The College Hill Independent V.25 N.5

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT Brown & RISD Weekly | V. 25 N. 5 | 10.19.2012

from the editors When you’re the Sports editor at a publication where people think Larry Bird is something with wings, the bi-annual kickball game with the daily student newspaper takes on embarrassing gravity and importance. It’s your chance to matter. To wear shorts that have always been shorts and never were pants and have it be totally acceptable. For two hours, the thing that matters to you matters to everyone else. I show up five minutes late so it won’t seem like I’ve been thinking about the game all week, volunteer to bat seventh even though I know I have the tools to hit cleanup (“I mean fourth. Sorry, guys, it’s a sports term.”) and wish I had spoken up and asked someone to partner stretch before the game. I do an “Aww shucks” when I fly out to center field, and weep deeply on the inside. We can’t tell if they know we’re adopting douchey caricatures or if they’re actually annoyed, but it might be less fun if we double-check. Have you ever been to New York? What’s your favorite website? How many kids did you babysit this summer? We were down by nine after two innings, mainly because it’s hard to catch a ball while you’re drinking Miller High Life. Morale was low. But then, new momentum. A few runners get on base. We record an out. Their pitcher’s insult is unsophisticated and spoken too loudly. And we’re clapping, hooting, hustling. Don’t you see? I want to yell. You’re playing sports, and you’re enjoying it! But they don’t see it like this. They’re just pretending to play sports. If I said anything it would ruin the fun. But Sam dives for a line drive and Claudia is keeping track of how many runs she’s given up and we want to win so badly that we grab two bewildered lacrosse players and guilt them into hitting home runs for us. We lose, which seems to kind of bother people, and that makes me feel wonderful. It’s dusk, and we’re all going home when someone grabs the ball. Anyone want to kick this motherfucker around a little? “Sure,” I say with fake nonchalance. Why not.— AR, SR

ephemera

news

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MANAGING EDITORS Raillan Brooks, Robert Sandler, Erica Schwiegershausen NEWS Barry Elkinton, Emily Gogolak, Kate Van Brocklin METRO Joe de Jonge, Doreen St. Felix, Jonathan Storch FEATURES Sam Adler-Bell, Grace Dunham, Alex Ronan, Ellora Vilkin ARTS Ana Alvarez, Olivia-Jené Fagon, Christina McCausland, Claudia Norton SCIENCE Jehane Samaha INTERVIEWS Drew Dickerson METABOLICS Sam Rosen LITERARY Emma Janaskie, Michael Mount X Drew Foster LIST Allie Trionfetti BLOG Greg Nissan DESIGN EDITOR Allie Trionfetti DESIGNERS Carter Davis, Lizzie Davis, Mary-Evelyn Farrior, Allison Grosso, Annie Macdonald, Jared Stern ILLUSTRATIONS Diane Zhou PHOTO Annie Macdonald STAFF WRITER Mary-Evelyn Farrior SENIOR EDITORS Belle Cushing, Mimi Dwyer MVP Grace Dunham COVER ART Anna Muselmann

reachably yours College Hill Independent PO Box 1930 Brown University Providence RI 02912 theindy@gmail.com blog: theindyblog.org Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI press in Seekonk, MA. The Independent receives support from Campus Progress/Center for American Progress. Campus Progress works to help young people make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at CampusProgress.org

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WEEK IN REVIEW // barry elkinton, emily gogolak & kate van brocklin

VENEZUELA NOW // kat thornton

metro

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FIRST THIRD // mary-evelyn farrior

features

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THE LORD’S BREAD FACTORY // patrick madden

VERDADE

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// pierie korostoff

CORRESPONDENCE // annika finne & robert sandler

science

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CURSE YOUR BRANCHES // urmila chadayammuri

interviews

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SHOWALTER // drew dickerson

literary

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PISS // michael mount

x-page

arts ARTPORTS

// jonathan storch

occult

// emma wohl

FEARLESS FELIX

IN STITCHES

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CHEW // mary-evelyn farrior

WEEK IN REVIEW by Barry Elkinton, Emily Gogolak & Kate Van Brocklin Illustration by Robert Sandler

Diamond in the Rough

Jeremy gets a Job

Going Commando

a new source for diamonds may be hard even for De Beers to tap into—it’s a nearby diamond-rich planet born mostly of carbon. The emergence of planet 55 Cancri e sounds like fodder for science fiction, but its implications for our universe and the study of extrasolar planets are certainly real. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope collected data on planet 55 Cancri e’s orbital distance and mass, and resulting computer models gave scientists a picture of its chemical makeup—the planet is likely covered in graphite and diamond. On October 9, this recent discovery was published by the Cornell University Library and should reshape our understanding of planetary chemistry. A diamond in our universe fundamentally changes our perspective of what planets around other stars could be like. “It’s the first time we know of such an exotic planet that we think was born mostly of carbon—which really makes this a fundamental game-changer in our understanding of what’s possible in planetary chemistry,” said study leader Nikku Madhusudhan, a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University. This gemstone in the sky differs from other rocky planets in the solar system, such as Earth, that are composed mostly of oxygen-rich compounds such as silicates, whereas carbon is very rare (less than 0.1 percent). “Unlike our solar system, which is dominated by oxygen and silicates, this planetary system is filled with carbon,” said Princeton astronomer David Spergel. This discovery could indicate the prevalence of a whole new class of planets whose chemistry has never been encountered by modern scientists. Classified as a “super Earth,” 55 Cancri e is twice the size of Earth with eight times its mass. The planet was first noticed when it passed in front of its parent star 55 Cancri A in 2011. Since the rocky sphere orbits its star in only 18 hours, its surface temperatures reach 3,900 degrees Fahrenheit—perfect circumstances for creating diamonds. Previous studies showed that 55 Cancri e’s parent star was abundant in carbon—much more so than our sun. “If we make the assumption that the star and its surrounding planets are all born from the same primordial disk of material, then it makes sense that the entire planetary system would be carbon rich,” said Madhusudhan, whose study will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. The planet is situated in the northern constellation Cancer, allowing its parent star to be clearly visible to the naked eye in dark skies. According to Forbes, the diamond planet is worth $26.9 nonillion ($26.9 followed by 30 zeros), which just goes to show that one can still put a price on rocks, even if they’re 40 light-years away. — KVB

on tuesday october 16, President Obama and former Governor Mitt Romney met in Nassau, NY for the second of three presidential debates. Over the course of the evening, the two candidates fielded questions from audience members in a ‘town hall’ format, leading to spirited exchanges over the economy, foreign policy, and Mitt Romney’s penchant for putting women in binders. Afterwards, the post-debate reaction seemed to indicate that both candidates had a strong performance, with perhaps a slight edge to President Obama simply because, unlike the first debate, he actually made it through the evening without needing a nap. But even if the Nassau showdown didn’t seal the deal for either candidate, America now know one thing for sure—Jeremy Epstein is going to get a job. Jeremy, a junior exercise science major at Adelphi University, was selected to ask the first question of the debate to the candidates. “As a 20 year-old college student, all I hear from professors, neighbors, and others is that when I graduate, I will have little chance to get employment,” said Jeremy. “What can you say to reassure me, but more importantly my parents, that I will be able to sufficiently support myself after I graduate?” In response, both candidates practically clamored to hand Jeremy his first paycheck. Going first, Romney looked Jeremy directly in the eye. “When you [graduate] in 2014, I presume I’m going to be president,” said Romney. “I’m going to make sure you get a job.” After Romney finished, Obama tried to match his rival’s encouragement of the cherub-faced youth. “Jeremy, first of all, your future is bright,” said Obama. Later, after discussing his plan to create a clean energy economy, Obama again turned towards America’s new favorite college student. “I expect those new energy sources to be built right here in the United States,” said the President. “That’s going to help Jeremy get a job.” All this attention quickly turned Jeremy into a media darling. By the end of the debate, #jeremy was trending on Twitter, and numerous media outlets tried to get Jeremy to reveal which candidate’s job offer he found most appealing. At first glance, Jeremy seemed to be leaning towards Mitt. “I felt like he was staring into my soul,” Jeremy said to MSNBC. “Just right through me. I felt like he offered me a job five minutes into the debate.” But if Romney won the opening skirmish, Obama won the war. In a later interview, Jeremy revealed that, while Mitt’s job offer lifted him to the sublime, Obama’s steady performance throughout the debate was more convincing. “Well, if the election was today, I probably would vote for the President,” Jeremy said to ABC News. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but presumably Obama will take what he can get. So forget CNN’s instant undecided voter polls. Obama won the debate. Why? Because Jeremy (kind of ) said so. Now, if all goes according to plan, they’ll both have jobs next summer. — BE

“what’s benito mussolini doing in your kid’s classroom?” has been the question buzzing around Italy this week, when a restored portrait of the fascist dictator sparked the wrath of locals after it was hung at a school in Ascoli Piceno, a small town in central Italy. The painting is an odd one, depicting Mussolini— responsible for as many as 500,000 deaths in his 21-year rule—as a sort of ascetic knight in shining armor, donning a white tunic, riding a snow white horse with a mythically voluminous mane, and carrying a sword. It was originally painted during Mussolini’s rule for an exhibition in Ascoli Piceno in 1937, when the town’s school first opened as a technical institute, and it sought to propagandize the dictator’s school reform policies. Last week, the recently restored portrait was put back in the main hall of the same school, now a public high school, eliciting an angry response from residents of the town. The school’s principal told Italy’s ANSA news agency that the painting of Il Duce, as Benito is known, didn’t mean to evoke any hard feelings. He called it “an allegory of Mussolini;” and in a letter to the provincial Young Democrats organization, he wrote that it was for “historical and cultural purposes”—whatever that means. If you think this sounds like a pretty lame and vague defense, you’re right. The National Association of Italian Partisans, which describes itself as combating historical revisionism and committed to the values of antifascism, announced that the move was totally unjustified and an attempt to “immortalize” Mussolini and the fascist regime. In a nation that still suffers from memories of the Il Duce years, any attempts to praise the dictator are taken very seriously, but revisionism persists. In 2003 Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, referring to Italian concentration camps during World War II, even said that Mussolini only “used to send people on vacation.” The detractors in Ascoli Piceno, however, quickly got their way: the school administration gave into pressure and removed the portrait on Monday. According to the newspaper La Voce, Italians hailed the removal as a “victory for common sense and reason and therefore victory for all.” The portrait is to be returned to its original owners. But just who they are, why they had the painting, and why it was restored in the first place remains as much a mystery as the flowing white tunic the allegorical Benito is sporting in its frame. — EG

OCTOBER 19 2012

NEWS // 02

COMRADERIE IN CUBA Cuba celebrates Chavez win in Venezuela by Kat Thornton Illustration by Diane Zhou on october 8, the day after Hugo Chavez was re-elected president of Venezuela, Cuban President Raul Castro Ruz printed a congratulatory message in bright red in the Cuban Communist Party’s official newspaper, Granma: “In the name of the Cuban government and people, I congratulate you for this historical triumph.” Chavez’s re-election represents a symbolic and economic victory for Cuba, which relies on the petroleum-rich state for stable oil prices and purchases of its medical and technological services. On election day, Cuban television broadcasted full coverage of the election unfolding in Caracas. Nearly 81 percent of Venezuela’s 28 million citizens voted in this year’s election—an unprecedented voter turnout for the country. Chavez, cancer-free since February thanks to surgery in Havana, savored the victory of 54 percent of the vote, addressed voters from his presidential balcony while brandishing a sword. Only nine points ahead of his opponent Henrique Capriles Radonski, it was the closest election in Chavez’s 13-year tenure. While there were not the same riotous parties in the streets that there were in Caracas on October 7, Cubans breathed a collective sigh of relief upon hearing of Chavez’s re-election. Intellectuals and people on the street alike acknowledged the importance of the Venezuelan election for Cuba’s economy as well as political unity across Latin America. It appears that for the next six years, Cuba can look forward to a symbolic partner and a stable economic ally. UNREMARKABLE TIME FRAME

“The most important election for Cuba [this year] is the Venezuelan one,” said Aurelio Alonso, an investigative sociologist and one of Cuba’s most prominent essayists since the triumph of the Revolution (to use local vocabulary). Chavez’s re-election means Cuba does not need to fear falling into an economic depression like the one suffered in the 1990s, which the government euphemized as the ‘special period.’ Last year Cuba traded $6 billion worth of goods with Venezuela, or about 40 percent of their total commercial trade. While the economic relationship is nowhere near the scale of the Soviet Union partnership from the early 1960s to 1991, which represented 80 percent of Cuba’s trade in 1961, Venezuela’s stable oil prices and purchase of Cuban medical services are an important source of economic stability. Without Venezuelan oil, “we would be in an eternal blackout,” said Victor Fowler, a Cuban writer who wrote poetry about life on the island in the 1990s. The ‘special period’ arose when nearly threequarters of the Cuban economy collapsed due to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Oil imports came to a stop, causing a simultaneous standstill in domestic transportation and agricultural production. Havana’s streets today are abuzz with car engines. It is hard to imagine the streets without the public buses filled to the brim with people, each paying a fare of less than two cents a ride. Without Venezuelan oil, the situation would more likely resemble the streets in the 90s—filled instead with imported Chinese bicycles and tired, skinny pedestrians. “This country could not handle another special period as brutal as the 90s,” said Ernesto Sánchez Valdés, a documentary filmmaker in Havana. “Oil is like water right now.” If Cuba did not have Venezuelan oil as a stable form of energy, it could not move forward as a society. In the special period, Cuban towns were subject to scheduled blackouts for an average of eight hours per day. “If there’s no light, you can’t work, you can’t develop things,” he said.

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THE PROJECT CONTINUES

Though Chavez’s re-election is an economic victory for Cuba, its ideological implications for the country are more muddled. Every time I asked someone about the ideological significance of Chavez’s win, they would respond with a variation on, ‘it’s complicated.’ While both Cuba and Venezuela identify their political systems as socialist, the two countries are working toward their own unique realizations of the paradigm. While there are numerous private corporations in Venezuela, Cuba’s economy is almost completely managed by the State, with semi-private enterprises having only emerged recently. “They are not working with an ideological inheritance from any nation. It is their own project,” Sánchez said. But some say Chavez’s re-election serves as proof of the popularity of an exemplary socialist project that now has six more years to move forward. Cuban leaders look to traditional leftist voices like Marx and Lenin for its socialist values, but Chavez primarily points to Simón Bolívar and his revolutionary ideals. An ambitious Venezuelan military and political leader, Bolívar fought for Latin American independence from Spain in the early 1900s. He pursued the unification of all of Latin America into one country, but Chavez is instead aiming for a strong alliance and economic exchange among the various Latin American nations. With the success of Venezuela’s economy over the past decade Chavez has strived to create a strong Latin American alliance by promoting economic exchanges with Cuba and Nicaragua. “His re-election makes it possible for this [unification] to be a more profound process,” Fowler said. Compared to Cuban leadership, “[Chavez] is on a new

its people dependent on the often-changing world price of sugar. In the first half of the 20th century, the United States was the primary buyer of Cuban sugar. Additionally, the list of Latin American leaders deposed or installed by American agencies in Chile, Cuba, and other nations is long and has resulted in a significant lack of confidence in American interaction in the region’s economies or politics. With Venezuela as a leader, Latin American nations have come together to confront US economic dominance. “Chavez is not nice to the White House,” says Alonso. “Neither is Correa [President of Ecuador], neither is Evo Morales [President of Bolivia]. The fact that these countries help each other to confront US commercial interests in Latin America means that «the identity of the continent is alive,” said Fowler. Anti-US propaganda is commonplace in Havana. On a wall labeled “The Cretins’ Corner” in Havana’s Revolutionary Museum, there is a caricature of George W. Bush alongside Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Sr., and the overthrown Cuban president Fulgencio Batista. Bush Jr. is pictured reading a book upside down, with his usual cartoonish big ears and squinty eyes and a not-so-usual swastika marked hat, next to a text box that reads, “Thank you cretin for helping us make socialism irrevocable.” Chavez expressed similar sentiments in a 2006 statement when he said, “I think Hitler could be a nursery baby next to George W. Bush.” Chavez’s re-election is a promise for a progressive, antineoliberal Venezuela, wrote Julio Cesar Guanche, a noted essayist and co-worker of Alonso, in an email. “He has demonstrated that there exists advantageous and viable exits from the neoliberal option,” he wrote. “The Venezuelan elections represent what election should represent: choosing not only a president but a model of society.” ON CITY SIDEWALKS

level,” Fowler said. Adult literacy rose from 90 percent in 1985 to 95 percent in 2007, and school attendance rates rose from 87 percent to 93 percent between 2000 and 2010. And international observers, including former US president Jimmy Carter, have praised Venezuela’s inclusive democratic process. Eighty-one percent of Venezuelans voted in this year’s elections. Cuba has reached similar health and education standards, and boasts Latin America’s highest college matriculation rate. But its democratic process is convoluted and generally regarded as a vertical system of power. Its economy is still struggling. With its democratic process and relatively strong economy, Venezuela is a “more advanced socialist experiment,” said Alonso. “I think there are experiences that should give lessons to Cuba.” Latin American unity, as defined by Chavez, has come to mean a multilateral front against US imperialism. Looking forward, the re-election will benefit Cuba and Venezuela’s resistance to the US’s economic and political influence in Latin America. Fowler partially attributes recent Argentinean, Venezuelan, and Brazilian economic success to their ability to defend themselves from US involvement. Along with many other Latin American states, Cuba has a long history of US intervention in their country. The world market pushed a sugar monoculture on Cuba since the height of the Triangle Trade, making the country and

On the streets of Havana, the Cubans I spoke with expressed overwhelmingly positive reactions to Chavez’s re-election. Several Cubans lauded Chavez’s likeness to Fidel and his consideration for the country’s poor. “Hugo Chavez is a president who helps the people, helps the poor—and the entire world is thankful for that,” said Rolando Rodriguez, a bakery employee. Wafrido Roja, a resident of Havana’s Vedado neighborhood, vociferously agreed. “For me, he is another Fidel,” he said with a grin. A group of elderly men sunning on the sidewalk with him nodded in agreement. “I think the fact that he helps the people who would never have had a chance for anything is wonderful, don’t you think?” asked Sánchez, who prides himself on coming from a humble background. But the narrow margin of victory in Venezuela shows that “there is less, rather than more, enthusiasm for his ideas than there has been in previous years,” wrote Esther Whitfield, a Brown University associate professor of comparative literature. Indeed, not everyone in Cuba was thrilled about Chavez’s victory. “What sounds good to me is a place where there is a democratic system where the president presides for a period and then no more,” said an elderly woman and former government employee who did not want to be identified because she did not want unnecessary publicity or trouble from the government. The Venezuelan president eliminated term limits through a referendum in 2009. The woman said today’s leaders should follow the example of iconic 19th century Cuban independence fighter Jose Martí who said “to renew yourself is to revitalize yourself.” KAT THORNTON B’14 triumphed in the revolution.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SHOW ME THE GREEN Third Party Politics by Mary-Evelyn Farrior Illustration by Diane Zhou

a small gathering stood outside of Local 121, a restaurant in downtown Providence, on the evening of October 11. “Are you here for Ms. Stein?” I asked. A few people nodded. A menagerie of people waited in the crisp afternoon to hear Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate. There was no mention, however, of Dr. Stein or Candidate Stein; to everyone, she is fondly known as Jill. A few articles of green clothing could be seen amongst the crowd, but there were no t-shirts or banners proudly claiming support for Stein. The political support that could be seen, in the form of buttons and bumper stickers, was in fact for Abel Collins, the organizer of the event and an Independent candidate for Congress in District 2, endorsed by the Green Party. As it got colder, the crowd shifted inside to the mahogany bar of the restaurant. The total attendance filled less than half the capacity of the small room. Waiting for Stein, the group sat around tables catching up and getting drinks. A waiter repeatedly came by to ask for food orders, perhaps forgetting that he was dealing with a group of people who have organized a national presidential campaign at less than one-thousandth the cost of either of the two leading candidates’. The $20 that could be spent on an entrée would constitute a significant donation to Jill Stein. The residents of Massachusetts, her home state, had donated just over $20,000 as of this summer, making it the state with the most donations to her campaign. Republican candidate Mitt Romney has raised about $13,000,000 in Massachusetts alone. Jill Stein arrived about two hours later than anticipated, hurrying into the room in a bright blue pantsuit with a colorful scarf tucked behind her collar. She was obliquely feminine and overwhelmingly elegant. After a general hello, she proceeded to shake the hands and hear the name of every person in attendance. She seemed thankful for the attendance but rather disappointed by the small turnout. the green party found roots in the United States during the late 80s. Inspired by the German Green Party, many American citizens hoped to develop a similar program within the American political system, beginning with the Maine Green Independent Party in 1984. In 1992, the Rhode Island Green Party was formed. The discrete state organizations joined together to form the Green Party of the United States in 1996, with both Maine and Rhode Island playing crucial roles in its foundation. Its current platform focuses on environmental issues, like climate change, green energy, and recycling. In addition, the party advocates grassroots democracy, decentralization of government, and non-violence in foreign relations. Stein began her political career in 2002 when she ran for Massachusetts Governor as the candidate of the Green-Rainbow Party, the state branch of the Green Party of the United States. In the course of the race, she debated Mitt Romney; a poll conducted by one local television network revealed that 32 percent of the viewers believed

OCTOBER 19 2012

she had won the debate, compared with the 33 percent who saw Romney as the winner. Stein, a Harvard-educated physician, eventually left behind her previous career to enter politics full-time. Despite her qualifications and amiability, Stein may not break the five percent of the popular vote that the party needs to ensure future success. The Green Party considers itself to be “the one party that is of, by, and for the people,” as Stein mentioned in her October 11 speech—meaning they are not supported by corporate sponsors like those that aid the Republican and Democrat parties. Although the Green Party wants to take money out of politics, money is what’s keeping them out of politics in the first place. Stein has qualified for federal matching funds, which required at least $5,000 in donations from at least 20 states. However, Stein’s campaign still lacks the finances needed to compete with the two major parties. The Green Party receives hardly any news coverage from major news networks. Despite being on 85 percent of the ballots, Stein and her running mate Cheri Honkala are barred from the presidential and vice-presidential debates. Stein and Honkala were arrested last Tuesday for trying to get into the presidential debate at Hofstra University. former rhode island green party chair Greg Gerritt has been a major player in the Green Party since its early days in Maine. Gerritt, considered one of the elders of the party, was the first Green Party candidate to run for the US House of Representatives, running in Maine in 1986. Out of all the candidates he has seen over the years, he believes in Jill Stein. “I was one of the people who said [to Stein], ‘Think real hard about this. We would love to see you run,’” he told me. Despite his prominence within the party, Gerritt is easy to overlook in person. His long, gray beard only exaggerates a slight lisp as he breaks into political rants. He wears faded jeans and flannel shirts and gesticulates wildly. Gerritt finds it hard to propagate his progressive politics within the state: “I have had several conversations with Lincoln [Chafee]… when he was running for governor… I arranged to meet with him to brief him on my work… and he wanted no part of it.” “We have really not been able to do much locally. Not much going on, you know, we get an upswing with each presidential campaign, but we really have not developed much infrastructure,” said Gerritt. The party lost a statewide ballot status in 2004 when David Cobb, its candidate at the time, failed to receive the five percent of votes needed to qualify the party for future elections, and it has not regained that status since. In order to get Stein on the Rhode Island ballot, the Rhode Island Green Party collected 2,000 petition signatures that were then validated by the Secretary General of the state. The Green Party of Rhode Island still hopes to elect a candidate to a state office. The party has backed Abel Collins, an Independent candidate running for Congress in District 2. Collins has lived his entire life in Rhode

Island, attended Brown University, and claims to be a direct descendant of Roger Williams. Yet he struggles to break more than six percent in the polls. Even with the recent numbers, Collins is still optimistic at the possibility of making a considerable dent in the elections. “Rhode Island is ripe for an independent electorate. In my district 50 percent of the voters are registered Independent,” he told the Independent. The majority of voters, however, are leaning towards the incumbent Democrat James Langevin. Collins was not included in the last public debate; but, after much protestation from his supporters, he is set to be in the next one in November. Personalities ranging from Noam Chomsky to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama have endorsed the Green Party. The Dalai Lama even mentioned the party in his speech in Providence on Wednesday: “If I had to choose a political party, I would choose the Green Party.” Yet, despite its prominence among the intellectual community, the Green Party is still struggling for broader public recognition. undeterred by the venue’s lack of sound system and the 60s pop hits playing the background, Stein stood at the front of the room. After a brief introduction from the state Green Party Chair Tony Affigne and a quick speech from Abel Collins, Stein began her talk, entitled “The Politics of Courage:” “Let me start by saying how incredibly grateful I am to be able to be a part of this amazing team that has made history together getting on 85 percent of the ballots for voters.” After speaking about her key issues—student debt, military spending, health care, and her Green New Deal economic plan—she talked about the more immediate problem facing the Green Party. “We are now hoping to raise the amount of money we raised in the primaries, about a half a million dollars. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the Wall Street campaigns, but from a people power campaign it’s a lot of money that we can change politics forever with.” With five percent of the popular vote comes a multitude of benefits, including a $20 million grant from the Federal Election Commission for the next presidential election, and ballot status in nearly every state from the beginning. “If you are able to make a contribution, do it. Any amount of money is a godsend … The largest donation we can take now is $2,500—I know that isn’t the spare change most Greens are carrying around in their pockets, but you never know,” said Stein. Tony Affigne of the RI Green Party, standing next to Stein, proceeded to play auctioneer, and asked anyone who would donate $100 to raise a hand. An uncomfortable silence ensued as no one raised a hand. He kept going down in donation size, and at $25, a few hands finally went up. MARY-EVELYN FARRIOR B’14 is going green.

METRO // 04

NOTES ON TRANSUBSTANTIATION by Patrick Madden Illustration by Allison Grosso

for the tiny children, it’s a tiny snack or a deprivation thereof. For the older children, it’s a proud act of parental mimicry. For the teenagers, it’s a quiet, habitual set of motions, perhaps accompanied by vague notions of scriptural significance but usually more replete with mental meanderings. And for the adults, a staggering range of beliefs and attitudes abound. But abound in silence. Expectation and performance of what the moment should be stifles any honest acknowledgement of what will transpire. And so we move through the motions again and again. And the motions calm us in the midst of our frenzied lives. The music lulls; the sanctuary is warm; the congregation speaks as one. And even if we don’t believe, even if the bread

05 // FEATURES

remains bread, even if we glance about seeking others who share our doubt, a ritual is somehow soothing. Transitioning from ritual participation as a child to participation as an adult has filled me with more honest curiosity than spiritual ardor. Who in the sanctuary believes what? Who of the somber-souled, quietly-chewing individuals around me even regularly questions or ponders what they believe? Exactly when in the service, in those more literal denominations, does the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ? Exactly who in my own Congregational Church is even aware that our doctrine claims the bread and wine to be a metaphor of remembrance rather than a literal transformation? Do the deacons buy the loaf

of bread from the same place every week? What brand of grape juice is that? Welch’s? What would it mean to accidentally step on a consecrated wafer? What would it mean to purposefully step on a consecrated wafer? I didn’t anticipate these inquiries to lead me straight to Greenville, Rhode Island. in the middle ages. . . Each church selected a single baker. This baker alone was concocted the bread to be used in the Eucharist. This baker worked in solitude and used a special oven, designed to preserve the ritual surrounding the unique baking process.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

This baker was often mandated to fast or meditate while baking. As of a charter in 1406, this baker could not be female. This baker was busy. As congregations grew larger and money scarcer, this baker simply couldn’t handle the strain. Certain orders of nuns began large-scale wafer-baking efforts in order to raise revenue for their individual churches. But even the nuns with their holy bake sales couldn’t manage in the end. The masses at mass amassed, and mass marketing eventually rendered moot the efforts of bakers and nuns. The bread of the Lord passed swiftly into the arms of machines. Today, the Cavanaugh Company in Greenville, Rhode Island holds an 80-percent market share in the US, Canada, Australia, and England on communion wafer manufacturing. It has been called the “Microsoft of altar bread.” the family-owned commercial bakery operates 24 hours a day. It churns out 25 million wafers a week. Cavanaugh bread is made from pure flour and water, “untouched by human hands” and “sealed minutes after baking,” according to their website. In other words, the ingredients are mixed, cooked, and packaged in tubes like Ritz crackers all by a whirring jumble of mechanical extremities.

things, to solidify Catholic dogma), communion wafers took the form of paper-thin white sheets, baked to dissolve on the tongue. In 1962, however, the Vatican Council decided to make communion bread a little more bread-like. And the Cavanaughs provided. Wafers with sealed edges that don’t crumb and aren’t too shiny. Wafers imprinted with religious icons that aren’t too tacky. Wafers that are unleavened but still retain a bread-like appearance. Wafers that can be easily broken into smaller wedges or distributed individually. Whole wheat wafers for those diet-conscious or color-concerned parishioners. The Cavanaughs have a machine and a price for all of these things. Call toll-free at 1-800-635-0568, or order online. brian cavanaugh is very straightforward with the Boston Globe about his product: “When it leaves here, it’s flour and water. It’s a baked good. And not a very good tasting one. But when you receive communion, uh, you know, it’s totally different. It is a transformation. We don’t do it. It’s done during the mass.” He’s also straightforward about sales trends: “When times are rough, more people seem to go to church.”

just as the manufacture of communion bread has adjusted to modernity, so too has discourse surrounding transubstantiation morphed in form and rhetoric: a great debate about the eucharist: Featuring “RachelKH”

(junior Member: forums.catholic.com), posting on December 15th, 2011 and “Fr. Vincent Serpa” (senior member with 3,682 posts: forums.catholic.com), posting on Dec. 22nd, 2011. rachelkh [Subject: Eucharist????????]: Please explain the

Eucharist – we say and believe it is the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ – ok – but if we tested the regular Blessed Eucharist, it would not contain the DNA of Jesus, right? So how can we believe it is physically the Body and Blood??? My very smart teenager wants this answered and I’m not up to it. Thank you! fr. vincent serpa [Re: Eucharist????????]: Hi, If we could

detect his DNA in the Eucharist, there would be no need for us to believe. There is nothing that is in any way measurable about the Eucharist that changes when it becomes the Body of Christ. The Apostles had to take what He said on faith—and did so because they loved Him. So we must take the mystery of the Eucharist on faith as well – and for the same reason! A collision, then.

Primarily purchased by Catholics, Cavanaugh wafers are available to and requested by a veritable maelstrom of denominational leaders, and even occasionally by the laity. “Cavanaugh wafers don’t crumb, and I don’t like fragments of our Lord scattering all over the floor,” says the Episcopal Reverend Bob Dietel from Washington. Rev. Dietel might have been joking. But then again he might not have been, making sanctuary janitorial duties quite delicate. Or rendering the church mice that much holier. According to Brian Cavanaugh, current head of management, sales, and marketing, the Second Vatican Council of 1962 expanded the company’s horizons. As of the 16th century Council of Trent (which convened, among other

Sales have spiked intermittently throughout the current economic recession, with a five percent increase this year.

A lurch at the grafting of new on old, of machine on sacrament, of forum on faith.

Sales spiked 10 percent after September 11, 2001. perhaps in the face of hardship, we return to faith in things we cannot see. The possibility that Christ himself is present in the bread before us is the possibility of transcendence. Of a way out and a way beyond. Or perhaps in times of strife, we revert to the familiar, cling to the soothing. As His body is broken, as the bread dissolves, we stand uncertain. We chew and sip and glance and eke out a prayer. But doubts take wing on hymnal refrains, lost amid the creak of wooden pews. Our bodies and hearts remember this; our minds need not be troubled.

A sigh of relief, then. Because consternation comes easy when its subjects are newfangled, pixilated, generational. A distraction, then. The how of sacrament; the where of discourse; the when of heavenly transformation. A furrowed brow, now, at the realization: we are further from meaningful inquiry than when we began. If we assume the Lord inhabits with equal ease a medieval loaf as a Cavanaugh construction, then the pause the latter provides begs attention. PATRICK MADDEN B’14 sweeps up the crumbs.

OCTOBER 19 2012

FEATURES // 06

Inconvenient Truths The Struggle for Justice and Memory in Brazil’s Truth Commission by Emma Wohl Illustration by Diane Zhou

as the credits rolled last week on The Day That Lasted 21 Years, a film about Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship screened at Rio de Janeiro’s International Film Festival, a man sitting in the row behind me stood and cried out, “Truth commission now!” At first glance, this may seem an unnecessary demand, considering that Brazil’s president, Dilma Rouseff, swore in the National Truth Commission last spring. The commission will investigate many as-yet undisclosed facets of the military dictatorship, ranging from specific instances of torture to businesses that financed covert government acts to Brazil’s influence on other regimes in South America. The investigation will look at the years from 1948, twenty-four years before the regime, to 1988, three years after its end; the commission has until the spring of 2014 to complete this task. But for human rights organizations that have lobbied for years to make the government recognize, publicize, and prosecute violations of human rights under the dictatorship and the many people and families who suffered under the regime, the proposed commission is a far cry from what they hoped for. many nations in latin america underwent periods in the 20th century during which the government took harsh, repressive measures against its own people—whether rounding up and torturing political dissidents or massacring a particular ethnic group. Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Uruguay all formed truth commissions to look into state violations of human rights. Brazil’s military dictatorship may not be as infamous as those in Chile and Argentina, but it was one of the earliest regimes in 20th century Latin America and lasted years longer than its neighbors’ regimes. It began with a coup in 1964, in which the military vowed to clean up what it claimed was a corrupt state and to return the country to democracy. But the military remained in power long past the coup, denying citizens the right to choose their leaders, purging Congress of opposition candidates, and censoring the press. As critics grew more vocal, the government rounded up dissidents, imprisoned them without trial, and tortured them, sometimes to death, in order to learn about further anti-government organizations. Some members of the opposition turned militant, robbing banks and kidnapping foreign dignitaries to gain attention and leverage with the hopes of freeing their comrades and ending the military regime. Most of those who were freed fled the country in fear of being arrested again.

07 // FEATURES

The government foresaw its own demise years in advance, and the final two General-Presidents adopted a strategy for transitioning out of power and protecting members of the regime, while allowing indirect elections in 1985 that chose a new president from the opposition party. The 1979 Amnesty Law pardoned all political prisoners and activists who had not committed ‘blood crimes’ (crimes in which someone died) and allowed those living in exile to return to the country; at the same time, it protected members of the government from future prosecution. the 2012 law establishing the Truth Commission allowed the commission members to determine their own guidelines for carrying out the investigation and releasing information to the public. For the most part its proceedings have been kept closed, a decision Cecilia Coimbra, vicepresident of the human rights organization Tortura Nunca Mais-Rio de Janeiro, calls “censorship.” But the commission has held several public hearings across the country to report discoveries and answer questions. Commission member Claudio Fonteles spoke at one such hearing in Rio de Janeiro in late September. The attendees—representatives of organizations involved in the question of transitional justice for years, such as Tortura Nunca Mais and the Brazilian Lawyers’ Association, as well as journalists, students, and some ex-prisoners and their families—sat mostly quiet, with occasional outbursts to demand more information, as Fonteles and representatives of several working groups and agencies thanked each other and reiterated the importance and complexity of the cause. As the officials spoke, Djalma Domingos da Silva sat in a corner of the auditorium, waiting for a chance to speak. He was draped in fabric covered with writing that told the story of his arrest and torture at a meeting of a metallurgical workers’ union in 1964. “I am the truth,” he said when the time came for the audience to speak. “I bear on my body the marks of the dictatorship.” At the time of his arrest, Da Silva was a member of the Marine Corps. He was taken to the naval prison, stripped of his uniform, beaten and abused, but he does not have official documentation of the time he spent in prison. Fonteles did not directly respond to Da Silva’s story, nor to a stack of documents that Jorge Eduardo da Costa de Nascimento, the son of another political prisoner, placed on the table in front of him. Several other speakers rose to tell their stories and beg the commission to use them as testimony. But when Fonteles spoke of gathering evidence, he talked about archives, not about witnesses.

memorias reveladas (memories revealed) is an online database of documents related to the military dictatorship, run through the National Archive in Rio. It was launched in 2009, three years before the commission was established. A new access law, which went into effect in May, requires government archives to collaborate with the government in making records about the dictatorship available to the public. Before the law, archives and databases determined what documents were available, and most remained largely inaccessible. Speaking to the audience in Rio, Fonteles credited the National Archive, Memorias Reveladas, and the access law with making available documents that led to revelations in the investigation. But some observers were skeptical. Desiree de Lemos Azevedo, a graduate student in anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro who has followed the commission since its formation, told the Independent that Memorias Reveladas “doesn’t exist.” According to Azevedo, the documents the database claims to have released were already available through other archives. The way the Memorias Reveladas database is organized makes finding documents next to impossible. Some of the documents it lists are digitized and available through the site if one uses accurate and specific terms for the search, but many are not. Rather, a successful search yields information about where these documents are held. This could be anywhere from the national archive in Rio or Brasília to the archives of Rio Grande do Sul, the country’s southernmost state, or Ceará, on the northeast coast. Such information hardly makes most of the resources in the database more accessible. But by flaunting the database as a path to further communication, the National Archive and the commission can claim progress. “It’s pure propaganda,” Azevedo said. That the commission need rely so heavily on documents stored in archives is a point of contention for those who have sought recognition of human rights violations. The commission has only two years to complete its investigation, and some of its members are starting from scratch in studying the dictatorship. Rather than relying on testimony of scholars who studied the regime, discoveries the commission makes come from its own members, Azevedo said, adding contemptuously, “They don’t know anything.” But to Fonteles and other members of the commission, first-hand research is necessary. When asked about a specific incident of torture, he said he cannot simply accuse a former member of the military of torture. “I need documental proof.”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The primary product of Argentina’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a 50,000 page report full of depositions from survivors of disappearance. South Africa’s first commission, in the aftermath of Apartheid, centered on testimony of human rights violations from both abusers and abused, using their accounts to further the cause of restorative justice. But those commissions had a clear goal of rehabilitating both those whose rights had been violated and the nation as a whole. The goals of Brazil’s commission, beyond creating an accurate historical record, are unclear. brazil’s post-military leaders have been more resistant than other countries to condemn crimes committed during the years of conflict. The Brazilian government only acknowledged responsibility for the regime’s illicit acts in 1995, establishing a law that would allow victims and their families to seek financial remittances, and President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva dropped his 2009 proposal to form a truth commission after members of the military, still a powerful and respected national institution, threatened resignation. Government officials regularly invoked the amnesty law as a reason not to pursue members of the regime. While Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay all passed Amnesty Laws near the ends of their regimes, these amnesty laws were either overturned or ignored by subsequent governments who prosecuted members of the regime. Victória Lavínia Grabois Olímpio is the president of the Rio de Janeiro branch of Tortura Nunca Mais and has lobbied since the end of the military regime for a commission of truth and justice. She disputed the “reciprocity” with which the Brazilian courts, and now the commission, view the Amnesty Law, extending its protection to the state as well as to political dissidents. “They have the interpretation that the amnesty law was made for the two sides—for the opposition to the regime and for the public agents of the state. But this is not written in the law,” Grabois Olímpio told the Independent. Even though it seems clear that the original law was intended to protect the regime, she argued that it need not be interpreted that way—the courts are free to prosecute agents of the state who violated human rights. But at this point, the Brazilian courts show no sign of changing the way they interpret the law. In a precedentsetting 2008 decision, the Supreme Court, responding to a challenge to the Amnesty Law, re-affirmed that agents of the regime could not be charged with human rights abuses. The Truth Commission, meanwhile, has publicly stated that it will not seek to prosecute. The Federal

OCTOBER 19 2012

Congress could only gain enough votes to approve the law forming the commission after including amendments that limited the power of its members and guaranteed it would not result in prosecution of any member of the regime found responsible. In arguing whether the purpose of further investigation into the dictatorship should be prosecutions or not, both the Truth Commission and Tortura Nunca Mais are fighting a third argument about reconstructing the past, which considers even studying it to be dangerous. “We are disturbing a wound that is scarred over, which may once again cause serious problems,” Representative Arolde de Oliveira, a member of DEM, a center-right party, told the Chamber of Deputies in September 2011, in the midst of the debate over forming the commission. This view is not the sole purview of the military and right-wing factions of the government. Swaths of Brazil’s public feel the same way. Suburban couple Luis Claudio and Ana Rosa Moutinho, a carpenter and an accountant at GloboNews, believe that the government tortured some citizens. They also firmly believe that political dissidents committed terrorism and murder. These acts, in their minds, balance out, and they see no reason to revisit the regime. Nina Schneider, in an article in the European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, describes this mindset as a common phenomenon throughout the country. There was never broad public sympathy for victims of the regime, a small and politically marginal group—one reason that the Truth Commission was not formed until now. fonteles said the “great challenge” for the commission was to find a way to reclaim justice in spite of limitations like the Amnesty Law and the Supreme Court decision. He was not optimistic. “We will fail profoundly. We will try, but we will fail.” What, then, does the Truth Commission hope to achieve? For now, according to Fonteles, its members are “studying a theme,” hoping to spark more discussion and produce more concrete information. The October 2 announcement that the commission would be relying on the findings of state-level truth commissions, which are currently being formed, further reinforced the idea that it is hoping to “push other sectors of civil society to create a permanent web in defense of democracy,” Fonteles told O Globo. But this, like the creation of various working groups and the agreements with archives, seems like a façade of progress to the commission’s critics.

Ultimately, members of Tortura Nunca Mais find fault with the commission’s very premise. “What is missing from the truth?” asked Pimenta, a member of the group’s Rio de Janeiro chapter. “The Brazilian public does not need more proof of these torturers.” For Tortura Nunca Mais, what the nation needs are politicians determined to publicly acknowledge and condemn both the human rights violations committed and those who committed them. the truth commission and other government agencies dismiss complaints about the danger of investigating the regime, but they maintain a hope for closure through the proceedings. The goal of the commission “is not to cause new wounds, but to cauterize old ones,” said Guilherme Guedes Raposo, a member of a working group on transitional justice organized by the city of Rio. A member of the Brazilian Lawyers’ Organization used a different metaphor, quoting one of the judges who tried Augusto Pinochet in Chile: “We all want to turn this page, but we have to read it first.” But Tortura Nunca Mais is not interested in turning pages or closing books. Their campaign for recognition of crimes committed by the government in the 60s, 70s, and 80s is part of a larger cause: fighting “against impunity” in all parts of the Brazilian government, past, present, and future, Grabois Olímpio said. For her, even if the law somehow changes and members of the regime are prosecuted, the fight for justice will continue. Today in Brazil, corruption is commonplace among government and law enforcement officials. The torture and persecution that were tactics of the military regime remain tactics of the police, who now target “the young, the poor, blacks, and residents of favelas” as well as people living “on the periphery of cities,” Grabois Olímpio said. But she is hopeful that in conjunction with public policy, the recognition of Brazil’s past human rights violations could help shape the country into one that treats its citizens with dignity. “You need to make an example so that people don’t do this again.” EMMA WOHL B’14.5 hasn’t finished reading this page quite

yet.

FEATURES // 08

What a lot of people don’t realize is that I’d been up there before so it wasn’t scary at all. We had done the jump a ton of times before we got 4:20 because I kept jumping too early or too late after the clocks started. Everyone was asking me what I saw and so I just made it up after I saw the video. — RM

He saw tomorrow, maybe. But not the day after. — KP

He saw fog because his facemask fogged up. That’s also why he pulled his ‘shoot so early. Stupid question. ­— MPR

Where it is no longer earth and not yet space, Felix saw the tops of his feet, packaged in the plush white spacesuit, peek out from under his helmet. When he was falling faster than sound, he saw a black nothing. When he landed in the New Mexican scrub grass, there were his feet, still peeking and still white, but now plain against the desert ground. ­— DSF

He saw words before they were, when they were just those things all over the place, before they said “please dispose of your gum properly, it is hard to get out of the rug.” He saw the gum and the rug and the chewing of it. He saw the idea of chewing, pre straws, pre teeth. — ­ AR

09 // FEATURES

Didn’t he black out? I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. — ET

The soft fog of his breath tracing the space along his visor no longer reminds him of the painful thrum of his blood circulating, and he reaches out his hand to meet the hazed curve of the Earth bowing up and out. The world shrinks to hand-size, as if on loan just long enough for him to make sense of. And in that split-second moment before he goes supersonic, he licks his lips and tastes a sweetness. — EJ

That fat blue whorl sucked him in (perhaps it hadn’t eaten for days) and as he slid into the slate-cerulean maw things started to sharpen up. Felix could make out the fuzzy edge of a peach, then some splotchy patches of red (his cheeks in brisk wind). He saw dull golds and runny greens, onto which bloomed little blobs—shiny, like swallowed quarters. At the end, his feet sunk into the tawny Earth, which belched dust onto his white suit. — EV

He saw ten years into the future. Sitting at home, belly spilling over a pair of brown-stained boxer-briefs, moving swiftly through a lifetime supply of RedBull, watching YouTube videos of himself over and over and over again— “Fuck, man, that was dope.” Walking into Starbucks, looking around eagerly for other eyes to meet his. “That’ll be $4.13.” Uh, no, I am Felix Baumgartner, that guy who jumped 24 miles to Earth? His grandchildren, cleaning out the garage after a funeral ceremony at which he requested to be buried in his spacesuit, wiping the dust off of an old newspaper’s front headline—Felix Baumgartner Completes Record-Setting Jump’—and thinking, “Mach 1 killed him, after all.” — ­ DA

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Bonk he head, broke me puzzle. — DF

From where Felix flew, the world was made of swimming watercolors. He watched the painted earth unhinge itself, unfurling until its back was flat. He also watched his feet. — NM

There are a lot of different kinds of houses down there, but it almost looks like they’re separated into small clumps of identical houses... — GD

The makeup girl is cute. Is the earth cardboard? It can’t be cardboard, I feel like they must use some kind of high tech polymer. But maybe they just do all that in post production these days. — AH

I don’t know that because I’m not Felix! I just can’t help her. — MF

Berbers! Berbers! Berbers! — AT

There is an essential loneliness in being human; it is the little golden nugget at the core of art and love and sex and everything we ever do that’s intended for someone else. But when you hover 24 miles above earth, by yourself and blinking out at no one, and then millions of breath-bated people will you back, I think you see what it means to be a discontinuity, a vertical asymptote of loneliness. ­— GB

Last week I tripped on the sidewalk. — ES

I used to kiss a boy that painted nuns in space. I thought it was a little weird at the time, but now I don’t know what to think. — RS

“Is there a breakfast bar?” “Wait, does she cut on the counter? If she does, it’s granite. If she doesn’t, it’s marble.” “Marble?” “Is your refrigerator see through?” — RB

OCTOBER 05 2012

Felix thinks of Brad Pitt, and Brad’s beautiful body and questionably puffy lips in his favorite movie Troy. — AW

planet label or sentient fire-orb bunny hopping into artifice at mach 1 — JDT

FEATURES // 10

Hanging on Air Airports as a Venue for Public Art

By Pierie Korostoff Illustration by Diane Zhou

this September, the Southwest Florida International Airport announced an addition to the terminal: the airport is acquiring “Dawn Forest,” a three-ton sculpture by abstract expressionist Louise Nevelson. On a two-year loan from the Naples Museum of Art, the multi-million dollar sculpture consists of 12 white geometric forms that will hang from the ceiling and stand free in the center of the space. There are few places capable of housing it properly—the airport is one of them. According to the American Association of Museums, the median attendance for art museums in the United States is about 44,000 visitors a year. JFK International in New York, on the other hand, has at least 40 million travelers passing through its doors annually. Despite this sheer volume, airport patrons are clearly different from the crowds found in art museums—it’s safe to say that few of them are there for the art. With this large but preoccupied audience, airports face an issue typical of public art but heightened in their circumstances—how to draw people into an experience that is different from the one they expect in a particular place and time. Though airport visitors are often subject to long waits, they must still be persuaded to notice the art around them in a scene that is far from the traditional art museum environment. “We’ve had to think hard about how to maximize opportunities for people to experience the art and to access the rest of the collection on the basis of one encounter,” wrote Todd Bressi, an urban planner and public art consultant who has worked for airports across the country, in an email interview. “There is a disconnect between where people spend their time (in line, at the gate) and where you tend to see art at airports.” To combat this problem, the Denver International Airport took an integrative approach—placing pieces at key points along a passenger’s path through the airport and working to keep the art cohesive with the airport design. Leni Schwendinger, for example, created a mile-long light installation that passengers view only in passing on the train connecting terminals. The success of this endeavor was mixed: “In our research we learned that people remembered seeing a lot of the art in the airport, but they did not necessarily realize it was art—they just felt it was part of the airport’s overall design aesthetic,” says Bressi. in an opposing trend, public art in cities has been gravitating away from permanent pieces that blend into the space, and toward pieces grounded in brief transformation, interaction, and spectacle. Christo and Jean-Claude’s project “The Gates,” commissioned in 2005 for Central Park, is a high-profile example of this kind of artwork— their installation of saffron-colored archways temporarily altered the landscape of the park and demanded extensive viewer participation. Cities have been increasingly attracted to the sense of accessibility in this kind of temporal public art, encouraged by the news-breaking aspect of temporary and interactive pieces. Artists, likewise, are drawn to the experimental and dynamic qualities that temporary art allows. “The Drift,” a floating platform that provides a way for creative projects to interact with the Pittsburgh waterfront, is an example of a piece that allows artists to continually respond to city conditions.

11 // ARTS

Temporary pieces can be less expensive, logistically simpler in cities, and more exciting, but fitting this type of art into the constraints of the airport is challenging. Airport use has been shifting to more time ‘airside’ than ‘landside’, meaning more time is spent behind security lines, especially since 9/11. The result is more art airside, necessitating security clearings for all artwork and anyone involved in the creation of a piece. Anything centered on performance, collaboration, or group engagement is thus logistically complicated. There is also a lack of flexibility in art funding for airports, and “a general level of top-down control,” which puts a damper on temporal artwork, suggests Bressi. Add to that the difficulty of fitting interactive work into a busy and distracting environment—most people dragging carry-on luggage to their gates are not inclined to engage with art the way spectacle-based pieces often demand. The more common trend in airport art is toward exhibitions that change several times a year, providing variation without the logistical challenges of temporal and performance-oriented work. However, even just switching out the pieces in an exhibit requires careful planning to complete without disrupting the airport operations, so permanent exhibits (like the imposing Richard Serra sculpture that the Toronto Pearson International Airport commissioned in 2006) and long-term loans from museums also remain popular. though creating and maintaining art in airports is complicated, certain airports worldwide have demonstrated a commitment to the visual experiences of their customers. San Francisco International Airport’s (SFO) program is one of the largest, allotting more than $3 million for artwork each year and maintaining 27 full-time employees and 20 gallery spaces, each with 6-month temporary exhibitions. The work on display ranges from the classical to the contemporary: current shows include ancient Hindu sculpture, mid-century Scandinavian ceramics, “From Art Nouveau to Pop Day-Glo: Levi Strauss Advertising as Art,” contemporary metalwork, and a show on the origins, evolution and global reach of the mountain bike. The shows that are located before security check points make a free museum that is open 24 hours a day. The art program at SFO started in the late 1970s, when the city’s Arts Commission launched the airport’s art program in conjunction with the construction of a new terminal. Over the next 20 years, nearly 70 works were commissioned, created, or acquired; all in accordance with San Francisco’s art ordinance, a program that allocates two percent of the construction or renovation cost of civic structures to arts enrichment. More instrumental than the efforts of the Arts Commission alone, however, was the establishment of the SFO Museum in 1980—the first and only airport collection to receive accreditation from the American Association of Museums. Though the accreditation process takes at least two years of review, the airport has found it to be worthwhile: local museums and institutions are more generous with loans to an accredited museum. The museum maintains a ‘Design Lab’ on airport property where staff store, protect, and prepare pieces for exhibition. Other workers build and customize structures for each of the nearly 40 shows of varying size that are

exhibited each year. This is an enormous number of shows, even compared to most museums—the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents about 25 exhibits per year. Though high-profile pieces like Louise Nevelson’s “Dawn Forest” and the accreditation of the SFO Museum have received plenty of attention, arts administration at airports is still frequently overlooked. When Todd Bressi worked with airports in the past, the biggest challenge he saw was that no one was in charge of the common spaces: “There are people in charge of concessions (shops and restaurants), people in charge of maintenance, and people in charge of branding (slogans, logos, colors and fonts). But nobody overall in charge of the experience of the place,” he says. Airlines, who hold a substantial amount of power in dictating how airport money can be spent, have few concerns about the feel of the environment on the ground. Meanwhile, a particular clause of the FAA’s policy complicates things further: under the Diversion of Revenue rule, money derived from airline operations can be used only for the operation of the airport. It is easy for art to be disqualified as part of airport operations and lose airline funding entirely. Last August, the Indianapolis International Airport announced the removal of “Chrysalis,” a piece by local artist James Wille Faust. The airport paid around $150,000 for the piece in 2008, part of a new terminal construction that involved a $4 million collection of public art. In 2011, facing low revenue in the economic downturn, “Chrysalis” was replaced with an LED video wall that displays digital media as well as advertisements. The reality of advertising mixing with original artwork on the LED video wall, however, remains controversial in the Indianapolis art community. Lingering below the embrace of arts and culture by airports is the fundamentally commercial nature of the airport space. Airports, for the most part, are not museums—they are free from the responsibility that museums face as explicit cultural centers. When pieces like James Wille Faust’s Chrysallis in Indianapolis are rejected in favor of advertising, this contrast becomes strikingly clear. in many places around the country, though, airports are still working on their art enrichment. There is a movement toward attempting to illuminate local creative energy. Differentiating one airport and community from the next is always a goal, so this trend appeals to arts administrators in airport corporations, who often work closely with local municipalities and arts agencies. Future airport exhibitions may involve more partnerships with local arts institutions, including museums, galleries, cultural organizations, historical societies, science organizations, and design firms. We may see airport exhibitions overlapping more and more with city-oriented shows and projects, like the Toronto Pearson International Airport, which is a venue for an annual citywide photo exhibition. Though the logistical constraints that accompany art in airports show no sign of diminishing, the enormous and varied audiences continue to provide an enticing venue for arts administrators and artists alike. PIERIE KOROSTOFF B’16 sits in the concourse, sees the food

court, stays put.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

STRANGE NEGOTIATIONS David Bazan and Post-Christian Rock by Jonathan Storch Illustration by Lizzie Davis david bazan was formerly the frontman for and brain behind Pedro the Lion, one of the few Christian rock bands to attain some measure of indie credibility in the early 2000s.1 He’s thirty-six, and since 2009 he’s released two solo albums, Curse Your Branches and Strange Negotiations, as well as a 7” collaboration with Deerhoof. On November 13, he’s playing Pedro’s 2002 album Control at the Brighton Music Hall in Allston, MA. Songwriters like John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats and Craig Finn of The Hold Steady develop strong religious themes in their work, but from a position safely outside the church. Born into a pastor’s family in Seattle and raised on Christian singers like Carman and Sandi Patty, Bazan was a child of American evangelicalism all the way through. He formed Pedro the Lion at his Pentecostal college, releasing their first album It’s Hard to Find a Friend in 1998. As his songwriting career progressed, Bazan became famous for his willingness to write seriously about spiritual struggle and sin. For ostensibly Christian rock, Control’s “Rapture” is an astonishingly wry narrative of a pastor’s extramarital affair. “Gideon is in the drawer / Clothes scattered on the floor,” Bazan sings. “She’s arching her back / She screams for more / Oh, my sweet rapture / I hear Jesus calling me home”.2 Unsurprisingly, Pedro the Lion proved an uncomfortable fit in the smooth-edged world of mainstream Christian music, primarily attracting secular and indie-Christian fans instead.3 But Bazan’s frank explorations of darkness made his occasional expressions of piety, like the acoustic hymns he played in his Cornerstone 2000 set, seem genuinely real. After the release of Pedro’s last album Achilles Heel in 2004, Bazan’s status as indie-Christian darling took a downward turn. At Cornerstone 2005 he was escorted off the premises, completely drunk and carrying a jug of vodka. That year, the release of his side project Headphones got good reviews but remained a one-off, and he started writing songs about alcoholism and a loss of faith. In a 2010 interview with Christianity Today, he reminisced on the period: “If I had refused to pursue those questions, I would have been admitting that belief in God could not be intellectually satisfying. . . I had to be honest, and let the chips fall where they may.” for those raised in devout communities like Bazan’s, coming of age in a secular culture often entails an acute process of dislocation. Faith, on its own terms, is supposed to ground your identity—what do you do when you have to give it up? The most appealing direction may be just to “get over it,” to learn to get along in a world without God like everyone else seems to do. But because of the degree to which religion ingrains itself in the believer’s psychic makeup, this move frequently proves impossible. More accessible may be a reactive atheism that identifies religion in general as deception—after all, the feeling of having been deceived leaves many ex-believers reeling. Reactivity animates much of Curse Your Branches, Bazan’s first album as a professed non-believer. The opening track, “Hard to Be,” starts with a minute of keyboards

OCTOBER 19 2012

and synthesizers before a verse that sketches the Biblical story of the fall. After a refrain, Bazan interrupts: “Wait just a minute. You expect me to believe / That all this misbehaving grew from one enchanted tree?” Elsewhere, resentment of his upbringing and resentment of God are intermingled, and he often encapsulates the contradiction that C.S. Lewis identified in his younger self. “I maintained that God did not exist,” Lewis writes in his autobiography Surprised by Joy. “I was also very angry with God for not existing.” In Lewis’s book, the contradiction was overcome by the grace that enabled his conversion to Christianity. In the image on Curse Your Branches’s title track, it was latent in belief from the start: “All fallen leaves should curse their branches / For not letting them decide where they should fall / And not letting them refuse to fall at all.” Although it may appear attractive, the price of reactive atheism for the erstwhile believer is often too high. On his blog An und für sich, theologian and cultural critic Adam Kotsko explains his aversion to the popular atheism of people like Richard Dawkins, the author of the bestseller The God Delusion. Adhering to it, he writes, “would mean submitting my own experiences to a framework that would entirely falsify them.” More structurally, by defining itself in opposition to God, this kind of atheism forfeits the ability to do precisely what it wants—to get beyond religion.4 The adoption of one of a number of secular pieties— spirituality without religion, Alain de Botton’s “religion for atheists”—may appear to be a more modest alternative. The problem with these kind of stand-ins is that they make neither the demands nor the promises that religion did. “Those who find their life will lose it,” Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, “and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Secular piety’s ideals of mindfulness and community seem unequivocally necessary for living a decent life, but that doesn’t make them substitutes. Bazan isn’t usually one for easy answers,5 and in his post-Christian work, he doesn’t go in for this particular kind. What semblance of resolution that does come is in Curse Your Branches’s more introspective latter half. “Lost My Shape” presents a movingly honest account of the pain and humiliation involved in giving up belief. “Bearing Witness” and “Heavy Breath” are both poignant meditations on human materiality. And the plaintive closer, “In Stitches,” finally arrives at the only way to start dealing with the contradiction of being a former believer—to learn to live with it: “I might as well admit it / Like I even have a choice / The crew have killed the captain / But they still can hear his voice.” after the release of Curse Your Branches, Bazan accepted an invitation to come back and perform at Cornerstone 2009. His old audience gave its prodigal son an enthusiastic welcome—Bazan may have left evangelicalism, but his problems are still their own. Bazan’s more recent solo effort, 2011’s Strange Negotiations, is musically strong and lyrically more varied than Curse Your Branches, picking back up on some of the more political themes he’d entertained with Pedro.6 The collusion of religion and capitalism is a major target, but

Bazan’s moral attacks on greed often feel less intrinsically necessary than his earlier attacks on God. (An exception is the melancholy title track; although it’s most obviously directed at bankers, many of its lyrics—“You blew all your inheritance / And now you’re trying to pin the blame on me”—could easily be aimed at the apostate singer.) Many of the songs contain second-person exhortations, which carry the manifest sincerity of someone who’s made it through the wringer. Two more intimate songs develop a motif of earth and air, in respective addresses to an absent lover and a dead friend. “Won’t Let Go” finds Bazan on a plane flight, longing for the grounding of his relationship—sonically it’s haunting, but like much of the album, its writing suffers from over-reliance on cliché. On the warmer, more organic “Virginia,” Bazan remembers: “We were worried about your personal salvation / Was it heaven or hell that you saw when your eyes closed? / You smiled at us, floating high above the question / Like you knew something we didn’t know.” Then two will be in the field; one will be taken, and JONATHAN STORCH B’14 will be left.

They got some good reviews on Pitchfork; in 2006, Paste magazine

1

somewhat questionably put Bazan on its list of the hundred greatest living songwriters. Pitchfork trashed this song in a generally positive review of the album,

2

but a big part of why these lines work is that they’re trite on their own but really gross given the narrator’s vocation. There’s also some subtle wordplay with “rapture,” whose literal meaning here is a Left Behindstyle evacuation of believers from the earth. Mainstream Christian music is generally the wasteland of derivative

3

corporate pop-with-a-message that most people imagine it to be. The indie-Christian scene is a little better, but usually not much. Made up of youth group kids, so-called “post-evangelicals,” and bands that play in clubs and churches, it congregates yearly at festivals like Cornerstone in Illinois, which celebrated its final year in 2012, and the more eclectic Wild Goose in North Carolina. Fundamentalism’s metaphysical tenets are an extrinsic product of its

4

more basic effort, to forestall spiritual authority from disintegration by fetishizing it. When Dawkins and co. attack them on their own terms, they mostly just embarrass themselves. Except in his early work—see 1997’s Whole EP for several particularly

5

distasteful exercises in the piety of submission that’s standard fare in the world of Christian music. As Pitchfork duly noted, the deferred apologia for belief on Achilles Heel’s “The Fleecing” is similarly lame, but in hindsight it looks more halfhearted than anything else. 6

The 1999 WTO protests in Seattle were the occasion for a kind of

political awakening for Bazan, causing Pedro the Lion to join an even more idiosyncratic breed—the Christian band that’s also anti-capitalist.

ARTS // 12

annika finne Sep 29, 2012, 09:06

annika finne Sep 29, 2012, 17:16

annika finne Sep 28, 2012, 17:24

robert sandler robert sandler

Sep 29, 2012, 11:36

Sep 28, 2012, 18:45

robert sandler Sep 29, 2012, 20:42

annika finne Sep 28, 2012, 19:24

annika finne Sep 29, 2012, 11:57

annika finne Sep 30, 2012, 00:12

robert sandler Sep 28, 2012, 20:10

robert sandler robert sandler

Sep 30, 2012, 00:46

Sep 29, 2012, 14:55

13 // OCCULT

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

annika finne Sep 30, 2012, 09:38

annika finne Sep 30, 2012, 21:42

annika finne Oct 02, 2012, 12:45

robert sandler Oct 01, 2012, 09:56

robert sandler Sep 30, 2012, 12:55

robert sandler Oct 02, 2012, 16:08

annika finne Sep 30, 2012, 17:47

annika finne Oct 01, 2012, 18:58

annika finne Oct 03, 2012, 22:14

robert sandler Oct 01, 2012, 21:13

robert sandler Sep 30, 2012, 21:08

OCTOBER 19 2012

OCCULT // 14

Dead Bears and Frozen Bugs Or, why the leaf turned red in the autumn by Urmila Chadayammuri Illustration by Diane Zhou “The leaves turn orange, yellow, brown The trees look like a golden crown.” – I Am Seven (my favorite book that has since disappeared without a digital trace) years after i was seven, I realized that autumn leaves offer an accessible and enchanting doorway into the world of science. The occasion? My well-travelled four-year old cousin was asking me why leaves never change color in India. “It’s because of chlorophyll,” I explained, feeling like a terrible teacher already. The kid was four. Later, Devu told his mom that I had taught him about photosisis. In other words, this is elementary school science. As Devu later recited, plants take sunlight and carbon dioxide—which is the air we breathe out—and turn it into energy. They store this energy as chlorophyll, the way our bodies save energy as fat. Chlorophyll is green, so the leaves are too. Once produced, however, the chlorophyll molecule is not stable. Come fall—or autumn, as you will—with its cooler and shorter days, it decays, revealing other colors that had been overshadowed. Xanthophyll is a yellow pigment that absorbs radiation of frequencies too high for chloroplasts to handle, helping prevent cell damage. The orange carotenoids, on the other hand, protect against self-destruction—chloroplasts, you see, sometimes get hit on by photons too energetic for them to handle, leaving their electrons over-excited. Excited states never last, however, and these electrons must return to ground state, producing dangerous oxygen radicals in the tragic process. Carotenoids graciously step in to shield neighboring cells and tissues against damage from these radicals, while also lending color to carrots, pumpkins, squash, sweet potatoes, and other seasonal delights. “The process of chlorophyll decay also occurs in a ripening banana,” notes former urban entomologist and ardent tree-lover Jonathan Liebovic B’12. “That’s why it

15 // SCIENCE

turns from green to yellow to brown.” Incidentally, bananas (except some in India, but that’s another sto ry) do not turn red. Red leaves were the unsolved mystery of autumnloving botanists up until the 1970s. Chemically speaking, these leaves are colored by the pigment anthocyanin. The issue is that anthocyanin is not generated during the summer, simultaneously with chlorophyll, the way carotenes and xanthophyll are. Anthocyanin is autumn’s child. This means, however, that leaves need to expend the scarce energy they have left to create it, and then die within a few weeks anyway. Why bother? Micmac Indians of the Northeast already had a theory: the asterism we know as the Big Dipper was, to them, the Great Bear and three hunters. Every fall, the celestial hunters would kill and cook the Great Bear, which is why it disappeared from the horizon. The bear’s blood dripped down upon trees and colored their leaves red, while its fat covered others in yellow and orange. The advent of the scientific method, however, has demanded an alternate explanation. Similarly flamboyant displays of color in other species—think a peacock’s tail or a lion’s mane—are often driven by reproductive motives. It would be sad indeed if leaves were trying to woo each other and then dying. Fortunately, this is not the case. Unfortunately, this indicates the possible interplay of multiple factors. As with Schroedinger’s cat, all solutions are valid at the same time, so let’s go through them one by one. As it turns out, the short period of anthocyanin dominance in leaves is crucial for the energy and nutrients generated through photosynthesis in the summer to be transported to the roots for storage in the winter. Linda Chalker-Scott of the University of Washington believes that anthocyanin may function similarly to xanthophyll, in that it also absorbs solar radiation. With chlorophyll gone, sunlight can no longer be used for photosynthesis and, unless otherwise harnessed, is now free to damage the leaf. Antho-

cyanin thus replaces the chlorophyll-xanthophyll complex as sunscreen for leaf tissue. There is also evidence that it might lower the freezing point of water within the leaf, thus stalling its dehydration and death just long enough to allow the aforementioned storage process. Red, flashy as it is, may also be a signal to animals and insects. Again, this could work two ways. Edmund Stiles of Rutgers University says his research indicates that certain plants, like the sumac tree he studies, use the color to attract insects and birds towards their berries and fruit, perfectly ripe and full of seeds. This hypothesis is strengthened by the added information that anthocyanins are, in fact, a family of pigments, ranging in color from violet and blue to red and found in berries, cherries, and grapes, all of which are as delicious as they are key to the host plant’s reproductive process. Simon Lev-Yadun of the University of Israel drew quite the opposite conclusion from a comparative study of autumnal trees across continents. If I am Seven was written in Russia, where I read it, Lev-Yadun wouldn’t be surprised that it didn’t mention leaves turning red. He believes this to be characteristic of North American trees, a development to warn potential pests to attack at their own risk. This signal, he argues, was less necessary in Europe, where colder ice ages simply froze out the herbivorous insects. Stiles’s theory seems to work better for fruit-bearing plants, while LevYadun’s explains leafy trees. At this point, lest the physicist in you become overwhelmed by the uncertain variables, remind yourself of the bigger picture. Every leaf is, in essence, a time capsule. The way it functions today has been shaped by millions of years of evolutionary history—spanning ice ages, droughts between various continents, and ecosystems the plant moved through over generations. URMILA CHADAYAMMURI B’13 loves maples for more than

just their syrup.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Wet, Hot, American

Michael Showalter in Conversation Interview by Drew Dickerson Illustration by Allison Grosso i first became aware of Michael Showalter B’92 during the initial run of Stella, a single-camera television show he put out alongside David Wain and Michael Ian Black. Thirteen year-old me was immediately taken with the anachronistic, Marx Brothers shtick—three schlemiels wandering New York, absurdly and sharply dressed—“ids in suits,” as Showalter would later describe the characters. Yet this sort of smart yet profoundly stupid comedy was cancelled after only one season. Other cult-classic credits to Michael Showalter’s name include The State—a sketch show that ran on MTV from 1993 to 1995— and Wet Hot American Summer (2001), which he co-wrote and starred in. He emails in 14-point Courier font. The Independent: I understand your education here at Brown was fairly heavily theory-oriented. Has this informed your work at all? Michael Showalter: A lot of the things I’ve done dabble in genre parody. I suppose I think that genre parody is semiotic in a sense. By shining a light on a certain convention or trope I’m trying to deconstruct it, maybe even understand it better, albeit in a funny and silly and not very high-minded way (hopefully). I am always very tuned into what things “mean” in the semiotic sense—especially in the realm of pop culture, whether it’s in social trends like the way people act and what they say or how they say it, or on TV and movies—and then by reflecting it back to an audience, sometimes by just repeating it verbatim, you are kind of revealing it for what it is. I think there’s a semiotic perspective hidden in there somewhere. Not sure. Maybe

OCTOBER 19 2012

not. What’s semiotics? Indy: Your book Mr. Funny Pants was released last year. Do you find that you approach prose differently than you might a sketch or screenplay? MS: Everything is different. Writing a sketch is very different from writing a screenplay. Sketches don’t require as much real storytelling or narrative attention as a screenplay. Sketches are really just about jokes and premises. Writing a book was very challenging. It was really something I had no experience with at all. It’s cliché to say but I didn’t know what “my voice” was as a long-form prose writer. It took a while to find the right tone. For a while I think I was trying to be “deep” because that’s what you’re supposed to do in a book, or so I thought. Turns out I’m not that deep so I wound up just making lots of lists and talking about my cats. It’s always a work in progress. I’m working on a few new book projects now and I already feeling better going in. Indy: How does this process change in working with a group? I’ve also always been sort of curious: what was The State’s process? MS: We wrote a prolific amount of material, individually and in groups. It was a free for all. Every day at 3PM we’d have a “Pitch Meeting.” We’d all meet in a conference room and pitch our sketches to each other. There was no set order for the pitches, you’d just raise your hand and say, “Okay I’ve got one.” Then you’d read it aloud to the group. If the

group liked it they’d laugh and cheer and hoot but if they didn’t like it you’d hear crickets and feel really bad about yourself. Then after a few months of just writing and writing we’d compile all of our material and vote on what we wanted to shoot. The sketches with the most votes would be shot. There’s hundreds of sketches we wrote that never got shot. Most of them for good reason too. Indy: You now teach at NYU Graduate Film School and both of your parents are professors. How would you characterize your relationship to academia? MS: My relationship with academia? We’re friends with benefits. Indy: There’s the rumor now and again that a sequel to Wet Hot American Summer is in the works. Is anything happening on that front? MS: Yes. It’s actually a prequel. We will all be in our forties playing teenagers that are six months younger than the teenagers we played ten years ago when we were in our thirties playing those same teenagers. The script is almost finished. Hopefully we’ll start shooting soon. The biggest obstacle is getting the cast all together at one time considering most of them are big movie stars now. Indy: What’s in the future? MS: Flying cars. Faster internet. Robots with feelings.

INTERVIEWS // 16

THE MYTH by Michael Mount “well, this is awkward,” she thinks to herself, squatting beside the brick wall. Her urine rolls down the sloping concrete in a thin stream, pooling up around the broken glass. She pushes the last drops out and stands up quickly to yank her underwear back under her skirt. The potato chip wrapper floats lightly as the urine flows underneath it. And then the breeze smacks her in the face and tells her it’s time to get moving again. She watches the road. Squinting with all of her might she tries to conjure a car into existence, illustrating its form in the deep cotton of night. It appears. Sometimes she can’t tell the difference between fate and determination. When she wants something to happen why should it not. When Willis went screaming into the ice bucket that time he shot his own finger off, did she not will it into being. She watches the headlights dilate.

“Do you have a band-aid?” she asks. “What for?” “Cause I got to patch something up.” “What you got to patch up?” He looks her up and down, keeping one hand on the weathered leather wheel. “It’s not here,” she says. “But I need one for later.” “Well I ain’t got any anyways,” he says. “You just gonna have to make do with some clothing or something.” She thinks of every Christmas she used to spend in the yellow trailer with Pigeon the dog and her mother Mary sitting beside their skeletal tree with mugs of instant hot chocolate. One time she finished opening all the presents too soon and she asked her mother if that was all and her mother started crying. There were only five ornaments on the emaciated tree. Then the truck runs over a possum with a slight bump.

“Looking for me?” he says. “I guess so,” she says. “Can I get a ride?” “Of course,” he says. “You want anything?” “Nothing. Hop in.”

“Oh my God,” she says. “We just hit that possum.” “What?” he says. “That white critter?” “That’s a possum.” “Damn. We killed it dead.”

His cigarette ember pricks the darkness. She runs her hands over the skirt on her thighs, rubbing out the wrinkles like her hands were irons. Just running the fabric smooth and steady as she felt the hairs on her thighs catch. Then the hot twitching inside her begins again, and she tries not to bend over.

In the rearview mirror she can see its long crimson entrails in a vector leading from the flattened white body. She can see the last flick of the paw. Then the taillights leave it in the darkness and she just has the little ember again, hovering under his nose. The smoke trails up, swimming into his nostrils in lines.

“It’s funny, I don’t really see many women like you. I see all sorts of strangers, though. Mostly kids who are just running away and sometimes I’ll get a boyfriend girlfriend duet. But mostly it’s just the kids, they’re the ones who are always waiting. I found this one kid once, waiting with two grams of heroin on him and he offered me half of one. The thing about going all night though is you don’t want to be on that kind of stuff because it’ll just put you down. I mean, it’ll put your head right through the floor. It’s mostly just the uppers that I like. You need those if you want to push this chariot through the fire or whatever.”

“Where are you going to anyways?” he asks. “Amsterdam.” “That’s not a bad place.” “Nothing will be open at this hour and I need a band-aid.” “There’s that little place on the corner that might be open. What’s a woman like you doing traveling alone anyways?”

At this point she notices that there’s a little bit of pee on her shoe, in a wet spot on the canvas. Damn it, she thinks, and begins to cry, very, very lightly. The feeling of holding Willis’s fingerless stump to staunch the blood comes back to her hands, the hot and pulsating throb. She gripped it tightly and her hands almost squeeze around nothing now.

17 // LITERARY

She looks at him as he looks at her long spidery fingers plaiting the folds in the fabric like irons. She looks at her legs, long and white and smooth. My God, she thinks to herself, watching the pine trees alternating between the telephone poles. My God, when will it all end. When will I be the one driving again. When will it all end. When will Willis regrow that finger. When will this night end. The driver says that he used to have a thief for a friend.

“The thing about the Lion King is you can’t trust him with a dime. You can’t trust him with a single thing. Don’t ever let him near your wallet. Don’t ever let him near your keys. But most importantly, don’t ever let him near you. He’ll steal the eyeballs right out of your head and you won’t have realized till you walk into a goddamn wall.” The headlights bleed into the light from a vending machine beside the road, under the awning of a garage. There’s a young man standing there, waiting. The truck slows down and the young man puts his face in the opening of the passenger window, breathing frosty words into her face. Good God, she thinks, he looks like he’s been awake for days. The driver hollers out the window and invites the man inside. She scoots into the middle, wedged between the new man and the driver. He throws the ember pinprick out of the window and it tumbles on the road. The truck moves again and she tries flexing, silently, almost wetting herself. “Welcome aboard.” “Thank you much.” “When I was your age there was one thing about the road that no one told me and now I wish someone had told me when I was young. That’s the thing about getting old though, you got to hold on to what you had when you were young and shed all that young skin at the same time. One time I shot a turkey in the neck with a pistol, hit that thing square in the neck with a forty four at twenty five feet off, swear to God. It just ripped the whole thing clean apart and you bet we had something to eat for a long time.” The man slips his hand into hers and she feels the warmth of something she had not felt for a long time, bubbling in her middle and rippling out into her toes and fingertips. She felt happy and safe again, watching through the windshield as the indigo night turned into the grey crimson, slowly percolating through the silhouette of the pine trees. She held her thigh tightly with her remaining hand, clenching the patchwork dress on her smooth legs. “It smells a little like piss,” the driver says, sniffing with his nose. She feels the sweat in his palm. “I can’t smell a thing,” she says. And she can’t smell a thing and she holds tightly to the skin.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

OCTOBER 19 2012

X // 18

friday the 19th ulysses glove project salon 5–7pm // the athenaeum artist jessica deane rosner & poet/translater stuart blazer to talk about rosner’s multi-year transcription project. namely, copying joyce’s ulysses by hand onto yellow cleaning gloves. inspired by her father’s infatuation with the text, censorship, art as daily practice & ideas of the epic and the ritual.

the intelligence, king tuff, jacob & the terribles 9pm // as220 // $6 who are the first two acts? who cares. i fucking adore jacob. and you probably do too. the gentlest human being on the planet and perhaps the funniest. do you read mother’s news? it is 1000x better than the indy. read mother’s news and see what news can be. jacob is mother’s news. jacob is everything but terrible. come, you idiots!

domenico quaranta lecture 6:30pm // cit 103 (risd) risd’s reframing the real research group presents a lecture by alumnus, art critic and curator domenico quaranta. he wrote a book (1) with the word media in the title three (3) times.

sunday the 21st

live bait: the musical 9pm // as220 // $7 for either or both shows first fridays are live bait fridays and that means telling stories in under 6 minutes on a theme. jerry “the professor” gregoire, bait’s beloved sidekick is taking center stage to perform a collection of original songs based on the past shows’ themes. four years in the making, he is ready and armed with a band. come early (7pm) for the standard live bait fare...with a twist (oh you’ll see). father finger, unicorn hard on, spiritual recess, cyclops 11pm // pr matrix hex (olneyville) // $ a mythical night of various babes. imagine the anagrams. cyclops hard on alone gets you psycho cauldron & achy scold porn. yow. saturday the 20th johnny cake festival 10am–5pm // kenyon’s grist mill (west kingston) over 85 local vendors, mill tours, old world demonstrations, free samples, live music, alpacas, & a waterfall. runs same time on sunday. brain storm 8pm // granoff studio one (brown) everett’s critically acclaimed dance theater company uses current neuroscience research and personal narrative to tell of the brain & how it makes us human, blending choreography, storytelling, information, humor, and video.

the warren walkabout 12–5pm // warren, ri live performances and demonstrations, open artist studies, samples, sidewalk sales, & “a chance to ride the dragon.” is warren better than west kingston? you decide, choose your poison, etc. the mill project 2pm // feinstein gallery (80 westminster st) the lavoce theatre shares stories from ri’s industrial revolution. fall fiesta 5:30pm–12am // as220 // $25 night; $8 music urban greens food co-op presents a day of food (chefs from flan y ajo, julian’s & more), music & dancing. eats start at 5:30. music starts at 9pm. support community-driven food initiatives! tuesday the 23rd simone leigh artist talk 6:30pm // college building (risd) ceramics artist simone leigh engages in an objectbased, sculptural exploration of female african american subjectivity. using pre-historical ceramic techniques, she challenges the boundaries between art and craft, between past and present. wwe: smackdown! 7pm // dunkin donuts center // $15–95 did you miss the indy v. herald kickball game? (we lost. this isn’t news.) here’s your chance at a redemptive can of whoop ass.

frank difficult presents halloween shorts 9pm // black box (95 empire st) // $3 a night of mostly local, all weird short films in a mostly local, all weird space. frank is dreamy & we’re gonna have nightmares. wednesday the 24th round table discussion with paolo rosa 5:30pm // brown-nightingale house (benefit st) acclaimed italian visual artist paolo rosa heads a discussion entitled “the future of museums and the public humanities: perspectives from italy.” action speaks: 1965 griswold v. connecticut 5:30pm // as220 (empire st) join host marc levitt for another live installment of the nationally distributed radio program, now in its 17th season. “contraception as a right of privacy? the supreme court say, ‘yes.’” harvest of shame 7:30pm // petteruti lounge (brown) brown’s fall food film series presents everyone’s favorite halloween thriller. just kidding it first aired on thanksgiving, 1960. edward murrow’s final cbs documentary about migrant workers in america. where does your chow come from & at what cost? thursday the 25th nihad sirees reading 4pm // 68.5 brown st novelist nihad sirees will read from and discuss his work and his life in syria. bi-annual graduate painting show 7pm // sol koffler student gallery (weybosset st) opening reception for a bi-annual exhibit of risd’s graduate students in painting. this list-er has noticed a marked fuschia current in risd grad painting. what’s up with that? in the know? know me! find me dreamy? find me! email listtheindy@gmail.com

this da y in lis tery 17 french 22 c. patent hopffer s th exting e fire uisher .