The College Hill Independent Volume 42 Issue 10 - The Small Issue

VOLUME 42 ISSUE 10 16 APR 2021

THE SMALL ISSUE

THIS ISSUE COVER

Celestial Pool Window Vero Bello Week in Elusive Neighbors Amelia Wyckoff, Gemma Sack & Alan Dean

03 WEEK IN REVIEW

Sara Van Horn, Gemma Sack, & Cal Turner

04 DEAR INDY

Exiting the Ivory Tower Evie Hidysmith

05 FEATS

Re-seeding Rhode Island Lily Chahine, Mariana Fajnzylber, & Ella Spungen

08 METRO

Indy Poster Ella Rosenblatt

Postcards Amelia Anthony, Nell Salzman, Justin Scheer, CJ Gan, Audrey Buhain, Dorrit Corwin, CT & Alana Baer

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ARTS

Runs Parallel Seth Israel

16

X

Flash Writing Audrey Buhain, Alisa Caira, Ryan Chuang, Lily Chahine, Thalia Bones, Harry Levine,

17

LITERARY

An Interview with Jordan Seaberry Nell Salzman

21

METRO

The Myth of Objectivity Neev Parikh

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT IS PRINTED BY TCI PRESS IN SEEKONK, MASSACHUSETTS

Toe Tags Liana Chaplain

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

23 S&T 25 EPHEMERA

TWITTER @THEINDY_TWEETS

INSTAGRAM @THEINDYPVD

FROM THE EDITORS Since January, our Indy lives have revolved around screens and spaces— too much of the former, and not enough of the latter. Of course, this is not a phenomenon specific to the Indy, nor is it specific to this semester.

What is specific, though, is the comfort of knowing that our collaborative and regenerative approach to writing can and will persist even without a physical space. We now know that we can exist together on screens and still put together twenty pages of thoughts and words each week.

So as our world takes tiny steps towards coming awake again, it seems fitting that the Indy emerges in this new form for Issue 10. That its pages are smaller but plentier.

That its prose are a composite of many pieces and many voices. That it is in some ways fragmented and differrent than before, and that it is special in spite of that, or maybe because of that. We write this FTE amidst Zoom room debates over whether white bread is bleached, ‘bumble bee’ should be hyphenated, and if that painting is ugly, cute, or ugly-cute, and to that we say, until Conmag.

- APA

MISSION THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT IS A PROVIDENCE-BASED PUBLICATION WRITTEN, ILLUSTRATED, DESIGNED, AND EDITED BY STUDENTS FROM BROWN AND RISD. OUR PAPER IS DISTRIBUTED AROUND PROVIDENCE’S EAST SIDE AND DOWNTOWN, AS WELL AS ONLINE. IN ADDITION TO PUBLISHING 20 PAGES OF ORIGINAL WRITING, REPORTING, AND ART ONCE A WEEK, THE INDY FUNCTIONS AS AN OPEN WORKSHOP IN WHICH WRITERS, ARTISTS, AND DESIGNERS COLLABORATE AND PROVIDE FEEDBACK ON THEIR WORK. THROUGH AN EXTENSIVE EDITING PROCESS, WE CHALLENGE EACH OTHER TO BE RESPONSIBLE, INTENTIONAL, AND SELF-CRITICAL. WE ARE COMMITTED TO PUBLISHING POLITICALLY ENGAGED AND ACCESSIBLE WORK. WHILE THE INDY IS FINANCED BY BROWN UNIVERSITY, WE HOLD OURSELVES ACCOUNTABLE TO OUR READERS ACROSS THE PROVIDENCE COMMUNITY. THE INDY REJECTS CONTENT THAT EXPLICITLY OR IMPLICITLY PERPETUATES RACISM, SEXISM, HOMOPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA, XENOPHOBIA, ABLEISM AND/OR CLASSISM. THOUGH THIS LIST IS NOT EXHAUSTIVE, THE INDY STRIVES TO ADDRESS THESE SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION BY CENTERING THE VOICES, OPINIONS, AND EFFORTS OF MARGINALIZED PEOPLE IN PROVIDENCE AND BEYOND. THE INDY IS CONSTANTLY EVOLVING: WE ARE ALWAYS WORKING TO MAKE OUR STAFF AND CONTENT MORE INCLUSIVE. THOUGH OUR EDITING PROCESS PROVIDES AN INTERNAL STRUCTURE FOR ACCOUNTABILITY, WE ALWAYS WELCOME LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

STAFF WEEK IN REVIEW Loughlin Neuert Nick Roblee-Strauss NEWS Bilal Memon Rhythm Rastogi Giacamo Sartorelli ARTS Amelia Anthony Nell Salzman METRO Mara Cavallaro Ricardo Gomez Deborah Marini SCIENCE + TECH Bowen Chen Anabelle Johnston LITERARY Audrey Buhain Alisa Caira FEATS Alan Dean Edie Elliott Granger Emily Rust DEAR INDY Gemma Sack Cal Turner Sara Van Horn EPHEMERA Liana Chaplain Anna Kerber X Yukti Agarwal Seth Israel SOCIAL MEDIA Justin Scheer

STAFF WRITERS Leela Berman Matthew Cuschieri Osayuwamen EdeOsifo Tammuz Frankel DESIGN EDITOR CJ Gan Ella Rosenblatt Lucas Gelfond Leo Gordon COVER Evie Hidysmith COORDINATOR Rose Houglet Sage Jennings Antonia Huth Amelia Wyckoff DESIGNERS Muram Ibrahim Anna Brinkhuis Nicole Kim Clara Epstein Alina Kulman Miya Lohmeier Olivia Mayeda Owen McCallumDrake Rebman Keeler Issra Said Issac McKenna Jieun (Michelle) Song Justin Scheer Sacha Sloan Mehek Vohra Ella Spungen Sojung (Erica) Yun BUSINESS Jerry Chen Evan Lincoln Isabelle Yang

ILLUSTRATION EDITOR Hannah Park ILLUSTRATORS Sylvia Atwood Hannah Chang Ophelia DuchesneMalone Camille Gros Sophie Foulkes Baylor Fuller Mara Jovanovic Olivia Lunger Talia Mermin Jessica Minker Rachelle Shao Joshua Sun Evelyn Tan Joyce Tullis Floria Tsui Dorothy Zhang

COPY EDITORS Alyscia Batista Grace Berg Elaine Chen Megan Donohue Nina Fletcher Christine Huynh Madison Lease Jasmine Li MANAGING EDITORS Alana Baer Anchita Dasgupta Peder Schaefer SENIOR EDITORS Audrey Buhain Andrew Rickert Ivy Scott Xing Xing Shou Cal Turner Sara Van Horn MVP Steve

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WEEK IN REVIEW

WEEK IN ELUSIVE NEIGHBORS WRAITHS AND REAL ESTATE A rare commodity hit the Littleton, Massachusetts housing market last week: a property bereft of ghosts, ghouls, witches, poltergeists, and termites.

A red and white placard reading “Not Haunted” perched atop a matching “For Sale” sign, presumably reassuring prospective buyers that their future home would be safe under the full moon, free of monsters under the bed. The conspicuous sign was retweeted by your mom’s favorite Facebooker, George Takei, as well as Coraline writer Neil Gaiman, who called the house “definitely cursed.” One spectator replied, “Sounds like something a haunted house would say.”

This unhaunted house’s virality reveals a deeper anxiety bubbling under the surface of New England home-buyers. In a region plagued by murderous dolls, doom-cawing crows, and calls of Cthulhu, it makes sense to speculate about the 18th century residence you’re buying before selling your soul to the realtor. One can imagine that Rhode Island’s very own Perron family experienced buyer’s remorse after purchasing the house from The Conjuring. A Massachusetts law states that realtors do not have to disclose “the fact or suspicion that the real property has been the site of an alleged parapsychological or supernatural phenomenon.” Taken in earnest, the “Not Haunted” addition sets a new standard of transparency for Massachusetts real estate agencies.

Eyewitnesses largely attributed the sign to pranksters, but this totally not-ghostly home may fill a niche in the housing market. Not many homes can claim to be entirely un-spooked; spirits may struggle to find a place without pesky tombmates in the westof-Boston area. Luckily, families can now pass down a summer home along with their generational curses.

Millennials prophesied to never be home-buyers may finally have a shot at paying a mortgage in death.

But buyer beware: this Indy writer has started saving up for retirement. They’ve trespassed on all ten of Providence’s most haunted locations, so they’ll need a vacant home to haunt for all eternity.

ACAB ( ALL COWS ARE BRAVE) 2AM. February 4, 2021. Johnston, Rhode Island.

Killingly Street and Greenfield Avenue. Uber driver Pho Xaykosy finds himself face to face with a mysterious fellow motorist waiting at the red light: a cow. “When it turned green, the cow goes,” Xakosy told Channel 10. Far from just another local out for a nighttime drive, this was none other than the infamous ‘Johnston cow,’ a 1,500-pound steer that had escaped earlier that day en route to a slaughterhouse in the area.

The notorious cow evaded capture for 48 days and in turn captured the hearts and minds of Rhode Islanders. As of April 9, 14,000 people had signed a petition imploring that the ‘Johnston cow’ be retired to a sanctuary. Providence Journal reporters have savored the cow’s story, making liberal use of cattle puns: “Johnston’s rogue steer briefly spotted, but remains cowvert,” a March 12 headline read. The Indy, in the spirit of self-criticism and accountability, urges for a halter to be placed upon these journalistic cheap cuts, which butcher this serious issue and make light of the weighty matter of a 1,500-pound cow.

Johnston Mayor Joe Polisena claimed (referring not only to the cow but also to a wild turkey that “terrorized the town in 2018 and 2019” and has since vanished, according to the Journal), “My police are good at catching criminals, but we can’t seem to catch this cow or this turkey.” But despite his misdemeanors—evading police, in the absence of aggravating factors, is not a felony—the Johnston Po-

- AW

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TEXT AMELIA WYCKOFF, GEMMA SACK, & ALAN DEAN

lice Department insists that the steer has nothing but respect for law enforcement. In a March 10 Facebook post, the Johnston PD shared a blurry, zoomedin picture of the cow in front of a “Support Our Police” lawn sign. “Though it appears in this picture that it backs the blue,” the post read, “the escaped Johnston cow is still on the lam.” Some Johnston residents were skeptical of the police’s narrative, however. “How is it we only see this steer when it is near a Support The Blue sign??? Is somebody in this house feeding it?” commented Deborah O’Brien.

The pigsty and the cow pen, it seems, may not be so far apart.

It was ultimately the cow’s owner, Ledyard Lewis, who was able to corral him on March 26 and return him to his farm in North Stonington, CT. Despite the efforts of the cow’s well-wishers, Lewis sold him to an anonymous buyer. Erased from the corporate media’s account, however, is the inconvenient truth that this was not the first ménage à trois between Lewis, cows, and the police. In 2012, Lewis turned himself in to the Tiverton, RI police after stealing up to 18 cows from a farmer who owed him money. Charged with grand larceny and theft of animals, Lewis escaped with his reputation and his farm intact—more than can be said for the ‘Johnston cow.’ While it seems that vigilante justice persists among the cowboys on the wild frontier of northern Rhode Island, so too does the ever-persistent truth that the real criminals and the boys in blue work hand in hand, horn in horn.

- GS & AD

DESIGN ELLA ROSENBLATT

ILLUSTRATION TALIA MERMIN

I N D Y

My soon-to-be landlord is [REDACTED]. While viewing a place on [REDACTED] with him last week, he started to read off names of other people planning to live on the block. He mentioned an ex of mine, who was going to be living a few doors down. The breakup was a while back, and while it was pretty brutal at the time, I've moved on. I hope they have too. The others in the group glanced at me, and [REDACTED] immediately knew what was up. At no invitation from us, [REDACTED] offered his advice: “Love the one you’re with.” I appreciate cliches. The older I get, the more often I find them being true.

How can we know when the one we’re with is enough? And how do you think I should navigate living a few doors down from an ex I haven't spoken a word with in nearly two years?

—Loyal Tenant You should not take love advice from your landlord.

Let us consider whether any other piece of proprietary guidance could have been more carefully designed to convince you that this potentially problematic living situation will, in fact, be perfectly fine.

Forget about your ex, [REDACTED] seems to say, and go ahead and buy my house. Love the one you’re with, Loyal Tenant, as long as that faithful loving happens within the walls of my beautiful apartment for $600 a month, utilities not included.

Regardless of [REDACTED]’s true motives, it seems worthwhile to note the suspicious similarity between his recommendation that you ‘settle’ for a romantic relationship, one that may or may not be meaningful to you, and his presumably strong desire to have you ‘settle’ for (and into) his apartment, regardless of the leaky pipes, the macabre stains, or the gas stove that won’t stop clicking. Unlike privately-owned real estate, romantic relationships—and housing, for that matter—should not be transactional, neglectful of quality standards, or dependent on the notion of ‘customer satisfaction.’

I would suggest ignoring your landlord’s dubiously-applicable maxim and, instead, reworking your chosen loyalties. Placing allegiance in your own values, motivations, and boundaries may prove more clarifying than a sense of everyday fidelity to your local property owner. And placing your loyalty in your romantic partner—by following through on a shared standard of communication—could more freely allow for flexibility when things in your relationship don’t seem to be working. Ideally, a partner will listen to you better than a fiscal document, unequivocally reject your monthly payments, and refuse to bind their love to a yearly contract.

Until then, however, let us pretend to give [REDACTED] the last word. Look here, Loyal Tenant, [REDACTED] wants to add, your ex has already moved on. Per my advice, they’re currently loving the one they’re with in my other house for $700 a month with coin-op laundry. In other words, love the one you’re with as long as they’re not a landlord.

- SVH As to navigating living a few doors down from your ex, I would advise against doing it at all. Last year, my best friends lived directly across the street from my recent ex’s new girlfriend. I dreaded running into them every time I walked down that block, and whenever I did, it sent me into a tailspin that ruined my day. I hope this won’t be your experience, and I think there are a number of things you can do better than we did to make this situation less unpleasant.

Things I did that I wish I hadn’t include: looking down at my phone for extended periods of time, exaggerating the volume of the music through my headphones, and making erratic sharp turns to modify my route when I ran into them. Things my ex did that I wish he hadn’t include: awkwardly pointing out to me how weird it was that multiple people he’d “been intimate with basically live on the same block.”

In short, don’t make things uncomfortable and don’t make a big deal out of it—that is, I don’t think you should initiate more or less interaction with them than you would if they weren’t your neighbor. And regardless of whether you live on the same block, chances are high that you would run into them in the Fox Point / College Hill area anyway—those of us who live here are all basically neighbors once

TEXT GEMMA SACK, CAL TURNER, & SARA VAN HORN

removed. Best of luck, Loyal Tenant.

- GS Crosby, Stills, and Nash only offer one real condition for whether the one you’re with is enough: “She's a girl, and you're a boy.” Obviously I can’t condone this logic, but I understand their desire to simplify the question. Tackling it otherwise amounts to tackling the question, of this whole column and of many of our lives. Old and wise as you are, Loyal Tenant, I’m sure that you already know the most practicable advice for this situation: creating another person in your mind, whether from fantasy or memories or some combination thereof, to measure the one you’re with against basically dooms any attempt at real connection. So I’ll try to answer directly what I think you’re asking: what does love feel like? I’d say it has less to do with how you see the one you’re with than it does with how you see the world through them.

Does the one you’re with make you feel like you’re looking at the world alongside someone, like you have someone to share your own observations with?

Do they make you feel, if not always understood, then understandable? The other half of the equation: does the one you’re with give you access to parts of the world that you wouldn’t have otherwise? Does the world become new through them? If it does, I’ll quote those songsters again: “You ain’t gonna need any more advice.” The one you’re with is more than enough.

- CT

DESIGN ELLA ROSENBLATT ILLUSTRATION FLORIA TSUI

D E A R

04

FEATS

EXITING THE IVORY TOWER Profiting from gratitude and nostalgia at Commencement

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+++

+++ Though an Ivy League diploma will still land on my mother’s doorstep sometime this summer, I will not be wearing a swishy dress to Campus Dance, or embracing my mom, diploma in hand. The graduating class will be divided in half to attend two smaller Commencement ceremonies, masked and distanced on the Main Green, where our degrees will be conferred upon us, and we retreat through the Van Wickle Gates. There will be no rushed, joyful embraces, or messy, ambling crowds. It will be cold, harsh, and sterile. Without the extravagance, Commencement weekend fails to cast its spell. The harshness of the virtual world and the exhaustion of this year make visible the occasion’s true incentive: to broadcast graduating students’ gratitude, fueling alumni nostalgia, and then to capitalize on both.

Though Brown is still attempting to cultivate pride virtually, the administration’s intentions emerge without Commencement’s usual extravagant facade.

This morning’s detached digital request for video reflections through Today@Brown asks exclusively for celebration and gratitude. Feeling the warm sun on my bruised knees at in-person Commencement, I might have welcomed this celebratory tone, but in the creaky Providence bedroom I’ve spent most of the past year in, the request lands poorly. This is Brown’s virtual attempt to maintain a polished veneer through its longstanding tradition of incorporating a wide range of proud student speakers.

For the first decade of Commencement ceremonies in the late 1700s, the central event was the ‘Disputatio Forensica,’ in which graduating students performatively debated with faculty members over the question of nationalization. Even the original structure of the ceremony’s finances was built around student speakers; every student spoke and paid a fee determined by the size of their speaking part.

ILLUSTRATION FLORIA TSUI

As a lower-income student, I’ve spent the majority of my education working towards my college graduation, with this final elaborate celebration held up as the pinnacle of achievement. Though my parents both attended college, as artists living in the increasingly expensive city of San Francisco, they struggled financially. Overwhelmed by medical debt, and hit hard by the recession, they declared bankruptcy when I was eight. In those fundamental early years, I thought about how much everything cost: longer showers meant a higher water bill, nicer dinners meant my mom worked longer hours. Every resource gained meant something sacrificed, even lost. When I arrived at a private school on financial aid, I quickly realized my wealthy peers’ thoughts weren’t overwhelmed by the stress of these constant calculations. Their worlds, seeped in the privilege of wealth, seemed so much bigger than mine. I wanted what they had—the freedom of asking for, or simply taking, what they wanted without the overwhelming guilt of knowing what it would cost someone else.

My mom fought tirelessly to get me into private school because she believed the world within those doors could offer me a different future. Factually, she was right. I’m graduating from college, and doing so with enough savings not to have to check my bank account before I charge a grocery run to my card (mostly because of the substantial amount of financial aid Brown has direct deposited into my bank account each semester), and a full-time job

waiting for me at home. Whether it’s because of my extensive resume, strong analytical skills, or the elite connections I’ve built, 12 years of private education are responsible for the stability waiting for me after graduation. When I came to Brown, the school made me two promises. Explicitly, it offered an intellectually formative, progressive education. Implicitly, it promised classically American upward mobility. It delivered on both.

DESIGN MIYA LOHMEIER

school’s first seven graduates. As was true of all colonial colleges, the graduating class was wealthy, white, and male. The university moved to Providence in 1770, where Commencement was held at the First Baptist Church on the edge of College Hill. Since then, the celebration of Commencement has taken over the city each year and even became an official public holiday. While alumni have always played a large role in the Commencement ceremony, more recently the addition of reunion-specific events have transformed Commencement from a formality to the school’s most lucrative fundraising event. Reunion Weekend in 2018 raised more than $13.4 million dollars, with many donors gifting over $10,000. The weekend is extravagant, traditional, and incredibly joyful.

TEXT EVIE HIDYSMITH

I used to imagine attending Campus Dance in a bright new dress that swishes just above my knees, and shoes that click with each step. With high-strung lights, swing dancing to the jubilant jazz band bigger than most of my classes, and impeccably dressed alumni spanning generations, the dance transforms the campus into an eerily blissful wonderland. In the soft warm light of hundreds of paper lanterns, the Main Green seduces. As a younger student looking towards Commencement, the thought of graduating next to my quadruple-legacied, trust-fund endowed classmates, knowing that I had to work harder than them to earn my diploma, felt like the ultimate proof that I was worth something—that I deserved a world just as vast as theirs, just as full of possibility.

I lay in bed this morning, half-heartedly scrolling through my email and dreading the final papers I’ve been procrastinating. Today’s priority message from Today@Brown states: “Graduates: Share reflections for Commencement.” The announcement from the Office of University Communications asks graduating seniors to submit short videos reflecting on our time at Brown. They ask: “What brought you joy? What did you love about your studies? Tell us about the friendships and connections that sustained you this year during the pandemic. How has Brown prepared you to enter life’s next chapter with hope and optimism? Describe the fun, happy experiences that carried you through this challenging time.” I am not the type of student who would submit a video like this, and I struggle to imagine the kind who would. But in this message, I’m particularly struck

by Brown’s implication that our experiences have been universally joyful. This ending to our college years is, at best, fraught. Our last two years of school have been drastically altered—filled with countless less than joyful experiences which the administration intentionally overlooks at Commencement.

In a normal year, Commencement and Reunion Weekend transform campus into constant celebration—extravagant events celebrating graduating seniors and returning alumni abound. Thousands gather in the evening on College Green for the elaborate Campus Dance, and line the streets for the graduating class’ final procession through the Van Wickle Gates. Brown’s Commencement traditions began in 1769, five years after its inception. At the first ceremony at the Baptist church in Warren, Rhode Island, bachelor’s degrees were conferred upon the

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FEATS

Though student speakers no longer directly fund Commencement, the institution’s incentive for centering their speeches, even when filled with gratitude and love for Brown, is still financial. Brown centers voices which uphold the image it has so delicately crafted, voices which have thoughtful answers to exclusively positive questions. +++ I spent the better part of the last year researching and writing my English nonfiction thesis on the inherent paradox of teaching progressivism in private education, focusing on the experience of lower-income students at the Urban School of San Francisco, the elite private school I attended. One teacher I spoke with described her frustration with the exclusively joyful exits of long-term faculty members. She told me, “you have everybody’s ear. You have so much institutional power. And I’m curious how you’re using it before you go.” Endings are natural moments of reflection, and the people for whom an experience is ending usually set the tone. As a bizarre academic year comes to a close, the Class of 2021 has everyone’s ear, in large part because Brown magnifies their voices in the ceremony.

By exclusively emphasizing the close-knit power of the Brown community, Commencement captures students, alumni and faculty in a glitzy whirlwind and hides the truth that the institution doesn’t want us to figure out; the celebratory tone of Commencement isn’t an honest appreciation of graduating students or returning alumni; it’s a financial strategy for the elite university to reproduce itself. As a lower-income student, the pride I gain by assessing my own worth through my successful participation in elite higher education is exactly what Brown has cultivated within me. If I earned it, others can too.

And, more lower-income students will have access to the vast world of possibility I’m about to step into if I support Brown financially. At least, that’s the story they’d like me to believe—in reality, my hypothetical donations would likely help fund a fancy performing arts center, profitable research, or Christina Paxson’s 1.3 million dollar salary. The school wants everyone to foster gratitude and love, and center voices which reflect it and exclude those who do not. The Commencement website even asks, “who isn’t in love with Brown the night of Campus Dance?” Even in

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writing this, in imagining the awe on my mother’s face at the grandiosity of it all, I feel myself craving it. +++ It isn’t that this love or gratitude for Brown isn’t genuine. It is, which is why it’s so effective. Another teacher I interviewed for my thesis (and, coincidentally, a Brown alum), talked often about the disconnect he feels between the day-to-day experience of teaching at a private school, and the way he thinks about the institution morally and ethically. To me, Brown feels good in the day to day. But, these joyful moments actually have nothing to do with the institution of the university. As this year ends, the thing I’m most grateful for academically is the relationship I’ve built with my thesis advisor. I have the utmost respect for her, and secretly hope my life someday looks a lot like hers—a balance of community organizing, writing and teaching. The Brown administration would like to take credit for this relationship, to hear my story end with how much I love Brown. But in reality, this gratitude is for my advisor and actually has nothing to do with the institution, although it may have been the conduit for our meeting. Granting Brown credit for daily joy and the strength of our relationships also allows it to capitalize on interpersonal power. The institution—the administrators that determine shockingly high tuition rates, the admissions office that carefully crafts education into a luxury product, and the corporation which invests Brown’s revenue—is in no way responsible for this joy. Yet by cultivating it, they profit from it: a gear in the self-sustaining economic machine of the Ivy League.

The administration not only carefully harnesses our love and gratitude to advertise its coveted product (an elite, Ivy League education), they use it to promote nostalgia among alumni. Each year, alumni return to the dorms, paying higher prices for a worn down Keeney Quad dorm room and musty shared bathroom than a fancy king bed in a hotel downtown. Brown touts graduating seniors’ love for Brown, makes alumni crave it, offers them a way to reproduce it through reunion weekend, then profits from their nostalgia. Though dorm rooms are objectively less comfortable than hotel rooms, they are more desirable because they are affiliated with an

Ivy League university—arguably the most powerful status symbol in the country.

Brown is able to rely on meritocratic desire to preserve the institution, because the classic college experience idealizes the lavish freedom of wealth.

When I was 17, my private high school’s college counselor asked me, “What do you imagine your college experience to be like?” I naively responded with a physical description of a place that closely resembled Brown’s campus. I wanted freshly cut green grass, bright against the deep red brick of the elegant surrounding buildings. I wanted an ancient, infinite library where I could sit in complete silence, smelling the musty pages of century-old books. I wanted well-respected professors, competitive classmates, and fresh flowers in the spring. My desire for that imagined version of my life—the classic college experience—was really a hunger for status. All elite universities, and particularly those within the Ivy League, rely on this hunger for upward mobility to ensure their survival. Though Brown prides itself on its commitment to diversity and inclusion, as a private university financially relying on status-driven pseudo-meritocracy, the school can never truly be equitable. +++ I will inevitably become nostalgic about my time at Brown. As graduation looms, I feel it in myself already. A part of me is grateful to leave this way.

Endings like these never land right, never live up to being what they need to be. It feels easier, and less painful, to just let it fade. After a year of missing people, it seems right to let them float away to their new lives without the long, drawn out goodbyes Commencement would necessitate. There is something more peaceful about ending this way, fading into new lives and new versions of ourselves instead of acknowledging the finality of it all. Whatever Commencement means for me, its joyful moments will be a celebration of people who have impacted my life, not because of the institution but in spite of it.

EVIE HIDYSMITH B’21 probably won’t attend Commencement.

METRO

“Our food comes from the earth, from the soil, from the land. And if we don’t own any and we don’t control any of it, we don’t really have a voice in the food system.” -Leah Penniman, food sovereignty activist and co-founder, co-director, and farm manager at Soul Fire Farm.

In Rhode Island, tens of thousands of residents experience food insecurity, small farmers and fishermen struggle to stay afloat, and our produce is grown… where exactly? This precarity is propelled by a nationwide system that threatens environmental health, just food access, and workers’ rights in favor of profit.

The pandemic has exacerbated the state’s hunger crisis, with food insecurity catapulting from 9.1 percent in 2019 to 25.2 percent in 2020, according to the Rhode Island Community Food Bank. As of 2010 (recent data from the United States Department of Agriculture is limited), areas with limited access to supermarkets—considered food deserts at the time—were concentrated largely in low-income, majority Black or Latinx communities such as the Southside of Providence. Access to grocery stores are a reliable measure of food apartheid, or the systemic separation of low-income communities from nutritious food, which leads to food insecurity and health disparities along lines of race and class.

While the majority of farms in the state are small farms, it is estimated that only about two percent of the produce consumed in Rhode Island is grown instate, and only about 10 percent of New England’s food supply altogether is produced within the region.

The vast majority of Rhode Island’s food is imported from large farms over long distances in a carbon intensive supply chain.

Through the Rescue Rhode Island Act, which was introduced this January, the Renew Rhode Island Coalition is taking on these challenges in the State House. +++ The Rescue RI Act’s three pieces of legislation seek to overhaul food, housing, and clean air and water infrastructure. The bills examine how the state can address the climate emergency, create jobs, and

improve the material conditions of marginalized Rhode Islanders. Renew RI is a subset of the Renew New England Alliance, a coalition formed last year of over 150 organizations engaged in confronting the climate crisis, mass unemployment, and racial injustice. Historically, climate legislation has only touched narrower issues of energy usage and pollution. Renew RI rejects this trend by attending to the inherent intersectionality of the climate crisis, from food justice to utility justice.

This legislation is a stark departure from existing RI climate policy, including the first climate bill in seven years to pass the State Senate, the recent Act on Climate. The act sets distant goals for climate change mitigation, offering negligible support for those who are already affected. The bill treats food and agriculture as an afterthought—despite the intrinsic link between our food system and climate change—and fails to enact actionable plans.

Renew’s Rescue RI Act, in turn, moves away from uninformed, incremental policy toward a model of a regional Green New Deal, reflecting the shifting makeup of the Rhode Island legislature. In 2020, a wave of progressive representatives endorsed by Renew—many of them young and people of color— unseated eight powerful incumbent RI Democrats.

Renew’s strategy is twofold: usher in a coalition of like-minded representatives into the State House and introduce bold climate legislation that is informed heavily by community organizing.

The food portion of the Rescue RI Act—the Food Security & Agriculture Jobs Act—comprises several smaller acts, which propose massive changes to the state’s food system: the creation of an agriculture jobs bureau, a program to incentivize sustainable agriculture with fair labor standards, a grant program for both home gardens and community agriculture, and finally an ecosystem restoration program. “Food is a perfect example of a moment to address people’s urgent needs on the ground and also to transform the systems that are pushing the environment past the point of no return,” Joshua Kestin, Regional Policy Director of Renew RI, told the College Hill Independent. While the act as a whole combats climate, racial, and economic injustice, the food bill in particular draws the challenges of big agribusiness

and food apartheid together, hoping to decrease the carbon outputs of Rhode Island’s food consumption, transportation, and production while putting food on the plates of marginalized communities.

This portion, just like the entirety of the act, was crafted collaboratively with numerous grassroots organizers. Arianna Cunha, a youth organizer with Renew, described this process to the Indy: “It was totally open to anyone in the coalition to make suggestions at any point in time…Emma [Bouton], the Renew co-chair, would just send us an email: ‘this is our next draft, anybody got any edits?’” This community-driven approach is of particular importance in a portion of the act that so directly addresses the lived experience of so many Rhode Islanders.

The bill places immense value in moving our food systems away from a universal prescription, instead foregrounding community decision-making. As Jazandra Barros, the Community Outreach Coordinator for the Southside Community Land Trust (SCLT), a member of Renew’s coalition, told the Indy, “This bill is so beautiful because it is really thinking more broadly about how to center communities. Part of my work is broadening who those stakeholders are, like the folks who are neighbors to our gardens, or the garden is a neighbor to folks.

Those people’s input is important, and how do we get their input? How do we create that feedback loop?”

TEXT LILY CHAHINE, MARIANA FAJNZYLBER & ELLA SPUNGEN

RE-SEEDING RHODE ISLAND

Examining the Food Security & Agriculture Jobs Act

“Our food comes from the earth, from the soil, from the land. And if we don’t own any and we don’t control any of it, we don’t really have a voice in the food system.” - Leah Penniman, food sovereignty activist and co-founder, co-director, and farm manager at Soul Fire Farm.

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Community land trusts

Community land trusts (CLTs) best exemplify the democratization and localization of the food system that the Rescue RI Act is working toward. CLTs are more concept than definition: land owned by a community whose members collectively manage the land to grow food. In Renew’s vision for CLTs—referred to as community agriculture cooperatives in the bill—communities register as nonprofit organizations and purchase land collectively. The Community Agriculture Act lays out a framework, largely in the form of grant funding, for the development of a network of CLTs across the state. The Rescue RI CLTs compensate labor to ensure participation is accessible, a common obstacle in the volunteer-based model of the oft-abandoned community garden.

Community land trusts are not a novel concept—SCLT, for example, has run land trusts across RI since 1981—and the ideas and practices of collectivized growing are rooted in systems found in Indigenous communities globally. What disrupts the status quo here is not the concept but the scale. The bill’s language allows for individual grants of up to $750,000, with the potential to apply for subsequent grants of up to $75,000. The initial land purchase poses the biggest hurdle in creating CLTs; the act empowers communities with grant funding to overcome that barrier and access land for autonomous food production.

CLTs established through the proposed program begin as a grant application, a process in which applicants identify a geographic membership area, indicate a proposal to grow community food, and provide evidence of community support.

Applications must detail “strong and credible plans,” a prerequisite that may be a barrier to the very communities it intends to serve, as grant writing is often laborious. Mirroring their model of paid labor for growers and CLT staff, Renew could introduce paid positions for assistants to support community members through the grant writing process. Yet Kestin assures that “[Renew has] people all over the state in these communities who would be doing this organizing ourselves…and who can really take the lead on setting up CLTs.” The bill underscores that applicants whose membership consists of census-designated low-income households and communities that have historically been denied access to nutritious, locally-grown food will be prioritized. This legislation also prioritizes autonomy rather than imposing a formula for what a CLT should look like, intentionally leaving open decisions about size, structure, and land type—or details as specific as culturally relevant seed choice.

Creating a network of CLTs is far from a destination; rather, it is a dynamic move toward a more just food system. Barros told the Indy that groundwork like “processing facilities, cold storage, [and] distribution channels have to be built in conjunction with the land piece.” This infrastructure is necessary in order to broaden access to community-grown food, which could be achieved in part through the grants. Rescue RI’s CLTs can create material change and increase access to produce for Black and brown communities impacted by food apartheid and insecurity; this connective tissue will only expand their reach.

Although Renew’s vision for CLTs challenges the status quo of a centralized food system, its roots in community organizing would be further strengthened through an explicitly anticolonial foundation, models of which already exist in New England.

Renew could take direction from the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, for example, whose land trust model works by “acquiring and returning land to Indigenous nations and respectfully connecting Black, Asian, and Latinx and other POC farmers…to land while centering…Indigenous sovereignty.” Progressive organizations like Renew should open the possibility of decolonialism through land repatriation in their CLT model; exploring means of land-back would only further realize their vision of collective use of land.

Restoration and preservation

The fourth section of the act, the Ecosystem Restoration Act, explicitly addresses the environmental damage to lands, wetlands, and waterways through the creation of an Ecosystem Restoration Program within the RI division of Parks & Recreation. The director of the program will be empowered to purchase land in order to “Promote biodiversity within Rhode Island; Create self-sustaining ecosystems within Rhode Island; Sequester carbon dioxide; and Mitigate the impacts of climate change within Rhode Island,” all of which will be designated under a ‘protected land’ category.

Renew RI asserts conservation-type restoration and food farming are intrinsically linked. “It will be, very soon, impossible to grow food in Rhode Island, if we continue to degrade our natural ecosystems without doing intentional restoration,” said Kestin.

“That’s why that is lumped in with the food pieces, because the two are utterly connected.” Indeed, reforestation, soil degradation and contamination, invasive species and pests, shifting plant hardiness zones, and development all pose threats to agriculture in New England—80 percent of Rhode Island’s farmland has been lost since 1940.

Beyond threats to agriculture and food supply, polluted lands pose a great peril to the well-being of Rhode Islanders. The dozens of national corporations situated along RI’s coastline have spent decades polluting the air and local waterways. RI ranks ninth nationally in its asthma rates, and the residents living within a mile of Providence’s Shell terminal—80 percent of whom are people of color—report the highest per capita rates in the state.

The privatization of land allows these companies free reign to degrade the environment and threaten health in the name of profit. The Ecosystem Restoration Act serves as a preemptive defense, cutting off polluters’ unfettered access to Rhode Island’s lands.

However, as written, the act has the potential to fall into practices of whitewashed, conservationist environmentalism. The legislation leaves the control of these newly purchased lands in the hands of the Department of Environmental Management to “restor[e] degraded natural ecosystems to a close approximation of their previous, natural state.” Making lands public is far preferable to private pollution; however, writing an accountability structure and community oversight mechanism into the language of the Ecosystem Restoration Program would be one step toward avoiding land-based harm—as has historically been an outcome of preservation.

The preservation movement has its roots in designating outdoor spaces for recreation and aesthetic enjoyment, secluded from where people live and work. This philosophy, and the subsequent creation of the first national parks, is linked to a federal policy of Native removal—inaugural wilderness areas were all built on Indigenous lands and the ‘uninhabited’ outdoors had to be intentionally ‘created’.

This separation of ‘wilderness’ from our lived environment comes at the cost of Indigenous sovereignty. Take Mashapaug Pond, the largest freshwater body of water in what is called Providence and an important cultural site for the Narragansett Tribe. Private and state exploitation and pollution of the pond has made the water unusable for fishing or drinking. The concurrent mourning and hope for Mashapaug Pond has been expressed through a collection of original poetry and art, Through Our Eyes: an Indigenous view of Mashapaug Pond, edited by Dawn Dove & Holly Ewald: “decay, decomposition / destruction / yet we live / we struggle, we survive / The layers of our existence / We are clay, we can remold / ourselves—our image / of who we are.”

Mashapaug Pond is merely one example of the disproportionate harm done to Indigenous food ways through continued environmental degradation. The Ecosystem Restoration Act presents an

Another major piece of the bill, one that perhaps is less invested in autonomous relationships to food and more so in strengthening sustainable avenues of food production on the whole, is the Regenerative Agriculture Act. This section stresses the necessity of more ecologically sound practices and fair labor standards in the state’s agricultural sector. Through financial incentives to local producers, it intends to spread the methodology of ‘regenerative agriculture’ throughout the state’s farms, a movement grounded in utilizing food production as a strategic carbon sink while restoring the land’s soil quality. Fewer than seven percent of RI’s lands are currently agriculturally active; the state cannot afford to lose any more to destructive industrial farming. It is vital that growers shift toward practices that will ensure local food can be produced for years to come.

But while regenerative agriculture has found a new audience amongst climate activists, the origins of such practices are rooted in techniques utilized

by Indigenous peoples. Polyculture, permaculture, pesticide-free—the buzzwords that pervade the dialogue around regenerative agriculture describe fixtures in Indigenous food practice. Yet this agricultural philosophy lacks acknowledgement of Indigenous perspectives that ground it, a tension present in the Regenerative Agriculture Act. In late 2020, a coalition of Indigenous leaders and organizations published a statement titled Whitewashed Hope that

enumerates the faults in combating the climate crisis with a colonial approach to agriculture. The document rejects regenerative agriculture’s binaries that separate nature and human life, and more broadly, its value judgments (think monoculture bad, intercropping good) that deny growers a relational outlook to the land they work with. As the contributors to the statement convey, the regenerative agriculture movement attempts to mitigate the harm that the western agriculture industry has caused, but the co-optation of these practices often results in a piecemeal approach.

The Regenerative Agriculture Act leans heavily on stiff definitions and requirements, revealing an unavoidable tradeoff—achieving sustainable farming on a state-wide level necessitates standardization; standardization inherently limits the holistic view of each independent crop, farm, and farmer that would in part answer the critiques in Whitewashed Hope. Agriculture in the US has become a monolith of intensely damaging practices to our lands, waterways, and farm workers—regenerative agriculture standards are a practical and necessary response to slowing this destruction, but are not a panacea.

Some 98 percent of Rhode Island’s produce comes from out of state; it is the exception to the rule for food to be grown locally. The Regenerative Agriculture Act focuses on ensuring that the five percent is grown in a more sustainable manner, but does not address the greater supply chain. Unlike subsidies—which in theory lower the price point for consumers—grants fail to assure equitable access to its yield. Renew’s grounding in community aims to both mitigate climate impacts and increase access to nutritious foods. While the Regenerative Agriculture Act does encourage more sustainable practices, who’s to say the produce will end up in the hands of the many Rhode Islanders who do not frequent the Hope Street Farmers Market?

+++ The Rescue RI Act would significantly disrupt the status quo of climate policy in Rhode Island. The choice to place community input at the center of the legislative process alone is an indicator of just how much more in touch Renew is with the needs of its constituency than the champions of the Act on Climate.

The act’s commitment to grassroots organizing and community input is innovative, but there is a subtle dissonance between this vision and certain parts of the legislation. The Ecosystem Restoration Act and the Regenerative Agriculture Act could be strengthened even further by extending the grassroots process by which the legislation was crafted into the policies the legislation creates—just as the Community Agriculture Act achieves. The Rescue RI Act provides an important point of departure from the status quo: even in its shortcomings, the act engages community members in the local food system. As Renew introduces more Green New Deal bills, the coalition must interrogate how it can center community members in every part of the process, from writing to passage to practice.

Food is unique in that it is inescapable, and encompasses issues as wide-ranging as climate change, economic justice, and Indigenous sovereignty. This legislation and critical understanding of it is essential because food is essential—not an afterthought, not a luxury, but a transformative part of our response to the climate crisis.

ILLUSTRATION MIKA ANDO

Regenerative agricultures

DESIGN MICHELLE SONG

opportunity to both ameliorate RI’s ecosystems and explicitly confront environmental racism. Individual access to and use of remediated public lands is often heavily regulated, which could further threaten Indigenous access to hunting, fishing, and growing. Renew’s power lies in community-grounded approaches. Thus it is of the utmost importance that the Restoration Act does not result in restricted points of entry, especially for Indigenous folks.

An explicit commitment to Narragansett and Wampanoag sovereignty would ensure Renew’s preservation efforts are not harmful in implementation. Lorén Spears, Executive Director of the Tomaquag Museum and a member of the Narragansett Tribe, told the Indy that the waiving of hunting and fishing licenses for those with a Tribal ID would be an important inclusion to her personally. “We’ve been living off the land since time immemorial,” she said. “It’s part of our inherent rights to hunt and fish and gather to sustain our people.” While protecting the land that bears our food is urgently critical, exploited land should be restored with a foundation that does not replicate harm done to the Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples.

LILY CHAHINE B’23.5, MARIANA FAJNZYLBER B’23.5, AND ELLA SPUNGEN B‘23.5 are tired of expecting strawberries in the winter and ask those who can to donate to the Northeast

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ARRTWORK ELLA ROSENBLATT

We know that art has gotten many of us through this unfamiliar and painful year.

So this week, we’ve put together a series of short vignettes of some of our writers’ favorite quarantine art outlets—from music to movies and everything in between. Consider these little tastes and recommendations. We hope they’ll inspire new scrolling, watching, and listening.

- AA & NS

Postcard to After Hours (1985) Once upon a time, I lived a life where it felt like crazy things would just happen to me. It was cyclical: there would be a period of quiet, and then I would wake up to a week filled with nonstop chaos and coincidence. The past year’s stasis largely quelled this phenomena, but thankfully, my chaos-loving heart got its fix with a sweet 98 minutes of After Hours (1985). For one night, I ran amok between different Downtown apartments, getting twisted up in a certain breed of strangeness found only in real life itself. Scorcese’s hidden gem is a gem indeed; it is laugh-out-loud funny, missing no beats, and overflowing with plenty of zippy plot twists. Just as the flotsam and jetsam of life tends to come full circle, so does any loose tie within After Hours. Soon, when I too will have a night so terrible and fantastic like this one, I’ll see an exasperation like that on Griffin Dunne’s face when I look in the mirror.

“My chaos-loving heart got its fix.”

- AA

Postcard to Mr. Nobody (2009) “Every path is the right path. Everything could’ve been anything else.

And it would have just as much meaning.”

A young boy stands on a train platform. The train is about to leave and his mother is on it, but his father is not. He needs to make a split-second decision. Should he stay with his father or go with his mother?

Nemo Nobody—played by Jared Leto—is subsequently followed through both of these narrative realities.

The ‘Many-Worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics meets the ‘Butterfly Effect,’ and the result is dizzying.

Small choices have catastrophic consequences. They determine who we are. They are final.

Director Jaco Van Dormael is ambitious. Recurring images—a floating leaf, a bathtub of water—exist in shadowy passageways and rainy expanses. Almost every scene feels like a delusion. Nemo is simultaneously five years old and 118 years old. He can run after a train but needs a cane to walk through the hospital. He’s had three marriages with three different women. He can remember the future, but he doesn’t know his own past. Though his lives are complex and fantastical, they are also oddly recognizable. Dormael combines science, memory, fear, and longing, using such intertwined plots that he toes the line of chaos. In many ways, it feels almost too ambitious.

This was the third movie I saw in one of my half-delusional quarantine movie-watching marathons, and afterwards, I laid on the floor of my room thinking about time, death, love, and decisions. I thought about how hard decisions are, about how perhaps this is why the idea of immortality is so appealing. If we had unlimited time to make unlimited decisions, maybe we wouldn’t feel as much regret. At the very end, Nemo is, in a way, immortal, but he’s also confused and sad—stretched by a timeline that moves back and forth, from side to side.

For me, Mr. Nobody spurred reflection on the different forking paths of life, revealing how complex, tragic, intimate, and joyous each can be in their own right. This movie deserves to be rewatched 1,000 times over, so that all of Nemo’s realities can be re-lived infinitely.

TEXT AMELIA ANTHONY & NELL SALZMAN

POST CARDS

ARTS

- NS

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ARTS TEXT JUSTIN SCHEER & CJ GAN

Postcard to George Clanton’s lost future revival Before George Clanton performed as George Clanton, he was Mirror Kisses, and before he was Mirror Kisses, he was the frontman of Kid’s Garden. But while he was Mirror Kisses he was also ESPRIT and now he is simultaneously George Clanton and ESPRIT. The evolution of Clanton’s monikers over his musical career details an artistic trajectory, a meandering route in sonic development, beginning in nostalgia but venturing forward into novel territory, cohesively repurposing and updating aspects of the pastiche from each former project.

Kid’s Garden was shoegaze, or perhaps ‘nu-gaze’, incorporating the dense, gritty textures and droning guitar riffs most obviously associated with My Bloody Valentine, embellished here and there with mechanical Primal Scream-esque percussion. Mirror Kisses was pure 1980s pop, tapping into a melodramatic vocal affect typical of that era which, as he notes in retrospect, helped him grow into his singing voice.

ESPRIT marked Clanton’s first genuinely new sound, enshrining him as a vaporwave pioneer, though anyone familiar with the genre might object that vaporwave was never truly ‘new’ insofar as it relies heavily on bygone sounds.

Contrary to the (in)famous vaporwave acts of the early 2010s, ESPRIT does not lean excessively on slowed, looped ‘80s samples. Instead, ESPRIT centers originally composed sounds, incorporating a melange of styles evoking ‘90s nostalgia, but whose exact influences in that era are often difficult to pinpoint.

Slow jungle breaks, synthesized animal sounds, bending layers of synth that one might imagine sound like a futuristic spacecraft banking a turn through an asteroid belt; ESPRIT sounds like the experience—pleasurable but longingly melancholic—of remembering a ‘90s future imagined but never realized.

By comparison, the aesthetic and sonic qualities of George Clanton (the music released under his own name, not an alias) might best be described as an attempted realization of that lost future, adapting and updating nostalgic sounds from earlier projects. It is an optimistic interpretation of vaporwave, revitalizing many of its essential elements—which are typically drowned in reverb, producing a depressive sonic weight—with brightness and clarity. In particular, George Clanton’s 2018 LP Slide repurposes sounds reminiscent of a past imagined future in such a way—uptempo, poppy, euphoric—that invites us to disregard, in a sort of blissful ignorance, the pessimism and hopelessness underpinning the notion of ‘lost futures,’ encouraging us to pretend that those lost futures were never lost—that they really did pan out; or perhaps, more optimistically, that we might yet manifest those futures for ourselves.

George Clanton thus offers a sonic imagination resonant with our mass psyche, battered by COVID realities yet optimistically anticipating a return to normal; as we collectively approach the light at the end of the quarantine tunnel, we look forward to what we left behind.

In the meantime, COVID has catalyzed Clanton’s actualization of lost futures, enabling him to utilize a moment when performers and audience are separated physically but connected digitally. Clanton’s label, 100% Electronica, hosts Virtual Utopia, a YouTube virtual reality concert series of four installments (so far) during quarantine. Viewers navigate virtual space— crude 3D landscapes reminiscent of primitive computer generated imagery— while Clanton (and others) perform future-nostalgic music. These shows, the music, technology, virtual landscapes, and name (especially the name), constitute Clanton’s exercise in worldbuilding; his realization, his un-losing, of ‘90s imagined futures.

- JS

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“Of all the ways that a family can grow in a wide-open Arkansas field, where there is so much space to outgrow one another, they choose a growing that saves each other – always.”

Postcard to Laura Marling’s Daughter In all those months at home, I couldn’t stand sounds that were so large they would press me against the walls until I felt like I couldn’t breathe, nor sounds that were so small that the emptiness of the room began to creep up against me. Singer-songwriter Laura Marling’s 2020 album, Song for Our Daughter, felt just right. The glitter of strummed guitar strings felt like the warm rays of sun streaming in through my window, and Marling’s vocal harmonies, carefully placed one on top of the other, had the soothing effect of a fresh pile of well-folded laundry on my bed. So many of these songs are about absent things. “I just meant to tell you that I don’t want to let you down,” Marling sings on Held Down, a confession of unspoken things to a person who isn’t there. In the titular Song for Our Daughter, she sings to a daughter she doesn’t have, but also to a younger self who no longer exists, describing the pain that she will come to face in her life. But these songs aren’t just articulations of the quiet pain of absence; they are also conjectures that attempt to fill that space with possibility, of what could have been and what can be. In the second half of Song for Our Daughter, that non-existent girl gently appears, embodied in the swooping strings that fly into the piece, a response to Marling’s call. I heard that, in my room, and didn’t feel quite so alone.

- CJG

DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

Postcard to Minari (2020)

- AB

Love Letter to Letterboxd

“I heard that, in my room, and didn’t feel quite so alone.”

ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES

Here, Arkansas is a fertile growing ground. The light falls with abundance, and you see everything that grows in the absence of shadows. A daughter reaches over to settle her mother’s trembling hand, and it reminds you of a climbing vine, reaching upwards to embrace the trellis that raised it. A son allows himself to be held in the hollow of his grandmother’s arms for the first time, and it’s like a seed being laid into open soil, a little heart sprouting open. Of all the ways that a family can grow in a wide-open Arkansas field, where there is so much space to outgrow one another, they choose a growing that saves each other—always.

Letterboxd, a social networking app for sharing movies, allows users to rate, view, and write reviews of movies and share them with people all over the world. I began rating movies during quarantine. I logged films I’ve watched in the past and wrote reviews as I watched new movies, like recent releases from Shiva Baby (five stars) to Malcom & Marie (two and a half stars) and classics such as Boogie Nights (four and a half stars) and Taxi Driver (three and a half stars). It became a diary of sorts, so I can remember what I watched when and how each film impacted me in the moment. The app allows me to see what my friends and other cinephiles are watching. I put movies they rate on my watchlist, which has grown to include over 500 films.

While Letterboxd has made me feel connected to what my friends watched during isolation, it has also become a source of anxiety: how will I ever watch all of these movies? There’s an imminent satisfaction that comes with logging a new movie and thus crossing it off my list; I begin to find myself watching and rating movies just to feel a sense of productivity. I checked off all of this year’s Best Picture nominees, but I admittedly fell asleep during Mank and missed a couple segments of Nomadland. I will watch something, half paying attention and half doing something else on my laptop. I don’t think Ari Aster would be pleased to know that’s how I first experienced Midsommar.

Movies are a commodity, but is this the way in which they were meant to be consumed—on a 12-inch laptop, distracted, with intermittent breaks? Letterboxd—a neat diary where I track my movie-watching experiences—also further implicates my experience with movies in the technological commodification of time and attention.

A year has now passed since my Letterboxd obsession started, and I’ve stifled this pressure to write an impressive three-paragraph review of every movie I watch. I turn to Letterboxd for honest ratings and reviews, to open a dialogue between me and my fellow movie junkies. Having those conversations amidst a time of great isolation reflects the universal movie-watching experience in a newly shared form.

- DC

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Postcard to Cole Montminy

DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES

TEXT ALANA BAER & CT

LOVE LETTER TO WOWEE ZOWEE

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In the week before the COVID pandemic hit Providence, I tripped on shrooms for the first time and had my first testosterone injection. Not simultaneously, but in sequence: shrooms Sunday, testosterone Wednesday, packing up the meager amount of stuff in my cinderblock room and heading home Saturday. Once I was actually there, cloistered in the vinyl-sided house where I’d grown into a mind that I’d recently altered and a body I’d recently endeavored to change considerably, I did very little outside of listening to Pavement’s third album, Wowee Zowee.

Wowee Zowee feels like the moment after the threshold of revelation ceases to be a threshold, when the epiphany has finally arrived. It also seems, famously, to be about almost nothing. Opaque even at their most direct, Pavement’s lyrics reach either a nadir or an acme of illegibility here. But if there is any common thread to Pavement’s lyrics, it’s one that contradicts the musical thrust of the album.

When lead Stephen Malkmus sings, it’s often about stasis, passivity, waiting. The first track is titled “We Dance,” but in the lyrics of the song, the verb dance only ever takes the future and subjunctive tenses.

“We’ll dance,” Malkmus starts, then, with even less assurance, “Maybe we can dance together?” The dance has not yet happened, may never happen, but the song plays anyway: resonant and richly textured (at one, oddly perfect moment, with the sound of running water), accreting instruments as it goes on and shedding them slowly after its climax. Even in “Pueblo”—the album’s most epiphanic musical moment, perfect beyond my powers of description— Malkmus insists, paradoxically: “When you move, you don’t move.” These songs collapse the time before the change and the change itself, movement and its absence.

Waiting to see the first effects of testosterone is not dissimilar to waiting for the psychedelic drug you’ve just taken to kick in. You wonder equally whether it’ll do nothing at all and whether it’ll do something that estranges you from yourself irreversibly. It’s hard to say whether the disappointment or the horror would be more crushing. Altering your body and altering your mind on purpose usually entail, in the time before they start to work, a kind of utopic hope within the uncertainty. Along with

I spent this year consuming work that inhabits and encircles the space of the home. I have read Apartamento and watched stay-at-home vlogs in search of words and images that pace around floor plans just as I do. The animations of textile and video artist Cole Montminy are situated in the home-space, too, albeit in a manner more fantastical than interior design interviews and less voyeuristic than a vlog. Made of felt and colored pastel, Montminy’s short stop-motion animations are composed of carefully arranged fabric that shift across a flat surface, producing scenes more reminiscent of two dimensions than three.

With laundry machines, MUNI buses, bumble bees, and curlyhaired crying boys, his videos depict the mundane. Taking place in San Francisco, they have an air of cautious play; they grasp at youth with a forceful and fabricated joy, wherein lies their sorrow. Soft fabric unfolds across the screen, suggesting the presence of Montminy’s hand, which implicates its own younger iteration. And so it seems right that the grid of Montminy’s Instagram (@coach_loves_you) oscillates between photographs of these felt constructions—slapped onto blankets and jackets—and animations made of that very same felt. It feels right, too, that his page is littered with photos of the everyday: a cluttered workspace, Judah Street, Kevin from the liquor store. Ordinary objects slide into a flat felt materiality, then unfold into these time-based fictions, and finally turn back again.

Montminy’s work captures the quotidian and subsumes it too. His work is both handheld and filmic, tactile and immaterial. Big things are made small and small things are made to move—all with gears that show themselves turning. It is easy to recommend these imagined pleasure-seeking vignettes, to write of their delicately unfinished veneer with words like ‘handheld’ and ‘nostalgic.’ It is easy to say that I like his animations, but it is more difficult to pinpoint the mechanism by which I am brought back to some more earnest and honest experience of art, and offered an unpretentious reminder that craft can be art and that art can be play.

- AB

maybe this will change everything for the worse comes maybe this will change everything for the better—or, even, maybe this will replace everything that’s currently there with new stuff entirely.

Where testosterone diverges from shrooms: on psychedelics, there comes a point when waiting comes to a decisive close, when you look around and see your mind has become an utterly new place. On testosterone, it feels more like your body is swapping its furniture out piece by piece: first, your unblemished skin for a face marked equally by peach fuzz and volcanic acne; next, your mezzo soprano squeak for a barely audible baritone croak; months later, your hairline for one very slightly squarer. If the fulfillment of hope arrives, it arrives piecemeal. Accordingly, listening to Wowee Zowee as sequestered weeks stretched into months, I realized: the contradiction central to the album is not such a contradiction at all. Sometimes the epiphany comes

in the moment of waiting; sometimes the waiting never stops, and neither do the revelations.

I doubt that you will ever find yourself on that particular series of brinks on which I found myself in early March of 2020, but at the cusp of reentering the world now, piecemeal or all at once, I think it’s worth returning to Wowee Zowee.

- CT

ARTS

X

ARTWORK “RUNS PARALLEL” BY SETH ISRAEL

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DESIGN ELLA ROSENBLATT ILLUSTRATION EVELYN TAN

TEXT ALISA CAIRA & AUDREY BUHAIN

FLASHWRITI

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Amid a year where concealment is increasingly mandatory, the face has been left, in many ways, to stretches of imagination and fleeting moments of intimacy. How do you continue or cease to imagine the face? We asked writers to respond to this question in less than 1000 words.

– AC + AB

Kulambo Writers have always been drawn to the way our islands resemble the shape of a woman weeping. I thought about this as I road-tripped up what would be the nape of her neck, and ferried across the ocean that sits between my island and yours. Was it a stretch to think of that space as an eye between eyelids? I wasn’t sure. When I got to your house, you showed me the stretch of forest that you called your backyard. For the rest of my visit, the two of us would sleep outdoors, on bamboo pallets veiled in local mosquito nets.

I’ve never had to use one before, I wanted to tell you. But all the coconut milk in our dinner knocked you out before midnight, and I had to figure it out alone. Maneuvering the mosquito net to get into bed felt unnatural, like I was peeling back a banana only to close it up back again. The next morning, as you rubbed White Flower oil into the bug bites that glazed over each of my toes, you told me that you couldn’t believe I didn’t think to tuck the edges back in. But it’s because I was mesmerized by the way the world looked from inside. The mosquito net

sieved moonlight into my eyes with such misleading dishonesty, it felt like I was looking at the forest through the moon’s eyelashes. The medicinal plants, lizards, jasmine shrubs—all as silver as the inside of a teardrop. When I got back to the city, this was the first thing I told Mama about: how beautiful the country was with a veil in-between.

She smiled. I think so too, she said. When I was younger, I spent a week embroidering sequins onto my mosquito net just so it would shine at night. But the group of fishermen who lived next door figured their nets were better put towards catching fish. In the early morning, when I would go outside to sew my sequins, I would also see them wading into the water. They carried the same net as me, only theirs was cut open. They’d get straight to bitter work: casting the mosquito net out, looping it through the ocean, reeling it in to retrieve their livelihood for the day. But from where I was sitting it always looked a bit odd. Like they were all working together to pull a big blindfold over your eyes.

go if not following each other?

As I learned to record my own television, I didn’t blink as my pigtails grew to the floor and the split hair became the water I floated in for a long time after. The tallest branches of that tree just broke the surface. I treaded my own waters for a while, stuck between choosing to search or floating on my back, letting the sun burn my stomach as the ocean pruned my spine. My parents, my first bicycle, my favorite books, and grilled cheese swam through the currents, and, I’m sure, found a shore. There was never enough strength to grasp with only one set of fingers eager to.

my frowns carved into branches and my expressions protruding in great knots.

I think, with toes in the sand, how hard it is to be split down the middle and from front to back. I create a list of reasons to interlock my hand with my own. Growing up to learn that companionship is in the trees that I am told my stories under. Realizing that the waters show me my thoughts like mirrors I know myself now. I have cut my hair and abandoned its ocean. Its strands fall like leaves. I have known many people whose hands I’ve let go of while the memory of them remains. I leave their initials in a tree trunk, recorded somewhere across emerging wrinkles. And I water them all with drops rather than seas.

- AB

Side of my Mouth A few years ago, all at once and during every year before it, the corners of my mouth slipped to opposite directions. They whispered secrets to fighting ears. Together, they crafted sentences given like double-headed snakes, causing one arm to reach toward hanging fruit as the other wrapped around my ribs, holding.

My heart’s tightening recalled childhood. Eyes captured by others’ televisions, breathing the shows my parents did not know how to record. Televised chefs made cakes that looked like the worlds I wanted to live in. I still remember the devastation of learning that all the decorations tasted awful, too sickly sweet with tastes that made hearts burn for fear of future.

But the past tasted too bitter, and childhood friends warned of their moving in the branches of our pine tree. My gaze split. Where do feet (ears, lungs)

I might be on a shore of sorts I realized as I looked for my arriving face in the bark of trees. I saw my smiles and

- AC

ING TEXT HARRY LEVINE

Fast Five I actually wanted to see Fast and Furious the other day with you. I thought about asking multiple times, but it would be impolite. I didn’t want to watch it because of the movie’s construction. Action, drama, romance and comedy, lots of exciting cars. Nissan, Honda, Mercedes-Benz. I remember a joke from the Horrible Bosses 2 trailer that the main characters would drag race in a Prius, or maybe they told a lie that they were drag racing, but they were in a Prius. My mom owned a Prius, so I thought it related. I just thought we would have fun together.

Jared Leto is a singer but also an actor.

And he is very attractive—he has a nice jawline and a simple smile. His band is called Thirty Seconds to Mars. The name is lovely, the band a gateway into a new future but unable to get there themselves, a holdover for the next generation. They were in heavy litigation with their label for a while, but actually ended up re-signing with them, EMI. EMI Records Ltd. Electrical and Musical Industries. I think EMI was subsumed into another larger label, possibly Sony. I’m pretty sure it’s only Sony, Warner and Universal at this point.

“I care about you” is something I might say, and I do. I just have things that are out of my control, I guess. I’ve actually seen one of the Fast and Furious movies before, the third one, Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift.

In Tokyo Drift, the drifting is most important at night. When the lead actor drifts in the day, it is only to prepare for the night, when nobody parks in the parking lot they

use, when the crowds come, where the cars stand out against the darkness. The nightlife in Tokyo seems wonderful, and when I watched it it made me a bit sad, thinking about how much I could not do or access.

Most of the characters were in high school, talking about last night’s highlights during lunch. The movie itself was validation of their choice, the story of this group of people strong enough to tell. I used to love walking long distances and posting about it on my Snapchat story. I don’t know about Fast and Furious’s streaming status. I’m not sure if it’s freely available. +++

of the song (Omar says “Diesel”) and it is considered Diesel’s song, or Diesel’s character’s song. The YouTube video of the song has no lyrics, just Diesel’s face, holding a steering wheel and looking forward. The video has almost 400 million views. “Quién diría que está canción tiene casi 400M con solo una foto de Vin Diesel,” the video’s top comment says. It is only his face.

This weekend, we should rent a Zipcar and go to Worcester, Massachusetts. I want to go somewhere I thought I would only know as somewhere on a map. Or we could do whatever. I’m good with that too.

- HL

There are two popular songs from the Tokyo Drift soundtrack. One is “Bandoleros’’, a song by Don Omar and Tego Calderon, heard in Vin Diesel’s car in a post-credits scene. His name is shouted out at the end

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TEXT LILY CHAHINE

( Almost) Getting Over 8th Grade Angst

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I’ve always had a hard time coping with distance without an end in sight. Counting up the minutes apart rather than counting down until reunion. The incessant tick of an internal second hand threatens the clarity of every relationship I have. After a while it gets very loud, and on FaceTime I can only hear that paralyzing reminder of separation—not words, sentences. I begin to question if I’ve ever really known the person on the other end of the call, or the authenticity of our relationship.

Sometimes I think I made too big a deal of moving when I was 13, but that fissure in my life seems to linger with me no matter how far away it is now.

The way it conditioned me to cling tightly to every emotional connection I make, to fight the natural ebb and flow of interpersonal closeness with every muscle in my body. A scarcity complex for friendship, for people I could genuinely value and (more pressingly) those who could genuinely value me.

How do you reach unconditionality? (Can you?)

My friends from middle school and I have a

tattoo together. The space it occupies on my body is a physical marker of the emotional grounding those friendships give me. It’s a promise of attachment unbound by time or distance. It helps me ignore the ticking, even though it’s just a little bit of ink on my rib. Not quite unconditionality, but close enough— reciprocated trust and commitment.

Moving forced me to confront that as you grow older, your heart will only divide and divide among multiple true Homes. Even the homes that you don’t have access to anymore, that only exist in your memory. Like my house on Yuma Street, with the new alien inhabitants who always have an American flag out front and got rid of our window boxes. Grey, red, white, and blue. The pink and green of my childhood home is still there if I squint hard enough—a picture of my past self sitting comfortably among the dandelion puffs.

I want to be able to hold more and more people and places without dropping any, to add and add, to never subtract. My fear lies in the potential mis-

match between myself and those I care about. I’d like to believe my personhood is constantly inflating, becoming larger with every new connection I make.

But what if those I hold dear consider their commitments a finite resource, and don’t choose me when the stopwatch’s been running for a while?

Since I haven’t been able to get rid of the clock running through my subconscious, I have no choice but to sit with it. To float on the ever-increasing numbers—the persistent tick of time and distance— until reunion. To trust that those I choose to hold will choose to hold me.

- LC

Ms. Pike was a raven. Her name carried onomatopoeic weight, down to the black gloss of her pointed kitten heels. She was her irascible slitted purple lips, her sharp, arrowlike nose that indefatigably pointed upwards in condescension and disgust. Her hair was sleek and teased, coated with an olgeaneous sheen.

Her skin was pasty, taut about her jowls and loose about her cheeks. Eyes, black and wide, varnished like glossy plastic. The orbs eyed you as you passed, surveying your every movement with contempt.

Every morning at eight she perched in the atrium without fail: feet poised in fifth, hands clasped, hair coiffed, black pencil skirt falling just below the knee.

She was not sinister; rather her demeanor was characterized by a tightness, a profound sense of decorum and the expectation to be followed by others with divine reverence. She stood by the glass door, calm with anticipation. Lean and agile, her wings folded and arched neatly backwards. Sometimes her hands would unclasp with deliberate grace, and instead they would cross and rest at her elbows. Black nails tapping a pinstripe-clad joint to articulate her

reproach beyond a judgemental stare, the power of which would quiet any angst into submission.

She cast a tall shadow, obstructing the soft rays that peaked through grey clouds. Her darkness shone. Feeble sunlight and obnoxious children were no match for her. They all had to pass her devastating gaze. Her dark intrusive eyes saw beyond the

distasteful length of a skirt and charged inwards, where no thought was safe. All the ugliness of hormone-crazed adolescents left her unfazed. She saw and surveyed it all with disdain but not surprise.

Past the barrier marked not by grey slabs of concrete and physical pikes, but by her pertinacious aura, you were subject to her scrutiny and hers alone.

The world oozed away, punctured by the tips of her elegant, bony nails. Light retreated slowly outwards, leaking down Finchley Road. You could return a banker, a doctor, a princess and it wouldn’t matter.

Under the sharpness of her beak, the jut of her chin, the oil of her eyes, you were always a student. Always subservient and feebly attempting to satiate her insatiable desire for perfection. In some ways, once under her claw you could never quite escape, you shouldn’t even try. All you could do was swim in the darkness of her face, and hope not for approval, but to avoid provocation at all costs.

TEXT THALIA BONES & RYAN CHUANG

Black Bird

- TB

Love in the Age of Louis Vuitton Squandering the afternoons is harder than it sounds, especially in late August when the telly is fritzing again. Magnet (22, M) keeps saying he’ll buy us a color television soon, but I don’t believe him. He’ll never admit it but I know he secretly finds the hues of grey comforting. A lack of appreciation for more liminal pigments can be fatal for a budding artist, especially for one with as many character flaws as Magnet has.

Since the telly is broken again, we’re all sideways across the ecru carpeting, watching as Magnet tries to open a can of Campbell’s Creamy Mushroom Soup with his teeth. Magnet thinks opening canned food and leaving it on the kitchen counter to sour is some sort of political statement. It’s either anti-Gulf War or pro-Gulf War; Magnet wasn’t exactly clear when he explained it to us. Magnet is too interested in making niche statements and not interested enough in replacing our television.

The girl under the sink (7, F) is in the middle of a performance art piece in which she tries to cover her skin in tinfoil to make herself seem more ornamental. Right now she’s covered herself from the torso down, but I can tell it’s about to fall apart. The tinfoil is scrunching at her joints—no matter how

much she tries, she can’t help herself from bending. If she could listen I would explain the parallels between her Reynolds Wrap bodysuit and the nuances of the 2000s third wave body positivity movement.

The doorbell rings because Willa (72, F) is at the door for her weekly visit. Willa’s shape is somewhere between a pear and a can of Grape Soda.

Maybe that’s why Magnet loves her. Magnet tells Willa he loves her three or four times per visit. Willa is 72 but doesn’t look a day older than 19. She alternates bi-weekly between Latex Catsuits and speckled overalls. Personally, I prefer my women boxy like a refrigerator and with a strong sense of direction, so I let Magnet hit on Willa unperturbed.

Tonight is the debut for Magnet’s one-man anti-commercialism screenplay, Love in the Age of Louis Vuitton, at the community theatre downtown. We’re all supposed to attend out of Gentleman’s Courtesy, but I’m only going for the free huevos rancheros.

Magnet’s screenplays are always too liberal with the word ‘vivacious,’ and he doesn’t take too well to criticism. If Magnet thinks he needs 18 repetitions of the word “vivacious” to really hammer his deep-seated existential crises into his audience, that’s on him.

Willa’s flicked on the stereo and it’s 2008 so

Katy Perry is singing about how she’s kissing other women. Willa’s got boxed wine in her left hand and Chanel No. 5 in her right, and she’s dancing. It’s a little risqué: flashes of skin that she clearly wants Magnet to notice and he’s more than happy to bite the line. She clearly hasn’t been practicing her footwork recently. It’s the chorus now and she should be in full pirouette, but her movements are a little disjointed, like someone forgot to screw her limbs on quite right.

Before we leave, I go to the guest washroom to clean up, and the girl under the sink sits outside the closed door to keep me company. We have a conversation through the wood where she’s talking about the effects of colonialism on contemporary central African politics and I’m talking about how I want to change my name to Mortimer, but it makes sense to both of us. It’s really easy to speak with the girl under the sink because her words are much rounder than Magnet’s. I wonder if this means we’ll get married one day.

-RC

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METRO

TWO LINES IN THE SAME PRACTICE: ART AND POLITICAL ORGANIZING An interview with Jordan Seaberry Jordan Seaberry is a Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) graduate, artist, and grassroots organizer. He is the co-director of the United States Department of Arts and Culture, a people-powered nonprofit, and he serves on the Providence Board of Canvassers, which oversees the city’s elections. In a phone interview, he shared his experience both painting and organizing for prison reform in Providence.

Nell: Where are you from and when did you first start painting?

Jordan: I was born and raised on the south side of Chicago and that is where I started painting. There are two big transformations for how I got into painting. The first is Bob Ross. In sixth grade, I started painting with a little easel and Bob Ross paint set.

My best friend would come over and read comics on the bunk bed, and I parked in front of the T.V. and learned how to do landscape painting. Bob Ross.

Every Monday at five.

ILLUSTRATION JORDAN SEABERRY

N: I love that.

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J: The second real intervention was an organization in Chicago called Marwen, which provides free art classes to Chicago public school students. They have extremely high-quality teaching artists and high quality studios with supplies. Absent that intervention, kids like me never would have interacted with serious artists and materials in that way.

N: I understand you went to RISD, briefly dropped out, and then became interested in political organizing. Tell me about your time at RISD. J: I came to Providence to go to RISD, which was my absolute dream school. It was what I had fantasized about as a high schooler. I worked really hard to convince my family that I wasn’t nuts for wanting to go to arts school, and I made it. I was really lucky to get a scholarship. But about as soon as I got there, I realized I was miserable, in a way that I think a lot of folks experience in college when they go through a really large culture shift—culture shock, really. I was in classes with students from economic and racial bubbles that were totally new to me. I didn’t have the resilience to not let that alienation and isolation

define my whole experience. I really struggled. I was depressed and felt alone.

N: So then what sparked your interest in political activism?

J: Those feelings of alienation are what opened my eyes up to a lot of the bigger structural issues—realizing that I wasn’t just doing these things in a vacuum, but that they were actually part of a bigger system that I had not been able to see before that.

Sometimes, it feels ironic coming from the south side of Chicago—a deeply segregated and in many ways deeply unjust place—but it took my coming to Providence to really see those issues. I wasn’t able to experience them in my childhood home, so it became really clear and urgent to me at that time. I started volunteering with Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE). I first got involved with them through acts of service. I was making flyers for their rallies, building relationships, and just trying to be useful to the movement they were building. It grew over time. They saw that I really had a passion for building trust and relationships with people, and I eventually became a lead organizer.

N: What drew you back to the art community?

J: I was at DARE for about two years and I loved it.

It was opposite from what I had been doing, and it was precisely what I thought was the antidote. I felt so confused by this ‘art academic discourse bubble.’

This was a world in many ways unrelated—or so I thought—to RISD and art-making. I didn’t paint anything for those two years. I only worked on the social justice organizing work. It was my best friend at the time, a fellow organizer, who sat me down and told me how stupid I was being thinking that these worlds had nothing to do with one another and that my contribution to the world had nothing to do with painting. I had closed that side of myself off. I went back to RISD even though I had convinced myself I was done with the school and with art.

N: How was your time after coming back?

J: They were very gracious, letting me back with my scholarship. My final year and a half was perfect.

It was incredible and I would have stayed as long as they let me. But that was because I had a world that I loved, a community that I built, that I fought for. The art that I was building felt so much more meaningful.

N: Now that you do both—grassroots organizing and painting—how do you consider painting and politics two lines in the same practice?

J: For me, art-making is not asking myself what it is that I want to say and more about who it is that I want to listen to. I use painting to meet people where they’re at, to find out who they are, and to listen to them. And that’s the same principle of organizing.

If we’re going to be able to imagine a fight for a better world, I believe that we need to be persuading people and winning folks over to our side. That is the same listening stance that I want my paintings to have.

N: How do you specifically use mixed-media to address systemic injustice, family wounds, trauma, moving forward? What does that process look like?

J: Painting has operated in different ways in my life.

One project in particular that feels like it speaks to that is a group of paintings I did called “The Violences Project” where I reached out to the families of every homicide victim in the city the year previous to the project. For each family that participated, I went to their home, sat on their couch, got to know who the person that was killed was, and then I painted a portrait for each family to keep. Based on the stories and larger conversations––more of a socio-political context––I made larger paintings to exist out in the world. I tried to tell their story, who the person was, what the community lost from that murder.

J: On the surface, there are ways that this feels like a straight-forward memorialization project. But for me, in the project design, there’s this built-in accountability. I’m in the studio alone, painting, knowing that I have a mother who is going to see this, who is going to question why I used these symbols, why I used this image, why I collaged this piece in. I have a responsibility to not only memorialize a person, but also to challenge some of our assumptions and to have an honest dialogue with the folks I’m working with, even if it’s uncomfortable. To me, that’s showing a level of respect to these folks, meeting them where they’re at, and building common ground.

The larger paintings are all the exact same size, they have the same basic composition, and they’re all in the exact same type of material. This equalizes the narratives. Suddenly, I’m giving the same amount of care to the extremely tragic loss of a young girl at a barbecue who had absolutely nothing to do with the rivalry that took her life. I’m also giving that same amount of care to somebody that the police might brand a gang member, that the police might say had it coming. To give that same level of care to me is a separation of the idea of who is an innocent victim and who deserves a bullet—to me the answer is no one.

N: I’ve seen the installation online and it really is beautiful. Can you talk to me a bit about your work on Probation Reform, the ‘Unshackling Pregnant Prisoners’ Bill, and the ‘Ban the Box’ movement?

J: ‘Ban the Box’ and ‘Unshackling Pregnant Prisoners’ were some of the first pieces of legislation I ever

worked on. I grew so much by virtue of working on those issues and meeting the incredible folks that were leaders in those campaigns, and who testified and spoke in those rallies. The biggest thing I learned was the importance of listening. In the case of the ‘Unshackling Pregnant Prisoners’ bill, we had nurses and experts testify. The legislators on the judiciary committee were interested, asking questions, but it wasn’t until a DARE member we brought in got up there and told her personal story about being pregnant in the Adult Correctional Institutions (ACI) that the movement made progress. She was able to point directly at the correctional officer who put her in a van, who brought her to her medical appointments without a seatbelt. She was able to contradict the testimony that he had given just moments before saying that the prison didn’t do those things. That bill was only possible because she was there with that direct experience. It really drove home to me, again, whether I’m organizing or building a painting, I need to be listening, meeting people where they are. I need to be interacting with people with direct experience, who have lived that direct impact. I really think it wouldn’t have passed if it wasn’t for her direct story.

N: That’s quite a story. As we near the end here, I’m curious what causes you’ve followed recently?

J: I’ve been really happy to see the legislature diversifying. I’ve been really happy to see access to voting expand in the state. The turnout in our most recent election was enormous, and that people are feeling more plugged in, more connected and more activated than ever. And I credit that to the organizers in the state—those at DARE, Open Doors, Providence

Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), Providence Student Union, and countless other organizers. That is what activates folks. We often think that the point of an electoral campaign is to get the candidate in office, or to get the ballot question approved, but really I think those are residual impacts. Communities are able to get to office only after they’ve done the long-term grind of organizing. And that’s what these groups are doing. It’s not about the campaign, it’s about the leg work done five years before the campaign.

N: What motivates you? Why do you find those experiences rewarding?

J: I deeply love this city. I love its diversity, I love the organizing energy, I love the vibrance of the communities here which are full of folks who are battling structural inequalities and marginalization, the Indigenous organizing. I love everything that’s going on here and in the state more broadly. I came here to get a four-year degree and go back to Chicago, and that was 13 years ago. I truly believe that this city and this state can have impacts reverberate so far beyond our walls. Being the smallest state is such a strategic possibility to be a laboratory for trying new things, for pioneering new projects—whether it’s the mayor’s reparations project, whether it’s the current campaign to close the high-security prison; whatever issue is taking place, we’re able to effectuate change here so much more rapidly and meaningfully because we’re a laboratory. We can be a model for the rest of the country.

TEXT NELL SALZMAN DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

N: Can you tell me about those larger paintings?

N: If you could dispense one piece of advice to someone going through a hard time, what would it be?

J: I’m thinking back to the hard times that I’ve felt and faced. I’ve had huge moments of discouragement, depression, and loneliness. The thing that has gotten me through has been the people around me that have reminded me that I’m an artist, even at my lowest. I think that’s true with everybody. I do not think that you are just an artist because you paint something, or just a poet because you write something. I think we all have that capacity. For folks who are feeling at their lowest right now, try to remember that you are an artist in some way, that you have something to contribute. You’ve got a poem inside you, you’ve got a song inside you, you’ve got a lot of imaginative thoughts. So use it.

NELL SALZMAN B’22 plans to buy an easel and start painting with Bob Ross this weekend.

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S&T

Algorithmic bias and what STEM can learn from the humanities Late last year, Twitter users discovered an unsettling behavior when uploading large photos: in a photo with darker and lighter skin tones, the Twitter app would first select and crop lighter faces. Zoom users found that virtual backgrounds were poorly applied to Black faces, often cropping out the person, even in good lighting conditions. These incidents of tech-induced bias are not isolated, nor are they new. In 2015, a user called out Google Photos when the app labelled their Black friend a ‘gorilla’. Such algorithmic biases are rampant in our increasingly tech-driven world and are difficult to address. In a Twitter blog post discussing the issue, the company acknowledged the difficulty of the problem and promised to decrease their reliance on machine learning (ML) approaches. Google has decided to instruct its labelling algorithm to not use the labels ‘gorilla,’ ‘chimp,’ ‘chimpanzee,’ and ‘monkey’. As of 2018, the band-aid solution of banning specific words remains. So far, there have been few efforts to address the root causes of intrinsic algorithmic bias.

In light of such incidents, there has been a marked increase in the number of researchers investigating algorithmic bias. Fairness in ML is a subfield that has emerged in the last three years, as researchers have encountered issues of bias when models were put into practice. In 2017, several universities included upper-level courses on fairness and ethics in ML, and in 2018, IBM released AI Fairness 360, a software tool intended to streamline bias detection in code. Other companies, like Facebook and Google, followed suit soon after. In academia, conferences like the Association for Computing Machinery’s FAccT (Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency) or FATES (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, Ethics, and Society on the Web) have sprung up as dedicated spaces to discuss these issues. This discourse has shed light on the myriad of ways in which bias permeates our software-entrenched world. Algorithmic bias extends beyond photos and popular apps. It is found lurking in facial recognition systems, subways, airports, and gov-

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ernment surveillance programs. In credit scoring systems, this bias influences decisions of credit-worthiness, and in judicial systems, such prejudiced software assesses a defendant’s recidivist likelihood.

Such biased systems have immense potential to irrevocably alter and damage an innocent person’s life. +++ The rise in polarization and divisiveness in social media has sparked research into the biases embedded into the recommendation algorithms of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Academic experts on social media, algorithms, and misinformation have criticized the development of ‘echo chambers’.

Renée DiResta, a Mozilla Fellow on Misinformation at the Mozilla Foundation (a global non-profit dedicated to a healthy, inclusive, and integrous internet) and a technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, recently wrote about the failings of the recommendation systems employed by these platforms in their preference for inflammatory, polarized content and potential misinformation. Prestigious artificial intelligence conferences, like NeurIPS, have started to require that sections of research papers analyze the impact of that paper’s contribution to the broader society.

For example, a paper that introduced a method to generate song lyrics from sound clippings (a shaker sound generates “Since sound and sun since innocence”) included a discussion about bias in song lyrics and the impacts of such work on the music creation industry. In effect, academia has begun to investigate, question, and address the biases in the systems it produces.

In response, academia and industry have begun producing preliminary theory that is only beginning to scratch the surface of how to represent the notion of bias in a technical sense. Software tools that analyze existing code for potential bias are being developed. The latest version of IBM’s AI Fairness 360, for example, includes metrics like ‘disparate

impact,’ which measures the ratio of favorable outcomes for unprivileged groups to that of privileged groups, and code to analyze a model’s performance on these metrics. While not perfect (who decides which group is privileged or unprivileged?), these tools enhance our ability to implement these ideas in practice, with real software and real people. Now, models often have a fairness component—code that encourages models to do their task (like facial recognition) while still being ‘fair’—baked into their architecture and trained to the same degree as other criteria. One such example is adversarial debiasing, an algorithmic technique designed to make ML models not rely on sensitive variables in the dataset (variables like zipcode are often proxies for wealth and race).

While such developments are welcome, they are incomplete and not wholly effective. Biases creep in at the level of researchers. It is not only the subject of research that is vulnerable to algorithmic biases but the act of researching itself. Therefore, the act of researching must be thrust under the microscope too. Research is a creative process; it consists of many iterations of the following: have an idea, try it out, get stuck, think of ideas to get unstuck, and repeat. However, what ideas appeal to the individual researcher are, well, dependent on individual context. Who that researcher is, where they work, and what experiences they have had are all factors that crucially influence what biases become embedded in the work they produce. In the vast majority of cases, research is carried out with earnest intentions. However, the outcome is not always just; bias is subtle and often overlooked. In the early 2000s, the research team that pioneered real-time, video-input, facial recognition systems was composed of engineers from Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs and Compaq CRL, all of whom were white and male. As a result, the algorithm and datasets developed were unlikely to be evaluated with

“Diversity should be embraced as it enhances creativity and provides more opportunity to address and mitigate bias. If bias is introduced via the researcher’s context, then a field that is diverse and contextually understands the work it produces is more likely to catch and correct that bias.”

+++

At Google, a ‘Product Inclusion Team’ of engineers and scientists work to identify and recommend ways to improve the inclusivity of its products for underrepresented groups of its users. They test prototypes of new products to ensure that the devices and software address the needs of minorities and underrepresented groups. However, this is merely an attempt to avoid another ‘gorilla incident’; it is a scramble to fix a product that was broken the day it was developed because the research and development process itself is broken. Instead, the next generation of Google algorithms that are developed at its labs should arrive at product development with biases already inspected. The solution to tomorrow’s Google Photos, Twitter, or Zoom incidents will not be a patch slapped on at the end of the assembly line. It will

require a sweeping paradigm shift in the field, one that transforms currently-held notions about science and the scientific process. STEM needs to abandon the myth of objectivity. It needs to normalize the process of evaluating technical work within the context of its production rather than merely analyzing the final product. It needs to celebrate the resulting diversity of thought that arises from this newfound subjectivity.

NEEV PARIKH B’22 is dismantling capitalism with intelligent robots.

DESIGN MEHEK VOHRA ILLUSTRATION OLIVIA LUNGER

Biased research is not limited to computer science and algorithms, nor are biases exclusively racial. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) sponsored a research program that investigated the influence of dietary factors in coronary heart disease (CHD). The SRF’s agenda intended to implicate fat and cholesterol in causing CHD and minimize the impacts of sugar consumption. This work was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, and their mission to absolve sugar was hugely successful, shaping policy and public opinion around fat and its harmful effects. The research published was accurate and peer-reviewed, but a close examination of the contextual background of the research would have revealed the bias that had crept into the final conclusions. A recent study published in JAMA Internal Medicine investigated these reports and the SRF’s research program, and it discovered that the foundation deliberately “singled out fat” and “downplayed evidence that sucrose [sugar] consumption was also a risk factor.”

Further, the SRF was not transparent in their sponsorship of the program. The study concludes that it is likely that the sugar industry severely biased the research in CHD risk factors to incriminate fat and absolve sugar. Such bias, while different from the algorithmic kind seen in computer science and ML, demonstrates the multitude of ways in which it can creep into any system of research.

The process of contextualizing research is commonplace in fields like history or sociology, but it is strikingly absent in STEM. In the humanities, there is no pretense of objectivity: no historical record can be faithfully discussed without closely examining the biases of the writer within the broader political and social networks. Yet, STEM clings tightly to the myth that science is ‘objective,’ and that is often viewed as a distinguishing virtue of the field. Attempts to define what is ‘objective research’ include ideas of impartiality and reliability, among others. However, achieving this is patently impossible, as science is undeniably human. Researchers are people with distinct experiences and backgrounds, diverse interests, differing modes of thought, and different biases. Moreover, this diversity should be embraced as it not only enhances creativity but provides more opportunity to address and mitigate bias.

If bias is introduced via the researcher’s context, then a field that is diverse and contextually understands the work it produces is more likely to catch and correct that bias.

+++

TEXT NEEV PARIKH

race and gender in mind because that was not integral to the experiences of the researchers involved.

24

AD There is being ME. And then there is being ME while taking classes and writing a thesis—in one semester—and applying to grad school and writing Bulletin each week and taking the hits when it inevitably disappoints (why is everyone so mean about Bulletin in crit?) and sleeping never. AD did all of this with eloquence and care.

With vigilance and kindness.

With a contagious laugh and a very sharp, bolded black text. It seems obvious to us that AD has more than 24 hours in a day, and it also seems obvious to us that you’d be lucky to get just one of them. We were lucky enough to get many such hours—on Zoom in the early morning and delivering Indy’s around Fox Point on Fridays afternoons. To AD, our dream co-ME: we’ll be back on campus for your lecture in ten years. - PS & AB

AD Before I knew AD personally, I imagined him LC When I think of LC, she is wearing as Thurston Meems, the an impeccable outfit, carrying a tote semiotics bro from The bag of her latest design, listening Marriage Plot. As we have to the new One Direction single become acquainted, I have (in this alternate universe they learned that AD is nothing have reunited), sitting in my living like Thurston Meems, perhaps room with all of our friends, eating other than having either seen a potluck dinner and drinking or heard of every movie ever smoothies, browsing Tumblr YA made. AD itches to explore, whether he’s yearning for fan-fic, watching cartoons on a lazy the steppe or embarking on Saturday night. When spring passes, a nighttime adventure to the you’ll make your voyage back home water. His incisive humor is to the opposite end of this earth and what first caught my eye: there I will feel very tender and bruised. is no one else so principled yet Some memories you outgrow, others so intent to seek levity in the you forget, but I’ll reserve those world. Though he may seem to wistful thoughts for the distant brood, a lucky few of us know future. After all, our next encounter is his soft side. We have seen only an ocean’s length away. - BC him delighted by a novel and intent to befriend a cat. “Did you see what I sent you??” he says. It’s a YouTube video titled A K “Cat adopts orphaned baby Where to find AK? “They’re friends,” SVH It began with a chance encounter hedgehog.”

She seems to be everywhere, he proclaims earnestly. And on the green, I believe. And then in doing everything, all at once. so they were. - GS the dorm, and then on the green, and She’s making a soundscape, she’s at then in the dorm, and thus, a rhythm the beach, she’s climbing, she’s doing a was born. From you, I learned to thumb headstand, she’s in New York, she’s abroad, through musical genres to learn more she’s read every zeitgeist-y novel of the last about myself and when you resurfaced, decade front to back and around again. I don’t a year later, in the wilderness, it was as have to tell you that she’s independent, selfif no time had passed. Maybe there is a certain intimacy forged assured, and level-headed because she exudes there in the forest, or maybe by then, we were just friends, it. You might know her from her exuberant but we talked Love and Friendship, Sex and Power, split dried laugh that cuts across the gentle hum of copy mango down the middle and left nothing unsaid and when you and makes you want to know what was so resurfaced, two years later, it was still as if nothing had changed. hilarious. You’ll recognize her when she zips The world was curvy and strange and like the wise willow, you past you by the swoosh of her signature bowed with it gently, and always with good advice, you became a wide-legged pants. When she dons her sort of guide. And so I stumbled through my season, with much sparkly bodysuit, clips on her lighter less grace than yours, and we biked about this beloved city and leash, and mixes you a whiskey drove wildly up and down, committed to the mission, couriers sour, you know it’s time to faithful to our appointed rounds and so when you resurface, three party. - GS years from now, I know I’ll be delighted to see you again. - IVS

OM I first met OM in Conmag to edit

an article together, and walked out with multiple menu ideas for her future ice cream shop, which will exclusively serve flavors that fuse Philippine and Japanese cuisines into a single bite.

Which brings me to say: OM’s writing sits on the tongue as soft as a mochiflour butt, with an insurgent wisdom as exciting as finding toasted sweet rice sprinkled on top. When you tell her how you like your eggs in the morning, she’ll say, “Why limit yourself to one or the other? Don’t you know you can have sweet leche flan and savory tamagoyaki all at once?” And if you tell her about wanting to take her words with you in an Indy to-go, she’ll never skimp out on offering you a banana leaf bundle—no matter how much care it’ll take to wrap it up for you herself. - AB

CT There are at least three generations of Indy staffers who can quote CT’s writing by memory.

One need only mention Mad Men or flag football or even, unbelievably, ice and people are nodding appreciatively, launching into their own commentary, or setting their drink down on the coffee table goddamnit because his article was just so good. Friendship with CT is characterized by a remarkably consistent logic. I read his writing: I want to be a better writer. I listen to his theorizing—over FaceTime, in Zoom chats, while drinking whiskey—and I resolve to be a better thinker. I watch him wrestle with highly nuanced moral questions—of his own fashioning— and I decide, right then and there, to be a better person. It’s hard for me to imagine the Indy without CT, perhaps because I’ve been lucky enough to have never experienced it. Brilliant and deeply principled, hilarious and profoundly kind, take us with you, CT, wherever you are going. - CVH

GS

“Excuse me, do you know where the RISD café is?” I recall asking a pedestrian on Benefit Street. An eager freshman, I was preparing to meet GS to discuss a News pitch for what became my first article for the Indy. At first glance, GS—with his art school buzz cut and single shot of espresso—thoroughly intimidated me. But as soon as we began talking, GS’s kindness and his intelligent advice immediately melted away all reservations and barriers. The conversation that ensued left a lasting impression. GS disappeared for a bit (I hear he was building houses and backpacking across America) and I continued with the Indy. GS, it was a great pleasure reconnecting with you this semester while working for News. Your precise thinking and open disposition influenced me as an editor and has no doubt influenced more colleagues and friends than you know.

Best of luck and much warmth. - BM

ER The first thing I wrote for the

Indy was a cringey FTE. I had nothing to say but didn’t know how to say no. When it came out, I felt relieved that I was only credited by my initials. Until it hit me that someone else might be framed for my awkward writing. I scoured the masthead for another ER, and there she was. Getting to know ER, I learned that it goes against her nature to read anything like that, to be embarrassed by association.

Besides compassion, ER is an expert in imagination—spending time with her turns on parts of my brain that usually lie dormant.

Somehow, every day I have spent with ER has literally glowed. If you have liked how the Indy has looked in recent years, and especially this semester, ER is one of the people you should thank. I have the delightful pleasure of knowing that she bakes like she designs (rigorously and with care), putting her eater/reader above herself, always. Takk for alt <3. - ER

EL The first time that I spoke

to EL was over FaceTime. Not Zoom, not email, but FaceTime.

In an age where formal text, audio, and visual communications overwhelm our sensory experience in every which one, FaceTime is a breath of fresh air.

Fortunately, the conversation matched the casualness of the medium over which we were conversing. Too often I felt like I spoke to a superior, even if that “superior” was two months younger than me. This wasn’t the case. EL felt like a friend catching up after my semester off, making plans to grab coffee. Now it’s been three months and I can’t imagine working with anyone else at the Indy. - JC

ML ML’s reach is both broad and deep.

She is a talented artist, with graphic design for the Indy and more, painting, printmaking… I’m sure there is more hidden up her sleeve. In writing, ML is critical, inquisitive, and persuasive, tying together topics of culture, TV, and anti-facism. In person, she operates with a calm, yet unwavering candid demeanor and expresses herself eloquently. Others tell me ML is an incredible friend. You could call ML a jack of all trades, but the truth is she is a master of each.

- XS

A BUZZ OF PROVIDENCE COLLEGE HILL LIQUOR STORE REVIEWS

SOLIDARITY RESOURCES FOR DAUNTE WRIGHT

HIGH SPIRITS LIQUOR

PROJECT LETS TRAUMA HEALING FUND FOR BLACK FOLKS

High Spirits Liquor—a popular choice for our most fresh faced readers—offers a judgment free zone to all its customers. Fear not if your taste in wine is not yet developed or your license photo exudes all the embarrassment of fluorescent lit hallway, the clerks generously create a safe space.

BOTTLES

Bottles has a wide selection and pretentious attitude, but is in a top-notch location next to East Side Marketplace. Contrary to its name, this store sells more than just bottles—it also sells cans! But they’ll make you look hard for the cans (in the back to the right, out of sight).

MADEIRA’S

A family- owned and -operated business, Madeira’s is of the highest quality. This storeMadeira is for a post-grad drinker. They will give you a little shot of cake flavored vodka on your birthday. Enjoy the occasional smutty romance novel from the outside bucket, or the absurdly affordable expired beer deals.

BIN 312

With the ambiance of a dimly lit chateau cellar, this chic spot delivers on fine wines just out of your price range enough to impress a hot date. The Bin 312 customer is not your average college student—they project their refined palette as they flounce up the hill, an elegant Bin 312 bag in hand. It’s so cute, you won’t throw it in the bin.

CAMPUS FINE WINES

If the inside of liquor stores is in any way scary to you, come visit Campus Fine Wines. Due to COVID they don’t allow you inside the store, meaning you can take in the fresh breezes and distinguished displays from afar. In contrast to Madeira’s which seems to run without hiring any help, CFW seems to be some kind of daycare for twenty-something liquor store employees—I’ve counted upwards of six in an otherwise empty store.

A Disability Justice organization, Project LETS seeks to prioritize solidarity in action and redistribute funds to those who are most directly impacted by structural violence. This fund centers the healing needs of Black folks, especially those who are disabled, queer, and trans.

Donate at www.PayPal.me/projectlets or Venmo @projectlets.

BROOKLYN CENTER MINNESOTA MUTUAL AID Support the work of community organizers in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, the site of the death of Daunte Floyd at the hands of local white police.

The shooting took place only a few miles away from where the trial of Derek Chauvin is being held in downtown Minneapolis.

Donate at https://gofund.me/c1e85927

BLACK LIVES MATTER RI PAC BLM RI PAC RI is working to increase the representation of young black people in politics in Rhode Island. They’re recruiting, organizing, and supporting black people to run for office up and down the ballot in the upcoming 2022 elections, with the goal of dismantling systemic structures of racism.

Donate at https://secure.actblue.com/donate/blmripacdonate +++ The Bulletin Board is a space for grassroots organizers, local small businesses, and other community members to collectively list events, businesses, and mobilize support for direct action against structural violence in Providence. Please write to us at theindy@gmail.com if you want to plug your event.