The College Hill Indepdent V.25 N.10

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT Brown & RISD Weekly | V. 25 N. 10 | 12.07.2012

from the editors Cut along the dotted line. Find the fold and lick it. Press the crease softly to your heart and whisper sweet nothings, wishes, mismatched desires. While you are doing this, we are arriving at our new digs, excited, puckered, ready to begin. We thought this made us serious. It made us ready. We were meeting that task while you played with toys in the sand pit.

Sometimes you have to cut shit up to make it grow. Apple trees are a series of grafts. In Maine, sitting on the dock, we read vintage farming books to each other and drank margaritas/martinis under the stars. What were you doing, babies? Following the instructions? Walking along the dotted line, with your dog? While your dad was watching, we were rolling in the confetti, little bits of paper sticking to the spittle of our lusty chins, the ducts of our eyes.

We sent you a letter. Coupons, clippings, anything that we could really get our hands on. Twigs, sea glass, a bit of gum, my little brother’s retainer.

It all piles up, all the little cracked bits you thought you’d never need. But you know what? It creates the most beautiful motherfucking clutter you’ve ever seen. The fusty old sweaters from your rheumatic grandmother wrap themselves around the swarm of crumpled paper, as if trying to keep them from moving too far from one another, not this time. — RB, RS, ES

ephemera

news

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WEEK IN REVIEW // barry elkinton & emily gogolak

metro

the indy is

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 Lizzie Davis, Annie Macdonald, Jared Stern ILLUSTRATIONS Diane Zhou PHOTO Annie Macdonald STAFF WRITERS Marcel Bertsch-Gout, Lizzie Davis, Mary-Evelyn Farrior, Megan Hauptman, Benson Tucker SENIOR EDITORS Belle Cushing, Mimi Dwyer MVP Claudia Norton COVER ART Robert Merritt

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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WITHIN THE LINES GREEN CARD // rick salame

TJ & DAVE // drew dickerson

science

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FIELD TRIP // austen mack-crane

features

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WET WALLS // grace dunham

TINSEL TRAP // drew foster, alex ronan & erica schwiegershausen

// sam adler-bell

E-MATER // your mom

arts

// benson tucker

interviews

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OUR HOUSE

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IT’S THICK // christina mccausland & oliviajené fagon

CIRCLE JERK // claudia norton

toe tags

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YOU’RE DEAD // the swarm

literary

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EVISCERA // julian park

x-page

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THE ROAD GOES EVER ON // drew foster

Week in Review

by Emily Gogolak & Barry Elkinton // Illustration by Diane Zhou

WRITFULLY RAUNCHY

SEMANTICS

a group of literary types gathered in London’s In And Out Club this past Tuesday night. There was hype, there was whispering, there were held breaths. Who is it going to be? They were at the club for the presentation of an annual award, one that had to do with another kind of in and out.

For the past 20 years, the British literary magazine Literary Review has been giving the Bad Sex in Fiction Award to the author who publishes the worst description of a sex scene in a novel. The award, however, is more of an anti-award. Believing that writers were encouraged by their publishers to write sex scenes in order to amp up book sales, Former Literary Review editor Auberon Waugh, son of the late novelist Evelyn Waugh, started the tradition in 1993. The goal, then, was “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”

Former winners and nominees include the Great—and Virile—Male Novelists trinity Roth, Mailer, and Updike—Rabbit even won the “Lifetime Achievement” award in 2008 for Bad Sex. Salman Rushdie, Amos Oz, and John Banville were shortlisted in the past few contests, as was Jonathan Franzen (the phone-sex scene in Freedom is indeed pretty bad). Tom Wolfe won once. But in the prize’s first 19 years, only two women’s names have been announced at In And Out. This year, however, a lady came before the lads. Paris-based Canadian author Nancy Huston was pinned for the worst passage, from her latest novel Infared, about a photographer who takes pictures of her lovers during sex. Some lines the judges cited include: “flesh, that archaic kingdom that brings forth tears and terrors, nightmares, babies and bedazzlements;” and a long lead up to a climax of “undulating space where the undulating skies make your non-body undulate.”

Huston, 59, has a lot of work of literary merit to counter this literary diss. She even won the Prix Goncourt (think of it as the French Pulitzer). Though she wasn’t present at the awards, she seemed pretty proud of her raunch. She sent a message to the Bad Sex panel, saying that she hoped her win would “incite thousands of British women to take close-up photos of their lovers’ bodies in all states of array and disarray.” (Indy protip: Disposable cameras are currently on sale at CVS). —EG

lighting a holiday tree in the State House is usually one of the more lighthearted moments among a governor’s duties. Last year, however, Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chaffee became embroiled in controversy when he insisted upon calling the tree in the Rhode Island State House a “holiday tree” rather than a “Christmas tree.” Although Chaffee insisted that he was simply honoring Rhode Island’s longstanding commitment to religious tolerance, many conservative media personalities labeled Chafee a radical secularist and a ruthless aggressor in the ‘War on Christmas.’ On the night of the treelighting ceremony, hundreds of caroling protestors crashed the event, interrupting a local children’s choir’s performance with a rousing rendition of “O Christmas Tree.”

This year Chaffee seems to have learned his lesson. Although the tree was placed in the rotunda early last week, no official lighting ceremony was scheduled, and rumors circulated that there would be no ceremony at all. Then, at 11:31 AM on November 27, Chafee’s office made a surprise announcement: at noon Chaffee would light the tree.

Sure enough, half and hour later, Chaffee stood by the ornamented, 17-foot spruce, electric switch in hand. “Last year, unfortunately, this event, turning on this switch, turned into what I thought was a very disrespectful gathering,” Chafee said to a small crowd of spectators and passersby. “So we’re going to light this tree, go visit some of the performers, and have a very merry holiday season.”

While his tactics have shifted, Chaffee’s semantics remain unchanged. “The governor has stated his position very clearly: He believes ‘holiday’ is more inclusive,” said Chafee’s spokeswoman, Christine Hunsinger. “It’s in a building paid for by all Rhode Islanders.” But while Chaffee successfully avoided a repeat last year’s debacle, many conservatives are determined to make sure he doesn’t get the last laugh. Representative Doreen Costa of North Kingstown, who last year labeled Chaffee a “Grinch,” said she was planning a separate Christmas-friendly party in her wing of the statehouse for sometime next week. “A lot of people were not happy,” Costa told the Associated Press about Chaffee’s surprise announcement.

“People weren’t able to go. But it’s OK. We’ll have an actual Christmas party.” — BE

DECEMBER 07 2012

NEWS // 02

DOCUMENTS FOR THE UNDOCUMENTED Driver’s Licenses in the Rhode Island State House

by Benson Tucker // Illustration by Sarah Grimm

on monday, november 19, around 60 protesters marched on the Statehouse calling for access to drivers licenses for those without Social Security numbers. After vocally supporting immigrant communities during his 2010 campaign, Governor Lincoln Chafee now must decide how much support his administration will provide. With national immigration policy change stalled and strict state laws like Arizona’s SB1070 under hot debate, state policy makers are in the spotlight. Immigrant rights groups, like the “We Are All Arizona” Coalition that organized the Statehouse rally, are working to raise the political costs of inaction.

IN OUR COMMUNITIES

Over the last decade, Rhode Island’s immigration policies have been on the line in an ongoing game of political tugof-war, and the Statehouse has been the major playing field.

With state-level powers— like issuing drivers’ licenses and defining state police policies­—largely under the governor’s authority, a flick of the executive’s pen can have farreaching consequences.

In the “We Are All Arizona” Coalition, organizations like the Fuerza Laboral (Power of Workers) and the Olneyville Neighborhood Association (ONA) help create a political presence for undocumented workers affected by state policies. According to Susan Beaty, an organizer with ONA who was among the Statehouse protesters, the license campaign, which has been running for a full decade, is heating up this year for a few reasons.

In part, there are the renewed hopes fueled by the friendlier Chafee administration. Chafee’s predecessor, Governor Donald Carcieri, signed an executive order in 2008 bringing about new immigration enforcement policies. The order demanded that state agencies and contractors participate in E-Verify, a federal program used to verify employee work eligibility that is used by 12 other states. Carcieri’s order also enrolled state police in a Department of Homeland Security program that trains state police to evaluate and detain individuals based on their immigration status. During the campaign, Chafee called the order “divisive,” likely referring to the policies’ implicit zero-sum outlook, and promised to repeal it. He did so during his first two days in office.

Even with the Carcieri executive order gone, recent pressures on undocumented immigrants still raise the stakes of inaction. In 2010, Rhode Island began participating in the Secure Communities program, making an immigration screening a routine part of arrest procedures. Local enforcement officials will fingerprint an arrested person and run these fingerprints through an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) database, flagging those who have previously crossed paths with the immigration system for further investigation. As Beaty noted, “driving without a license makes you vulnerable to deportation in ways you wouldn’t [have been] before.”

However, Attorney General Patrick Kilmartin, who signed Rhode Island on to the Secure Communities program, has downplayed that scenario and called attention

03 // METRO

to the possibility of deporting violent foreign criminals instead. In 2010, Kilmartin wrote an article in the Brown Daily Herald defending the program: “If you receive a traffic violation, such as a speeding ticket or a parking ticket, you will not be impacted and your fingerprints will not be entered into or run against the Secure Communities database.” The important distinction is whether the driver has a license—in which case the issue remains a traffic violation—or is driving without a license, a crime in and of itself that warrants an immigration screening separate from the traffic violation.

Immigration attorney David Borts has dealt with “numerous cases” where deportation proceedings were initiated due to Secure Communities. As he explained, “What Secure Communities does is to create a doublejeopardy situation in which one’s civil [i.e. immigration] status adds the possibility of being thrown out of the US for the crime of operating a motor vehicle without license.” What do immigrants do to cope? Borts says, “drive slowly (no joke), take the bus or train, purchase fraudulent licenses.”

CLOSED WINDOWS

Another source of urgency is that many immigrants without Social Security numbers hold licenses due to expire this year. Acquired during a 2002-2003 window of more tolerant state policy, these licenses cannot be renewed under current laws.

In 2002, making licenses available to immigrants was an administrative matter. Immigrant rights groups lobbied Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) administrators to allow tax-paying immigrants to prove their ability to drive and receive a license. Robert Carl Jr., head administrator of the DMV at the time, saw the issue in pragmatic terms and supported the policy change. Speaking to the Providence Journal last year, he explained, “I wanted to be able to track people down… I wanted to collect their taxes… I wanted them to pay car insurance.”

From 2002 to 2003, pragmatism reigned. Immigrants who filed taxes with the federal government, regardless of immigration status, could get a license using their Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN). However, after his election in 2002, Carcieri intervened and ordered the DMV to stop accepting ITINs, reportedly over concerns of fraud and homeland security. Further grounding the new drivers license policy, Republican lawmakers passed legislation in 2004 demanding that the DMV record Social Security numbers upon license issuance and renewal, and the policy stands.

How a new order might interact with the 2004 legislation, though, remains to be seen, and this jurisdictional confusion is one possible reason that Governor Chafee has delayed. Responding to the protesting groups in the Statehouse, he opaquely reiterated, “I want to do my homework, that’s what I’ve always said.”

The Governor has said more than that, though. He has offered hints that he’d like a return to pragmatism, citing

unlicensed drivers as a public safety issue. While rescinding the Carcieri executive order, he said, “My view is that Rhode Island can grow economically by being a tolerant place to do business. The immigrant-rich areas, I want to see them prosper, and they need it.”

Like Governor Chafee, Juan Garcia, a longtime organizer of the drivers license campaign, emphasizes a view of immigrants as an economic engine, pointing out that licenses help people go to work and buy homes and cars. But, Garcia adds, “it’s all up to the governor.” “The first step is to renew the grandfathered licenses,” says Garcia, allowing those holding ITIN-registered licenses to renew their licenses with the ITIN on file. For Garcia, the expansion of the license to the undocumented comes later and requires legislative cooperation, but after Latino groups got out the vote for Chafee, Garcia feels that the Governor is obliged to show some initiative.

POLICIES AT WORK IN PROVIDENCE

Providence is home to upwards of 10,000 undocumented immigrants, and Garcia referred to a population of 7,000 unlicensed drivers. The 2010 Census showed that nearly 30 percent of the city’s population was born in another country, dwarfing the comparable nationwide figure of 12.9 percent, 20 to 30 percent of which DHS estimates are not legal immigrants.

While many Providence immigrants are not Hispanic, and many Hispanic residents are not immigrants, ONA has become a hub of Spanish-language immigrant political organizing. The west side Providence neighborhood of Olneyville has had a majority Hispanic population since at least 2000, growing still during the last decade.

For organizations like ONA, political action is just one part of organizing against immigration enforcement.

ONA’s emergency response team comes to support residents at any hour by documenting altercations with immigration officials. Garcia, an ONA member, reports knowing many people who have faced deportation proceedings due to Secure Communities. He rattles off the whole administrative procedure, from jail to ICE, like someone who knows the process all too well.

The rally, a counterpoint to these daily struggles, brought the confrontation back to state officials. According to Beaty, the Governor is set to have a face-to-face meeting with advocates in the coming weeks, though the rally’s success involved some disagreement. A handful of members of Rhode Islanders for Immigration Law Enforcement, RIILE, staged a counter-protest portraying all legal permissions granted to unlawful immigrants as absurd and misguided. As the pro-immigrant groups marched out, they responded to RIILE’s references to illegals in a chorus, chanting, in Spanish, “no human being is illegal.” Even with both groups gone, the contest remains to be decided in the Statehouse.

BENSON TUCKER B’13

is a tolerant place to do business.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WE CARD? Politics and Pot in The Ocean State

by Richard Salame Illustration by Catherine Hebson

this isn’t the first time Democratic member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives Edith Ajello has tried to bring legal recreational marijuana to Rhode Island. But with the successful legalization ballot measures in Colorado and Washington generating widespread discussion on the issue, the media is starting to pay attention.

On November 15, during a conference call with the Marijuana Policy Project, a national pro–legalization advocacy group—Representative Ajello announced her intent to propose a bill in the upcoming legislative session that would legalize the drug and regulate it like alcohol. Ajello, a certified Oriental rug appraiser with frizzy white hair and two children, has introduced versions of this legislation twice before, in 2011 and 2012. This time, however, it’s getting a lot more media coverage due to the current focus on marijuana policy nationwide. If it resembles the 2012 bill (H. 7582), the 2013 bill will eliminate all civil and criminal penalties for people over the age of 21 possessing or purchasing up to one ounce of marijuana. Private citizens would be allowed to cultivate marijuana plants at home, so long as they affix a stateissued ID tag to each plant and keep them out of public view. H. 7582 also planned to levy an excise tax of $50 per ounce on marijuana purchases. According to Ajello, government revenue generated from ID tags and the tax would be used to fund substance abuse education and rehabilitation, with an emphasis on young people.

This bill would be the latest step in the steady softening of anti–marijuana policy in the state. In early 2006, medical marijuana became available legally with a prescription, making Rhode Island the tenth state nationwide and the second state in New England to pass the legislation. Maine legalized medical marijuana in 1999.

In 2009, the Rhode Island General Assembly authorized the creation of state–run dispensaries for medical marijuana, but they have yet to open due to Governor Chafee’s concern that they will provoke legal action from the federal government. In other states, US district attorneys have prosecuted dispenseries that seem to cross the line between being purveyors of medicine and dealing drugs. After three years of hammering out the regulatory details and talks with US Attorney for the District of Rhode Island Peter Neronha, Govneror Chafee signed a bill in May that authorized three small dispenseries. The Governor’s signature came two weeks after Mr. Neronha issued a statement saying that the federal government would not prosecute patients and caretakers in Rhode Island involved in legitimate medical activites but would still combat “large–scale commercial cultivation and distribution.” The dispensaries plan to open in January under strict size limitations. In June of this year Governor Chafee also signed into law a bill that decriminalizes

DECEMBER 05 2012

marijuana. Massachusetts and Connecticut previously decriminalized marijuana in 2009 and 2011 respectively.

Democratic Representative John Edwards of Tiverton wrote the recent decriminalization law, which passed in both chambers by wide margins despite vocal opposition from Democrats as well as Republicans. Republican House Minority Leader Brian Newberry co–sponsored the legislation, which was opposed by many of his fellow Republicans. Anti–decriminalization lawmakers from both parties were primarily concerned about the message decriminalization sends to young people and the potential increase in usage that might result from a more lax attitude. “Look at the precedent this is going to set for 15, 16, 17-year-old kids,” said Republican lawmaker Joseph Trillo of Warwick, who voted against decriminalization.

Proponents of the law, including Ajello, argued that decriminalization protects young people from serious long–term consequences related to having an arrest on their record. During the debate there was also an extended discussion of exactly how many joints could be rolled with an ounce of marijuana.

The law imposes a civil penalty of $150 on adults over the age of 18 who are caught with an ounce or less of the drug. A civil penalty is similar to a parking ticket; there is no arrest and it does not appear on a criminal record. That law hasn’t gone into effect yet and won’t until April of next year, but attention is already turned towards the possibility of full legalization for adults. And, to advocates, 2013 looks promising.

“I think there’s an excellent chance of the bill passing in 2013,” said Jared Moffat, President of the Brown chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy and an organizer of the New Directions drug policy conference to be held at Brown on December 8. Moffat, like Ajello, views the measures in Colorado and Washington as indicators that national opinion is changing on the issue of marijuana. Even opponents seem to agree: “I’m hoping this goes nowhere, but I think we’re getting closer and closer to [legalization],” Representative Trillo told the Associated Press. In a January 2012 poll commissioned by the Marijuana Policy Project, 52 percent of Rhode Islanders supported legalization and 41 percent were opposed.

Neither of Ajello’s two previous legalization bills were ever brought to a vote, as the relevant committees declined to act on them. The House Judiciary Committee, which Ajello chairs, received H.7582 and will probably get the new bill as well. Of its 14 members, five are being replaced after the November elections, but it is unclear what effect this will have on the bill’s chances. When asked if she expects the bill to pass this time around, Ajello was measured in her response. “I’m expecting thoughtful discussion,” she told the Independent. “Every year that something like this comes up, more people think about it

and more people talk about it.” Her primary obstacle will be convincing members of her own party, which dominates both chambers of the legislature. Edwards recently told the Associated Press that the state should wait and see how decriminalization goes before potentially escalating tensions with the federal government. On November 7, The Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Justice reemphazied to reporters that they will continue to enforce the Controlled Substances Act, which has outlawed marijuana at the federal level since its passage in 1970.

According to Ajello, some of her Democratic colleagues are concerned with the message legalization might send to young people, as they were with the case regarding decriminalization.

Complaints about drug prohibition range from the high fiscal and human costs of enforcement to its supposed inability to reduce usage rates. According to the FBI, there have been over eight million cannabis arrests in the US since 1993. Despite this, the World Health Organization says that 42.4 percent of Americans will still use marijuana at least once in their adult lives. H. 7582 opens with a litany of charges against the current prohibition of marijuana. The bill declares, among other things, that Blacks were arrested at nearly three-and-a-half times the rate of whites for marijuana offenses in Rhode Island in 2009, according to unspecified sources. But Ajello maintains that her primary concern in legalizing and regulating marijuana is to prevent minors from gaining access to it. Liscenced retailers will be required to check IDs. This will make it harder for minors to buy marijuana, according to Ajello. Fred Trapassi, Senior Program Director for the Rhode Island Programs of Phoenix House, a national network of rehabilitation centers with locations throughout the state, is unconvinced. “Legalization will make marijuana not only more accessible but more acceptable in the eyes of minors,” he told the Independent.

He said that underage use of other age–restricted products like alcohol demonstrates how permeable the ID system is.

Both Ajello and Trapassi agree that marijuana is harmful, especially for young people. For her, legalization is an unfortunate cost incurred in hopefully controlling the sale and usage of marijuana. If the forthcoming version of the legislation includes any changes, she said, they will be to ensure the bill is as “clear and strong as it can be on the issue of my concern: minors.” With both sides of the issue staking out the moral high ground of concern for Rhode Island’s children, the voice of the parents themselves is conspicuously missing. Perhaps Colorado and Washington were right to put the issue to a vote.

RICHARD SALAME B’16

is a certified Oriental rug appraiser.

METRO // 04

WAITING FOR IT An interview with improvisers TJ & Dave Interview by Drew Dickerson // Illustration by Diane Zhou every once in a while, an artist or ensemble emerges that reminds the medium of its own possibilities. Emerges is the wrong word-improvisers T.J. Jagodowski and David Pasquesi have been performing together under the moniker of TJ & Dave since 2002. To say that they’ve now come into popular relevance or are only now being recognized feels patronizing. I prefer to think that longform improvisation speaks to a certain moment in the trajectory of American comedy that has been only recently realized. The discerning humor viewer, reader, and audience-member now knows that it is within his or her rights to expect to be treated like an adult. TJ & Dave are that alternative. TJ & Dave offer a nuanced show that expects and rewards your attention. The team was the subject of the Alex Karpovskydirected documentary Trust Us, This Is All Made Up and recipient of the Del Close Awards for “Best Improvised Show” two years running. They play weekly at iO theater in Chicago.

THE INDEPENDENT:

It seems like these days a lot of people approach improv with the hope that those skills will translate into a writing or an acting job. You guys seem to be two of a few people working today to affirm: “We are improvisers independent of any other value.”

I think so. We both happen to do other things but we don’t do improvisation as a means to something else. Improvisation is worthy in itself. A long time ago, improv was a guaranteed dead end. You didn’t find anyone who was improvising as a way to get somewhere else. There was improvisation and then there was sketch. In Chicago, a long time ago, a lot of people had sketch groups.

But the only job that came out of that was Second City.

And very rarely at Second City people would sometimes get hired for Saturday Night Live. So that was the only track.

Now that happens constantly. And improvisation in itself seems to be valued as part of a larger acting curriculum.

Before, it was very separate. It wasn’t of value to anyone. So I think it’s great, quite frankly, that improvisation is viewed as helpful for many disciplines. A lot of people used to, and still do, use improv as something you use to develop material that will be performed for an audience. But there’s the school that believes improv is valuable in itself. Just because someone says that doesn’t mean it’s true. A lot of time improvisation is not worthwhile. So it’s more of a risk by the audience, to go to an improvised show. They can be hard to sit through as a performer and they can be even worse to sit through as an audience. You can’t really do anything about how terrible it is.

DAVID PASQUESI:

INDY: What

are your thoughts on forms like the Harold that dictate a sort of rhythm or structure?

DP: What do I think about different forms? It’s all great.

Whatever the particular form that someone is improvising within is of less importance to me than the kind of improvisation that is going on. And it’s whether or not the goal of the improvisers, either individually or collectively—if the goal is to be clever, that’s one thing. If the goal is to be entertaining, that’s one thing. If the goal is to be controversial, that’s something. But to me that’s how I gauge improvisation. What appears to be the goal of the improvisers? The form, however it presents itself—whatever package its wrapped itself up in—is of less importance I think. But the Harold, I’m a huge fan of the Harold. Huge fan.

INDY: I always feel sort of claustrophobic going into the Harold. I feel like I’m not as present with that kind of structure.

DP: As

opposed to what?

As opposed to a montage or something a little more freeform.

INDY:

DP: What

is your understanding of the structure of the

Harold?

INDY: There’s three beats. All beats have three scenes with the scenes recurring in one way or another through each.

There are palate-cleansers—games not associated with any

05 // INTERVIEWS

previous scene—between each beat. It’s a weird convergence of narrative and thematic connections.

DP:

And how long does a Harold last?

INDY: Something

guy does this.” Unless you were there for the whole thing, I agree with you that it’s difficult to pull a sketch out of a longform improvisation and have it able to stand on its own.

like 45 minutes.

DP: OK. Great. That’s probably closer to what we used to do. They wrap them up more quickly most of the time.

And it seems to me like 45 minutes is about the right amount of time. It doesn’t allow for time for discovery rather than invention. To me that’s the most important part: the discovery of what it is that we’re doing. And I think TJ and I make that distinction. It’s not: “What can we make this?” It’s: “What is this already?” We don’t force our will on things. We simply discover what it is that’s happening and has been happening even before we got there.

How does the time it takes to become a competent performer map with the time it takes to be in an advanced or auditioned ensemble at a theater like Upright Citizens Brigade or iO Theater?

INDY:

DP: I don’t know. I was not involved. They didn’t have an established curriculum at places when I was coming up. I started improvising in 1981.

// INDY: I always have a hard time describing improv—like if I had to give a sound bite to my parents or something. Do you have a term that you can throw around as explanation?

T.J. JAGODOWSKI: Well,

it’s so varied it is tough to put a single sentence or two together. It’s almost always explained as something like short-form. Something like Whose Line? or whatever. And one has no promise or guarantees or constrictions. It has the ability to put scenes in a consecutive order so that they seem to resonate with each other. For Dave and I, for our show specifically, it’s basically a madeup one-act play. That description comes closer than other things even though it’s still not quite right.

INDY: Dave and I talked a little bit about the Harold. I was saying that I tend to feel uncomfortable in that sort of format. What are your thoughts?

I love it. I love all different forms. If I remember hearing correctly, even from Del’s point of view it just ended up becoming the signature piece that he would work on. For whatever reason, this one ended up sticking around. And I love doing scenes. I love watching the whole cast create something. Implicitly but then explicitly in the group games. It’s as good a form as any. And I’m lucky enough to get to do a bunch of different ones so I appreciate them all for different reasons. Also, you can do the strict Harold on any given night—opening, three scenes, game, three scenes, game—but also the Harold has a lot of elbow room in it too that is free to become whatever it’s supposed to be that night. So I guess I don’t feel boxed-in by it because it still has its own soul that evening. It’s tough. In almost any form you have to start loving the box before you know how to break it properly. Like a child does want rules. I kind of take comfort in the structures of form.

TJ:

INDY: Chicago is so interesting to me. I feel like—with the community and the history and the cost of living compared to New York or Los Angeles—it really becomes this great watershed for young performers.

INDY:

So you knew Del Close.

DP: Yes. He was my teacher for a long time. He was my teacher and then we wrote and performed a show together and acted in plays together.

INDY: Was

he the messianic improv guru he’s made out to be these days?

DP: Yeah. He’s the one who developed the Harold and first made long-form improvisation the reason you bought a ticket. It was his belief that improv could be worthy.

Whereas like Second City, you go and see the review show—the sketch show—and you paid for that. The improv was something they threw on at the end of the night for free. Just to develop material. His belief was the improv is valuable. Anything I know I learned from Del. INDY: It seems so counter-intuitive to me to use improv as a writing exercise. There’s a floating context that I don’t think can make it to the sketch.

I don’t disagree. Unless you’re improvising with the goal of coming up with a sketch—which I think is a different thing. I worked at Second City. They have this setup where you establish “Who,” “What,” and “Where” very quickly and we’re going to investigate this particular topic within this setting. Then you improvise within those constraints and you can come up with this sketch that can be repeated. But when you’re doing something like a Harold, I don’t see it either. Like the shows that TJ and I do, the funniest stuff is just not funny to repeat unless you were there for the half hour or 45 minute development that everyone was aware of. We’re all finding out: “Oh, that DP:

TJ: I’ve

been here close to 20 years and I’d say it’s as vibrant as it’s ever been. It’s a really supportive space. There’s a lot of theater and not a lot of competition. You can play at a lot of different places without somebody worrying: “No. No. You’re an Annoyance Theater guy or you’re a Second City lady. You can’t play over there.” You can play with whomever you want just about as often as you want. I still think it exports the finest folks to the finest places. All three of the last SNL hires were Chicago improvisers.

I often see the word “quiet comedy” attached to you two as an ensemble. Would you agree with that characterization?

INDY:

I guess we get “quiet” or “slow.” It can be a misnomer. I like the sound of it because it gives us some freedom not to necessarily be fast or loud. But on occasion we are that. We just don’t promise it. I think to say we’re quiet or slow, you might not necessarily fill every moment with chatter. But also that you don’t sell out the moment. And that’s what I take it to mean more often than not, that you don’t put the bit above the reality. If I’m right about that definition, I like that we’re referred to that way.

TJ:

INDY:

It’s more like a relationship-based or patient comedy.

TJ: Yeah.

And also that you kind of see where the force presents itself within a scene. You can kind of see: “Well, they can play this for the hard actuality of two people going through a divorce or they can play it for the bit. They can play it for the lighter comedy of it.” And we hope that we can go the more serious route than the bit route.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Random Acts of Public Policy Field Experiments in Social Science

by Austen Mack-Crane Illustration by Katy Windemuth

telling parents about the positive effect of education on wages makes students in Madagascar go to school more. Negative political ads don’t seem to change voter turnout. Living in a wealthier neighborhood doesn’t make people earn more, but it makes them feel better. Employers discriminate against African Americans, ex-convicts, mothers, and, in some states, gay men, in their responses to job applications. Charging for public health interventions like drugs and mosquito nets decreases use so much that it may not be a good idea. Health insurance causes people to see the doctor, save money, and feel healthier.

All of these diverse findings come from field experiments in social science. The last of these findings was produced by the Oregon Health Study, a recent policy experiment that studied the effect of insurance coverage on health care use and outcomes. In 2008, the state of Oregon had money to expand its Medicaid program and asked for applications for the new spots. It received nearly 10 times as many applicants as it could accept, and decided to allocate the insurance by lottery. This aroused the interest of economists and health researchers, who asked the state if they could take advantage of this random assignment and collect data on outcomes. The resulting study is a collaboration between the state of Oregon and academic and nonprofit research groups, and its first results were published in August in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Social science seeks to determine causal relationships in the social world, both to inform theoretical models and to make recommendations for policy. Controlled experiments are a powerful tool for uncovering causation: if every aspect of a system is held constant except for the factor of interest, then any variation in outcome that is correlated with that factor must be caused by it. This model doesn’t apply exactly to human subjects, because we can’t perform different treatments on otherwise identical people; they have different health histories, habits, genes, and childhoods, which will affect the way they respond. But social science experiments solve this with randomization.

In an email to the Independent, Bill Wright, a principal investigator on the Oregon Health Study, says “when you get a large group of people together and randomly assign them into two groups, everything else other than the [treatment] should be equally present in both groups by chance.” Any difference in outcome between the groups must be due to the treatment variable.

Experiments in social science are also restricted in scope: clearly we cannot dictate people’s life choices in the same way that we can pulverize protons, or grow plants in the laboratory. As a result, most social science research uses observational data, such as surveys or government

DECEMBER 07 2012

records. This data, though, is harder to work with than experimental results. Before the Oregon Health Study, previous studies on health insurance using observational data had failed to clearly isolate the effects of insurance on outcomes. Typically, people choose health insurance because they want it and can afford it, not at random.

Wright says that “maybe people with certain characteristics are just more likely to have both health insurance and good health, and maybe it’s that other thing that matters most.”

With this type of data, we cannot assume that correlation means causation, and this makes interpretation difficult.

Laboratory experiments solve these data issues, but their abstract setting means that their results may not hold true in real applications.

Field experiments incorporate aspects of both laboratory and observational data. The field may differ from the lab on several dimensions, including the subject pool, type of activity, and environment. Everyday activities, subjects who aren’t college students, and an uncontrived location are all ways in which a field experiment can be made more realistic than the laboratory. Field experiments also have varying degrees of artificiality: “natural” field experiments study an experimental variable that is already present in the social environment, and participants are unaware that an experiment is occurring. One wellknown natural field experiment, conducted by Bertrand and Mullainathan in 2004, mailed résumés with either white- or black-sounding names to employers to assess discrimination in hiring practices. On the other hand, “framed” field experiments, such as the Oregon Health Study, are explicitly presented to participants as experiments, although they occur in real settings.

The Moving to Opportunity experiment, another example of a large-scale framed field experiment, began in 1994 in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. This experiment looked at the effect of neighborhood quality on poverty and well-being, which, similar to the effects of health insurance, has long been an open question in sociology and economics due to the limitations of observational data. To study this experimentally, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development found volunteers currently living in public housing, randomly selected some of them to be given the chance to move to other neighborhoods, and has collected data on their health and economic outcomes in the 15 years since. Analysis of this data appeared in September in the journal Science.

The results show that people who move to a higherincome neighborhood do no better economically. However, their rates of obesity and diabetes decline, mental health

improves, and subjective well-being (SWB) increases with the neighborhood change. While some have been dismayed by the absence of an effect on families’ economic situations, the increase in SWB alone may justify this type of program. The study also finds that the change in SWB is caused by neighborhood income, not racial composition, as some scholars had predicted, which sheds new light on the decreasing racial segregation but increasing income segregation America has seen in the past few decades.

In departing from the typical laboratory setting of human-subjects research, field experiments introduce new ethical considerations around participants’ consent and the minimization of harms. In a 2009 paper, economists Stephen Levitt and John List of the University of Chicago argue that in natural field experiments the absence of any experimental context is important, so one cannot obtain participants’ consent. For example, if the researchers conducting discrimination studies by mailing fake resumes had noted in their cover letters that they were fishing for racism, they would not have had accurate responses.

Political scientist Macartan Humphreys of Columbia University, in an American Political Science Association newsletter, says that natural field experiments may risk violating the principles of “beneficence, respect for persons, and justice” that serve as guidelines for human subjects research. Ensuring compliance with these principles is simpler with informed consent, because then the subject is also making the judgement that he or she is respected, that the experiment’s benefits outweigh possible harms, and that its burdens are distributed justly. Without consent, Humphreys says, researchers must more carefully weigh the benefits and costs of experimentation themselves. Levitt and List agree, stressing the role of Institutional Review Boards in assessing research ethics alongside researchers.

Policy experiments face different obstacles. They can be difficult because they rely on the cooperation of governing bodies and are often expensive. Ethical issues arise if the treatment is fairly certain to be beneficial, and thus withholding it from some, as an experiment requires, would be harmful. The Oregon Health Study researchers could never have denied some people insurance just for the sake of research, says Wright; they were able to perform the study because Oregon’s limited budget required it to randomize anyway.

When the opportunity arises, field experiments evaluating government programs can be an important tool for improving policy. The Oregon Health Study finds that people with health insurance seek more primary care, take on less debt, and report better physical and mental health than the uninsured. This research, coming at a time when the future of American health insurance is in debate, gives an idea of the costs and benefits of expanded insurance coverage. Additionally, Wright says that the study’s estimates can help plan the implementation of Obamacare in 2014, by determining the extra primary care capacity needed, the costs of expanding health coverage, and the expected changes in population health. The Moving to Opportunity experiment, thanks to its scale (15,000 participants), length, and randomized design, has produced robust evidence on the effects of neighborhood on low-income individuals, which is a vital component of our understanding of poverty. Field experiments must be carefully designed and opportunistic, but according to Wright, “when you can do it, you gain a level of certainty around policy making that just doesn’t exist normally.”

AUSTEN MACK-CRANE B’13 thinks casting on Grey’s Anatomy should be randomized.

SCIENCE // 06

THE OPENINGS

by Grace Dunham Illustration by Robert Sandler

the galleries in chelsea are white. Their floors are usually polished concrete. Galleries are modern. Their job is to highlight the transcendence of objects and ideas through their simplicity, and maybe through their purity too. One night a month galleries have openings; many galleries on the same street often have their openings on the same night. During openings, people fill the galleries.

If someone knows most of the people at an opening, he meanders through the room—or rooms, depending— moving from group to group, catching up. If someone knows fewer people, she tends to stick to the group she came with. If someone knows no one, he stays close to the walls, looking at the art (if the work is two-dimensional).

People drink wine or sparkling water, in clear hard plastic cups. Lots of people stand outside smoking cigarettes, even in the winter. This makes openings smell like wine and smoke, mixed with new paint. White walls are always being repainted.

I think of the opening smell when I think of being young. I grew up going to openings because my parents are both artists. I was usually the smallest person in the room and I moved from group to group enjoying the freedom that came with being little. When my parents had openings, I walked around like I owned the place. I would look up at people and say things like, “It’s great work. I’m very proud of my mother.”

My father, who is a painter, has a show of new work in New York every two years, more or less. A show of his was meant to open last month, but during the hurricane a 12-foot Hudson River wave rushed eastbound through Chelsea’s streets and filled the galleries with five feet of black water. His paintings, as well as hundreds of other works of modern art, were damaged.

The paintings are of women: wild, naked, paper-white women bathing in brightly colored landscapes. Sometimes he asks me if I’m embarrassed that he paints wild, naked

07 // FEATURES

women and I tell him that I’m not, that actually I’m proud. All winter, spring, and summer he mostly stayed in his studio—a barn next to our house—leaning over big canvases laid out on the ground. He starts in the middle, so that he can stand on the unpainted parts in his socks, and then works his way out. When he takes breaks from working, he comes into the kitchen in paint-smudged khaki pants so that he can eat an apple. He was worried that people would think his paintings were of Eden. The women in the paintings are always alone—sometimes bathing knee-high in aqua water, sometimes reaching for a round purple fruit, sometimes facing a yellow sun on the horizon. We only ever see the women from behind. Big flowers, a yellow circle surrounded by red petals, fall from boxy trees, little green cactus mounds pop from the ground, and round brown hills rise in the distance. The flowers, trees, and hills look like the first flowers, trees, and hills.

The paintings do remind me of the beginning of time.

My father is obsessed with the end of humanity, I’ve recently realized. He is working hard to make sense of his own impending death. Part of that, it seems, is learning about the impending death of all of us. He likes to remind me, and others, of the collective work that we are doing to speed up the process. Two weeks ago he sent me an article from a nature journal about humanity’s next inflection point: the moment when we will exhaust all the resources this little green and blue planet has to offer us and begin our rapid decline. When we fall, the article suggests, we may take the animals and plants with us: “the earth will again be a choir of bacteria, fungi, and insects.”

About 75,00 years ago, a giant volcano erupted on the island of Sumatra and covered the earth with 3,000 cubic kilometers of magma, ash, and rock—enough, says the article, to blanket the District of Columbia up to the stratosphere. Dust blocked the sun for a decade. Most Homo sapiens died. It’s possible, even, that only a few

thousand survived. When a species shrinks, mutations spread quickly: the remaining Homo sapiens banded together, swapped genes, and became more or less what we are today.

In the 1930s, imported red fire ants arrived at the port of Mobile, Alabama. The ants came from Northern Argentina. When a Brazilian cargo ship filled its ballast with local soil for balance, it accidentally took the ants on too. Lucky ants, ending up on the coastal flood plains of the Gulf of Mexico: their own home had been coastline, laced with rivers; they were built to thrive in floods. When rising water lifts the ants from their nests in the earth, they coalesce into enormous floating balls—workers on the outside, queens in the middle. They make a raft out of themselves. Whole cities can survive on the surface of the water for months. When the water recedes the ants rush back into the earth, wherever that may be. In Argentina, competing ant colonies had warred against one another; in America, they coexisted with relative ease. Like us, their initial scarcity was ultimately their strength. The fire ants did well in Alabama: they floated their way along the flood planes and up through the Mississippi Delta, invading the entire American South.

If I let my imagination get the best of me, I see big red ant rafts navigating the square rooms of my father’s exhibit. I imagine a green future: thick algae, the kind that looks like sequins, wavy water plants, and lily pads. I like to picture my dad’s paintings half-submerged in a verdant indoor pond, tangled up with new life. This dream, of course, never could have happened. Bacteria, fungi, and toxic mold do well in the dark still waters of the city, but not much else. Even if green things somehow started to grow, the pond—contained by the gallery’s once white walls—would eventually run out of what they needed.

When I was young, I loved the stories about mushrooms popping up in the Earth Room. The Earth

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Room is a loft filled with two feet of soil. It’s on Wooster Street, a few blocks away from the loft in SoHo where I lived for the first six years of my life. It’s been there since the 1970s, when the artist, Walter De Maria, installed it, and when my mother had just moved to the neighborhood.

People did a lot of strange things in lofts then—like lock themselves in cages or take off their clothes in front of audiences—but not many of those things are still in SoHo. The same man has been taking care of the Earth Room for over twenty years now. He sits behind a desk off to the side, rakes the soil, and waters it weekly to keep it dark and moist. Whenever a mushroom appeared, he plucked it; whenever there were edible ones, like shaggy parasols, he ate them. When there were weeds, he raked those too.

The artist had wanted the earth to stay the same. Once all the nutrients in the soil were used up, the mushrooms and weeds—nuisances that everyone enjoyed—stopped growing. things in chelsea are back to normal. Two weeks after the hurricane, I walked around and looked at all the galleries. Draining hoses ran out of doors and onto streets. A filthy waterline ringed some of the galleries. In others, the lower five feet of sheet-rock had been removed.

Painters were repainting everything the usual bright white.

People were devastated—they had lost beloved objects and money—but also knew that things could have been worse.

Last week my father had his opening, less than a month behind schedule. I saw all the people who I’ve seen at his openings since I was little. The paintings looked beautiful, maybe even more beautiful because they’d been through something. People agreed that his time in the country— and watching his daughters become adults—had been good for him: his work had never been this bright and alive, never been so joyous.

DECEMBER 07 2012

FEATURES // 08

EVERYT TO KNO BUT WE

By Drew Fost

What’s the best color to wear to a holiday party?

If red and green don’t look good on you, don’t even think about it! Go online and take a quiz to figure out if your color palate is a winter, fall, spring, or summer. Then, pick a holiday in that season. Dress accordingly.

How to spot fake online product reviews: From The Atlantic: “Nobody cares this much about a Kindle case. That 5,000 people bothered to review a Kindle Fire case doesn’t make sense. If reviewers are anything like commenters, they usually chime in out of anger and sometimes say something out of pure joy. Where are the trolls? There aren’t any because this isn’t the type of issue or product that inspires much enthusiasm in either direction. Yet, we see so many enthused reviews.”

How many gifts is too many?

Forget the enduring controversy over re-gifting. Re-gifting is fine, and also really practical. The real holiday calamity is over-gifting. Last year the boxes and wrapping paper in our home constituted a fire hazard!

To calculate the appropriate number of gifts for a friend, relation, or acquaintance, take the number of holidays you’ve celebrated together and subtract the years you’ve known this person. Then, multiply this by the number of times they call you per week. (If this number is smaller than their shoe size, just use their shoe size.)

What should I buy for my dad?

Dads are all the same. They’re always like, “all I want for the holidays is for all my children to dwell together in peace.” A good gift is usually gourmet coffee, if he’s a coffee guy.

What’s the best holi-date?

Couples massage. Some kind of bobsledding thing. Adopt a reindeer.

09 // FEATURES

But some dads have acid reflux, or actually like getting gifts. Drew says his dad really likes getting autographed baseball cards, baseball memorabilia, Earth Wind and Fire CDs, and Duke Ellington boxsets. He loves getting iPod Minis, but only if the kids can put all his favorite music on.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THING YOU ALWAYS WANTED OW ABOUT THE HOLIDAYS ERE TOO AFRAID TO ASK

ter, Alex Ronan, and Erica Schwiegershausen

Guide to Re-gifting THINGS TO CONSIDER: 1. Is the gift re-giftable? A good rule of thumb is to avoid re-gifting monogrammed items unless the recipient has the same initials. A lot of people will tell you never to re-gift a homemade item, like a hand knit sweater or a plaque. But, if you’re in a pinch, one option is to take a photograph of the item you’re considering. Then, gift it as a piece of art. For cookies, just change the name. Butter pecans balls can easily become snowballs, meltaways, or jingle butter bells.

2. How is the condition?

3. Is this going to work?

Will I feel lonely on the day after Christmas?

Yes. Yes, you will. This is why you should add a body pillow to your holiday wish-list.

DECEMBER 07 2012

FEATURES // 10

The House on Broadview Terrace

by Sam Adler-Bell // Illustration by Robert Sandler over and cut the tree into logs with his father’s axe.” The axe, like jai alai, came from Basque Country in Spain. My dad says the tree didn’t touch the roof.

Unlike my mother, he doesn’t care much about the house itself. “No regrets about it being destroyed,” he told me, “another world, another time.” He’s just “happy we all survived and flourished.” (This the kind of stuff my dad says regularly.) But he remembers the sounds of “creaky stairs, of babies sleeping, crying, emerging.” His mother-inlaw’s laughter as he, a “New York City kid,” tried to mow his first lawn. My sister’s first birthday caught on VHS. And an image of me, as a baby, “sitting in a box in the back yard covered with leaves.”

a few days after hurricane sandy made her way, clumsily, morbidly, along the Atlantic Coast, a friend emailed my father a picture from the Hartford Courant. The subject line read: “This isn’t your old house, is it?” The answer was no. The thing in the picture wasn’t a house at all.

Unlike Connecticut’s coastline, where surging water and winds damaged thousands of homes and killed three people, the hurricane mostly spared the state capital. Few homes were damaged. But at 647 Broadview Terrace, the address on my birth certificate, high winds uprooted a giant oak tree in the front yard. The tree toppled, its reluctant roots splitting the asphalt of nearby driveways, leaving wide woody grooves, before landing atop the house whose front yard it had shaded for almost a century.

The façade of the house was shorn off completely. In the picture, the giant tree obscures most of what remains, its flailing limbs reaching up and out, spidering over the frame. Yellow caution tape surrounds the waist of another tree in the yard, feebly marking off the wreckage. And a lone red campaign sign, obscenely still-standing, colors the foreground. For a moment, I wonder with vague irritation, whether some Chris Murphy for Senate supporter had walked by and propped the sign back up.

But beyond the downed tree, the piles of wood and metal debris, a triangle framed Victorian roof emerges above the slipshod ruin. And if you look closely, turn your head slightly to the right, you can see a whole room on the top floor—a red door, powder-blue dry wall, a light switch—seared of its fourth wall. A dollhouse. luckily, there was no one at home. In 1992, my parents sold the house to a woman they met through our friend Phil. My mother says they discounted the price for her

11 // FEATURES

because she wanted to fix the roof. But she never did. Phil said she only lived there some of the time. A few years ago there was a story in the Courant about the old house. Other homeowners on the street complained about its disheveled condition. It looked empty. The paint peeled. An exasperated neighbor had weed-whacked the overgrown yard, but the yellow, unkempt lawn was still an eyesore. It was a local embarrassment, the neighborhood haunted house, where middle-schoolers dared their dates to knock on the front door or stand on the porch for five whole minutes. And the roof needed fixing.

The woman, Phil told me, worked for the US Department of Justice, “in a hard-to-locate division that reviews civil rights complaints about state and local grantees receiving federal funds.” He had misplaced her contact info.

And I couldn’t find her online. My mother says the woman was a “progressive of sorts, in the low-income housing advocacy community.” When my family sold her the house, my mom says, they believed they were passing on “something of value to someone else who would value it.” They thought she was “kindred in some way.” But the house stood empty and derelict for years. When she saw the hurricane damage, my mother was angry with the woman. The house, she said, “had held me and my family, my newborn babies when they came home from the hospital.” And it struck her, staring at the picture, that the woman “had finally unloved it to death.” my father says a different tree fell on the front porch in 1985, two years before my older sister was born. At the time, my dad, a union labor lawyer, represented the jai alai players from the fronton in Milford. The players were on strike. So, he says, “the union president, Riki Lasa, came

my sister, who was four or five when we moved, has her first memories there. For her, the house represents what might have been lost when my parents divorced. “I felt surprisingly sad,” she told me, “not because I care about the house as a physical thing, but because thinking about it made me remember the beauty of my childhood family, the family that for a long time, I felt I had lost, but now am slowly coming to find and feel again in a different shape.” i don’t remember the house. We moved when I was two.

But like pictures of living rooms in Staten Island filled with two feet of sand, like front stoops in Breezy Point, Queens, that lead to nothing, a charred floor, the big blue sky, there’s something horribly lewd about seeing a house’s inside being made out. When we look at these pictures, our chests tighten with empathy. We see the pain, the loss. We see the terrible burden of costly repairs. But also we see a violation of the sweet domestic delusion that what happens inside a home—the games we play, the meals we cook, the arguments and sex we have—is somehow distinct from what happens outside it.

Our eyes linger on the massive piles of debris, the scattered shards of domestic ephemera, the half houses and three-quarter houses, the roofless and wall-less and flooded, because somehow they reveal, tragically but also alluringly, that there is always only wood and metal and fiberglass— physical not metaphysical barriers—separating private from public, inside from out, tranquil domestic solitude from the howling winds of the social. When my mother saw the picture of the house on Broadview Terrace, she said she hated to see her home, which had been “filled with love and the sense of building and nurturing new life,” so “torn apart,” so “exposed.”

And there’s something about exposure, about being able to see through, that makes these houses into nothouses. The everyday voyeurism of walking down a street at night, window-framed flashes of foreign familiarity, revelations of the realness of the other—these only remind us, in the end, that we too have someplace to be. But in the picture of our old house on Broadview Terrace, you can see everything. Can’t not see: the little powder-blue rooms where we began to try to make our lives together.

A woman who witnessed the tree falling on Broadview Terrace reportedly exclaimed to her boyfriend, “Oh my god! I can see into their house. Their house is gone.”

SAM ADLER-BELL 12.5

is covered with leaves.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

INVENTO R Y

by Olivia-Jené Fagon & Christina McCausland Illustration by Diane Zhou Suxist In the wake of two well-publicized condemnations of art journalism—art market writer Sarah Thornton’s list of “Why Writing in the Art World Sucks” and attendant resignation, and major critic Dave Hickey’s diagnosis of an art world “too obsessed with money and celebrity” along with his own resignation—an anonymous open letter pointing to latent racial and sexual bias in the writing of New York Times art critic Ken Johnson seems well-timed. The letter, which appeared online on November 23, chides the Times for publishing reviews by Johnson that mobilize “irresponsible generalities” to compare “women and African-American artists to white male artists, only to find them lacking.”

It specifically takes issue with Johnson’s October 25 review of MoMA PS1’s “Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles” and his November 8 preview of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art’s show “The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World.” Its writers point out that, in both reviews, Johnson creates a division of broad-strokes between white, male artists and these historically sidelined groups, glossing internal differences to the detriment of his critique. In his “Now Dig This!” review, Johnson posits that the show’s pieces are weak in that they depend on a racial solidarity potentially alienating to white viewers—a criticism that assumes a singularity of racial experience, places the burden of artistic signification entirely on the artist (as opposed to the interpretive work a viewer might do to understand a different point of view), and equates universal appeal with appeal to white people. He makes a similar move in his summary of “The Female Gaze,” where he writes that though “sexism is probably a good enough explanation for inequities in the market” that make it unlikely for a woman to earn “the big bucks that men like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst rake in.” According to Johnson, it might “also have something to do with the nature of the art that women tend to make,” a statement made without insight as to what such essential qualities of work made by female artists he’s referring to. As the letter’s writers put it, Johnson’s comments imply that the relative marginalization of these groups’ work is their own fault, replaying “stereotypes of inscrutable blackness and inadequate femininity.”

As of this writing, the letter has over 1,500 signatories: though many of them are “anonymous” signatures (the equivalent of a “like”?), many prominent artists, curators, and critics added their names soon after the letter appeared, including Glenn Ligon, Coco Fusco, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Emily Roysdon, AK Burns, and Brooke Davis Anderson.

The letter asks that the Times acknowledge Johnson’s writing as “below the editorial standards” of the newspaper and its writers told Gallerist, The Observer’s arts blog, that the letter “is not a personal attack on Ken Johnson… we have simply asked the Times for a considered, public response to the piece they published, for the reasons we outlined in the letter.” There has been no response on the part of the newspaper. Meanwhile, Johnson has been engaging with the discussion on his Facebook page, where there are now hundreds of public comments by other people that range in tone from invocations of Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology (though confusing his ‘interpellation’ with ‘interpolation’), pronouncements of “entry level women’s studies drivel,” to the troll-y “BORING!” Johnson acknowledged that at least part of his statement about “Now Dig This!” “taken out of context seems needlessly provocative,” though he appears to stand by the nature of his reviews.

It’s worth noting that the problems the letter’s writers found in Johnson’s work are likely also symptomatic of broader inequities in the way art is read and written about, something he alludes to when he concludes his review of the PS1 show by noting that “the art of black solidarity gets less traction because the postmodern art world is, at least ostensibly, allergic to overt assertions of any kind of solidarity. Covert solidarity of liberal white folks? That is another story.” This indictment of the art world is confusing in its lack of consistency with the rest of the article. He’s racist, but at least he knows it? — CM

DECEMBER 07 2012

Phenomenal Listening “All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations.

But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.” ­— James Baldwin “Sonny’s Blues” This past week, the stage of the Martinos Auditorium in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts was occupied by artists, musicians, and writers, gathered before crowded audiences for the performance series, Close Encounters. Jazz pianist Jason Moran and drummer Charles Haynes led a master-class on the first evening, poets Kevin Young, Evie Shockley, and Terrence Hayes participated in discussions and read their work on the following evening, and the series concluded with a performance by longtime collaborators, pianist Vijay Iyer and hip hop artist Mike Ladd.

What all seven artists share is a willingness to traffic in the spaces between artistic disciplines, while also staking a creative claim on the personal/public history of African American master musicianship and writing. Drawing upon sources such as the blues, hip-hop, black vernacular, and visual artists like Jean Michelle Basquiat, these artists’ work function as re-tellings, appropriation, and re-making of an already voiced articulation of black culture.

“If a black person is alone in a forest, are they still a black person?” ­— Kevin Young There’s a form of canonization implicit in these three evenings, an effort at identifying a shared and sustained cultural aesthetic in black music and black writing. But it is not that the Close Encounters artists, who are predominantly African American, have been cornered into an artistic and cultural heritage they might not have any stake in. Rather, they demonstrated an explicit interest in the racial politics of their work and seemed to orient themselves around a legacy of black artistry.

Moran and Haynes punctuated the first evening’s master class with explosive periods of improvised music.

As they played they shared looks, grooved in their chairs, and sat back and smugly watched the other play on. There were moments in which Haynes threw back his head and laughed.

The deliberate spontaneity of improvising in music, especially jazz, means that neither the listener nor, to some extent, the player can anticipate the next musical progression, chord, or rhythm change. Hearing Haynes and Moran improvise together, pushing the composition’s formal constraints, the two jazzmen became both creators

and witnesses of their own performance. That what they produced was cohesive music makes it clear why its so often difficult to explain musical improvisation without thinking something more cosmic and thus unquantifiable is occurring on stage.

“You little bag of … sugar” — Terrance Hayes For Hayes, Shockley, and Young, fulfilling or frustrating the listener’s expectations is their way of intervening in the going-through-the-motions approach that often impedes critical or meaningful public reflection on African-American history. “There is a certain tiredness to this history,” Shockley pointed out during the second evening’s roundtable discussion. “Yes, Slavery. Yes, Jim Crow. We know. We know.”

In musical dissonance, the refusal to be harmonic often sounds good or a player’s refusal to resolve a phrase can become precisely the moment you listen for. Similarly, the exploitation of register and linguistic tropes, rules and expectations that we have when hearing words, can provoke a very new form of hearing.

“We are not responsible… for your lost or stolen relatives” — Harryette Mullen It is in the pause between expectation and the deference of that expectation that Young, Haynes, and Shockley carve out a space for newness in their poems, for a reconsideration or re-determination of certain boundaries of language that we take for granted “fork. fork. fork. fork. fork. fork. fork. fork. fork. fork. fork. fork. fork. fork. fork. fork. fork. fork..”

— Terrance Hayes At the end of the first evening’s master class Moran sat back from his piano, “I’d like to play something for you.” Pressing a button on the top of the keys, a recording of Billie Holiday’s Big Stuff was introduced into the room.

Sitting in the audience on all three evenings, I was in the grip of these close musical, lyrical, and cultural encounters.

I became markedly aware of how people listen, the postures and facial expressions that listening provokes: you sit back in your seat, you cross your legs and turn your body in, you lean forward, open your mouth, cast your eyes up.

Norman Mailer described jazz as orgasm: the jazzman blows and the listeners come together. Listening to Holiday with Moran with the audience, no description could be more accurate. — OF

ARTS // 12

UNTITLED (2012) a retrospective

by Claudia Norton Illustration by Diane Zhou

my last relationship consisted of me, my boyfriend, and Tom Friedman. My boyfriend and I used to look at a book he had of Friedman’s artwork. He used to read the interviews aloud to me and I would make him stop reading so we could sit in silence and think about the ideas behind the sculptures. When I would wake up in the morning feeling anxious, he’d pick a new page from the book and show it to me, and then we would turn each other’s brains inside out. I loved most of the stuff in the book, and whenever I would see a new piece I would feel an airy feeling in the webbing of my toes. That feeling would prompt me to say something about the art and then he would say something back and then we would be shouting at each other about how simplicity and complexity are really the same thing, and then we would get over ourselves.

My relationship represented a lot for me—it showed me that I could live out my values with another person and have a really good time in the process. I didn’t think I ever needed anything else but to keep growing with him.

We broke up a few weeks before I heard that Brown was receiving a Tom Friedman sculpture from an anonymous donor. I’m not sure if it was my ex-boyfriend who donated it, but I felt that airy feeling I mentioned before. I hoped the University was going to get Untitled (1992), a poppy-seed sized ball of poop on a white, cubic pedestal, or even Untitled (A Curse) (1992) that comprises a witch’s curse that occupies an 11-inch spherical space 11 inches above white, rectangular pedestal. To the untrained eye, Untitled (A Curse) looks rather vacant. I like the idea he’s getting at in that—of looking at something and it being vacant if you think so, or something being full at one time but then empty when you look at it again. Friedman once spent a thousand hours staring at a white sheet of paper. It

13 // ARTS

takes a lot of trust to believe that he did it, that something is actually there. The piece of paper and all the hours is called 1,000 Hours of Staring (1992-1997). Friedman is an America contemporary conceptual sculptor who’s had solo exhibitions at the Art Institute in Chicago and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He’s well known for his laborintensive work with mundane objects. In Untitled (2005) he made a realistic 3-D replica of his shoes entirely from paint, in Untitled (1995) Friedman connected small sections of pencils together to form a continuous loop knotted up in an 11 x 14 x 11 inch ball, in Untitled (1995) he filled a transparent gelatin capsule with a great number of tiny, colorful balls of Play Doh. Instead of those sculptures, we got Circle Dance (2009), which is a stainless steel sculpture of 11 life-sized figures holding hands and dancing in a circle. They cemented it into the grass between Waterman and Angell just after Thanksgiving.

The first day I saw Circle Dance I got scared. I had been telling people how Friedman was my favorite artist and how his work was so striking, but when I saw Circle Dance I wasn’t struck in the same way I had been with his other work. And the reflections in the metal hurt my eyes.

I wondered if the intensity I had experienced in reading his book wasn’t actually meaningful, like when you are struck by the beauty of something when you’re high only to realize its banality when you’re not anymore. I was afraid that a period of my life that I folded so deeply into my identity was an illusion I had allowed myself to indulge in. I wasn’t sure what Circle Dance meant. I read online that the sculpture was modeled after Matisse’s La Danse, but I asked Tom and I learned that’s not fully true. He said that the meaning is a byproduct for him and that context determines the piece.

When Circle Dance was displayed at Regents Park in Lon-

don he said that he read ‘ring around the rosy’ and Black Plague. In the context of Brown, the sculpture is different.

Friedman told me, and the rest of the audience last Wednesday at his talk at the Granoff Center that he used to keep all of his works untitled so that they would remain open. He had to begin titling pieces once referencing pieces became tedious. When someone would request of image of Untitled (1997), Friedman explained, “I would then have to say, ‘Can you be a bit more specific?’ He told me in an email that he tends to title his work as the most “generic, open-ended description,” or as Untitled with a descriptive subtitle. Friedman likes interpretation. He likes it when people take control of the presentation of his work—he once made a cloud of pillow stuffing and a tiny plane of Play Doh to be suspended high up, but when it was presented through a window, with cloud and plane close up, he was thrilled.

Friedman told me that Circle Dance exists in the context of a show he did in 2007 for Lever House in New York, entitled “Aluminum Foil.” The original sculpture was very small and made from aluminum foil. Friedman explained that this piece was not born from a particular idea, but rather from a show the explored the possibilities of the material. He calls this type of piece an open system, where he sets parameters during the work’s construction and is free to be fully creative within pre-determined boundaries. Friedman got the idea to scale up the sculpture when he was transporting it home in a blue, Styrofoam box on a bright day. He told me, “I noticed the reflection of the blue and the sun on the foil. It was beautiful. I then thought if this work could be constructed to exist outside it would reflect its surroundings.” So the piece wasn’t conceived as a public art piece, it just asked to be outside. In fact, Circle

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Dance is the only public, outdoor sculpture Friedman has ever made. The second time I saw the sculpture was at dusk. It wasn’t very bright outside and I could see an orange reflection of the sunset in the folds of the metal. It was beautiful to me in that light.

It’s made of stainless steel because it’s an outdoor sculpture, but before it was stainless steel is was ovenroasting pans. When Friedman made the sculpture big, he realized that oven pans would hold the wrinkles better than foil would. Oven pans also fold at a large scale like tinfoil does on a small scale, so it’s almost more like foil than foil is. And now that Circle Dance is big, people climb on it.

I sat on it the other day with a friend and he fell off and scraped his arm but he’s OK. It was fun to climb on it with him and we both had the same favorite figure—the child that’s flying away. I’m pretty sure that’s everybody’s favorite.

When my boyfriend and I broke up, he gave me the book. He was angry and sad, but when he’s angry he’s still gentle so he said to me, “I really don’t want to give this up, but I think it’s best that you have it.” And it was really sad that it wasn’t ours anymore, but I was also happy to be getting the book, and it almost didn’t fit into my suitcase because it’s a decent-sized book. Circle Dance strikes me as a departure from a lot of the work in that book because the piece is about a specific idea. It doesn’t lead me by the nose, and that’s confusing to me because it’s not what I was expecting. It isn’t snarky and I don’t think it’s supposed to be smart. It’s earnest and I think that makes people defensive. I’m sometimes afraid to like something that’s earnest in front of certain people, but that’s something that I’ve been moving away from. After thinking about it a lot, I’m pretty sure Circle Dance is just supposed to be there and reflect light.

DECEMBER 07 2012

It makes me sad that I’m not floored by the sculpture, but Friedman isn’t an idol. It was difficult for me to realize that I was treating Friedman’s work as a validation of my connection with another person. I wasn’t interested in art until I met my ex-boyfriend. He’s the one who taught me how to mono-print, how to use power tools, stay present with my work. He’s the one that took pictures of me naked with a mask of his own face over mine. He’s the one that rented me a studio to work in and taught me to open the window when I’m using oil paint. He’s the one who helped me make my first sculpture. He’s the one who introduced me to Friedman, and he’s the one who gave me the book.

So it followed logically that when I left him I left a lot more than him. For some reason, it was always hard for me to gauge how special I was to him, how real our connection was, so I paired my belief with external markers. If Friedman’s work is good, our love isn’t just chemical, it’s meaningful in and of its self. If my friends like the art I’m making, my relationship isn’t just fucking, it’s a sustainable, productive partnership that holds up to external standards.

And so, newly single, when I saw Circle Dance I became disillusioned because it didn’t bring me to my knees. The ‘if, thens’ began to work against me—I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t tell if I had lost the ability to read Friedman’s art when I lost my relationship, or if now I could put Friedman’s work into perspective. I almost didn’t go to Friedman’s talk, but then my false logic broke down.

Before I heard Tom speak last Wednesday, I went to look at the piece again. After looking at its textures for a while I stepped back for a broader view and began visualizing the Circle Dance as a huge version of a tiny sculpture someone made at a kitchen table. When I saw the piece like that, I got pretty excited. I had to abandon the idea that Fried-

man isn’t static and his body of work isn’t a monolith.

That realization also makes me sad. I come to question the integrity of my convictions when I slip in to the quiet vacancy of falling out of love; but I think Tom would want me to think of the structure of things as more periodic, that sometimes my love for his art can be there or not be there and it depends on my belief system. I’m pretty sure he’d tell me all I have to do is be there and reflect. After all, meanings in his work continuously unfold, that’s what I liked about him in the first place.

I met Tom for the first time at his talk and he was kind. I introduced myself, and his neck bent and his eyes got soft when he realized that I was the person who he had been speaking with over email. I don’t really understand autographs, but I wanted one. I asked him to sign my book. I has a plan to get the book jacket signed too, and send it to my ex boyfriend but I was too nervous to ask Tom to sign two things of mine—especially because I’m writing an article semi-about him and I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to accept gifts. I didn’t want to seem unprofessional or silly. So I asked him to sign the book only. Tom drew five lines that splayed outward around an empty space. Then he wrote “Best, Tom” on the bottom of the page.

CLAUDIA NORTON B’13

is an untrained eye.

ARTS // 14

MOMS

15 // FEATURES

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

MICHAEL MOUNT

SAM ADLER-BELL

EMILY GOGOLAK

Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward him, Michael thought, “I have come from North Carolina: a fur piece. All the way from North Carolina, awalking. A fur piece.”

Lately he’s been thinking in freeform haiku. These particular lines refer to the sumptuous collar he’d attached to his Carhartt. Not raccoon, not muskrat, but pure white rabbit of dubious origin. Some said the Rust Belt, others, the Arctic. Others still: Bloomingdale’s. He was, it was said, one pretty motherfucker.

He ma’amed his way out of trouble. He grew in spurts.

He made some cash on alfalfa, misplaced it, hotwired a dunebuggy, orienteered northward. Half-boy scout and half-stripper, Mr. Mount nursed a twang in lieu of a moustache. His boots were made for walking. On the trail he told women to call him Ishmael—actually, don’t call him, he’ll call you. He had some fun but he has to wrap up his thesis, a fourth screenplay. It’s inspired by Thelma and Louise, but grittier. It riffs on the hamburger scene in Pulp Fiction.

Whence came you, Michael? You grew your hair long, shaved it off. You are a leopard and you are drinking whole milk. Is it from the White Russians? Is it true you speak German? You look like a lot of things. You smell like a man.

Outside, Michael ruminates: dancing on her own, she appears to care so little; as he sees her, she exists. Let’s d.o. this, he said, and she didn’t understand. Do, he said, wry smile, leaning in— A flash of mountain peaks, mist skimming, twigs underfoot, the supple taste of peanut butter. It comes: you, it, everything.

He rubs his jaw distractedly—a dull and clenching pain. I don’t hate it, he thinks, painting in the cold air, the iron New England dark. I don’t! I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!

Sam, with the Dylan-mussed hair. Sam, with his hands tucked in his back pocket, all downtown style. Sam, talking quiet and slow about home. Sam, playing like he should— all out—but withholding, still. And Sam, saying it so bold you don’t know why you even tried in the first place. Sam, the siren in skinny jeans.

But then: Jesus, Sweets, listen. That one time, you ducked under this porch you didn’t know, because it was raining. See this thing. On a street you’ve never been, because you were lost. See what spins without purchase.

Sam, laughing so hard his temples pinch, his scruffy cheeks stretch rosy and the porch light flicks on. Close your eye.

From that swing on Ives, the one that creaks, you watched him and he got bigger as he walked away. Relax. I want nothing from you. Lighting lights, standing there at 3 AM, Sam talking politics and beauty and taking swigs, and 3 AM feels like morning.

Listen.

Hear it?

At 6:00 AM she opens her eyes, slips into a black denim bodysuit and matching cape, and blends a quick macrobiotic shake before soaring out her second-floor studio window. As smart as she dresses, she is precious and ductile as her platinum hair, and she flies light as air-but don’t take her lightly. At 6:02 AM, she’s just passing over Hope St. and her editor at the Times calls asking if she can expand the piece on Uzbeki street performance another 300 characters. She drains her shake, aims perfectly for the nearest receptacle, and whips out her MacBook Pro mid-flight to tap out a few paragraphs. She lands smoothly on the steps of the State House just as she hits send, for she is a yogini among international journalists. After freeing a small bird trapped in the door, Gogo pulls a notepad out of her leather satchel and leafs through a few depositions on Palestinian immigrant policies, before slinking into a sundress and her floppy invisibility hat. Her lover in Cuba calls her liga mia. To her Parisian paramour, she is la chatte qui rit d’un rire féerique. We know her as a goddess among women. Ô mon chou, how your Brussels sprouts make me ooh, and ahh, help! We need you but we know, just as sure as your collarbones could cut through glass, who is already on her way to save the day. The casual superhero is at it again.

CHRISTINA MCCAUSLAND

We’re sorry. There has been a big big ‘big’ mistake. Christina is not a Virgo and who cares about the rules of astrology, anyway? Christina is really a Libra. Like Nietzsche. Like Barbara Walters. A highly sensual being who is merely discriminate. How tall is she in tights? Where does she get her nail polish? What are the six things she can’t live without?

Good questions, all. We don’t really know. But we do know that she is from Florida. She has good posture. She can’t live without theory. No Doubt she loves Mariah Carey.

Christy, Crusty, Tina. Our grammar girl, our balance.

Our babysitter (Kristy), in the other room, online shopper, clicking, clicking, clicking. She is our voice of reason, our victimofapathy. Before the 404, before the final BYLAS, just know this: Christina McCausland, always checking her email. We’ll miss you, Xty. See you in pug heaven.

Sent from my iPod.

DREW FOSTER

ALLIE TRIONFETTI

This person awoke, spoke:

“Getting I Sparrows! The very we. A about already.

Michigan. Also. Attention. Awkward. Didn’t ballet?

We’re bar, be be, be: beat best big big big. Oh bird, birds bit bloody blurted business butter, called city conversation. Covered cracking date day. Definitely.

Did. Didn’t dinner? Dinner! I do, don’t, each eating eight-nine else. Day figured flying football for force found friends. Right? From fruitful going good had hand. Whose hands? Her high school. His history. I hit honey. We, if immediately, in, into invited is. Is it it juice? Juice late. Late. Feverishly laughing like, literally little little live lobsters. Look, lost love lover.

These loves meant met mutual. My. My. My not of off.

We open other our out out out, out. If over palm pay phone. I’m player really rest. Same, same school see source special talk, talking team. I’m texting that. I the the the the this to to to to to to together. For very very wanted was was was was was way we we we we we wedding. We went were were years, you.”

All slept while she wandered slovenly. Do you like her hair, the pelt of longing. Do you like it? Do you like it? You like it. You want to lick it. She’ll fix it softly while you’re sleeping. Her hands bloody. All praise little cat. All praise her cohort.

DECEMBER 07 2012

TOE TAGS // 16

HOMAGE TO LOVE

by Julian Park // Illustration by Adriana Gallo 1.

4.

(time is of the essence strike is of the) sense

the grain an in and intense expression 3.

of the waking warbly street & shoesnumbed feet the panic attack held back by movement & the suck marks on the neck & the closeness of passing & the closeness of sleeping bodies on hard floor next to the one door & the other door may it break the car may it not break & the fake feels in the stomach in the face by the grace of gods imperial speed feeding on cajun seasoned potatoes & broccoli 2.

I, well yes, have a full stomach

with sensible and promised wavering waving garbage trucks breaking the youthful sound barrier eyes uncontact bravier than anything promising sense to the sensing but all smells like cloth soap crossing the road hopping for clean hope

fingering the pressures of the burning pages vibrated of analogy aurality vibrated of temperature’s temporariness peeling lips dry and wet chancing time to the quiet minutes’ smallness blessed wind twisted betterment felt in the risk felt in the clinched fist of the knife pressed through the flesh dreamt of electric chronicles & chronically electric dreams seen with the toes curled into the carpet 5.

pretend you told me this real brick these real bricks these real brick layers ecstatic, in the morning stealing cars

but am still hungry. We could

far, far, far away mortar mixing mortar to piss squid

walk in the rain from here.

We could

and dunk forget not dingle with kid

carry a broken umbrella to protect our cigarettes

scally beneath champagne stars

but i have quit or never started & only kinda love you, sometimes.

let’s just sleep let’s just sleep let’s just sleep with socks on

17 // LITERARY

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

friday the 7th tuned in: new urban arts’ mentor exhibition 5–8pm // new urban arts (705 westminster st) annual show of artist-mentor artwork—come formally meet the 2012–13 artist mentors & mentoring fellows. exhibit up through the 17th. the system for reconsidering the pattern (in light of) 8pm // studio one (granoff center) in light of that title, i smell a loop. in light of the loop, i smell a conceptual sound project that requires a release form to the tune of: i consent to be space. i consent to be time. i consent to be signal. the lovely peter busiggel’s m.e.m.e. dissertation performance. i will be making all sorts of moans & mumurs in a non-audience way. i’m trying to tell you something: i’m part of this performance. also saturday, same time. doors at 7pm. christmas live bait 10pm // black box at 95 empire st // $ it’s christmas at live bait! but really it’s the aniversary of pearl harbor. at the risk of being offensive, come with stories in mind related to “naughty or nice” and/or “ho.” you’ve got 6 minutes to impress me. but even if you don’t, i’m getting a present from the tree swap. so bring one to take one. jingle all the way. dead times, sandworm, cottaging, timeghost, zerfallt 10pm // p.r. matrix hex (olneyville) // $3–5 donation m’dam morosky is at it again. let the curatorial heft wash over your quaking bod. steven vallot makes a much anticipated return to the pvd sound scene, sandworm becomes a brief three piece (farewell pat! / hello mindy!), & samuel beckett’s corpse gets reincarnated as a hip young vocalist with a penchant for screaming. with performances so heavily invested the performers sometimes swoon. divinely excited for this. u should b 2. saturday the 8th risd holiday alumni art sale 10am–5pm // convention center // $7 over 200 risd alumni will have work for sale. get those holiday gifts. or browse longingly & then go to the mall and blow it all at brookstone. proceeds go to support risd scholarships.

as220 holiday sale 12–4pm // as220 swing by the 2nd annual holiday sale! includes work by as220’s youth, staff & residents. includes free demos. handel’s messiah 7pm // the vets auditorium // $15–100 the rhode island philharmonic joins up with the providence singers for a spectacular performance of one of the most glorious works in the choral literature. moth cock, ryley walker, mincemeat, workdeath 10pm // dungeon c (olneyville) // $5 moth cock is hazy clarinets & electronics (“laid back, but not chill”). mincemeat or tenspeed reminds me of a koosh ball. work/death is so profoundly lovely that i usually cry. what a weird mix. hope i can go. sunday the 9th hips & heart yoga workshop with sarah grimm 12:30–2pm // hillel chapel (angell st) we hold a great deal of stress in our hips & grief in our hearts. come detoxify these sore spots.

adjust pressure, adjust roller height, register and feed a sheet of paper, make an impression and then clean the press. create and use polymer plates in combination with metal movable type to create your own vision in letterpressed embossment.

i don’t really know anything about any of these acts except dungeon broads. dungeon broads is excellent noise. there are rumors that xavier (that modelesque alum of foreign affair; that waify worshipper of all things adidas) might be making an appearance late.

reading digital language arts 7:30pm // rock library & mccormack theater (brown u.) from video games uncomfortable video. from text readers to textual erasures. performances by members of digital language arts ii & advanced digital language arts. starts in digital scholarship lab on the first floor of brown’s rockefeller library (10 prospect st) & finishes in the mccormack family theater (70 brown st).

thursday the 13th

tuesday the 11th digital performance: final show 8:00 pm // studio one (granoff center) the culmination of a semester-long course in multimedia performance. so. new works. obviously. wednesday the 12th

monday the 10th

keir neuringer, nick millevoi, night work ensemble 7pm // 168 carpenter st come celebrate the release of erik ruin’s book-with-asoundtrack, drowning on land. keir neuringer pounds drums doom-like whilst wielding a sax & the poetic capacities of the voice. nick millevoi shreds (doom, again... duh) on guitar & night work is a providence supergroup (members of assembly of light choir, whore paint, work/ death, daily life, justseeds). holy holy.

introduction to letterpress 6–10pm // as220 printshop // $ the first in a 3-part installment. learn to ink the press,

fat worm of error, sediment club, bang bros, cyclops, dungeon broads, bubbly mommy gun 10:30pm // p.r. matrix hex (olneyville) // $

gyna bootleg (for quarter volume noise lounge) 7pm // machines with magnets gyna bootleg’s burlesque opts for gore in lieu of glitter. feel sexy, feel dirty, but mostly feel weird. consume cocktails and feel consumed. because there are many ways to whet ones appetite and wet ones pants.

the list

youth studios showcase 5–9pm // as220 support the children. revel in the art. the moment past this one & then forever to my adoring fanbase: as with thistle, things die. lucky for you, the list keeps metaphoric house with the fake shit at craft stores & not with prickly members of the daisy family. tell me more, allie. i won’t . i believe in mystery. and the smart reader whose mouth i (don’t) don’t anticipate. and believe me when i tell you: it looks good. you could be a fucking carmex commercial. i mean it. for 13 months i have kept house here. you have come to know me by my predictable use of photography from the mid-late century flickr commons goldmine & a solid gold collection of pet rearing manuals. you said to yourself: this is a girl who has a palpable affinity for babies, rocks & russian tsarlag. you said to yourself: i wonder if she finds herself funny & charming. you said to yourself: if we met under the mistletoe next week, would i know her by these traits? and would she know me? and would we kiss? i can’t answer these things for you. this is my last list. it has been a true treasure writing towards you. forever the aspirational text & nearly breathless, thanks for the company. i’ll be seeing you on troy street. —allie keep close: listtheindy@gmail.com

Week of December 7th, 2012

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