with drug money.
But wait… it goes deeper. The Al Pacino Scarface is a remake of [the] Scarface produced by the infamous Howard Hughes. Instead of Cubans dealing coke, it was Sicilians bootlegging liquor. The original was about immigration, too, but no one noticed because they were entertained by all the gangster stuff.
LS: Clearly, prisons view film as a potential catalyst for violence and unrest, but do you believe it has the capacity for longterm change? Can film change our perception of the world for the better?
PVS: Long-term change depends on the individual, if you’re talking about rehabilitation. What programs or entertainment a person is exposed to plays a role, but it depends on how the person synthesizes what they encounter.
Films impact me long-term, because I appreciate how art imitates and guides life. For instance, I just watched The Theory of Everything about Stephen Hawking. After watching his body deteriorate into a prison that his mind desperately tried to escape, I tied it with my own fight for release from incarceration. I felt his powerlessness, his frustration, and his resilience. Juxtaposing our experiences made one of the last lines he said mean so much more: “Where there is life, there is hope.” It is advice to keep on living, no matter what life throws at you. It felt like a cheat code to success.
+++
You can read more of Phillip’s writing on his website or his Substack, which I have attached below. I asked if he wanted me to include a QR code instead, and here was his response:
“I have no QR Code. Sorry. Don’t know what that is. I been in the clink for 23 years, kid. Wtf is a QR Code? Something Elon Musk invented? Lmao!”
Website: phillipvancesmith2.com
Substack: “Prison Life Unlocked”
LUCA SUAREZ B’26 is rewatching Scarface
Graph-o-Mania
Visualizing Blue Crabs in the Providence River Estuary
c I have, on my desktop, a folder called “Visualizations”: it’s a chaotic archive of charts, graphs, and figures, each labeled with cryptic names like “propm2f_salgroup_ seine21-23.png.” Most of them were created in a frenzy of data exploration—an attempt to untangle years of messy fieldwork and make sense of a shifting ecosystem.
For the past two years, I’ve been studying the Providence River Estuary with The Nature Conservancy in Rhode Island. From May to October, we visit twelve sites along the Providence and Seekonk Rivers, casting a 130-foot seine net along urban beaches. When we haul it in, we count and measure whatever fish and crustaceans we’ve caught. The seine survey, running since 2017, primarily monitors juvenile fish populations, but I’ve been focused on one subject in particular: the blue crab.
The scientific name for this species, Callinectes sapidus, means “beautiful swimmer,” and they are—their blue bodies are equipped with elegant paddles for
swimming and powerful orange-tipped claws for crushing prey. As waters warm, many marine species are responding by changing where they live. While culturally associated with the mid-Atlantic, some argue these crabs are starting to make a splash here in New England as their territory stretches northward. More crabs might not be a bad thing; this species is the most valuable seafood commodity in the Chesapeake Bay, making millions for commercial fishermen each year. But, as an aggressive predator and scavenger, increased numbers of the crab in New England could also have unpredictable consequences for local ecosystems.
The truth is, climate change promises to change ecosystems in ways that surpass our predictions and expectations. Very few scientists have looked into the role of this species in the Providence River Estuary, a gap in our understanding that will only become more glaring as they mount in number. The potential opportunities and consequences they pose to the ecological/economic function of this region possessed me, driving me to comb through years of survey data looking for patterns. As I searched, my investigation became both more complex and more
refined. My project initially focused narrowly on sex—I wanted to confirm my anecdotal observation that the seines seemed to be turning up more males than females. But now, after many iterations, I’ve clarified my scope of inquiry, examining how salinity levels affect the abundance, size, and sex ratio of the blue crab population.
The visualizations shown here are a record of the evolution of my project. They range from early drafts of graphs produced during my first summer of research, to sprawling monstrosities that sank under their own weight, to the final(ish) versions of the few that will make it into the ecology paper I’m trying to write.
In Graphesis, scholar of visual knowledge production Johanna Drucker writes: “most information visualizations are acts of interpretation masquerading as presentation.” These drafts, scraps of thoughts that never went anywhere, and attempts to make something both beautiful and intelligible out of thousands of entries in a database pull back the curtain on that interpretive process.
This is one of the three visualizations that appears in the final version of my research. It displays four histograms that show the length distribution of crabs split by sex and by salinity regime. I lean on this pri marily to show that crabs tend to be lon ger at polyhaline sites than at mesohaline sites. The sharp cut off in the two subplots representing mesohaline sites also shows that the net we used in this survey excludes most crabs smaller than 10 mm – the drop-off is artificially created by the limitations of our methodology.
( TEXT WILL MALLOY DESIGN ASH MA )
This histogram is essentially a precursor to the histogram on the other side of the page – a simpler representation of my interest in analyzing what factors might influence the lengths of crabs. It was made before I really got interested in thinking about salinity. The curves of the male and female distributions are very similar, which shows that the male and female crabs tend to be similar sized. However, at every length, there are more males than females. The histogram, therefore, makes two separate points—about length distribution and abundance by sex—but each rather weakly.
This visualization was produced sometime late in Summer 2024, late in the data exploration phase. I was becoming more comfortable working in R and was intoxicated by the power of the function “facet_grid(),” which allows you to split visualizations into a grid of multiple analogous plots according to different variables. In this, for example, each small histogram shows the length distribution of crabs for a particular combination of month and site. The result is a monstrously large, difficult to interpret, yet somewhat intriguing super-visualization. Each cell is so small that it’s almost unreadable on its own, but it does look like there are more crabs in the first four sites in May and many more crabs in the following four sites in July and August. Maybe there’s something interesting there? More than anything, though, it’s a product of my excitement about getting more comfortable in R.
These stacked bar charts show what proportion of the catch was male and female in each month, split by salinity group (mesohaline is lower salinity, while polyhaline is higher salinity). This visual, along with the neighboring one, exposes both the power and the limitations of continuously splitting the data up by more and more variables. Mostly, the proportions can be dangerously misleading. Each bar is the same height – out of 1.00 – which hides that each bar may represent very different numbers of crabs. For example, this graph shows that, in October 2021, 100% of crabs caught at mesohaline sites were female and 100% caught at polyhaline sites were male – which is true, because there was only 1 female and 3 males captured in October 2021. Meanwhile, the equivalent graphs from August 2021 represent a total of 103 crabs. This visualization implies that the subplots are comparable, but a more careful consideration of the data reveals that such comparison would be misleading.
If it seems like these two boxplots are the same it’s because they essentially are. They show that, on average, the temperature measurements taken at mesohaline and polyhaline sites were very similar, with a similar and had a very similar amount of variance. While Both visually boring and conceptually simple, these boxplots nonetheless became critical in my analysis. To make a strong claim that salinity drives differences in populations, I have to show that other factors are not different between sites. In other words, if temperature was extremely different between these two groups of sites, how could I claim that it was salinity that was driving those differences rather than other physical characteristics, like temperature or dissolved oxygen?
WILL MALLOY B’25 prefers low salinity environments.
TARINI TIPINS B’26 is receiving prophecies.
WELCOME TO THE WANDERGROUND
A conversation with the librarians of
New England’s lesbian archive/library
Tucked behind the inconspicuous wooden door of a business complex in Cranston is a set of rooms covered wall-to-wall with posters, art prints, and a sign that reads “women working.” Shelves and tables brimming with boxes, books, T-shirts, and CDs. The space is called the Wanderground, a community archive whose mission is to “gather the stories of New England Lesbians and protect legacies which might otherwise be forgotten.”
On February 15, I sat down with Mev, Instigator Lesbrarian, and M’lyn, Wanderground Groundskeeper and Steward on the Amazon Steward Council (the board of directors for the archive). The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Cindy:
I have some questions about the archive itself, but I think it would be nice to start with both of your journeys as lesbians. What has your life been like and what led you to this time and this place?
Mev:
At a very young age, I realized the inequity between how girls and boys are treated, and that just stuck [with me]. Plus, being a hefty tomboy, they tried to girl me out, but I didn’t like that so much either. And when I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, there wasn’t the language for [lesbianism]. Given where I was living, a really conservative Roman Catholic family, I decided at that point I was not going to ever have children (I was the oldest of seven, and I was sick and tired of it already). That meant I didn’t have to date boys, because the only reason to date boys was to get married and have children (I’m ten, so this is making sense). I just decided that I was not interested in boys. I didn’t know I was a lesbian; I just knew I wasn’t going to do what was expected of me in that generation. It wasn’t until my early twenties when I started figuring out sex because [up until that point] I [had] just ignored sexuality. I went to an all-girls school. I was almost a nun, so I loved anything that had to do with where girls hung out. With girls and women, I was totally happy. And in mixed groups, I was completely miserable. Having been able to go to an all-girls high school and an all-women’s college, I was safe in a way, [especially] because college was very much supporting women’s agency, power, education, assertiveness, and all those things. That’s how I grew up: being in a situation where I didn’t necessarily have to acquiesce to what boys wanted. That said, I was certainly acquiescing to what my father and my siblings expected, but I did what I could to rail against it. When I finally figured out lesbianism, then it all fell into place. When I did come out, I was a radical feminist lesbian right from the jump. And this would have been in [the] late 70s, early 80s.
To give a glimpse of a visit to the Wanderground and my conversation with Mev and M’lyn, I curated this visual snapshot. Object descriptions in this article are based on my conversation with Mev and M’lyn, the Wanderground’s online catalogue, and additional notes from Mev.
M’lyn:
Some similar threads and some different parts of our journey. I was not a tomboy, but I was a feminist from the get-go, and the injustice in this world—the differential treatment, the difference in opportunities and attitudes, the lens through which girls were judged and valued—was so scathingly, clearly misogynist. I didn’t know that word yet, but I knew the meaning of that word. And I was a lone voice. Every single girl would vocalize, “I wish I were a boy.” It had nothing to do with gender dysphoria. It was about injustice. It was about, “you mean I can be a wife, a secretary or a teacher? Nurse? Why? What do you mean I can’t play sports?” There were no sports for girls in school until I was in high school. I was a raging feminist. I was 14 [when] I found out that women didn’t have equal rights under the Constitution. And I found out because of religion class. By 15, I was a community organizer for the McGovern campaign. I definitely knew I was different, but “lesbian” was not a word. We had nothing. We had no role models. We didn’t even have the negative stereotypes because there was silence. Complete silence.
My next part of the journey was when I somehow found out about the Women’s Liberation Union (WLU) and I sent them a letter. I tried college, dropped out of college. I was a VISTA volunteer and doing community organizing and activism work. But I was very frustrated because I was in a bunch of leftist organizations, and the men in leftist organi zations were just as sexist, just as misogynist as the men who didn’t care about politics or progressivism. I was just enraged. And I somehow stumbled across [the WLU and] sent them a letter, and I got a phone call from Maureen Crimmins.
Mev: Oh, wow.
M’lyn:
So then I became an activist in feminist organiza tions, and I began marching in pride marches. I still thought I was straight. Had no interest in dating guys,
though, because, of course, they’re all misogynists. Let’s dig them. Right? I just couldn’t imagine being intimate with someone who thought, by virtue of his penis and my clitoris, he was better than me. No. I didn’t come out until a couple of years after being involved in feminism. It was all [about] that deep seated cry for fairness. Equity.
Mev:
My activism was a lot slower coming. I didn’t use the word “misogyny” because I didn’t know it. But I knew something was not right in the world. I didn’t have any access to any groups because my family was pretty secluded. We were conventional, I guess… the word to say [is] “conservative.” I didn’t have any role models for activism, either. And it wasn’t until I moved away from my parents’ house to Detroit— that would have been 1977—that I went to work for a university.
There are leftist Catholics in some way[s]. That’s where I got radicalized [and] learned a lot of language and could put some theory around what I was feeling. It was like getting hit with a firehose. I had a really tumultuous three years because I was really off my center; there was just too much that I was so hungry for. Plus, I was having a really bad experience with my first girlfriend, so I was in emotional, psychological, and theoretical turmoil all the way around. I did get involved in a women’s ordination conference, which was a Catholic movement of women
who said women should be allowed into the priesthood. That moved my spiritual journey from being a devout Roman Catholic to being a feminist pagan. I left Christianity completely after.
Cindy:
You’ve touched on how your lesbian identity and political activism have changed over time in relation to each other. What are some lessons you’ve learned over the course of your political lives that you think young people could learn from today?
M’lyn:
One of the things you said made me think about the WLU. A lot of the women there were lesbian. A lot of the women there were straight, but all of the women were feminist. All of them had removed, to the best of their ability, the blinders that this culture had placed upon them. To be in a space where you are free to be yourself, where you feel completely safe, deeply respected; when you lift your voice, your sisters listen thoughtfully, and when they respond or share something new, you value what is in their hearts to share—that is a rare gift. And I got that gift because I was politically active. I’m not saying it can’t happen anywhere else; that’s [just] where I found it and what I learned from the WLU. It sounds so trite and so cliché, but yes, every one of us makes a difference in the choices that we make. If you’re staying home because it feels too overwhelming, scary, and threatening, then you are left with the feeling of powerlessness, selfishness, and narcissism. But if you join with others, you can discover that actually there are things you can do. You can let go of that narrow focus and make a difference and grow. It’s so empowering to get engaged.
Mev:
I agree with all of that: having courage and passion. One of the things I see happening today is that [if] somebody pisses you off, you run away from them. We were not good in our generation about talking and understanding. I remember so vividly the time when a Black woman friend of mine called me out on my racism, and I stood there and listened to what she had to say. And that helped me really under stand how I, as a white woman, was not understanding how what I was doing was racist, because I didn’t see it. She called me out on it. The willingness to be called out and really listen and understand what the speaker is saying makes it a little harder for you to just walk away from someone. The frustration I have had with gender studies in the academy is that it’s become so high theory that you can’t even find your way through it. For a lot of women and lesbians, that’s really disengaging. There are ways you can talk theory and not get so out there with the language. Having real conversations about real stories, real lives—
back to. We used to call [these conversations] “consciousness-raising groups,” women talking to each other about their raw experiences. That’s how the battered women movement got started. “Oh, you’re being beaten up by your boyfriend, your husband, your brother, your…” and “we’re not going to take this anymore.” By raising consciousness around those issues, that’s where a lot of [community and activism] came up from. Really listening: listening to understand rather than listening to respond. Not that any of us did it all that well. I mean, I remember being in really contentious conversations with other lesbians. But once we stopped and stepped back to think about it, [we realized] “You know what? I think you’re right about that. I could learn from that.” We did a lot of programs together: reading groups, self-education, connecting with lives that were not like our own, learning from writings of women or lesbians that we would not necessarily encounter in our day to day. That’s really useful.
M’lyn: It’s helpful to find a way of living outside of your experience. I [have] found myself in circumstances where I was the only white person in the room, and that opened my eyes to what it might have felt like for the kids I knew growing up who were the only Black kid in my classroom, and I had never given a thought. When I lived in Kentucky, in rural, poverty stricken Kentucky, and when I lived and organized in South Providence and [the] West End, each time, you just shut up and you go to serve.
Cindy:
Sometimes the everyday is a strong political action. I’m so in tune with that right now because a very dear friend of mine passed away this past week, and she was one of the co-owners, co-founders of Bloodroot, a feminist vegetarian bookstore and restaurant. They lived out their feminism. They have an ethics around the environment, food, and cooking. And they lived as a collective. Some lesbians have come and gone, [so] that collective changed over time, but Selma— who just passed away—she was the constant [alongside] her strong business partner, work partner, lover, Noel. They really saw a vision and lived the vision. What does that mean for them? They live practically in poverty because their margin of income is very slim. They pay their workers before they pay themselves. They work a lot. They’re there all the time. But parades of people would come through, and they have a very strong commitment to the work that they are doing. They’ve had a huge impact on the world, even though when you look at them, they’re just funky little restaurant owners who wear hand-me-downs and go to the thrift shop, and all the dishes in the restaurant are things that they bought at Goodwill. I think this is true for a lot of the women’s bookstores: long hours and little pay, no benefits. And I think that’s [something] we were all willing to do…in order to make it work.
Being able to have conversations where you can sort of distill what is misogyny, patriarchy, capitalism, what [are] all of these things and the impact [they have] on our lives—sorting that stuff is really complicated. Being able to think critically, analyze carefully, and…pull away the threads of what can be women-centered, women-powered—how would that work differently if we could really extract [ourselves] from the patriarchy?
Yeah, I’m really grateful to be here. Being at RISD, people [here] feel like they don’t have to [be a part of the city]. They’re not a part of Providence. They’re not a part of Rhode Island. And that sentiment of “I’m here as a student for four years, and I’m going somewhere better to do something better,” that really frustrates me. I want to go out and learn, and that’s what I’m hoping to do here at the Wanderground. Which is also why it was important to me to reach out first as a volunteer before reaching out as a journalist, because I want to be committed to this place as a community member.
To circumvent laws prohibiting women-only congregations, Bloodroot established the G Knapp Historical Society. G Knapp Historical Society hosted “members-only” private gath- erings for its all female membership. According to Mev, “G Knapp” was a
This compilation was made to help fundraise for Respond Inc, a non profit organization that provides confidential, free services to victims of domestic violence.
From 1982 - 1992, Mev was an employee at Bloodroot, a vegetarian restaurant and bookstore owned by a Lesbian collective in Bridgeport, CT. This hat was likely made in the 1990s and purchased on one of her later visits.
woman executed in Connecticut after being accused of witchcraft, not far from the grounds of the restaurant.
M’lyn:
I’m grateful you’re here.
Cindy:
To move this conversation closer to the Wanderground: how did the Wanderground come about? I thought it was an archive, but there is clearly a distinction between what the Wanderground does versus what Brown’s or RISD’s archives do. Perhaps not just what the Wanderground is, but also what the Wanderground isn’t?
Mev:
I would say the biggest distinction, and one that I’ve been adamant about, is that we are community-based. You can walk in and see stuff. You can touch. [You don’t have to] feel alienated from the stories and the materials that are here. In terms of how it started, I’ve held a dream like [the Wanderground] since I lived in New Haven. At that point I wanted to start some kind of lesbian women’s center, but it didn’t happen. I have been in the Women in Print Movement since [the] early 80s, doing various things related to feminist and lesbian publishing. I worked at Bloodroot for ten years. I worked at Amazon Feminist Bookstore in Minneapolis [as] a cooperative owner and buyer. As a result, I collected
a lot of stuff. Somehow I knew it was valuable and I needed to hold on to it. It’s changing now as we’re open and more people are seeing and giving us stuff. But I would estimate that 80, 85 percent of the stuff that’s here is out of my personal collection. I’m old; I need to say the value of [everything] now while I still remember, for one thing, but also to share with larger communities. So many young people have said, “I’ve never seen this before.” Even lesbians of our generation have said, “I never saw this before.” I don’t know what this is, but because I have some weird, quirky shit in here I’ve gotten over time, everything has a story behind it.
Mev:
In 2021, I was able to get a research grant from Rhode Island Humanities. My question was: if I were to do an archive, would anybody come? The results I got [was] basically yes, please do this. One person, who was a little snarky, said, “You could find everything on the internet.” No, you can’t. Ever since, I have started talking about it and getting folks interested. Initially, the idea was to get a bigger space and find a permanent home [for the collection]. But [the Amazon Steward Council] talked me off the ledge and said maybe we just need a workspace for now, because everything was in my house. Now, others can look at it [and] enjoy it, [and] I can still have access to it. I can tell the stories behind it. I can get others to tell their stories, which is one of the things we’re working on with the grant that we have right now. I was [also] a radio DJ for ten years, so I have CDs and albums—I need to do something with this while I still can. I think it’s also a good time [now] because there’s a lot of young people like yourself who are really interested in this stuff. There has not been access necessarily to lesbian herstory, and there is this desire to know and to talk to us old gals.
And I think the other thing that’s important to me about this is that there are no lesbian spaces around here. I’ve heard anger and dismay, actually, from some younger lesbians who are upset that there aren’t the bookstores, festivals, concerts, bars, this or that. I’m really angry that I can’t go to someplace. There’s a lot of stuff out there that’s queer or LGBTQ, but having a space that’s identifiably lesbian is something I think there is interest in. That’s the other [connection to the] Wanderground. [The name is from] the title of a book, The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women by Sally Miller Gearhart. [The book is] about what happens when women live together with no men in their communities, what are the powers they have, and how do they have conversations? In the book, they can link minds and fly. There’s something really thought-provoking about what [we could do] if left to our own devices because it’s asking us to ponder, what could women be if women were not defined by patriarchy? What power could we have as a community?
Cindy:
What has the cataloging process been like? What does it look like now on a daily basis?
M’lyn:
We’re just getting started. What is missing here that I really want to get more of is personal papers, diaries, journals, letters, photographs of lesbians from the New England region. A lot of lesbians from our generation have already donated their stuff to Lesbian Herstory Archives or Sylvia Smith or Brown, so the pickings may be a little slim, but I think there’s always somebody who finds a box somewhere that they’ve forgotten about or something they weren’t willing to let go of. Even if you decide not to give it to Wanderground, it should be put someplace, you can decide according to your interests where the best place is.
And one of the things that I love about [collecting donations is that] we become not just a community archive, but a community-driven archive. Lesbians in the New England community decide what’s in the archive by contributing [ephemera] and telling the stories and the context about [them]. That really excites me, because then we get such a rich understanding of the lesbian experience in this time period.
I think the first 18 months, the Council spent a lot of time laying the groundwork. How do we explain why we’re here, what our mission is, what our vision is, and how do we accept things? All [the infrastructure] had to be built. And then it was “we need space.” Now we have space, [but we need] more volunteers to come in. And so we’re building that system. Also, now we need more money. That’s another thing of our day-to-day: it’s a lot of grants. We also need to be raising money in other ways besides grants; we need to find a way [to] sustain this going forward.
Mev:
That’s one of the big challenges that’s sitting in front of me right now. We got this far; how do we move it forward? My time on this planet is maybe another 20 years or so, and the older you are, the faster the time goes on. Realistically, I’ve had people who have said to me, “I would really love to give you my stuff, but what’s your plan?” What happens if I’m not here anymore to curate it, then who’s next? How does the organization continue forward? [Does it] embrace the mission as we’ve defined it? Logistically, if some horrible thing happens where Wanderground can’t sustain [itself] and has to close, then what happens to the stuff? [This] is another message to [the] youth: [don’t] be afraid to take leadership and ownership. The reason why I am where I am in life is because I’ve said, “I can do this. I don’t have to have somebody to tell me what to do. I’m going to figure it out myself. I’ll talk to people to get their ideas and their input.” That to me is what being a successful leader and organizer is—somebody who gets a lot of information from a lot of people and can distill it in a way that makes sense. The more you can embrace the challenge, take the responsibility, offer and listen to suggestions, and then combine all those things to come up with an even better idea—I think that’s how a movement moves forward. That’s how places come into being.
The Amazon Bookstore was a feminist bookstore in Minneapolis that served as hub for the Women in Print Movement and a safe gathering space. In 1999 The Amazon Bookstore won a case against Amazondotcom for $500,000, on the condition that they rename the store to “Amazon Bookstore Cooperative”. Mad Wimmin Books in Allison Bechdel’s series Dykes to Watch Out For is based on this bookstore.
The Lesbian Power Authority (LPA), hosted by Mev, aired on KFAI radio in Minneapolis from January 1994 through July 2002. This is one of the many tracklists that Mev hand-wrote daily and a photo of Mev on the last day of the show, July 14th, 2002.
Wanderground: Stories of Hill Women
Sudie Rakusin.
M’lyn:
When I was a young person, something that moved me forward was doing things I was afraid to do, things I didn’t think I could do. But because I felt passionate about the cause, and a body was needed to take on a responsibility, [I took] it on. And then you just ask a thousand questions and seek help everywhere you can. If we wait until we’re ready to do something, it doesn’t ever happen, right?
Mev:
That phrase, “Build the plane while you’re flying it.” There are so many lesbians I’ve talked to that said, “If I knew then what I know now, I never would have done it” because there’s a sense that we have to be perfect, organized, and well-informed. Everything has to be in place before we try to do something. No, just get off your butt and do it, and you’ll figure it out as you go along. Will you make mistakes? Absolutely. Will you learn what not to do? Absolutely. But in the meantime, you’re moving forward and making the thing that you want to make, whatever it is. I mean, how many times do you have to wipe the canvas clear and start all over again? You wouldn’t have gotten that far if you hadn’t tried ten things that didn’t work until you found the one thing that did work.
Cindy:
My slightly oddball question: if a group of very intelligent aliens who have no background on the human experience arrived on Earth and came to visit the Wanderground, what story about lesbian life do you hope they can learn from the archive?
Mev:
We are happy and joyful, content with ourselves. We are funny. We enjoy each other’s company. We have a lot of serious thought, political engagement, and theo retical knowledge; but we also have a lot of creativity, art, and expression in a variety of different ways.
M’lyn:
We have survived. That makes us strong and our hearts soft, compassionate, and open for others.
In the Mighty Queer Pack instead of kings, and maids instead of jacks. The pack comes with unique illustrations for all the face cards, a set of rules for playing: “CANSTA—THE LESBIAN RULZ: As played at the Lesbian Summer Camp, 1991, and com monly known as ‘Christ-church Dyke rules.’” The pack also instructs: “HAPPY PLAYING! Don’t forget that rules are meant for breaking, and Lesbians are good at that!”
We offer support and care.
M’lyn:
And make great music together.
Mev:
We have a lot of color, there’s a lot of diversity. You would say “what is this collection of oddballs” because we’re all very different, and we enjoy being different together.
M’lyn:
I like that. We enjoy being different together.
Mev:
Yeah. And that’s okay.
M’lyn:
And I want those aliens to know that we accept donations [in] all forms of currency.
Mev:
M’lyn:
Yeah, I really like that.
Mev:
Somebody said that… was that Flo Kennedy? “Making good trouble together.”
Cindy: What do you think the future of this archive will look like? And how do you hope people experience [the Wanderground] in the future?
M’lyn:
Although we haven’t quite gotten to crypto yet. Yes, we need money, but I think there are a lot of other valuable things that lesbians, women can bring to this space. Whether it be their ability to facilitate a group, organize, get into the minutiae doing detailed work in a catalog, or starting good trouble. I think there is lots of value in whatever anyone can bring. Even in terms of money: if you have three bucks and that’s what you have, that’s fine. We value everybody’s donation according to their means.
M’lyn:
That’s interesting because I think it’s kind of a class issue. And I don’t know if this is a gross generalization, but very often the people who give the most are
The future will be a bigger space with a lot of natural light, plants, and a coffee [or tea] shop. There will be spaces for people to just be secluded and comfy in their own minds, and there will be spaces for gathering. It will be a space that a lesbian can walk into and feel the weight of patriarchy roll off of her shoulders, whether she’s there to be by herself, explore things in the archives, or engage with other lesbians to learn something new or share something she knows.
Mev:
I would add: spaces to make, to explore, learning circles and conversation groups, or maybe larger events like concerts. More art on the walls. Colorful. Sometimes people like the darkness, some [areas of] somber atmosphere. The other thing that harkens back to the old days is a huge-ass community bulletin board overflowing [with] fliers, posters, jobs, and apartments.
My favorite things were the little fliers that had the phone number tags. You pull [the tab,] then you get home, like, I don’t remember what it was for. I’m supposed to call this number, but I have no idea why. Just a lot of opportunity for interaction.
M’lyn:
From 1981-1999, the North Eastern Women’s Musical Retreat(NEWMR) broughttogetherthe bestin women’s music, trade and showcase crafts. It served asaforumfordiscussionsandworkshopsonissues affectingthecommunity,andaplaceforself-exploration,affirmation,andcommunitybuilding.
And opportunities to engage in activism. Conversation that leads to organizing, that leads to action, that leads to change.
CINDY LI R’26 wants you to peruse the Wanderground’s digital archive and donate in your preferred currency at wanderground.org
Sometime in the 1990s, Mev purchased this cookie cutter. Years after moving from St.Paul MN to Rhode Island, Mev rediscovered it while making cookies for the Solstice. Only then did she realize who the artist was — her now friend, Thea Ernest.
This button was created by Giant Ass Publishing (Diane DiMassa) to ad vertise her comic books by the same name.
One of a series of greeting cards created by Alison Bechdel from her Dykes to Watch Out For Series
In reference to the town’s high con- centration of Lesbians, Northampton, MA was named “Lesbianville” by Jaime Michaels and Susan McKenna in 1992. They sold this post card at a Lesbian and Pride March in 1993.
The Aurora Lampworks Softball team played in New Haven, CT from 1987- 1989, accruing a large following in the Lesbian community. Mev was a long-time player on the team.
Carnaval of the People
RECONCILING HISTORICAL INEQUALITIES WITH THE MODERN-DAY CELEBRATION
c Feathered headdresses, elaborate costumes, mesmerizing samba, and parades from day until night; from Rio de Janeiro to right here in Providence, the popularity and cultural reach of Brazilian Carnaval is undeniable. Historically, Carnaval is a celebration of the Portuguese, African, and Indigenous roots of Brazil, its mestiçagem (mixture). People of all backgrounds participate in Carnaval celebrations. From the extravagant parades in large cities like Rio to more informal street parties in smaller municipalities, Carnaval celebrations proudly display the diversity of Brazilian society. Most Brazilians view Carnaval as an authentic representation of Brasilidade: diversity, joy, and unity all in one space. My mom, who grew up in Brazil, compares Carnaval to the experience of “eating comfort food.”
Yet, this harmony coexists with the stark reality that Brazil is an exceptionally stratified society. Many people misconceive Brazil to be a ‘racial democracy,’ in which skin color does not matter. Marcelo Paixão, a professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, further explains that this concept stems from the “positive image that [Brazil] conveys for itself [...] as a land of cordiality, happiness, and racial integration.” Brazilians tend to be ethnically ambiguous, where one individual’s ancestry can be traced back to several diverse ethnic groups. Within my own family, there is variation in our outward ‘ethnic’ appearance, and our ancestry is mixed with Portuguese, Sephardic,¹ and Indigenous roots. However, this mestiçagem does not directly correspond to racial equality. Brazilian society is plagued by systemic racism and colorism: 63 percent of households headed by Black women exist below the poverty line, and 63 percent of children not attending school are Black. These patterns of inequality are reflected within the different regions of Brazil, where states with larger Black and Indigenous populations are significantly worse off than states with a predominantly white population.
My family is from Fortaleza, the capital of the Northeastern state of Ceará. In this region, as well as across the more rural Northern states, Brazil’s urbanrural divide is distinctly felt. On the drive from Pinto Martins International Airport to my grandmother’s apartment, houses built haphazardly into the mountainside—the favelas—suddenly turn into high-rises and guarded apartment buildings. The Southern states of the country, which include highly developed urban areas like Rio and São Paulo, vastly outperform their Northern counterparts. Despite comparable population sizes, 54.6 percent of Nordestinos (Northeastern Brazilians) lived in extreme poverty in 2022, compared to 23.8 percent of the Southeastern population. While the Brazilian economy has had a historically sharp economic divide between rural and urban, Northern and Southern, national income inequality is at an alltime high since the twenty-year-long military dictatorship. The combined wealth of the richest five percent in Brazil is equal to that of the remaining 95 percent of the population, and Brazil’s elite is accumulating wealth at three times the rate of its general population.
Carnaval arrived in Brazil through Portuguese colonization and originally emulated a Roman Catholic tradition that marked the beginning of Lent, the forty-day period to abstain from certain luxuries. From the Friday before Lent until its beginning on Ash Wednesday, people indulged in extravagant
festivities. During this celebration, immigrants from the Azores, Madeira, and Cabo Verde initiated the Entrudo (entry) festivals, which involved taking to the streets and throwing balls of flour and buckets of water onto each other. This precursor to contemporary Carnaval celebrations also included the poor and enslaved populations of Brazil, bringing together society across class and race. Many elements of Entrudo are visible in modern-day Carnaval; throwing eggs and flour at others is still common practice in certain parts of Brazil, like the Northeast. Yet, despite its popularity, Brazilians are generally ambivalent about the tradition. My mom remembers “dirty Carnaval” where her peers would bury eggs days before the parties so that they would rot and smell when broken. She dreaded the custom, as she disliked the feeling of sticky, pungent egg whites on her skin. However, my cousin Caroline affectionately refers to the tradition as “mela mela” (from the verb “to get messy”) and describes how her family would travel to Pacoti, a small town in the interior of Ceará, to visit her grandparents and participate in this beloved ritual alongside her sister and cousins. Though involved to a certain degree, Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous contributions were not always openly welcomed into the celebrations. During the 19th century, the upper classes began hosting bailes de carnaval, which were more organized parties restricted to the elite. They considered Entrudo an “unruly celebration,” and Rio went so far as to ban it. Carnaval no longer took place as parades in the streets; rather, marginalized groups like the working class, African immigrants, and descendants of enslaved people were segregated and forced to celebrate in private. This historical view of Carnaval as “unruly” and undesirable to the upper classes diverges drastically from the modern conception of Brazilian Carnaval, and I question why it is largely missing from mainstream discourses. As the middle class emerged in the late 20th century, Carnaval went back to its roots as a popular celebration that integrated all of society regardless of race or economic class.
The music genre that accompanied the spread of Carnaval was Samba. It originated from the days of Entrudo, beginning with candomblé—a spiritual dance associated with Angolan, Beninese, Congolese, and Nigerian traditions—practiced in settlements of escaped enslaved people called quilombos. The funk carioca and reggaeton heard at today’s large street parades were born from Samba. Whenever my mom works from home, she commands our Alexa to play her favorites: Alcione, Beth Carvalho, Gilberto Gil. Hearing the music makes her reminisce about her carnavals spent at Iguape Beach with her friends and cousins, dancing and laughing into the late hours of the night and early hours of the morning.
Growing up in the United States, I’ve always wanted to experience Brazilian Carnaval in person. When I was a kid, I used to dance around our living room pretending I was a rising dance star and a student of one of Rio’s famed samba schools. From the vantage point of a first generation BrazilianAmerican, I’m struck by the structural erasure of Carnaval’s more unsavory past. Not once in discussions about Carnaval have I heard about its significant history of discrimination. Beyond the flashy and joyful customs, there is no public space to reconcile the contradictions between past and present celebrations, to see the story of Carnaval in its entirety. Most importantly, learning about the stratified past of Carnaval provides insight into the fundamental issues of socioeconomic and racial inequality afflicting Brazil today. I imagine that actively acknowledging Carnaval’s evolution from something divisive to a unifying event can help Brazil move toward a more equitable and just society. The challenge lies in confronting and interrogating utopic depictions of Brazilian ‘racial democracy’ to truly fulfill the Carnavalian spirit of unity and equality.
LEAH FREEDMAN B’27 is still learning how to samba. (Sorry, Mom!)
Leah Freedman / My grandmother, Diana, in an elaborate costume and lipstick during Carnaval, 1955
Leah Freedman / Lilian (my mom, directly behind the little girl) with her siblings Cláudio (far left) and Lara (in front of my mom) and her first cousins in matching costumes for Carnaval, c. 1977
¹ Sephardic Jews are a Jewish diaspora population associated with the Iberian peninsula.
( TEXT LEAH FREEDMAN DESIGN LIZ SEPULVEDA )
A Body Without Organs, A Glittering Mass
Jay DeFeo’s The Rose
( TEXT ISABEL TRIBE DESIGN ESOO KIM )
c I was a sophomore in high school when I first encountered The Rose. It sat like a hulking gargoyle in a corner of the seventh floor in the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was supposedly a painting, but looked nothing like one. Described by the artist as a “marriage between painting and sculpture,” The Rose is a colossus of oil paint and mica carved into a starburst that radiates from the center of the canvas. Underneath all the layers of paint, it is rumored that the heart of The Rose is still wet.
It was upsetting to look at, like a desecrated relic or something salvaged from a fire. It was erupting, it was imploding, it was collapsing. It was governed by a feverish entropy. It reminded me of the casts of corpses uncovered at Pompeii.
Standing 11 feet tall, eight feet wide, nearly one foot deep, and sagging under the weight of more than 2,000 pounds of paint, The Rose is grotesque in size and gross in texture. With its gigantic fan-shaped ridges, The Rose resembles a nightmare rendition of the scallop shell in Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. While Botticelli’s scallop yielded the goddess of love and beauty, I wasn’t sure what kind of creature would arise from the depths of The Rose. It seemed equally capable of producing a pearl and spitting out a hunk of rotten meat. Where Botticelli’s scallop is blown to shore by the winged gods of the wind, The Rose was ushered into the world by more ominous forces—madness, obsession, fury. Had Aphrodite risen from this sordid bivalve, I imagined she would have cried, besieged by the repulsive darkness it seems to portend. And yet she very well could have emerged from The Rose (she is the goddess of roses, after all) because the painting also has an unplaceable, uncanny beauty to it.
It was easy to mythologize The Rose. I imagined it had been discovered rather than created, a
mysterious artifact retrieved from the seafloor or the moon. Perhaps it was the sealed portal to another world or some freakish fluke of geology. I sat staring at it for nearly an hour, fixated with growing unease on its pristine white center. I had half-convinced myself that if I turned away, The Rose would suck me in and swallow me between its alabaster teeth. I had the lurking sense that it was alive, a carnivorous plant with an unquenchable appetite—just put it under an x-ray, I thought, and you’d see its digestive system gurgling beneath the surface. If you disemboweled it, pulled out its intestines in yanking handfuls, what would you find squirming inside?
I parted from The Rose warily but returned to it often. Every time I visit the Whitney, I make my quiet pilgrimage to the seventh floor to gaze at The Rose and try to understand its thrall. It continues to provoke me in its massive silence, but I’ve grown fond of it. Its craggy, inscrutable face is an old friend. This is a painting with secrets. Some of these, I will tell you. +++
As much as I wanted to believe it, The Rose did not simply materialize out of the ether. Instead, this painting is the product of an eight-year obsession that took over the life of the beatnik artist Jay DeFeo.
A fixture of the Bay Area counterculture scene of the 1950s, DeFeo worked in a studio on Fillmore Street in San Francisco alongside other artists, jazz musicians, and writers. When Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl” at the Six Gallery in 1955, she was in the room, and her work hung on the walls. Though she was forced to contend with the stifling misogyny of the 1950s and ’60s, watching male peers gain acclaim while her work flew under the radar, DeFeo could hold her own in the boys’ club—even if such recognition was often as sexist as being ignored. The artist Billy Al Bengston recalled DeFeo as having “style, moxie, natural beauty and more ‘balls’ than anyone,” as if the only way to make it in the art world was to grow a pair.
DeFeo began working on The Rose, which she initially called Deathrose, in 1958. In its infancy, the painting bore little resemblance to the final product. “All I knew about it was that it was going to have a center,” DeFeo later commented. “When I started, it wasn’t a symmetrical thing. It was off-center.” This protean painting with its migrating center had a magnetic force over DeFeo’s life. She would labor over her progeny for nearly a decade, utterly consumed by her project like Frankenstein by his monster. Just as Frankenstein’s monster transformed from a corpse into a living creature, Deathrose, too, would eventually come alive as The Rose
“It went through, I would suggest, a lifespan, a chronology of different stages,” DeFeo recalled. In photos, it is possible to trace the metamorphosis of The Rose: its childhood spelled out in sharp geometric lines followed by an explosive pubescence of organic shapes (what DeFeo dubs her “super-baroque period”) before she tempered its flamboyance and the painting eventually settled into a maturity “more classic in character.”
Like any child, The Rose was demanding. It grew and morphed and consumed, fed on a diet of cigarettes, bottle caps, barrettes, keys, wire and other peculiar objects DeFeo would throw onto the canvas
and conceal under thick layers of paint, while she herself subsisted on cigarettes and brandy. The painting looked something like what the French theorists Deleuze and Guittari might call a “body without organs”: pure production and consumption, “deterritorialized” flow, desire freed from any constraints, subverting attempts to impose meaning.
The work isolated DeFeo from friends, diverting her career and commandeering her apartment. “The room itself was the work,” remembered Bruce Conner, an artist and close friend of hers. He described the apartment as “covered with the chunks of almost flesh-like paint,” adding that the paints had a “micalike sparkle” that made entering the room “like walking into a temple.” “It was almost alive,” he said.
A glittering room dominated by an insatiable painting? An artist driven to madness by a Sisyphean undertaking? If this all sounds like something out of a Gothic tale, that’s because it very nearly is. In The Oval Portrait, Edgar Allan Poe envisions a painter so obsessed with capturing his wife’s beauty that he unwittingly drains her of life in the process. Only upon finishing the hauntingly lifelike portrait does he realize his wife lies dead before him.
The Rose seemed to present a similar existential threat to DeFeo, who is, in this analogy, both the artist and the wife, tethered to a painting that had taken on a life of its own even as it sapped that of its creator. In refusing to declare The Rose complete, perhaps DeFeo was bargaining for time. “It was not that it was ever finished,” Conner explained. “It had to take an uncontrolled event to make it stop.”
That event came in the form of an eviction notice from her landlord in November 1965. The painting, weighing almost a ton, had to be removed with a forklift, along with the wall behind it. Conner documented the process of the painting’s extraction in his short film The White Rose (1967). In it, DeFeo can be seen lying across the covered canvas as if entombed and later perched in the carved-out window, dangling her legs out over Fillmore Street. “It was the end of The Rose, and it was the end of Jay,” Conner said. “All that day I wondered if Jay was going to go out that window herself.”
Of course it wasn’t the end, and both DeFeo and The Rose lived on, though DeFeo stopped making art for several years. Now that The Rose was finished, she
Jay DeFeo working on The Rose, 1958–66, in her Fillmore Street studio, 1960. Photo: Burt Glinn.
didn’t know what to do with herself. And no one knew what to do with the painting. The Deleuzian phantasmagoria was over: once ripped from the wall of DeFeo’s apartment, The Rose became a static object, no longer an agent of consumption or production. Carted off to the San Francisco Art Institute, it was dismissed for years as a strange work by a woman artist and therefore of negligible value. “Bolted to a wall of the McMillan Conference Room, it became a monumental witness to the mundane, a silent presence at faculty meetings, student bull sessions, symposia, and slide lectures,” writes the journalist Martha Sherrill. “When the overhead lights were shut off and the room darkened and all human attention was turned to images of other paintings, other works by other artists, The Rose was strangely easy to forget.”
Relegated to the role of wallflower, The Rose began to wilt. Paint was sliding off in chunks, but the institute could not afford to restore it. Instead, the painting was interred in plaster and hidden behind a false wall where it languished for nearly twenty years. It was, in effect, buried alive. For two decades, The Rose existed only in rumor.
Then, in 1995, the Whitney Museum stepped in, taking a gamble to resurrect the painting, which had been deemed largely unsalvageable. The museum’s hefty bet (an estimated $250,000) paid off, and a revamped Rose was displayed in full glory back in New York, the crown jewel of an exhibition on the Beats that same year.
DeFeo never got to witness her painting’s revival. Diagnosed with lung cancer, she died in 1989 at age 60.
Today, DeFeo remains relatively unknown. While The Rose is featured in the Whitney’s permanent collection, few know the story of the woman behind the painting. In many respects, though, The Rose speaks for itself. It is a painting that demands attention; you cannot simply walk past it. DeFeo herself was aware of the painting’s peculiar power: “I had the feeling that that painting kind of reached everybody on some level or another,” she said. “Everybody seemed to know what it meant for them and it seemed to transcend a verbal explanation.”
So what is it about The Rose that evokes such a visceral reaction? And what makes it at once menacing and alluring, both the siren and the song? What is a rose, anyway?
Gertrude Stein famously wrote, “Civilization begins with a rose. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” Each successive rose, then, is also The Rose that came before it; another reading of the phrase might be: a rose arose from a rose. In attributing the birth of civilization to The Rose, Stein endows it with the power of creation and affirms its symbolic association with the maternal body and, implicitly, female genitalia. “But DeFeo’s Rose,” writes Yevgeniya Traps in The Paris Review, “is not the bloom of purity, not the blush of first desire. It is more vagina dentata, an alluring but dangerous trap, a pleasure and a menace.”
While The Rose may have approximated a Deleuzian body without organs spewing mica in the privacy of DeFeo’s apartment, once inscribed within the context of the larger art world and its institutions, The Rose was inevitably endowed with the gendered attributes of its title and its creator, becoming both a body and an organ. The painting now more closely embodies Freud’s absent maternal phallus, a
terrifying, larger-than-life vagina dentata, the classic symbol of castration anxiety. I’m not sure how much I buy into this theory, but I think it is worth exploring in an institutional context like this one where gendered readings are endemic.
Its ridge-like folds fanning out around a center point, The Rose is certainly vaginal. This is where its supposedly subversive power lies: the perceived threat of The Rose is the threat of castration—and of empowered women—in a patriarchal world.
The word “vagina” entered English in the 17th century, from the Latin word for “scabbard,” or a place to put one’s sword. A historical symbol of dominance, size, and power, the sword stands in for the phallus, and the vagina is what threatens to swallow it up and thus what must be vanquished—with violence. As Hannah Williams writes in Granta (channeling Lacan), “The female body is defined by its fundamental lack: uncanny, strange, and unfinished. It’s why so many euphemisms for the vagina focus on the female genitals as a wound: cleft, axe-wound, gash—the woman is always a site of violence.” The Rose’s history of mistreatment and neglect mirrors the history of abuse sustained by female bodies and female artists and points to larger cultural anxieties surrounding the influx of women in a male-dominated art scene.
The Rose may challenge us to confront the unabashed, uncompromising female body. In facing The Rose, we face some of the ugly and inconvenient conceptions we’ve internalized about where, how, and what female bodies ought to be. I was 15 when I first saw The Rose. Maybe what I saw was the female body, the vagina dentata. Or maybe I saw a glimmer of something else—that rebellious, protean thing that took over DeFeo’s apartment, its desire freed from any constraints, its shifting form eluding meaning entirely.
Before her death, DeFeo told a friend she’d had a vision: in another life, she is wandering through a museum when she finds herself before The Rose. She sees someone looking at it and approaches them. “You know,” she says, nudging them, “I did that.” I will continue to visit The Rose. I feel I have yet to get to the bottom of it. And maybe one day, from her next life, DeFeo will come up to me and whisper, “I did that.” I would like to be able to say “thank you.”
ISABEL TRIBE B’27 is still searching for the maternal phallus.
( TEXT GABRIELLA MIRANDA DESIGN SELIM KUTLU ILLUSTRATION ELLIE LIN )
Day 0
When I come to, the ceiling of our bedroom is plexiglass and indifferent, the walls the same. The sheets sleep in a skin of plastic, reptilian to the touch. A cold intrusion skates along the speed bumps of my teeth, and I use my hands to follow the breathing tube cradling the back of my scalp. I goad the oxygen towards my lungs and aerate my head with the recognition that I am somewhere else.
The shelter is a makeshift pod incubating concentric rooms like a nesting doll: one cell in a colony of identical temporary homes along the plateau. Enclosed in the center of the pod is the bedroom. Its walls are rounded and sanded down to an off-white color. Together, they make the room into a work of pottery, a clay eggshell, the bed comprising the yolk.
A divot forms in the center of the bed as Wyatt rolls over, the tube of his oxygen mask whining under his weight. The machine it’s connected to lives next to his bedside table, beeping in tandem with his heartbeat. Tomorrow he’ll divide his time evenly between makeup trailers, fittings, and physical conditioning, but this morning he is my husband, feverish with sleep, drunk on a new atmosphere.
“WYATT BARLOW TO STAR IN Rover 91, FILM’S FIRST VENTURE INTO SPACE”
-Variety
“DIRECTOR ALDO BIANCHI’S RED-HOT Rover 91 SET TO BEGIN FILMING ON MARS THIS WEEK”
-People
Day 1
That’s something these magazines seem to relish in getting wrong: the warmth of this planet. I imagine a staff writer, sitting before their computer for the day’s assignment, picturing an illustration of Mars as one swath of desert, crusted ruby-red. Having been at that desk, I can’t find it in myself to fault them; I also had an inclination towards imagery over accuracy.
Like home, it’s coldest here before sunrise. That’s when the red of the planet is at its most deceptive, before the sun bleaches everything gray. In the mornings, when I lay a foot on Martian sand, I can feel its stagnance, the fabric of it spread out like an ocean. The landscape avails itself to us too readily.
By the time I disconnect myself from the oxygen machine and slink out of the plastic covers, Wyatt must be halfway to the planet’s Southern Hemisphere. Location scouting in advance of production wasn’t feasible, but so far, the South proves to be the only region with peaks distinct enough to texturize the shots’ horizons.
I walk from one side of the pod to another, disoriented by the lack of corners. I trip over what feels like a soft brick, but when I look down, it’s a worn copy of his script, dense with dog-ears and BIC pen annotations. Some of the pages are so full of blue they look like denim. I know these are the scenes and exchanges Wyatt—or more likely Wyatt’s reading assistant—believe merit the most preparation. On our third date, he asked me what I studied in college. When I told him English Literature, his face puckered, a string pulling his features together.
“So you’re a big reader then.”
“I’d say so, but nowadays it’s more writing.”
“The Next Great American Novel?”
“Journalism, actually.”
“That pay well?”
“Does your job pay well?”
He smiled. Not the smile he offers as currency, but an artless one. A slice of moon, gentle and waxing. It is my favorite of his gestures, but also the most infrequent.
I feel a tenderness at the idea of him stranded on set, having left his script behind. But it also contours his arrogance, this learned forgetfulness. I rifle through the pages, hoping to clasp on to any suggestion of his brain and its preferences. His scribbles take on their own linguistic quality: jagged lines for when he’ll play the scene with a sense of command or urgency, rounded lines for when he thinks he needs to read as empathetic or vulnerable. But the dialogue he chooses to anoint with asterisks is—to put it lightly—empty. This desert will dry you out before you know it. We wage a war of honor, not glory.
He’s drawn a box of emphasis around the line May you lead the way, my son, followed by his note in the margins reading “not blood related, but clear paternal dynamic. play up this nuance.” I shut the book.
Day 8
My first visit to set doesn’t come until they’re a full week into filming; I prefer getting underfoot once everyone has had the chance to settle in. I call what I’ve been doing in the meantime acclimating. When we’re on location, I derive a routine from finding close approximations to my life at home. I’ve settled my books like furniture on a shelf in the pod, and I extract them throughout the day. Lately, I consume them with an analytical, almost compulsive attention to detail. What I’m trying to siphon is unclear, and this doesn’t change with time. But there must be a thread—something synthetic and shared—that makes these stories all work, that necessitates them to be written. It’s a type of research, but a passive one. It distracts from my suspicion that there is nothing here worth writing about.
The commute to set is a tax on the body. Without the gauze of afternoon light, everything looks as though it may as well be made of styrofoam. I think of the red rocks two hours south of my parents’ home, their monotony in color. In the right sliver of sunlight, they could pass for another planet. Authenticity is the largest production expense.
A Jeep meets one of Wyatt’s assistants and me halfway to the site, and unlike on his other projects, I am not given anything resembling preferential treatment. I take comfort in this. These people do not work for me by virtue of working for him. Handling me is an added endeavor, another task to round out the morning, and I want to apologize. I want to tell them I understand what it is to be uprooted for someone else to play make believe, that there is something beyond other people’s time and money financing this.
By the time we get to set, my bones are denser and my teeth are chattering. Everyone scatters with the sand at our arrival, and I know he is already here, roaming about the landscape. He stands half-undressed, a different assistant holding what looks to be a juicebox with a hinged straw to his mouth. I watch as a woman wraps a tape measure around his bicep, noting the measurement with a click of her tongue. I watch the corner of his mouth turn upward, and in place of what I should feel is relief. It’s the kind I assume mothers have when someone else offers to hold their screaming infant. I move sharply to walk out of his eyeline, but my boots screech against the sand, and he looks beyond the heads of stylists and interns to where I’ve been caught. He smiles, but when he does, it’s a cold, fast train of white. He lowers his head again, retreating into the congregation.
I watch him rest the whole of his weight in his spine, and I briefly imagine how he would translate on to the page. “Missing a dimension,” my editor from home, Aubrey, might say. “An outline of a character without the matter to animate it.”
“SLOANE BARLOW PUTS A FUTURISTIC SPIN ON THE DRESSED DOWN LOOK ON Rover 91 SET—HOW TO STEAL HER STYLE” -Vogue
“IT’S A GIRL! SLOANE BARLOW BARES BABY BUMP ON SET OF HUSBAND’S NEW MOVIE” -Page
Six
Day 11
Incorrectly, I assumed the remoteness of our current situation would limit its coverage. But the manufactured treasure of satellite images and the delay of transmitting them quite literally across space and time has only stoked the tabloid appetite. Somewhere, Wyatt’s publicist is vibrating with glee, bracing himself for a raise.
I know my isolation in photographs will read as idleness. There will be as much diversity as there is polarity in the readings of how I embody the character of “wife.” I will either be too believable or not believable enough. Visible, but in the context of my lack of visibility. I will be critiqued for both wanting too much and not wanting more.
The second interview I ever conducted was with the wife of a Russian oligarch, following his indictment for money laundering. On the subject of his eventual arraignment, I asked her what outcome she wanted, believing that, in doing so, I was gifting her something I assumed she—and every other interviewee—was always silently, privately asking me for. Instead, she angled her nose down, looking at me over the rim of her bifocals.
“And what value would that be of to you?”
I think of all the things I house behind closed teeth and chew into the texture of want. If these are indulgences, they should be mine alone.
But these narratives are almost flawless. If the press intends to use this movie to render Wyatt a “pioneer,” they may as well use it to color me a saint. Sacrifice sells, possibly more than sex. That isn’t to say I’m pregnant either, although that would really clinch it; like everything else here, my clothes have become unforgiving.
Day 16
On my third visit to set, I meet Bianchi and his three children, all of whom are older than me. They orbit Bianchi in varying degrees of codependence: his daughter, Chiara, the most removed, his sons, Ercole and Leone, engrossed in competition to see who can sew himself into his father’s side first. Bianchi carries himself like a luxury, while his teeth are too big for his mouth. When we shake hands, his eclipses mine, and he evaluates me the way someone might appraise a palm tree: vertically and with emphasis on the top.
“You have gorgeous hair. Can’t believe it holds up in this desert.”
“Oh,” I force out. “It doesn’t.”
He laughs at this, a kind of laugh that refracts light on every surface in his vicinity. An exposing, accusatory beam more than a nebulous glow. He immediately starts walking, and Wyatt’s third assistant and I jog to fall in place, behind him but not quite next to him. As we walk, I look over to see a row of trucks idling on the hem of the set, their exhaust seducing the air. They’ve been like this each time I’ve come to set, arranged in the Earthly ugliness of a parking lot.
“What do you need all those trucks for?” I hear myself ask.
He looks at me sideways, then at Wyatt’s assistant for verification.
“This is a temperate planet,” he says, like I’m stupid. “If we have to pack it up to go someplace else, we pack it up and go someplace else.”
“I’m sure, but they seem more like pollutants than resources.”
Bianchi stops and Wyatt’s assistant audibly swallows, moving to stand on the other side of him.
“Baby, this is a billion-dollar shot. Let’s talk politics when you can find a way to balance my budget.” He punctuates this with another laugh, but this one comes from some reservoir that I don’t think exists in a woman’s body. Wyatt’s assistant flushes with apology, kicking at his own foot. I give a closed-lip smile, picturing Bianchi’s head detaching from the doughy intrusion that is his body. I shiver off the thought.
“THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF MOVIEMAKING ON MARS AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR FUTURE HABITABILITY”
- The New York Times
Later in the day, while resetting between scenes, I scan the network of kinetic bodies for something still. Chiara sits cross-legged in a chair by the makeup trailers, writing on the backs of polaroid photos. I approach her, and when she turns around, I’ve visibly startled her.
“What are you working on?”
“Mining scenes for a movie.”
“You’re writing a movie?”
“I’m making one, but I’m not writing it.” She looks up from her task for the first time, her eyes narrowing. “I put these pictures in a book, and someone else writes what turns them into a movie.” I nod at her. “From what I hear, you’re a writer,” she says, squinting at me.
“Yeah? From who?”
A part of me hopes to hear her say Wyatt. She spreads her photos into a line, then condenses them like an accordion.
“I don’t know. Why? Does it matter?”
“No.” I use my foot to trace a pattern of waves in the sand before continuing. “I just think you have to actively be writing something to be considered a writer.”
“Who says that?” Probably your father, I think.
“I say that, I guess.”
“Well, are you writing right now?”
I consider her question for longer than I’d like to. “I think so.”
“Then by your own definition, you’re a writer.” I like her. It’s staggering.
“Would you call yourself a filmmaker?” When I say this, I watch her eyes drift to where her father is erected behind a camera.
“Yeah, I would.”
I sit down next to her, and she lets me turn over her photographs. I sense Bianchi look over at the two of us, and he gestures at me vaguely to a camera operator.
“Keep these journalists off my set. They make me nervous.”
“WYATT BARLOW TALKS METHOD ACTING, LEARNING HOW TO PEE IN A SPACE SUIT, AND GUSHES ABOUT
- The Today Show
Day 25
When I take myself to the visitor’s center in the afternoon, in search of new pens, I end up ruffling the tops of magazines for the better part of an hour, the glossy, vinyl texture of the paper one of the few things that remains the same as it is on Earth. At the checkout desk, bordered by chocolate bars wrapped neatly in aluminum, is Wyatt’s face, red and ruddy, flashed across the looming screen on the wall.
The night before, he had sat cross legged on our comforter, recording an appearance for one of the morning talk shows via a camera he’d perched in the corner. I watched as he adjusted to the friction of skin against plastic.
Now, on its aired recording, what I registered as fidgety and misplaced, the world will read as human and accessible. It strikes me that the cameras he finds the most unnerving are self-operated. A toothy woman in lilac sitting behind a dark wood desk brandishes her smile.
“We hear filming on Rover 91 will be wrapping in about a week, is that right?”
She asked him a handful of questions, ensuring he hadn’t dried out here before I heard the conversation migrate in my direction, and I found an excuse to flee to one of the encircling rooms. On television, her tone comes across as even more accusatory than it did through the wall.
“And you’ve brought your wonderful wife with you?”
Even in grained quality, Wyatt noticeably breathes to himself at this.
“Yup, the wife is here.”
The lilac woman deflates a little, then is quick to cover it up.
“What a trooper! I mean, can you just imagine?”
And when he says that he can’t, I know he’s telling the truth.
“ON
COMPLICITY AND SPACE-AGE COLONIALISM: SLOANE BARLOW’S
recent photo, like a building that retains its integrity.
The email continues. Though I understand why it isn’t possible to keep you on staff with us amid your expedition, you are doing not only me but the entire world a disservice in depriving us of your writing! Send me a draft of something, anything, when you get a chance. Your diary, your Martian grocery list, really anything! I’ll put you in touch with my friend at HarperCollins.
I scroll down to where her postscript waits at the bottom. Don’t mind Simon’s piece. In your absence, your name has accrued what I might crudely call “shock value.” It by no means reflects our team’s holistic opinion of you. We wish you all the best.
When I read Simon’s article, I was, in some disembodied way, envious of it. I remember his writing being opportunistic—and occasionally unethical—but it was decisive. If a portrayal of something or someone that is neither categorically good or bad is done well, we call it “unflinching.” Simon didn’t flinch. Not once.
Day 38
At the wrap party, I drink like it’s a kind of detox, like the fluid might expel the discontent from my body before we go back. The room we’re in isn’t necessarily a night club, but it has the makings of one—a slick, sediment of a bar, walls with pores that sweat the fragrance of alcohol.
I feel Wyatt’s breath before I feel him, warm and humid in the cove between my ear and neck.
“Where are you?” he croons, and when I open my mouth to simulate an answer, it’s dry from lack of use. I should ask him what he means, but when the question occurs to me, he reaches around my waist, planting a hand on the bar like a barnacle, the other pulling me into the front of his body.
“Did you hear what I said?” He tries to wedge his groin into the small of my back as his mouth moves closer to my face. “I’ll tell you where you are.”
He can be a drunk, but he doesn’t have the skin or body of one. He’s taking on the prescribed mannerisms of an alcoholic, getting into character mid-performance. I crane my neck to stare at him as he tries to find a way to finish the thought, limp and dangling. He answers himself.
“You are a looooong way from home.”
Ugh. “And so are you.”
“No, you’re not even here.” I wonder which script he’s lifted this from. Before he continues, he cinches my scalp in his fingertips, rubbing the skin.
“I think if I wanted to touch you right now, I’d have to crack open your skull and cup your brain.”
“What does that mean?”
“What does it mean?” He dilates his eyes, stumbling backwards. “You’re the writer, you tell me.”
I try to move out from under the serpentine arch of his stance, but it only emboldens him to tighten his hold. I feel him open his mouth again.
“What are you thinking of writing this time? Oh wait, I know! It’ll be that tell-all-memoir-what have you about my affair with the intern-set designer-costar? Tell me, who is it I’m screwing again?” If he wants me to laugh, I don’t. I speak before thinking.
“You know, maybe I am writing something.” I pause. His attention to the conversation is fraying, splitting to cover different corners of the room. “Maybe I’ll turn it into a screenplay.” I search for recognition and its absence makes my skin itch.
“I’ll get Chiara to direct it.”
His expression remains blank until he can place the name in his index of faces. He chokes, performatively. “Bianchi’s Chiara? Yeah, alright. Cash in your life for some arthouse shitflick with someone who can’t even operate a camera.”
Something cracks in my vision and I loathe him. I feel it in my mouth, dense and salivating. At the same time, he pinches my earlobe.
“Baby,” I bristle, muscle memory. “You’d have to be the second Barlow on the call sheet for that movie to ever get made,” he slurs with affectation.
When he moves to lean his head onto the shelf of my shoulder, I pivot clockwise so that he’ll fall forward, slamming his face into the side of the bar. He drops at a slow, almost indulgent pace, his temple meeting the ground first, then bouncing off it. The rest of his body collapses in a flaccid thud, the sound of it absorbed by the music. He lies face down, and I move to stand over him, a foot on either side of his torso, considering whether or not to turn him onto his back or let someone else do it.
When I finally lift him by the shoulders, rivulets of red pour out of his nose and mouth, a blank aperture where his two front teeth should be. As I hold the ridges of his jaw in my hands, keeping him upright so he won’t choke on his own blood, all I can think of is exactly how I’ll write this scene. How I’ll write him, petulant and toothless, the people behind me on the ground in search of anything small and white, rewarding even his malignance with work on their hands and knees. I’ll write about how the blue wash of light overhead gave the illusion of an ocean, its abundance and license over all that passes through it. I think maybe I can write myself into that role, give myself the same ability.
GABRIELLA
MIRANDA B’28 doesn’t care for Dune.
Indie is a big fan of grains of
( TEXT KALIE MINOR DESIGN APRIL SUJEONG LIM ) WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
salt.
It’s getting warm again. Indie is being reminded of her purpose. A long winter can take a lot from a person, and I’ve found that what it takes is often replaced with a singular vision. Indie has been mildly cold, at all moments, for the last three months. This prolonged state of chilliness has been enough to make her shaky and snappy like a small chihuahua with bulging eyes that should’ve been put down years ago. Indie knows she’s not alone in this. But as the earth warms, Indie can feel her tendons relaxing and watches on as people crawl outdoors one by one, like Puxatawny Phil, fearless. More than any brisk yet sunny sixty degree day, Indie recognizes the true winds of change in the budding of flowers on long-barren branches. Indie is reading the tea leaves.
How do I beat the hangxiety? Freshman year it never hit but now I’m tortured. Am I blissfully (agonizingly) unaware that I am the fool? – Espresso Martini
Here’s the thing, I’m always surprised when the winter ends. As irrational as it may sound, the cage of 4pm sunsets and wool coats feels impossibly locked. One develops Stockholm. Then, all of a sudden, it’s dark no longer, and the time comes to move on. My curse, as is the plague of all others, is that of subjectivity. I am constantly seeking an ultimate truth yet only ever find my own. But that is okay. Holding the absolute truth would be too much responsibility, even for Indie. I prefer to do my best and absolve myself of any adverse accreditation. That being said—and dare I say?—spring has sprung. And aren’t we so grateful?
Dear Espresso Martini, I imagine a person’s fortitude against the adverse effects of alcohol as an optimization problem dependent on three factors: 1. Hydration and nutrition. 2.The Will to Partayyyy. 3. Gumption. For most of us, what we lack in the first variable (because let’s be honest, no one is vitamin ficient, nor well-hydrated) we make up for our freshman year in an excess of the others. We’re enamored with glitz and glamour. It’s Katniss and Peeta witnessing the capital partygoers vomit the enchanting buffet only to consume more. That sort of fervor is lost once you realize going to Lantern and crashing a small intimate gathering of friends on Governor weighs the same on the cosmic scales. Exhaustion creeps in until your Will to Partayyyy becomes nothing more than a speck pounding its fists against your hardened heart—begging to turn up just one more time.
The half-life of The Will to Partayyyy is a short one, that’s well-documented fact. But Gumption? Gumption is what determines how many shots you can down before feeling the impetus to run away from your friends. Gumption gets your ass up out the bed, onto the streets, and moving. Most importantly, if you’ve got the gumption, everything you encounter on your night out doesn’t transform from the dimension of glitter to the dimension of wrongness in the bleak light of morning. The retrospect that hangxiety makes all green and surreal, with gumption, is nothing but a haze of bittersweet nostalgia.
When I open my eyes one at a timecanthingsmovearound.Ilookedatasoup other.withbotheyes.Thenone.Thenthe It kept moving a little bit to the left and right when I switched them. I know this is to be expected, but it fills me with fear. How do I come to terms with my own fundamentally altered perception of the things around me? – Friend to All
My mom is “ok” with me having girl sex because she doesn’t want me to think she is homophobic. However, she doesn’t want me to have girl-boy sex because she thinks I will get pregnant. How do I tell her I want to also do boy sex?
– A Curious Bisexual Woman
Dear Friend to All,When Andy Warhol began painting the Campbell’s Soup Can he called Princess Diana and asked her what her favorite kind of soup was. To Mr. Warhol, Princess Di was the lady for the job. She was the outsider’s insider. She was the diva for all time. The phone call, as I’ve heard it recounted, went a little something like this:
“Diana, it’s Andy.” “I’m sorry, who is this? How did you get this number?”
“Andy. I’m Andy Warhol. You know, I paint the pictures in Red Robin, I did Marilyn in all the fun colors.”
“Ohhhh Fancy Warhol. Yeah, yeah, alright. What can I do for you, Fancy?”
“So. There’s this soup can.” And the rest was history. I wish I knew how that phone call ended, and I wish I was listening in from the British side because I’ve always wanted to be in a castle. But as you could probably infer, that phone call never happened, I just made it up. Which means I don’t get to know how it ended, because there was nothing to end in the first place. As for the soup cans, you could say that Andy Warhol made iconoclast artwork of a soup can and in that same moment made history and furnished the bachelor pads of 42 year old creeps and Red Robins for decades to come, but many could would contest that what he did was not art. Or at the very least it wasn’t good.
And for Princess Di, some aren’t a big fan of the diva either. So where does the objective truth lie amidst all this subjectivity, amidst all this skewed perception and unwarranted movement? Every time I go to the Sciences Library, the library seems to put a new book at the desk I choose to sit at in an inter-universal fashion. As a result, I’ve slowly been reading The Ghost in the Atom, a book of transcriptions of radio interviews this guy did a while back talking about Quantum Physics. Because I don’t know anything about any of that, the real value has been synthesizing the information from the book into my own quantum cosmology. It’s more fun that way. My theories would tell you that this reckoning has already happened inside your atoms, that they know there will always be a disconnect between the ‘real’—which is just the B-sharp all living things are tuned to—and the soup can you’re seeing. The uncomfortability is nothing more than a scratching against your basal ganglia, the atoms are trying to let you know. Remedies include learning to read morse code, fostering some gumption, and sleeping at the foot of your own bed.
I’m not saying, Espresso Martini, that you don’t have the gumption. That would be mean, let alone untrue. Everyone has the gumption. It was planted in their core as a little seed and nurtured or neglected all their life, becoming the sturdy oak of facile shrub it is today. Maybe your gumption needs to watered a little more. Maybe it needs some fertilizer. While I’m not qualified to determine whether you’re the fool or not, I did put my hand on a tarot deck and pulled, just to see what they said. I got the Card of Judgement, which I’ve never even seen before. Maybe it says more about me than it does about you. Maybe it’s the hangxiety manifest. Maybe we’re all thinking about ourselves too much.
Dear Curious Bisexual Woman, I’m always astonished at the seeming flexibility parents have for their parents. I wonder how our futures map out in front of them. If they appear like this gleaming brick road to the futures they always wanted, or if they are littered with potholes and hippies just waiting to drag us off Exit 32 all the way to Joshua Tree where we’ll inevitably end up in someone’s Oscar-winning cult documentary. It sounds like your mom is really trying, and I may be biased because I love my mom a whole lot, but I feel like that always warrants a little shift in perspective, if you will.
Let’s break this down: Your mom doesn’t want you to think her homophobic. There are usually two main reasons why people don’t want to be thought of as homophobic. The first is that they’re afraid to be cancelled by the woke mind virus and aren’t brave enough to go full on scorched-earth right wing, so they hover in a space of in-authenticity, consuming seed oils and feeling sorry for themselves. The other is, as is likely the case of your mom—because who am I to start talking on people’s moms in the Indy omg
not me—is that person is truly, genuinely not homophobic, and have found themselves in a world of new territory with new words and norms and expectations. Your mom probably knows Chappell Roan and like, that’s it. And that’s okay. She’s trying.
Second: She doesn’t want you pregnant. Girl I don’t either?? We are in college and as much as I
champion group baby and imagine a fat stupid thing running around the Main Green, I understand the infeasibility. Seriously. I saw a baby at the Ratty the other day and I couldn’t stop gushing over it and staring at who I assume must’ve been its parents. There are two parts to that. One, a baby means unwarranted attention from strangers, imagine an opp trying to rub your pregnant belly out of nowhere! Second, your baby is gonna be all over Sidechat and that’s like really lame.
Tell your mom what’s keeping you preggers sober. She needs to know your reasons in the same way she’s trying to understand your queerness. She’s seeking to understand, but as the daughter of your mother, it is your imperative to meet her where she is at. She’s already stretched so far since day one and she is tired! And she keeps bringing up Boygenius with a gleam of pride in her eyes and you don’t know how to break it to her that you’re well beyond that. Oh, and let her know you’re using protection, that’s always a safe bet.
forming, and listening to music. Gatherings will take place twice per semester and include time to make announcements, share RI-based resources, and build connections. Open to all Brown University faculty, staff, and students. Refreshments provided.
EVENTS MAR.21APR.4
45th Annual Student Exhibition Till April 6th, All Day Granoff Center for the Creative Arts
Events @ Brown �� Kaos Screening and Pizza with Charlie Covell Monday, March 31st 5:30PM Smith-Buonanno Hall British creator-writer Charlie Covell (they/them) recently created the Netflix original series “Kaos.” Previously, Charlie wrote the hit series “The End of The F***ing World” for Channel 4 in the UK (also available on Netflix).
Aid & Community Action
Rally & March Against Southeast Asian Deportations
Tuesday, March 24th — 5:30PM Wat Thormikaram; 178 Hanover, Providence
Deportation Defense Outreach Organizing Meeting
Sunday, March 23rd 2-4PM Rhode Island Indian Council, 807 Broad Street, Providence
María Berrío Artist Talk Wednesday, April 2nd 6PM List Art Building Rm.120 Arts �� MIXDOWN Tuesday, April 2 — 5:30PM6:30PM Join us at MIXDOWN to meet fellow Brown University students, staff, and faculty who are passionate about writing, making, producing, per-
SPOTLIGHT
The Trump administration continues to crack down on dissent. Brown remains silent. This spotlight was written at 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 19. Things may have changed by the time you’re reading it in print. Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a doctor and assistant professor at the Warren Alpert Medical School, was detained at Boston Logan Airport on March 13 and deported two days later after traveling to her home country of Lebanon. Dr. Alawieh, who held a valid H1-B visa, was deported despite a court order. US Customs and Border Patrol alleged that her deportation was due to the presence of photos of former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Khamenei on her phone. According to the Department of Homeland Security, Dr. Alawieh admitted to attending Nasrallah’s funeral alongside hundreds of thousands of others. In response to her deportation, hundreds of people gathered at the RI State House on March 17, demanding her return and protesting the Trump administration’s targeted attack on Palestinians and their supporters. Dr. Alawieh’s case comes a week after the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian organizer involved in anti-genocide protests at Columbia University who was taken into custody by ICE agents on March 8 without a warrant. As of Wednesday, March 19, Khalil remains in an ICE detention center in Louisiana. These deportations and detentions occurred shortly before March 18, when Israel broke the terms of a ceasefire deal agreed with Hamas in January. In just two days, Israel has murdered more than 430 Palestinians, more than a third of them children, and launched a ground invasion into Gaza. In response, protests erupted across the US, including a demonstration in Providence that gathered over a hundred people.
While the Trump administration accelerates its criminalization of dissent against genocide, Brown has yet to explicitly comment on the deportation of Dr. Alawieh or give clear answers as to whether they will comply with federal actions that threaten rights to due process, such as in Khalil’s case. The Graduate Labor Organization has demanded that the university refuse to comply with illegal deportation orders, protect freedom of expression on campus, and ensure access to gender-affirming healthcare and the safety of trans people in the Brown community. Sign the petition linked at the QR code to support these demands.
