the college hill inside:

Chicken barns | 6
Hog slaughter | 9
independent Mountain mines | 11
Birdwatching | 12
the brown / r i s d w e e k ly | M a r c h 1 1 , 2 0 1 0 | Vo l um e X X i s s u e v

“Basically Jason DeRulo is the best rhetorician since, like, Cicero,

but probably gets laid a lot more so yeah, he wins.” –pg. 13
 table o f c o n t e n t s f rom t h e editors

news

2 Week in rev iew Ask your Mom if you can come over and play Barbies
The chewed and the screwed at my house! We can play Distant Husband with Repressed
EG, ES, KS, AS Wife or Cheating Husband and Objectified Secretary!
Yes, darlings, Mad Men Barbies—it’s a thing.
3 Spilled milk Don, Betty, Joan, and Roger dolls can be purchased for
Farming mental health crisis $74.95 on two online sources: amc.com and barbiecollector.
Marguerite Preston com. Lionsgate has licensed the production of 7,000-10,000
dolls.
metro Some fans might feel that these Barbies violate the Mad
Men brand name, while some will find the magic in its
4 Drastic measures mimesis: a show that depicts the norms of 60s marketing
State intervention at Central Falls High packaged in an institution that helped create these norms.
Hannah Kang The dolls themselves show a rewarding verisimilitude
of period costume: padded undergarments, pearls, fedoras
5 Cycles, Killer! all included. But can we talk about how Joan’s body is no
Qu’est-ce que c’est? different than Betty’s except that it’s coiffed with a ginger
Katie Lindstedt beehive? Mattel, you, of all people, we would not expect to
miss an opportunity for breast augmentation. There’s also
6 family-style Chicken the devastating lack of cigarette- and alcohol-related acces-
All-you-can-love sories. What Emily Post-ordained dinner party can function
Nathaniel Levy
without ashtrays, cocktail shakers, and martini glasses? Who
would believe a Betty doll sans cigarette? (Who would be-
lieve a Dickless Whitman?)
The dynamics of the Barbie world will doubtless be af-
fected as well. How will the marriage of feminized Ken and
undersexed Barbie function under the libidinous spell of
Don and Joan? As withdrawal drives Betty into deeper agita-
tion, will she finally snap? And where the hell is Peggy?
It all proves how difficult it is to write tasteful ad copy for a
subtext-rich show. The meta-marketing of Mad Men requires
more innovation than, say, Desperate Housewives. Which is
why we see Brooks Brothers coming out with a line of Mad
Men-inspired suits. And why last summer, Banana Republic
sponsored a contest for a walk-on cameo. Just because there’s
no Sterling Cooper doesn’t meant we gotta throw Barbie out
with the bathwater.
Mad Men’s cross-marketing paths are played out. Please
send over The Wire line of Barbies. But those better come
with crack pipes.
—LT

features

7 sin papeles
Detained immigrants speak
George Warner
E p h em e r a AS IF YOU CARE
9 after hogs
Sharecropping’s legacy in KY
Sarah Gibson
I have two boys. One fetches the wine, the other
11 mountaintop re moval stands to await my whim. When I grow bored I upend
Destruction and illness in WV all the silver and scatter the grapes. My Khmer consorts
Phoebe Neel become very nervous then because they have come to
know my quick temper. I usually collapse back upon the
science couch, declaring how languid the heat makes one feel as
the women stroke my back with long fingers and scented
12 species of a feather herbs. I send for my Opiate pipe and watch the boy’s
Go extinct togther delicate feet (morsels!) dance out of my reach. He will
Nupur Shridhar be back soon enough. But, sometimes, I feel the need to
look upon our magnanimous empire’s work, and I stride
opinions to the great windows. I look out- the dam built, the road
straight and true, the children with their bibles. I return
13 collected rants to the couch content once again, knowing that I deserve
Sonorous, furious but one more dalliance. The boy returns, and I smile, and
The Editorial Board I beckon.
Know that I may love you still. Tell Francoise I am
arts dead- The other children too. They must never know.
-M’Artin
14 alice in burtonland
The movie and the MoMA show
Nick Greene & Nick Werle

review à trois
French Film fest
g e t i n touch
15 Street museum
Westminster transformed
Ryan Wong
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Chen, Fitzgerald, Hornick & Sanford Jesse Strecker, George Warner Photography: Annie MacDonald
Opinions: Jordan Carter, Eli Schmitt Design: Robin Davis, Liat Werber, Yue Pang, Joanna Zhang
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A comic Literary: Kaela Myers, Rachel Sanders Margo Irvin, Miguel Morales, Emily Segal
Science: Sam Dean, Nupur Shridhar Staff Writer: Malcolm Burnley
Momoko Ishiguro
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the college hill independent M a r c h 11, 2010

 week i n r evi e w
BY e m i ly g o g o l a k , e l i s c h m i t t,
k at s t o e f f e l & A s h t o n s t r a i t
i l l u s t r a t i o n b y e m i ly m a r t i n
M ANGA - M ONGER
A 39 year-old Iowa man who pled guilty to charges of child
pornography in federal court was sentenced to six months’
jail time and five years’ probation in February. The case be-
gan in 2006 when US Customs rummaged through a pack-
age from Japan, recovering seven manga comic books of the
‘lolicon’ genre. “Lolicon is the sexual depiction of someone
under the age of sixteen,” according to Urban Dictionary.
The defendant, Christopher Handley, is an avid collector of
all kinds of manga. There is no evidence that he ever partook
of authentic kiddie porn.
Odd to go to jail for looking at pictures of naked kids
when there were never, in fact, real naked kids. Mr. Handley
was prosecuted under the Protect Act of 2003, which bans
any “image that is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging
in graphic bestiality, sadistic or masochistic abuse, or sexual
intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-
genital, or oral-anal […] and lacks serious literary, artistic,
political, or scientific value.” The comics in question, besides
portraying kids doing things you can’t do at Sex Power God,
also featured images of children having sex with animals. Mr.
Handley’s lawyer, Eric Chase, refrained from describing the
content of the comics in question to the press, and instead
said grimly “Use your imagination.”
On March 2, Mr. Chase remarked in a statement to the
press that “the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and others
concerned about the defense of comic books specifically, and
free speech generally, are upset that the case did not go to
trial.” Recent precedent, both at home and abroad, however,
was against Mr. Handley. A similar case arose recently in Aus-
tralia in which a man was charged with possession of, among
other things, sexualized depictions of the Powerpuff Girls.
Bedroom-eyed comic book god Nail Gaiman described such
litigation as “just deeply wrong,” in an interview with MTV.
As of March 11 the Facebook group “HELP CHRISTO-
PHER HANDLY [sic] (the guy who was arrested for own-
ing manga)” had only 45 members. Sympathizers with Mr.
Handley may be reticent to voice their support on so public
a forum as Facebook. Or they might just be busy with their
comics.
—ES
ANTI - HERO
One brave Blimpie employee in Illinois is taking a stand
from within the fast food industry, refusing to participate in
the undue proliferation of the most disgusting foodstuff in
industrialized history: cold cuts.
The sandwich-maker’s resistance made waves among the
meat-lovers of Madison County, Illinois last month. Ronald
“McDonald” Williams and Jennifer “more litigious than her
brother Michael” Clayton filed a class action lawsuit against
Blimpie’s parent company, Kahala Corp., on behalf of Illinois
residents. The plaintiffs claim Kahala falsely advertised the
company’s Super Stacked sandwiches—promising double
portions of meat at a slightly higher cost and, allegedly, fail-
ing to deliver. They seek “just and appropriate” compensa-
tion, including legal fees.
The lawsuit ignores the obvious aesthetic and political
motivations behind the Blimpie employee’s meat-scrimping.
Although the sandwich maker will likely remain anonymous
for security reasons, one can assume that he no longer wished
to be complicit in the sale of stacks of congealed, refrigerator-
slick, flimsy meat products that exceed the dimensions of the
human jaw and, frankly, good taste. It is likely that he was
pretty fed up with gagging as diners struggle, due to the un-
natural consistency of cold cuts, to get a good incisor chomp
and are left with flaps of meat hanging indecorously from
their bloated, half-open mouths. He is probably also appalled
by his insider knowledge of the quantity of mayonnaise ne-
cessitated by meat ingestion of Super Stacked magnitude. In
fact, don’t even get him started on mayonnaise.
—KS
M a r c h 11, 2010
M at h i m o n y
Today, at least 50 percent of marriages end in divorce,
but a group of Australian mathematicians believes
they’ve come up with a magic formula to combat
this alarming number. Anthony Dooley, professor of
mathematics at New South Wales University in Syd-
ney, has derived a mathematical formula that deter-
mines the optimal age at which a man should propose
to his fiancée, using the youngest and oldest age at
which the man would want to marry. The system was
created primarily for men, but Professor Dooley and
his colleagues noted that it could also be applied to
women who are perhaps uncertain about whether to
accept a proposal from one of their many beaux.
The formula was based on the mathematical
technique called optimal stopping. While the exact
derivation remains unclear, restless boyfriends the
Supersize Me One
world over can be assured of the fact that it is nearly
foolproof. Indeed, as professor Dooley notes, many
More Time
Is 24 ounces simply not cutting it? No need to worry. Meet
men already follow it, “albeit, accidentally.” the Trenta.
It’s frightening to imagine that for the last few
thousand years of human civilization people have
Pulling a Business 101 oldie-but-goodie, Starbucks Corp.
is giving Americans more of what they want. Standing tall at
formed lasting relationships with no thought at all
31 ounces—the equivalent of two and a half cans of soda—
for the mathematical optimization of their chances of this newest addition to the fleet of Italian euphemisms makes
staying together. Fortunately for those who’d rather
even a Venti look weak. Why deprive yourself with just a
not risk their future happiness by proposing at any- cup, when you could get nearly quart of Joe?
thing less than the optimal age, they merely need to
Starting this month, Trenta is taking a test run at 170
decide the oldest age by which they would want to stores in Tampa and Phoenix, where soaring temperatures
get married (N), the earliest age by which they would
and demand for cold drinks go hand-in-hand. It’s a shrewd
want to get married (P), and subtract P from N, then move for Starbucks, which is trying to contend with the
multiply that number by .368 and add it to P to de-
lower-end competitors that masterminded the supersized-
termine their optimal proposal age. beverage machine. Watch out Dunkin’ and Mickey D’s.
Those whose optimal age has already passed
Will the Trenta be hitting Thayer any time soon? We’ll
would, in these mathematicians’ opinions, do well to have to wait and see, since Starbucks is declining to discuss
pop the question to the next good catch they come
its future test markets. Sit tight and cross your fingers that it
across. But there’s a caveat. Professor Dooley warns gets here in time for reading period.
that “probability isn’t the most romantic basis for
Caffeine junkies aside, not all are so hyped about the
marriage,” despite the fact that the formula “does XXL. Others believe that Starbucks is populated with greedy
seem to fit a lot of couples, whether through accident
capitalist-consumerists and are therefore totally unsurprised
or design.” Furthermore—and unfortunately for the by the latest invention they’ve dug up from their moral black
tabloids and fans the world over—the formula doesn’t
hole. Sensitive to claims that the Trenta will set America back
seem to be able to tell us whether Brad and Angelina in its epic battle against the bulge, a Starbucks spokesperson
are ever going to tie the knot.
insisted, “Even a sweetened iced coffee or tea in a Trenta cup
would be less than 200 calories.” If you were banking on
using the additional seven ounces of frothy vanilla frap to fill
—AS
the emptiness you feel inside, you’re out of luck: only plain
old iced tea and coffee can get the extra boost.
So, okay, let’s say the Trenta won’t make us any fatter. But
what about our nerves and our poor, bursting bladders? Not
to mention the lack of super-sized cup holders.
31 ounces of love? Bigger isn’t always better.
—EG
t h e i n dy. o r g
n at i o n a l | 3
DON ’ T BUY THE FAR M
a C ry f o r H e l p F r o m Am e r i c a’ s D a i ry Fa r m e r s
I l l u s t r at i o n b y s a m b a l l a r d i n i
O n January 21, on a cold morning in Copake, New
York, Dean Pierson rose before dawn. Just as he
did every morning, he went out to the barn of
High Low Farm alone and milked each of his 51 milking
cows. By the time he finished, it was early afternoon. He
went for his rifle and returned to the barn. For a second time,
Dean Pierson made his way down the row of cows; this time
he shot each one in the head. When all 51 were dead he
wrote two notes, sat down in a chair, and shot himself in the
chest.
A neighbor discovered the scene. A note on the barn door
warned not to go in, but to call the police instead. Inside they
found the bodies of Pierson and his cows, along with the
second note, in which he explained that, though he loved his
family, personal and financial troubles had left him struggling
with depression. He had, he wrote, been “overwhelmed.”
Conference c all for help
Last week the National Farm Family Coalition (NFFC)
Dairy Subcommittee held a teleconference calling on the
USDA and Congress for help. As it turns out, High Low
Farm is an all-too fitting name for a dairy, and Pierson was
not alone in feeling overwhelmed. In the past year the milk
market in the US has taken a turn for the worse, with prices
dropping to the lowest they’ve been since the ’70s. Already
overworked and in debt, dairy farmers are finding it increas-
ingly difficult to survive. The dairy farmers participating in
the teleconference described being barely able to maintain
their animals and machinery, or even to feed themselves.
“Farmers have their necks between a pair of scissors,” dairy
farmer Brenda Cochran told the teleconference. Among ag-
ricultural communities, the growing concern now is that that
US is not only at risk of losing its family farms, but of losing
its farmers themselves.
These farmers feel the same burden Pierson did. Pierson’s
father, a Swedish immigrant, had purchased High Low Farm
when Dean was a baby. For his entire adult life Pierson ran
the farm single-handedly, working 15 hours or more a day
from the first milking before sunrise to the last after sunset.
He faced a combination of troubles that farmers of all kinds
often face: the pressure to maintain a family legacy passed
down through generations, the responsibility of running the
business, often with little help, the weight of debts incurred,
and the inability to earn enough money. This set of problems
is in the nature of family farming, which requires a high
investment of labor and capital and offers no guarantee of
return. Farms are highly susceptible to both economic and
natural disaster. Although exact numbers fluctuate, studies
have shown that farmers tend to have a higher incidence
of mental health problems as a result. During hard times,
rates of depression, substance abuse, familial breakdown, and
suicide all increase. Now dairy farms are showing signs of
becoming the center of a suicide epidemic.
a troubling pattern
This is not the first time suicide has broken out in farm-
ing communities. The Great Depression is perhaps the best
known case. More recently, the Farm Crisis of the 1980s
the college hill independent
b y M a r g u e r i t e P r e s to n
caused an outbreak of mental health problems in the agri-
cultural community. Farmers had invested heavily in new
machinery and expansion when the economy went bad.
High interest rates and decreased consumer demand left
them with debts they couldn’t pay. As a result, the suicide
rate among farmers in the ’80s was roughly double that of
the non-farming population. Similarly, during the outbreaks
of hoof and mouth and mad cow disease in Great Britain in
2001 and 2002, in which the government mandated that
whole herds be slaughtered, farmers’ suicide rate rose to nine
or ten times the national average. India has seen one of the
worst suicide rates of all in the past ten years, where large in-
vestments and poor crop yields have led to unpayable debts.
According to The Hindu, a national Indian newspaper, the
number of farmer suicides has been steadily increasing. Just
last year 1,500 Indian farmers committed mass suicide after
drought caused their crops to fail.
Much of the evidence that dairy farmers are next comes
from AgriWellness, Inc. This nonprofit corporation, based in
Iowa, was founded in 2001 to help advocate and provide be-
havioral health services to agricultural communities. Among
other programs, they sponsor Sowing Seeds of Hope, which
provides education, healthcare support, and crisis hotlines
for seven states in the Midwest. In the past year, says Agri-
Wellness’s executive director, Mike Rosmann, the number of
calls received from dairy farmers has increased 40 percent.
These hotlines have had success in keeping suicide rates
down, but right now they exist only in Iowa, Kansas, Min-
nesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin,
New York, and Tennessee. Though exact numbers are not
yet available, “in states without hotlines,” Rosmann told me,
“the number of newspaper accounts of suicides [among dairy
farmers] has increased.”
That the suicide rate among male farmers has always been
double that of non-farmers is due, Rosmann says, “to what I
call the agricultural imperative.” Farmers “feel the burden to
hang onto the land and be successful” and are driven by “the
urge to create the necessities for our life.” Furthermore, they
are often working in isolation. Rosmann would like to equip
farmers with the skills to manage stress. “We can’t control
weather or government policy,” he said, “but we can control
ourselves.”
Currently there are no federal programs that focus spe-
cifically on the behavioral health of the farming population.
AgriWellness would like to see this change. “I would like to
see the emphasis in the federal government on the people
who produce the food, rather than on price support,” Ros-
mann says. AgriWellness is working to establish a National
Center for Agricultural Behavioral Health, and has also been
vocal in the push for Congress to approve funding for the
Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN). This
program, which is modeled after Sowing Seeds of Hope, was
authorized by the 2008 Farm Bill but failed to receive fund-
ing then and in 2009. This year Congress will again consider
funding for the FRSAN, but for now mental health services
for farmers are limited mainly to what Sowing Seeds of Hope
programs can provide.
MILK M ONEY
Farmers are also seeking financial help from the government.
Right now, according to the New York State Department of
Agriculture & Markets, the average New York dairy farm
of 100 cows loses about $10,000 a month, and the market
doesn’t show any signs of improving. After reaching historic
highs in 2008, US milk prices plummeted by 27 percent last
year, down to around $12 per hundredweight (12 gallons)
according to the USDA. This drop was in part due to the
end of drought conditions in Australia and New Zealand,
and in part due to a decrease in demand for cheese, due to
the recession. Meanwhile, prices would have to reach at least
$17 per hundredweight just to cover the cost of production
in the long run.
In the past few years, consumer demand for certified
organic and bovine synthetic growth hormone–free milk has
increased significantly, and these products can go for twice
the price of conventional milk. In 2007 organic milk pro-
duction increased by about 40 percent. So while the industry
was still booming, farmers invested heavily in expansion and
the means to produce organic, hormone-free milk. Now, if
farmers are to pay off these debts, milk prices would have to
rise even higher.
Last year the USDA announced a new Dairy Economic
Loss Assistance Payment program, with $290 million au-
thorized by the 2010 Agricultural Appropriations Bill to go
towards loss assistance payments for dairy farmers. Eligible
farmers received a one-time payment determined by esti-
mates of how much milk they would produce in a year. This
subsidy pushed the price of milk up some in the past year,
but the price is still below what most farmers need to stay
afloat.
At the teleconference last week, the heads of the NFFC
Subcommittee announced that they had sent a letter to
USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, as has New York State Agri-
culture Commissioner Patrick Hooker. Both urged him to
set a higher price floor for milk, and expressed support for
a bill proposed by Senator Arlen Specter, which would do
that, as well as simplify the pricing structure to two classes
of milk and provide dairy farmers with a living wage. As of
now, this bill is still in committee.
High Low Farm, however, has already toppled over the
brink. After Pierson’s death, neighbors banded together
with a backhoe and a bulldozer to bury the 51 cows. A
John Deere tractor pulled his coffin to the cemetery. Pier-
son did leave alive some 50 heifers and calves, which did
not require milking. Neighbors speculate that his shooting
the milking cows was a mercy killing: he knew they would
need to be milked, and with him gone there would be no
one there to milk them. And Pierson’s wife told the Times
Union newspaper of Albany, NY, “[W]e need to figure out
how to keep the farm going. It wouldn’t be right for all
that work he put into it to go to nothing.” Still, with the
dairy industry as it is, and without the milking cows or
Pierson’s fifteen-hour work days, it’s hard to see how they
will manage.
____________________________________________
Marguerite Preston B’11 didn’t know that
exposure to insecticides also increases the risk of suicide.
m a r c h 11, 2010

CENTRAL AND FALLING
r h o d e i s l a n d’ s s t r u g g l e f o r s c h o o l r e f o r m
by Hannah Kang
i l l u s t r at i o n s b y r o b e rt s a n d l e r
O n February 23, the Central Falls High School
(CFHS) Board of Trustees voted five to two to
fire every single member of its faculty, support
staff, and administration, a move Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan lauded as “courageous.” The vote came after
the school was named one of the six “persistently lowest-
achieving schools in the state,” in a news release from the
Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) on January
11. Since the firings, local, state, and national media have
been watching the smallest state’s smallest city, one of the
first in the country to opt for the turnaround model under
new federal guidelines for School Improvement Grants. In
this radical approach to school reform, a school must fire
its entire workforce and can only re-hire up to half of the
original members upon a thorough performance evaluation.
At the epicenter of a national debate on educational re-
form, students, parents, alumni, and teachers in this tightly
knit community grapple with the practical and emotional
consequences of the termination of the 93 faculty and staff
members. At a Rhode Island Board of Regents meeting at
West Warwick High School on March 4, longtime Central
Falls guidance counselor George McLaughlin voiced his
opinion on the media attention: “The reason this has got-
ten on national news, I believe in my heart, is because every
school teacher in America is worried and they are not just
worried about their jobs, they are worried about the future
of public education.”
In a passionate defense of her former teachers, Theresa
Agonia, a 2009 CFHS graduate, addressed the members of
the Board: “I lost my father junior year to cancer, and these
teachers, they took me under their wing, they stayed with me
day in and day out after school. [...] I’m currently a freshman
at Roger Williams University, I’m on the Dean’s List, I have
a 3.65 GPA out of a 4.0, I’m a high school mentor at PAIS
[Providence Academy of International Studies][…] and I’m
proud to say I wouldn’t be there without the help of these
teachers.”
Not all students are against the choice of the turnaround
model. On February 17, high school members of Young
Voices, a state-wide youth research and advocacy organiza-
tion, gathered outside the RIDE office to show their support
for any CFHS students who were in favor of turnaround but
feared offending their teachers.
A necessary m easure?
While the new RIDE protocol on interventions for low-
achieving schools mandated that Superintendent Gallo take
action, many involved were surprised by the severity of her
response. Michael Paul, a teacher who has spent the last 19
years at CFHS as an English as a Second Language (ESL)
instructor, questions the reasoning behind the decision: “Are
we a failing school or an improving one?”
Out of more than 50 high schools in the state, CFHS
juniors ranked seventh worst in reading, fifteenth worst in
math, and sixth worst in writing on the October 2009 New
England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) tests. Yet
the teachers union points to the growth in NECAP scores
over the last two years as evidence of progress at CFHS: a
21 percentage point increase in reading, 14 in writing, and
four in math. In a March 1 press release urging the district to
reconsider the firings, Central Falls Teachers Union (CFTU)
President Jane Sessums and American Federation of Teachers
(AFT) President Randi Weingarten cited an April 2009 re-
port on former RIDE Commissioner Peter McWalters’ visit
to CFHS, in which he praised the school for “the accom-
plishments, successes and positive changes that have taken
place over the past few years.”
Supporters of teachers also emphasize that Central Falls
as a whole has the second highest English Language Learn-
ers (ELL) and special education population in the state: 25
percent of CFHS students are classified as ELL, while 21 per-
cent receive special education services. Sixty-three percent of
students at CFHS are eligible for free or reduced price lunch.
District-wide, CFSD has a mobility rate of 27 percent, the
second highest in the state, an indicator of a highly transient
population due to immigration, the housing crisis, and job
turnover.
But CFHS Trustee and alumnus B.K. Nordan rejects
these facts as excuses for poor performance. At the Febru-
ary 23 Board of Trustees meeting, he addressed the teachers
directly: “It’s not fair to these students to have these statistics.
The rhetoric of they’re poor, they’re ESL, you can imagine
the home lives—this is the exact reason we need you to step
up and take a bigger role in their lives, regardless of the pay,
regardless of the time spent—we need you.” Nevertheless,
Nordan voted against turnaround. He commented in a later
interview with The Providence Journal that he is often asked
how he reconciled his words with his vote: “I say to them,
that’s what I thought was best for the
kids.”
Teachers also cite the instability of
the last six years as a significant factor
that should have been considered be-
fore approving a model of reform that
they feel would cause further disrup-
tion in students’ school lives. CFHS
has had five different principals and
18 vice principals. In 2006, the school
began to implement new proficiency
based graduation requirements, block
scheduling, advisories, and a literacy
program. In 2007, after failing to meet
adequate yearly progress (AYP) under
the terms of the 2001 No Child Left
Behind Act (NCLB) for the fifth year
in a row, CFHS partnered with the
University Rhode Island to reopen as
the Central Falls-URI Academy; or-
ganized smaller academies within the
school; restructured into a lower school
and upper school; and abolished de-
partment heads. “The only constant for
our students has been the teachers [...]
We need stability,” in addition to “long
range planning, and commitment to
metro | 4
research-based programs,” says Paul.
In response to this call for stability, Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan said in an interview with The New York Times:
“The status quo needs to change […] this is not the kind of
stability I want. I’m looking for improvement.”
REFORM school
Do radical reforms like the turnaround model really work?
Scholars remain divided over this question. One enormous
problem in the research to date lies in the number of fac-
tors that must be controlled for any quantitative analysis.
Although federal guidelines contain many stipulations, the
individual school district can choose from a number of op-
tions to satisfy these requirements. The resulting statistical
samples of turnaround or transformation models contain a
great deal of variety. In order to address this problem, most
research relies on case studies and other small data sets; how-
ever, this approach yields less generalizable conclusions.
In the meantime, the rest of the country is watching
Central Falls navigate the difficulties of implementing radical
reform. In particular, the two national teachers’ unions, the
AFT and National Education Association (NEA)—which
supported Obama during the 2008 campaign—have ex-
pressed their anger over the situation in Central Falls and
threatened to withdraw their support of his administration.
Superintendent Gallo and President Weingarten of the AFT
each released statements on March 3 confirming that the
district and CFTU will resume talks about reform at CFHS.
The union continues to advocate for the repeal of the turn-
around decision in favor of transformation, but it remains
unclear if that is possible.
If Superintendent Gallo’s decision stands, it could send
a powerful political statement to educators everywhere.
“Other school boards and school superintendents around
the country that want to do something similar […] can say
the President of the United States, Barack Obama, someone
the teachers voted for, supports us here to take some radi-
cal actions to shake up our schools,” said Michael Petrilli, a
vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Wash-
ington, an educational research and advocacy organization.
On the other hand, the outcome could reaffirm the power
of teachers’ unions and deal a blow to the Obama admin-
istration’s efforts to promote radical reforms in chronically
failing schools. The events of the next few weeks will likely
fall somewhere in the middle, with both sides spinning the
media coverage to claim victory.
Relations between the district and teachers union remain
strained, but longtime CFHS guidance counselor George
McLaughlin remains confident that the faculty and staff can
move on if an agreement is reached. He said at the Board
of Regents meeting in West Warwick, “I’ve had worse fights
than this in the crazy Irish family I grew up in, and there’s
no doubt we can go back together, and there’s no doubt we
can get along and there’s no doubt we can make Central Falls
High School a better place in the future.”
______________________________________________
HANNAH KANG B ’10 is also from a crazy Irish fam-
ily.
t h e i n dy. o r g
metro | 5
I n the world of bicycling, according to David Byrne, there
are no fashion prerequisites.
“You don’t have to wear spandex to ride a bike. You
can be a normal business person in a suit,” Byrne advised
a full house at Trinity Repertory on Tuesday in downtown
Providence. He commented on the final image of his Power-
Point presentation: a Louis Vuitton executive riding a vintage
cruiser through Manhattan.
Byrne, former lead singer of the Talking Heads and a
lifelong bicycling activist, spoke at the second annual Sena-
tor Claiborne Pell Lecture on Arts and Humanities. This
year’s sold-out lecture was a panel discussion entitled “Cities,
Bicycles and the Future of Getting Around: How Bicycling
Can Transform the Urban Experience.” Providence Mayor
David N. Cicilline initiated the lecture series in 2009 to
honor the late senator Pell.
Tuesday evening, Mayor Cicilline welcomed Byrne, a
man of “rock-solid rhythms and adventurous
In his lecture, Byrne discussed the ways in which bicy-
cling can change a city. Samuel Zipp, a Brown University
American Studies and Urban Studies Professor; Barry Schil-
ler; the Providence Bicycle Coalition Head of Advocacy; and
Thomas Deller, the Director of Providence’s Department of
Planning and Development, were among the other panelists.
Byrne himself has roots in Rhode Island; he attended the
Rhode Island School of Design, where the Talking Heads
formed in 1974. “When I went to school here, the river was
paved over,” he said.
According to Lynne McCormack, the Director of Provi-
dence’s Art, Culture, and Tourism Department, Byrne’s pub-
licist approached the city with the concept of the lecture in
mind. Byrne recently released The Bicycle Diaries, a chronicle
of his journeys through Buenos Aires, San Francisco, New
York, and many other cities on a bicycle. He has given similar
lectures at other cities worldwide.
Tuesday’s four lectures ranged from romantic accounts of
biking glory in days past to pragmatic outlines of a transpor-
tation mode’s future. The event’s diversity—if not its lack
of cohesion—illuminated the complex state of bicycling in
this era of fixie-loving hipsters and climate change. That is
to say, biking likely signifies something different to each of
the panelists, to each demographic in the audience, and to
each individual in attendance. It is difficult to predict which
one of the bicycle’s present sub-identities—a factor in ur-
ban development, the transcendentalist’s transport, proof of
subcultural identification, or a cure for climate change—will
define its future, or if bicycling can even be reduced to any
single essence.
Poetry in Moti on
Of the bicycle’s many rôles, David Byrne is most fascinated
by the vehicle as a factor in the changing landscapes of cit-
ies. He referenced the Parisian bike-share system, Portland’s
conversion of two parking spaces into complex bike racks,
and Berlin’s stoplight-equipped bike lanes as examples of
how bikes have defined cities’ spatial organization.
the college hill independent
DAV ID B YRN e l e a d s pa n e l
o n p v d’ s c y c l i n g f u t u r e
i l l u s t r at i o n b y s a m B a l l a r d i n i
Byrne cherishes the unity of physical sensation and geo-
graphic cognition that biking provides. Zipp agreed that bik-
ing provides “much more intimate reflections on the kinds of
social and cultural divisions that all cities have.”
Some years before his time on College Hill, Zipp wrote
in a book review of Travis Hugh Culley’s The Immortal Class:
Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power, “A friend of
mine once observed that there is a certain soul to the job of
messengering. It’s in making a steady, motionless track stand
at a busy intersection or a graceful, soundless curb hop paired
with a fluid dismount and lock-up.”
The single-speed Bianchi that sits in Samuel Zipp’s of-
fice—one of the “three or four” bikes he owns—is, in a way,
a vestige of his past. During the early ’90s, Zipp made many
soundless hops atop the curbs of San Francisco as a bike mes-
senger.
“It was important to me,” he said. “You learn cities in
a novel way biking around, because you actually feel their
geography.”
Zipp discussed America’s transition from bicycle to auto-
mobile culture. Towards the last half of the 19th century, he
explained, the “feedless horse” became a phenomenon. Yet it
was ironically the bicycle that paved the way for cars as city
streets increasingly became single-use spaces. Cyclists lobbied
for increased quality of roads, providing the automobile in-
dustry with an opportunity on which it capitalized.
Though the automobile has traditionally functioned as a
substitute for its two-wheeled predecessor, it has never ad-
equately replaced the nuances of bicycle travel.
“Bikes supply the same kind of freedom that cars supply,
but with the added responsibility of physical exertion. You
have more physical contact with the city on a bike,” Zipp
said.
It is perhaps this unique physicality of bicycling that lets
it transform of urban experiences, and thus of the utmost
relevance to city planners. Bikes can get into the interstices of
cities, the alleys and uncharted spaces—but have no parking
spots and multiple lanes, automobile accommodations now
deeply ingrained into our metropoleis. It is no wonder that
the integration of bikes into cities has entailed such innova-
tive urban transformations.
No C hild Left Inside
Based on a American Community Survey, bicycling com-
prised a small percentage of US transportation in 2005,
especially in comparison to European cities like Copenha-
gen. Even in bike-friendly Seattle and Portland, bicycling
comprised only 2.3 percent and 3.5 percent, respectively,
of commuters’ journeys. Those figures were still above the
United States average of 0.4 percent. In Copenhagen, 36
percent of all commutes are by bicycle.
Since the 1980s, city planners in Copenhagen have been
building bicycle tracks on main streets and reducing traffic
on local streets—creating neighborhoods that cater to the
needs of pedestrians and bicyclists, rather drivers. The result
is a city where there are more bicycles than cars. Copenhagen
TALKING
HEADS
B y K at i e L i n d s t e d t
has also undertaken initiatives to create green routes—alter-
natives to urban bike paths that promote recreational biking
at greater distances.
The panel’s final speakers, Barry Schiller and Thomas Del-
ler, shared their visions for a future bike-friendly Providence.
Schiller spoke of ways to reverse the transportation rates
in Providence, currently at 90 percent car travel and 10
percent pedestrian and bicycling. The tone of Schiller’s sug-
gestions varied from humorous (“No child left inside! Teach
your kids to bike!”) to somber (“Help combat dangerous
driving”), but his ideas were nearly uniform: less driving,
more biking, again and again. He encouraged support for
RIPTA, Rhode Island’s public transit system, and the state’s
vast bike advocacy network, which encompasses organiza-
tions like the Providence Bike Coalition, Recycle a Bike, and
the Narragansett Bay Wheelmen.
Rhode Island’s Department of Transportation has a
number of green bike paths, including the Ten Mile River
Greenway, the Blackstone River Bikeway (which currently
extends from Woonsocket to Pawtucket and will eventually
reach Worcester, MA), the Fred Lippitt Woonasquatucket
River Greenway, the William C. O’Neil South County Bike
Path, and the almost-finished Washington Secondary. Del-
ler mentioned on-street bike riding in Providence’s Jewelry
District and connections between the urban paths with the
rural green bike routes as future goals.
Despite Schiller’s enthusiastic call for Rhode Islanders to
“help get the bike path system finished,” neither he nor Del-
ler offered any coherent policy for the completion of Rhode
Island’s urban bike routes.
A Routine Pleasure
The panelists eagerly anticipate a day when Rhode Island
will resemble a cyclist’s utopia. But that very bicycle haven
remains a subjective notion in light of the many functions
our pedal-driven, human-powered vehicles serve. The ten-
sions implicit in the structure of Tuesday’s panel discussion
remain to be reconciled. Can the intimate connections
that Byrne and Zipp have to their beloved cycled cities, the
novel vantage points and urban experiences afforded by their
off-the-beaten bike paths, remain intact in an age when all
bicycles are awash with the green glow of pragmatism and
zero fuel emissions? Let the existence of a blog by the name
of Copenhagen Cycle Chic affirm the interrelated nature of
biking’s many facets.
Time will tell whether bicycles will dominate the streets
of Providence as they do in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, or
even Portland. In the meantime, it’s difficult to imagine any
obligation more enjoyable than a daily bicycle commute
down Benefit Street as our rubber tires roll gracefully over
cobblestone. And what’s more, you don’t even have to wear
spandex.
_________________________________________
Katie Lindstedt B’11 doesn’t mind wearing
Spandex.
m a r c h 11, 2010

WHERE HUNGER IS
THE HEART ’ S DELIGHT
R h o d e Is l a n d C h i c k e n B a r n s
i l l u s t r at e d b y A a r o n K e n t W a r d e r
T he Ocean State and the Bay State draw salivating
hordes seaward during the summers for an array of
seafood’s finest, such as lobster rolls, oysters, and
clams. But further inland, along the mostly exurban stretch
between the two towns that compete for the title of New
England’s second-largest city, family-style chicken restaurants
have cultivated an attraction and following that may very well
rival, if not surpass, those of their coastal, seafood-serving
counterparts. The fry shack, though, is a poor parallel; the
Rhode Island chicken barn is a different quantity altogether.
Family-style roast chicken, all-you-can-eat with friendly
table service, constitutes the bill of fare at a handful of
restaurants in and around Woonsocket. Endless rounds of
white wine vinegar-tossed salad, pasta with red sauce, french
fries, and rolls of varying kinds accompany the poultry, all
for about $11, give or take a buck. This dinner lineup has
developed a devout following in northern Rhode Island and
Central Massachusetts over the past thirty plus years. Fel-
low diners are quick to chat and most reveal they’ve been
frequenting family-style chicken their whole lives. But even
a one-time customer would be easily
convinced. As one man-
ager told me, “If you leave
hungry, it’s kinda your
fault.”
Some allege that the
family-style tradition
dates back
W h e r e to f i n d fa m i ly - s t y l e c h i c k e n
Wright’s Village Haven
84 Inman Rd, Harrisville, RI 02830 90 School Street, North Smithfield, RI 02896
Thurs&Fri 4-9 PM, Sat 12-9:30, Sun 12-8 Wed&Thurs 4-8:30
Never need a reservation, unless you’re hosting a ban- Fri&Sat 4-9
quet Sunday 12-8
Browse the gift shop online at http://www.wrightsfarm. Again, never need a reservation just for dinner
com/ www.thevillagehaven.com
M a r c h 11, 2010
b y N at h a n i e l L e v y
much farther than Ma Glockner’s, all the way to the onset of
industrialization in the Blackstone River Valley, when labor-
ers in the textile mills would gather for hearty meals to sate
their massive, work-induced appetites. Regardless of whether
this narration reflects a historical reality, the lore contributes
to the pleasure of tucking into the chicken—after, before,
alongside, or stuffed between everything else they serve (in-
cluding Oreo ice cream pie at Wright’s). Eating family-style
chicken feels like the kind of meal you’ve earned after a day
of hard labor.
After visiting Village Haven Restaurant and Wright’s
Farm Restaurant, it is perfectly clear that neither relies on
such stories for validation. When I asked one manager if she
knew anything about the mill-worker account, she said no
one had ever asked about the regional origins of the cuisine
itself. For the people who come to eat and those who serve
them, the food’s background hardly matters; its local dimen-
sions are self evident. A wealth of family connections affirms
the restaurants’ local roots and confirms their staying power
as local institutions.
Family-style chicken’s more recent origins are in the now-
defunct Ma Glockner’s in Massachusetts. Although no one at
Wright’s or Village Haven could name the year it opened, it
is clear it was before 1954, the year Jean Wright started open-
ing up his garage on Sundays to serve barbeque chicken and a
bag of chips, according to Wright’s Manager Tammy Forgue.
Village Haven got its start a decade or so later, and by the
end of the 1970s the Galleshaw family bought Wright’s, and
Rachel Narodowy took over Village Haven from her brother.
Families Do it Better
Family business is not an empty refrain at either restaurant.
Narodowy co-owns Village Haven along with her son
Gary, who, as he explained from his post behind the
bar, doubles as the beverage manager. Most of her
other six children, or their spouses, remain directly
involved, including her daughter-in-law Donna Nar-
odowy, who manages the floor. Mark Constantino, the
son of the head chef Ron, said he still drives up from
URI on Sundays to wait tables, which he’s been doing for
seven years. Nor is the Narodowy presence confined to its
older generations—three of Rachel’s grandchildren bus,
bar-back, and serve.
Narodowy admits, “People love our family.” When
asked if she ever considered expanding and opening
another restaurant, she expressed unequivocal commit-
ment to maintaining Village Haven as is so the whole
family could remain involved. According to Narodowy,
Ma Glockner’s tried repeatedly to expand, once on
Cape Cod and once in East Greenwich, Rhode Island.
Neither venture lasted. For Narodowy, that’s reason
enough to stay put in a community she enjoys
and knows well. “I’m happy,” she stated.
Similarly, the Galleshaws maintain
an active presence at Wright’s.
Much more remarkable,
though, are the close ties
employers share at the
massive chicken
The Pines Restaurant
1204 Pound Hill Road, North Smithfield, RI 02896
Thurs 4:30-8:30
Fri&Sat 4-9
Sun 12-8
www.thepinesrestaurant.com
metro | 6
barn. Roughly 300 employees staff the grounds, gift shop,
lottery counter, bar, six dining rooms, and kitchen. Of the
lot, Forgue, who began her Wright’s career during high
school, said that she knows all of them well. “Even though it
looks so massive, it’s like any place,” she explained.
But in some ways, it’s not just like anywhere else. Em-
ployee turnover is low; a small contingent has been working
for over thirty-five years. For some, rising through the ranks
can even be something of a family affair. Forgue met her
husband working at Wright’s. One of her two brothers, both
of whom are managers, met his wife there too. The banquet
manager Roger has been her boss for her entire life.
Reconsider “ Tastes like chicken”
While Wright’s and Village Haven both prioritize family ser-
vice, each offers its own distinctive variation on the family-
style theme. Both are popular for functions of different sorts,
such as weddings or celebrations—Forgue mentioned that
she has also hosted bereavement dinners—but Wright’s,
with its spacious and well-lit interior, caters a bit more to the
youth sports crowd. I encountered a girls’ basketball team
from Douglass, Massachusetts, there to close the season, who
informed me that the little chocolate chicken at the bottom
of the ice cream cup “will change your life.” Village Haven,
with its much more expansive menu, has carved out a place
in local food culture in other ways. “Our fried fish is basically
how we survive Lent,” Gary told me, referring to the sizable
Catholic population of the surrounding area.
It’s inaccurate to say that Village Haven’s menu is larger;
Wright’s doesn’t have one. While Village Haven has a variety
of chicken, meat, and fish offerings, Wright’s does just two
things —family-style chicken and steak. Though curious pal-
ates might well enjoy the roast chicken alternatives (a friend
ordered the pot pie at Village Haven; he seemed content,
but I remained dubious), it is the family-style experience,
or excess, and the corresponding amazement it elicits that
endears both restaurants to me. But the initial appeal had
nothing to do with my appreciation of the family-style tradi-
tion. The juiciness, tenderness, and the ease with which the
meat slides off the bone, a quality not typically associated
with roast chicken, was distinctive enough to merit a write-
up by Gourmet magazine last August.
Wright’s and Village Haven are not the only two places of
their type. The Pines Restaurant in North Smithfield and the
Bocce Club Restaurant in Woonsocket also do family-style
chicken. Alhough I can’t yet attest to their quality, I hope
to be able to soon. For the faint of heart, northern Rhode
Island’s peculiar specialty may be worth only an occasional
trip. The rest, however, will find something to enjoy in the
state’s unique variant of an otherwise ubiquitous dish.
______________________________________________
Nathaniel Levy B’10 is a charter member of the
clean plate club.
Bocce Club Restaurant
226 Saint Louis Ave, Woonsocket, RI
Since there’s no website, call (401) 767-2000 for hours
t h e i n dy. o r g
THE VOICES OF UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS
O
n Wednesday, January 6, Martin Ji-
menez Lopez and Norberto Gomez,
two K’iche’ Guatemalan immigrants,
cleared snow from Gillette Stadium, home of
the New England Patriots. The wind was blow-
ing hard, spraying snow into their faces as they
shoveled. It was twenty something out, Jimenez
recalls, but most of the workers were just wear-
ing sweatshirts and jeans. “I don’t have gloves,
boots…nothing,” Jimenez says.
At around 2PM, a man he knows simply as
“the big boss,” told him to leave the field, along
with about 70 other workers. The Patriots were
coming to practice, and management did not
want the players and workers outside at the same
time. The overseer corralled the workers into a
small room without windows and gave them hot
chocolate to drink.
Why management sought to conceal the
workers remains unclear. It could have been to
keep secret the Patriot’s plays for the playoff
game against the Baltimore Ravens. It could
have been to restrict interaction between the
players and the workers.
But for Jimenez, the experience felt like just
another instance of being hidden in the country
he has called his home for fifteen years.
Hours earlier, Immigration and Customs En-
forcement (ICE) officials had detained Jimenez,
Gomez, and 57 other immigrants traveling
to work at Gillette. After taking their photos,
recording their information and making finger-
prints, Jimenez says ICE officials drove all but
seven of the immigrants—who had either previ-
ous run-ins with the law or outstanding depor-
tation warrants—to work as planned at Gillette
Stadium. It was the largest raid in southeastern
New England since 2007, when 350 undocu-
mented immigrants were detained at a leather
goods factory in New Bedford, MA.
These detainments tell a story of living on the
margins of society, while working at the center.
Immigrants shovel snow unseen, yet make a
Patriots game—a New England and American
spectacle—possible. Being sin papeles, without
papers, is more than merely legal status. It repre-
sents their struggles for dignity within a broader
society that fails to recognize their contribution.
“I came here because of poverty,” Jimenez
says, sitting in the same Dunkin’ Donuts in
Silver Lake where he was picked up to go to Gil-
lette. It is a sentiment shared by many within
Providence’s Guatemalan community, the larg-
est in New England.
Gomez speaks of poverty as well—his family
could no longer support him when he decided to
leave Guatemala— but says it was violence that
ultimately provoked his departure. “There were
lots of killings,” he says. During what Guate-
malans simply call La Violencia (The Violence),
Gomez saw his grandfather murdered before his
eyes. “I was afraid,” he says, pausing and then
repeating quietly, “I was afraid.”
Josh MacLeod, an Anthropology graduate
student at Brown writing his dissertation on
Guatemala, explains that between 1960 and
1990, Guatemala faced “an incredibly violent
internal armed conflict”—what the UN has
classified as genocide. The Quiche region, home
of ethnic K’iche’s, suffered the most violence
in Latin America’s longest-running civil war,
MacLeod says, “with hundreds of massacres and
tens of thousands of civilian deaths.”
There is a Guatemalan saying, civilians were
“caught between the two fires” of guerillas and
government counter-insurgency forces, though
the UN ascribes 93 percent of massacres to gov-
ernment forces.
MacLeod says that now, one in ten Guatema-
lans live in the US. While a number of Guate-
malans sought immediate political asylum, many
Guatemalans still immigrate because of the war’s
lasting damage, which left few economic oppor-
tunities in the country to this day.
Some left for reasons more personal than
poverty or war. Detained in the last major ICE
raid before the Gillette Stadium raid, at Licht
Judicial Complex in Providence, Lucy Contreras
has lived undocumented in the US for six years.
She comes from Guatemala, but unlike Jimenez
and Gomez, is not K’iche’.
“Poverty I can bear,” she says while sitting at
the kitchen table of her house in Mount Hope,
“but abuse, no.”
“I was afraid to leave the house, when I knew
my husband was out,” Contreras says, describ-
ing how her husband would become crazy when
he drank. If she saw him out on the street, she
would hide to avoid being harassed or abused.
“I wanted a rest from so much violence, and
[a break] from seeing my children afraid,” Con-
treras says, as a tear escapes down her cheek.
Gomez lives in a small, windowless room in
the basement of a single-story house in Silver
Lake, Providence. The room is sparsely decorat-
ed. Gomez’s keyboard, which he proudly shows
off, is propped up near the middle of the room.
His first job, which lasted three years, was
cleaning fish at a factory in Fall River, MA. He
pauses, and then says in English, “This is hard
[work].” Since then, he has worked a number
of jobs: at a car wash on Dexter Street, at an
ice-skating rink, a supermarket, another factory.
Due to the economy, Gomez has been out of
a steady job for the last six months. He takes
whatever odd jobs he can find.
“It is not because I don’t know how to work,”
Jimenez says, talking about his own problems
finding employment. “After 90 days, a company
would check my papers. The boss would tell
me, ‘Your papers are not good. Sorry, but I can’t
[keep you]’.”
Over the last few years, finding work with-
out papers has become harder. Contreras found
the custodial work only five weeks before being
detained, beforehand unemployed for a series
of months. She heard about the job through a
friend from her hometown in Guatemala. Like
the immigrants at Gillette, Contreras was work-
ing for a temp agency, Tri-State Enterprises,
formerly based in Providence. Jimenez and
Gomez both say that Legal Pro-Temps. Inc., the
Roslindale, MA temp agency that managed the
Gillette snow removal, was one of the last places
that would still hire undocumented workers,
albeit on an irregular schedule and paying cash.
Working for Legal Pro-Temps meant being
constantly on the move. Gomez tells of being
sent to different companies, sometimes for a
day, sometimes for three days, sometimes up to
a month. He has traveled to Boston, Fall River,
and New Bedford, among other cities. The
work was different each time. Sometimes it was
picking up trash after events, sometimes clean-
ing offices. Other times it was shoveling snow.
Recently, Jimenez wore advertisements for stores
on the street, standing in the cold all day.
The one thing that stayed the same was the
pay: $7.50 an hour. After the money that Legal
Pro-Temps took out for transportation, workers
would sometimes only get $250 dollars a week.
When they had to work overtime, Jimenez says
they were paid nothing extra. But sin papeles, Ji-
menez says he could not complain to authorities
about the unpaid overtime.
On January 25, two weeks after the raid, Legal
Pro-Temps filed papers for voluntary dissolution
with the Massachusetts Secretary of the Com-
monwealth, Corporations Division. No charges
have been filed yet against Legal Pro-Temps for
labor practices in the wake of the ICE raid. When
asked about the company, the Massachusetts At-
torney General’s Office declined to comment,
citing a policy of not disclosing whether or not a
company was currently under investigation. Af-
ter the courthouse raids in 2008, in which both
temp agencies were involved, only the owner of
Falcon Maintenance LLC was charged. He pled
guilty, spent two months in a federal halfway
house, and was fined $10,000.
For Contreras, finding work after her deten-
tion has been difficult. “I have a few people as
[house cleaning] clients now,” she says, “but
some people don’t think it is a good idea to have
undocumented immigrants in their house.”
For Jimenez, the 14-day journey from Guate-
mala to the United States was “easy.” He literally
walked across the border, found the van on a side
street as instructed by a coyote, the people who
smuggle immigrants out of Mexico, and drove
off in a van full of immigrants to Phoenix, AZ.
The journey was successful, but funding it
was difficult. Coyotes demanded money up front,
and Jimenez had to solicit the help of family and
friends in the US to pay the cost, sending the
money through Western Union.
As Jimenez readily points out, much has
changed in the 15 years since his border cross-
ing. These days, crossing the border has become
a far more harrowing experience. And with the
increased risks, coyotes demand more money for
their services. Now “people are paying five, six,
seven thousand dollars to come here,” says Ji-
menez. With no work, many family and friend
networks no longer can pay the upfront costs of
the trip. Instead, the immigrants go into debt.
Jimenez says that many of them have not been
able to get out of it.
“There are a lot of good things here,” Gomez
says. Gomez, like Jimenez and Contreras, says
he came to Providence because he knew people
in the area. Since his arrival, he has classes in
English and toward his GED —he needs only
two more to graduate. In the past, when he
had steady employment, he took music classes,
“mostly the piano, sometimes the drums.”
Despite the educational opportunities Gomez
has found, he has not found a broad sense of
community in Providence. With the difficulties
of finding work and paying the bills, some be-
lieve that the members of the Guatemalan com-
munity are too busy looking after themselves to
worry about collective problems.
For Jimenez, the difference between the US
and Guatemala rests in unión–unity. “In Guate-
mala, we don’t have money, but we have unión,”
he says. He acknowledges that there are groups
trying to build and support the community in
Providence, but in the US, “one person has one
opinion, another person has another,” and no-
body comes to a consensus. In Guatemala, when
there was a community issue, Jimenez says, “we
would all [fix] it together.”
Besides unión, the other word Jimenez repeats
is dinero–money. Since the Gillette Stadium
raid, many of the affected immigrants have been
soliciting the Guatemalan Consulate for help, in
the form of financial assistance. “Did anything
come of this?” Jimenez asks rhetorically, then
answers, “No. There is no money!”
Contreras has had a different experience.
“Perhaps I have survived because of my faith in
God,” she says, but also suggests that it is also
thanks to “all the organizations” that she has
depended on for legal and educational support.
Without immigrant advocacy organizations like
Immigrants in Action, Contreras says she would
not understand her rights. She has taken classes
in English, Spanish and computing. At the same
time, she mentions that she has helped other im-
migrants, teaching them about their rights.
Contreras says that one of the most difficult
aspects of post-detention life is the ambiguity.
“Every case has happened in a different way,” she
says, “Never, never the same.” Some cases from
the 2008 raids closed in a matter of months, oth-
ers are still ongoing. Alex Isbell, an immigration
lawyer working with some immigrants from the
Gillette Stadium raid, describes a similar variety
in terms of outcomes. “Whenever you encounter
a group of fifty people,” he says, the individual
decisions of the case will not be the same.
After the 2008 courthouse raids, some of the
immigrants involved were granted legal status.
A few were deported. Immigration law is more
complex than merely determining whether or
not an immigrant has legal papers. Isbell explains
that immigrants can have claims to residency,
the first step towards citizenship, without hav-
ing legal documentation. While there are many
factors that could warrant permanent residency,
the potential harm, economic or emotion-
ally, on an immigrant’s immediate family in the
US—especially if some family members are US
citizens—and health concerns that could not be
treated in one’s home country have won legal
residency in the past. Isbell suggests that seeking
asylum from domestic abuse or being an unac-
companied minor—seven of the undocumented
immigrants were 16 or under—would also be
legitimate claims.
Nearly two years after her detainment, Con-
treras still waits anxiously, not knowing whether
she will remain in the states. Filing for asylum
because of her history of spousal abuse, Contre-
ras’s court case was recently delayed again, from
March 2010 to May 2011. “I don’t want to, I
can’t, return to Guatemala,” she says.
Gomez says that since the raid, he has “felt like
a prisoner,” continuing, “I do not know what is
going to happen.”
Contreras says that one thing she has learned
is to “continue the fight. To fight for dignity, for
equality, for respect, for peace.”
“We are not animals, we are human beings,”
Contreras says. At the same time, Jimenez says,
frustrated, “sin papeles, you’re nothing.”
G eorge Warner B ’10.5 would like
to thank Will Lambek and Jesse Strecker for
translation assistance.
 G S
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I
y family’s barn burned down in 1962, lit aflame by a heat lamp hanging
in the hog pen. It was one of their first years in Todd County, Kentucky,
and, like every other farmer, they raised hogs. Chester Whites, black
Hampshires: they were big-shouldered breeds with oversized, floppy ears for the
hot summers and skinny legs that gave their scrounging an unexpected delicacy.
The lamp provided extra warmth for the piglets when their pile of sleeping bodies
didn’t generate enough heat, but one winter night it lit up the nearby hay bales, and
flames devoured the barn.
A premature pig roast.
“The Reeves lived across the road. Jesse Reeves was a hard-working dirt farmer
[with] a very religious Baptist wife. Jesse was the first man to come bring us hay
the morning after our barn burned down.” Jesse’s son, Mike, rode the school bus
with my mom and aunt. Today Mike roasts pigs for a living, smokes pork shoulder
in a pit of hickory coils and serves them with his famous vinegary barbeque sauce.
We buy the pulled pork regularly and serve it at terry-tableclothed family reunions.
Mike’s done well for himself, and some people resent it, think he’s gotten too big
for his own dirt farmer shoes.
I’ve asked my mom to tell me the fire story several times, in nighttime conversa-
tions as the cicadas screech outside and in formal interviews in the quiet of the
tall-ceilinged farmhouse. Each time it moves me. I imagine the trapped piglets,
curly-tailed and squealing, the barn a charred heap the next morning, and I am
struck by the tenuousness of wealth and the hardness of poverty here. One must ig-
nore certain questions and cultivate certain kinds of faith to survive. Mike inherited
his mother’s devoutness, adopting the nickname “Pit Master Pastor.” In his BBQ
joint off 848, there hangs a sign quoting Psalms 37:4: “Delight yourself also in the
Lord; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.”
II
If those piglets had lived, my grandfather and his sharecroppers would have
killed them eventually. Hog killings were yearly rituals, done once the summer
heat had retreated and August’s tobacco leaves hung drying in the barns. Hog kill-
ings were a family event, like reunions or church dinners, and most everyone has
pictures of them in their family albums. A black and white photo: overalled men
inspecting the hog carcass with furrowed brows like doctors in an operating room.
Next picture, a disemboweled hog hanging from its dainty feet, the slashed head
dangling precariously from its sinewy neck. Oh and this one: black sharecroppers
hoisting the hog’s heavy body to hook up to a rail, their breath smoky in the No-
vember cold. These are the pages of the photo album that remind us of histories we
prefer to forget, that ask from us certain strains of faith or blindness.
Hogs had poor eyesight but made up for it in other ways. They were stubborn
and smelly but profitable, and the joke goes that you never heard a farmer com-
plaining about his hogs’ odor unless they weren’t selling well at market. They were
part of the unwritten sharecropping agreement: in exchange for the sharecropping
family’s labor, farm owners gave sharecroppers a small house to live in, space for
a vegetable garden, coal for the winter, and two hogs. At the end of the year, the
sharecropper would also receive half the profit of the tobacco crop with expenses
taken out. Sometimes it was a very, very long wait.
Hogs would eat trash, would grow fat in spite of it all. Hogs would provide just
enough sustenance that one’s faith might be sustained. Hogs reminded one of who
provided and who owed. The hog killing, then, was a ritual that marked the end of
life (the hog’s and the growing season’s) but also shaped the social landscape.
“The colored fellows would help us kill hogs and would kill their own hogs.
You’d slaughter by sticking them through the throat and letting them bleed [...] And
then we’d hang hams and the jowls and side meat and the shoulders up in here and
smoke ‘em. The smoke would help you keep your meat. When it come out of that
barn you’d salt it down; you’d run it all over with salt. And that would preserve it.”
Salt the meat in November. Eat it come hunger time in February. This was well
thought out, calculated.
III
I sometimes worry that asking people to tell me about hardship is like rubbing
salt in open wounds. Were there times when sharecroppers didn’t get their share
at the end of the year? I want to know, what do those pictures hide? This question
is an undoing of faith, an eating up of innocence, and I am not sure what kind of
sustenance can emerge from it.
“We wasn’t treated right, I know that for a fact. I mean the boss man took
advantage of my father, I know he did. I don’t even want to go into it because all
that’s done past, and I don’t even want to think about it, but I know for sure.”
This is not as much blindness as it is the careful tending of wounds not yet
healed. I am wary of willed forgetfulness, but here one might forgive it, appreciate
its complexity and its suggestion of strength. Still, I ask Calvin to tell me more.
“Some of them raise the crop—work all year—and then didn’t have nothing
coming out of it […] They had to live the whole year and then by the time they got
through taking out stuff to get their food, when they sold tobacco they still didn’t
have nothing coming. A lot of people did that, or so they say. That was before my
time, but I heard the older people say that—they raisin’ it and didn’t have nothing
coming but still they kept on raisin’ it.”
They just kept on raising tobacco. This sounds near-sighted, hog-like; it implies
an absence of foresight or self-consciousness. But I don’t think Calvin meant it that
way. There were no nearby factories, no loans for black farmers, no inherited wealth.
What else was there to do than hope that next year might be better?
 IV
Calvin sharecropped on our farm but didn’t stay there. He lived on his own
property near other black landowners, on a dirt road that wound through pasture
for cattle and hogs and small plots of tobacco. He shared the cost of the tobacco
seed and fertilizer and provided all the labor to receive half the profits. “I share-
cropped and still had another job. Everyone asks me how I did it and I say, ‘I had to
do it! Didn’t have no money so I had to do it.’... Had to work on Sundays. Didn’t
want to but I did.”
People resented working on Sundays, the supposed day of rest. Sundays were
church day, barbeque day, drive-to-town-once-a-week day. My grandfather, a
writer-turned-farmer, stayed home on Sundays while the sharecroppers made their
way to pray. On Sundays he smoked a cigar and drank gin and tonics with farming
friends, men who sent their families off to church before driving down the long
gravel road to Mabry Farm to ignore the dry liquor laws and talk about hogs. They
discussed other subjects too, but my grandfather seems to have taken a particular
interest in hogs. Cookie Askew convinced him to buy Landrace hogs, delicate Dan-
ish breeds with two extra ribs. More meat but less sturdy.
He also wanted to start a ham smoking operation, but “the labor situation was
wearing on him.” In other words, the sharecroppers showed signs of discontent. My
mother describes one sharecropper as lugubrious and resentful; the other was bril-
liant but alcoholic. They hated each other, and my grandfather was apparently too
interested in the human condition (in the writerly sense of the word) to recognize
that perhaps one of them needed to go. His kindness had viscous consequences. The
sharecroppers remained unhappy, and my grandfather spiraled into deep depres-
sion. He saw no end in sight.
V
I’ve never seen these breeds of hogs before the pulled pork stage, at which point
they are unrecognizable. People don’t raise hogs anymore. There aren’t any share-
croppers around, but their shacks remain to house farm equipment, or, in some
cases of ironic continuity, bunk beds for Mexican migrant workers who have come
to harvest the tobacco.
I am not the only one who seems struck by the hogs’ absence. There is a sadness,
some twisted nostalgia that enters the voice of old people when they remember
hogs. The space they have left behind is fraught and confused: if hogs validated
and supported a system of poverty, must we grieve their passing? But what if their
leaving also marks other sorts of human exodus? Hogs marked calendars, marked
the social landscape. Now they mark the demographic changes, the dwindling
numbers of black landowners, the deterioration of farms, the growth of housing
developments.
I would like to see the decline of the hog as some kind of emancipation. I would
like to think that in pulled pork, we have preserved what was beautiful about the
hogs—sustenance and community—and discarded all else. But the forgetful-
ness worries me, so I ask everyone for memories. The barbeque man. Wizened
grandmothers. Former sharecroppers. Old suspendered white farmers. We stumble
through romance and silence and willful blindness; I do not want to hear just about
how good it was, because I do not believe you. Tell me about my grandfather. Tell
me what the farm looked like. Tell me what you see.
“Well you look outside your window and you see things and it makes you won-
der. And you start asking questions ‘why’ and sooner or later you’re going to get
answers. I rode up and down the road for years and never paid much attention to
the little falling down houses. It grieved my heart to know that my people lived that
way—not only lived that way but thrived—raise their family, go to church, go back
to work in a harsh environment. Those conditions are not here now, but it’s the
reason why we don’t have what we should have.”
_______________________________________________________________
SARAH GIBSON B’10.5 invites you to check out her multimedia exhibit,
“We Care for the Land: Farmers, Sharecroppers, and Migrant Workers in Todd
County, Kentucky,” in the John Nicholas Brown Center at 50 Williams Street.
I conducted these interviews in summer 2009 for an oral history project that was
ostensibly about changes in agriculture. Hog ghosts hung heavy.
I Eliza Mabry.
II Robert Downer.
III Joe Moore, Calvin Bell.
IV Calvin Bell, Susan Menees.
V Stanley Russell.
Photos courtesy of the author.
 f e at u r e s | 11
M O V ING M OUNTAINS
M a ss e y e n e r g y c o . & t h e c o n s e q u e n c e s o f m i n i n g a p pa l ac h i a
W
alking through Lindytown, West Virginia, the
loudest sound is the whistling of wind through
the decaying houses that line the streets. Much
of the town has already been destroyed and is scattered in
enormous piles of rubble—but other sections still stand
boarded up, families long gone. The demolition appears
almost leisurely. Behind the abandoned church, stumps
prickle the once-majestic mountains, sheared clean by those
still invested in this land—Massey Energy, and the other
companies mining West Virginia for coal.
Lindytown is only one of the many once-vibrant towns of
West Virginia that lie vacant as a result of mountaintop re-
moval coal mining (MTR). The residents of Lindytown were
slowly driven away by blasting and pollution from MTR
mining, until they were bought out en masse by Massey
Energy. Now it has been largely bulldozed, but the remain-
ing wreckage serves as a chilling example of the economic,
cultural, and environmental devastation of the Appalachia.
Nearly every day, throughout certain areas of West Vir-
ginia and Appalachia, the sound of blasting shatters the air
and shakes the ground as millions of tons of explosives rip
the peaks from the mountains. This type of coal mining
was developed to access coal seams buried hundreds of feet
deep, by clear-cutting mountain forests and blasting away
the tops of the mountains. The wreckage that’s left after the
blasting, called overburden—once some of the biodiverse
land in North America and home to dozens of endangered
species—is dumped into nearby valleys. In the past fifteen
years, this practice has buried over 2,000 miles of streams
and contaminated them with pollutants from mining.
In addition to the overburden, MTR produces huge
amounts of coal slurry, liquid waste made up of water, coal
dust, and toxic chemicals like lead, arsenic mercury, and
other carcinogens. Coal slurry is stored in what are essentially
enormous, toxic lakes contained by dams made of the rocks
and debris from the mountains. Eight years ago, a coal slurry
failed in Martin County, Kentucky, releasing 360 million
gallons of toxic waste into local streams and poisoning the
drinking water for residents. The Environmental Protection
Agency later called this the worst environmental disaster ever
in the southeastern United States.
massey’s mess
One of these sludge impoundments, as they are called, is
Massey Energy’s Shumate Impoundment, which holds 2.8
billion gallons of coal slurry. Beyond that, there is a 1,849
acre strip mine. Right in front of the coal-filled silo, a mere
150 feet away, is the Marsh Fork Elementary school. Chil-
dren who run through the playground barefoot can leave
with the soles of their feet blackened by coal dust.
Ed Wiley, a former coal miner, tells of the unusually high
rates of illness in the children of Marsh Fork Elementary
from to the exposure to mining chemicals. He describes
bringing his daughter home from school three days in a row
due to coughing and severe headaches. Her face turned blue.
“When she looked back at me she had tears running down
her face and she said, ‘Gramps, that coal mine is making us
kids sick.’” Now an environmental activist, he says, “Those
tears are what woke me up. I realized I was setting things up
that could possibly kill my granddaughter and hundreds of
other kids.”
In January, Science completed the most comprehensive
survey and condemnation of MTR mining to date, prov-
ing what Ed and Kayla Wiley already knew: mountaintop
removal was poisioning the people and the land. “The
scientific evidence of the severe environmental and human
impacts from mountaintop removal is strong and irrefut-
able, ” the scientists said of their work, and “its impacts are
pervasive and long lasting. […] There is no evidence that
any mitigation practices successfully reverse the damage it
causes.” They took an unusually strong stance for sicentists,
the college hill independent
demanding its abolishment. In response, Massey CEO Don
Blankenship dismissed their evidence of water contamina-
tion as “simply not true.”
Dressed entirely in an American flag suit, Blankenship
told miners at a Friends of America rally, “We’re smart
enough to believe that God determines the weather, and not
Al Gore…[the government thinks] they can save the earth
by giving your job away and putting you out of your home.
But global warming is pure make-believe. Our government
wouldn’t know a fact if it tripped over one.”
the real price of coal
Massey Energy may decry government involvement, but
environmental groups insist the DEP and the EPA have en-
abled coal companies’ environmental abuses. Massey Energy,
the largest producer of Central Appalachian coal, has a long
history of environmental violations, for many of which they
allegedly have yet to acknowledge responsiblility. In 2008,
they were fined $20 million for 4,600 documented instances
in which they dumped toxic chemicals down waterways.
“Incredibly, Massey’s violations have increased in frequency
since its settlement with the federal government,” says a state-
ment released by a coalition of local environmental groups
formed. In January they said they intend to sue Massey if the
company doesn’t change their pattern of operation.
“The threatened suit is but another attempt by out-of-
state extremists to attack the coal industry,” Massey respond-
ed. In the past, Don Blankenship has remarked to Forbes,
“We don’t pay much attention to the violation count.”
Massey may not be counting, but the same coalition of
environmental groups now estimate they are in excess of
12,000. And as the poisons pile up, so do the cases of grave
illnesses and deaths among those who call these regions
home.
A study from West Virginia University concluded that
while mountaintop removal mining brings $8 billion a year
into the state in terms of jobs and economic benefits, the ac-
companying pollution, sickness, and death has a $42 billion
price tag. In Kentucky, illegally overloaded coal trucks have
killed five and injured over 500 in the past five years. In the
past three years in West Virginia, 14 have been killed from
floods linked to coal mining. Massey Energy continues to
defend mining. “It’s not a perfect world,” Blankenship told
The New York Times, but “there’s more pollution coming off
of cars than off of mines.”
Maria Gunnoe, a Boone County, West Virginia na-
tive whose home is bordered by a 1,200-acre MTR site, a
ten-story valley fill, and two ponds of toxic sludge. Since
the mine became operational, her home has been flooded
seven different times. Now an award-winning community
organizer against mountaintop removal, her final straw came
in 2000 when another flood contaminated the water on her
property and destroyed the farm her family had for genera-
tions. Massey refused all liability, calling it “an act of God.”
m ountain m en and wom en
In an crescendoing clamor, those fighting against MTR say
it is not only destroying the physical health of those from
Appalachia, but their culture and way of life as well. Paula
Kaufman, a Brown student and Appalachian native, writes:
“The Appalachian are among the oldest mountains in the
world: 460 million years. Our culture is inextricably bound
to the land. Our music, crafts, food, folklore and stories. We
are a land-based heritage. We are mountaincentric. When
the mountains go everything that makes Appalachians sin-
gular will vanish. They are the map of our past, present and
future.”
These mountains are disappearing rapidly. By the end of
this year, it is estimated that 1.4 million acres will be mined
with mountaintop removal, an area larger than the state of
Delaware.
b y P h o e b e NEE l
“Massey Energy is terrorizing us in Appalachia,” says
activist Judy Bonds. “Little old ladies in their 70s can’t even
sit on their porches. They have to cut their grass wearing
respirators. That’s how these people have to live. The coal
companies are the real terrorists in America. And we’re going
to expose them for the murdering, lying thieves that they
are.”
Since MTR began in the 1970s, outspoken citizens and
environmental advocates such as Maria Gunnoe and Ed
Wiley have formed a diverse and dynamic movement to
fight to reclaim their land and way of life. In January, three
members of the organization Climate Ground Zero lived
atop platforms they erected in the treetops of the Coal River
Mountain mine site, halting blasting on the site for nine
days.
Coal mining dominates the economy of West Virginia and
much of Appalachia. Consequently, the debate surrounnd-
ing mountaintop removal mining has been framed as a battle
between locals and non-native environmentalists, trying to
protect nature at the expense of the livelihoods of those from
West Virginia. However, the organization I Love Mountains
tells a different story. They assert that mountaintop removal
mining and its technology were developed precisely to mine
the most coal with the smallest workforce. According to the
Labor of Bureau Statistics, in the 1950s, there were between
125,000 and 145,000 miners employed in West Virginia.
Today, this number has plummeted to 16,000. This means
some of the most mineral-rich areas in the United States are
home to the poorest people, with 17.8 percent living below
the poverty level.
“The Appalachian people have been promised prosper-
ity through coal for the last 125 years,” says Maria Gunnoe.
“And we’re poorer now, because we used to be rich in the
abundance of the land, and now that’s been taken away.”This
week, as the 5th annual End Mountaintop Removal Week,
200 people from across the United States came together to
Washington, bearing samples of blackened, poisoned water
from Appalachia. They’re advocating for H.R. 1310, the
Clean Water Protection Act, which would seriously reduce
mountaintop removal mining and work to protect the Ap-
palachians currently under siege from polluted water and
destructive floods.
In Appalachia, the visual evidence is grim and undeni-
able—leveled mountains, exploited peoples, and disappear-
ing ways of life. It is these people and communities that are
paying the highest price for cheap coal. On the East Coast,
out of the shadows of the coal fields and towns like Lindy-
town, these are stories that are seldom told. Nevertheless, the
blasting of mountains and the devastation of fragile ecosys-
tems directly affects us all.
“Today the coal industry […] is allowing our water to be
poisoned,” community organizer Judy Bonds of Coal River
Mountain Watch, said in a statement. “Tomorrow it will be
the East Coast’s water supply as the mining discharges will
reach downstream water sources.” Across America, people
are made complicit with every flip of a light switch, illumi-
nating houses with energy whose production is devastating
communities in Appalachia. “There is an old saying that
civilization lived thousands of years without electricity and
never without clean water,” Kaufman says. “We have a right
and a responsibility to speak out, to protest and to act for the
environment, for Appalachians and for change.”
______________________________________________
Phoebe Neel B ’12 appears to be a small girl from
South Providence but she is a husky mountain man at
heart.
m a r c h 11, 2010

e v e ry w h e r e
thoughts on birds and humans
l
canaries
Nupur Shridhar and
by Nupur Shridhar
i l l u s t r at i o n b y
Ro b e rt S a n d l e r
I n about two months, during the last full moon in May,
red knots (Calidris canutus) migrating from the Pampas
to the Arctic will land on the shores of the Delaware Bay,
their sole rest stop on the 12,000-mile journey home. This
will not be their first visit: the birds have always arrived, year
after year, as far back as anyone can remember, on the one
night of the year when horseshoe crabs crawl out of the sea
to lay their fatty, delicious eggs in the sand—sustaining food
for the strained, starving knots. This year, though, there will
be far too few eggs and even fewer crabs: humans have over-
fished them for their blood, which, since the 1970s, has been
used by researchers everywhere to test drugs, vaccines, and
medical devices for bacteria. No other test is as simple or reli-
able. The horseshoe crab’s blood is irreplaceable, and this is
why we’ve killed so many, and why, this spring, hundreds of
beautiful birds will fall, hungry and exhausted, from the sky.
It’s sad to think of so many red knots dying, but evolution
teaches us not to care. These are the rules of the game: eat or
be eaten, adapt or die. Mother Nature isn’t nice, but at least
she plays fair. If you’re not fast enough, big enough, or smart
enough, you forfeit your right to this planet and its precious
resources. Humans aren’t being selfish. We just know how
to win, and we have, for centuries, been happy to ignore the
losers. Consider the dodo, once native to Mauritius, which
was eaten to extinction by invasive pets and livestock while
their European owners looked the other way. As a species,
the dodo failed to impress us: it wasn’t tasty; it couldn’t fly; it
looked more than a little silly. Unsurprisingly, the last dodo
was gobbled up slightly over a century after the species was
first discovered. In the face of all that human indifference it
didn’t stand a chance.
What makes humans so remarkable, then, what makes
us so different from the species we domesticate or destroy, is
our ability to determine who lives and who dies by changing
the kinds of things we think about and how we think about
them. We’re wiser than the red knot. We haven’t arrived at
these shores unawares. Thanks to countless scientists and
educators everywhere, we know about the great circle of life;
we know we have to care about the environment; we know
what’s going to happen if we don’t. We recycle (or always
mean to); we read the Science Times; we endorse only the
most conscientious goods and services—but birds, though
they remain the best indicators of environmental health, ca-
naries both in and out of the coalmine, are as unseen as ever.
On the surface, this disservices done to birds presents itself
as yet another problem for scientists to solve. As laypersons,
most of us lack the resources, and often times the willpower,
M a r c h 11, 2010
s c i e n c e | 12
to study animals and their habitats extensively, and we are
right to blame the institutions we’ve inherited—our highly
specialized society, our insufficient educational systems—for
the damage already done. Yet we shouldn’t forget to blame
ourselves as well: this indifference operates most often at the
level of the individual. We honor valuable ideas by giving
them our attentions and affection, by integrating what we
know into what we do—but birds, though they have pen-
etrated our menus and mythology, have failed to leave an
impression on the modern mind. This is the responsibility
we inherited with our astonishing success: if humans, the
most influential animals on the planet, do not make room
for other species in our heads, we will forget to make room
for them in real life.
Fortunately for us, birds are everywhere, eager to be seen
and admired by those who are taking the time to find them.
Providence in the springtime is filled with hundreds of gor-
geous winged creatures. House sparrows nest in nearly every
nook, and starlings are currently looking their best: keep an
eye out for sleek birds white shiny black/purple/blue feath-
ers and a generous sprinkling of white speckles. Raptors and
gulls frequent Prospect Park, and anyone living on Hope or
Cooke should look for cardinals, the downy woodpecker,
and the tufted titmouse—and let’s note forget about the per-
egrine falcon pair has built its nest downtown on the Bank
of America building.
Admittedly, simply observing another species doesn’t
constitute political or environmental activism. Bird watch-
ing in Rhode Island isn’t going to save any red knots this
season, and continually ascribing this kind of importance to
our thoughts and activities can seem like another brand of
species-dependent selfishness—once again we’ve developed
inflated senses of self-importance. Yet birds, like all other life
including our own, don’t exist for any particular reason. They
simply exist, and bearing witness to this existence, at sunrise,
with a friend, a full thermos, and an unashamed curiosity is
satisfying enough: I’m telling you to get out there now, while
they’re still around, and fall in love with a bird.
______________________________________________
NUPUR SHRIDHAR B’11 found the Brown Boobies
spotted.
t h e i n dy. o r g
 o p i n i o n s | 13

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The majority of those
people are African-Ame Cr app y Cr eat ivit y ma n’s mo ra ls
They pay taxes.  rican.  that my Fiction
Fucking free association. It’s the shit Hey, let me run this by you, tell me if
you think it’s
They have no voting and the thing that sev-
representatives in eithe workshops prefers to traffic in a good idea. Normally, you have a mal
e and a fe-
congress and congress r house of c in befo re text mes-
can overturn any laws
passed by the enteen year olds preferred to traffi male, and they join together. I see you’
re nodding,
local city council.  a gene ratio n. Canadian
saging eliminated feelings for good. From this union comes reprodu
ction, copies
D.C is overwhelming I’m doin g it again.
ly left of center on a co
nventional poets also seem partial to—shit, of whatever their code tells them to
make. You’re
political spectrum.  Pave men t. Pave ment is
Sometimes it’s alright. Take with me so far? OK, so how about then
you put a
In 2008 it voted 92.9 the stud io, I’m all like
% for Barack Obama. 
  fun. Stephen Malkmus said, “In male and male together, or a female and
a female?
Our exclusion is inexc I’m sayin g.’” Now that
usable political and rac
ial oppres- ‘Look at me and the crazy shit se
No more copies, the code just hits a
wall. What
sion in a capital city fill got us cove red. Plea
ed with monuments to
freedom. Pavement is back together he’s is
do you think of that? Bad idea, righ
t? Immoral,
wor st part abou t it
stop trying this at home. The g
even. So now I ask you this: how, give
n the fact
dy. The shit keep s pilin that you, you sniveling factotum (I’ll
when you’re feeling shitty alrea for explain what
, and she took a shit
on. I was just walking my dog that is later) ordered not one, not two
, but an in-
number of times
the second time today. Imagine the dustrial GROSS of MALE-TO-MALE
cables for
gine pick ing it up with
M eg a M us ic she’s shit in the past month. Ima the Xerox vendor retreat, are we supp
osed to set
Head” video pare nts. Be grateful.
Jason DeRulo’s “In My club jam out- your hands. Now think of your up the demo displays?! With our goddam
n dicks?!
d the insight to film a Stop romanticizing pet ownersh ip. Turn the page. Get me some fucking coffee before
 Why no one ever ha to me. They I wrap your
re before is a mystery ballsack around your own throat you
side a convenience sto t drinks. JdR cocksucker!
here and plenty of sof
provide a dusky atmosp with is not
de this chick is dancing
points out that the du ution. Sleep
Luckily, JdR has the sol Alu m. Let ter
going to give her love.  go, he’ll be
the word and they’ll Many people think that the status quo in
with him now, just say his solution a
health care
e r n P is s
in g ple steal-
the ropes. He repeats is sustainable. They are wrong. Per capi m o d it, like peo
the teacher, show her also because ta health Po s t
of post-m o d er n sh g like it
se it’s the chorus but care costs in the United States rose to
I am tired d pretendin
few times mostly becau her problem
over $8,000
e salvatio n ar m y an
g that ther
e
her and wants to see in 2009, and at their present rate of
ing from th eople sayin
he really cares about xt verse is just
increase will
n anyth in g , o r p
ings like fa ct s,
that was good, the ne surpass $16,000 by 2019. Without the
doesn’t mea g as obviously real th
solved.  Ok, while all by his mind passage of
in diffuse
e chick was confused comprehensive health care reform, the
is no such
th in on’t believe
KILLER. In case th he just spat. number of
dichoto m ie s. I d
ecisions. I
gate all the great game uninsured, inflation, unemployment,
gender, and l all my d
games he goes on to ne ht here, but I
bankruptcy
ctures th at co n tro
e, or that
to a great novelist rig rates, taxes, trade deficits, and budget
power stru is subjectiv
I would compare him who’s ever deficits will
that ev er y th in g
pating in a
r anyone in the canon all be increasingly higher than they wou
don’t think ld is partici I believe
actually can’t remembe He explains ld other-
riends o r S ei n fe
anything that baller.  wise be. We have the most expensive
watching F al discourse.
Nor do
written/done/thought say (ey aaaay)”
health care
ri arch that can be
all the right things to in the world, with per capita costs that
hegemonic
, p at itute ‘texts’
that “some girls know t ga-ay-ayme.”
are at least
s or Sein fe ld co n st
down to it, it’s all jus double those of any other country, and
that Friend e-quotes.
BUT “when it comes at sex. That’s yet we live
A ls o, fuck scar
about how he is great shorter, sicker lives than do people in
‘deconstru ct ed .’
Then he explains more the greatest the vast ma-
ally Jason DeRulo is jority of other advanced industrial coun
pretty cool also.  Basic gets laid a lot tries: our
Cicero, but probably infant mortality rate is higher, our life
rhetorician since, like, is shorter, and we experience many mor
expectancy
. 
more so yeah he wins severe, chronic, debilitating illness. Con
e years of
gress must
pass comprehensive health care reform
now so that
millions of jobs and hundreds of billions
in taxes will be saved, so that millions
of dollars infa nt inju stic e
old.
Pea san t Pre dic tio ns
bankruptcies will be prevented, and so
of personal On the fifteenth of July in 1992, I was three years
People like to talk about how the wor that we and sure I wasn’ t hung ry or anyth ing,
ld is going to end— our children and grandchildren may be Instead of making
like global warming, the recession, peak able to live ing about my baby sister, since it
oil, etc. But that’s longer, healthier lives. my mom kept worry
not what’s going to happen. It will be What the fuck? Then again , five
much subtler than   was her first birthday.
me
that. Basically anyone who is a poli
tician, investment Kevin Costa, AM ‘89 years later, she can’t listen to me re-tell the aweso
banker, or who has over $10 mil. in the Doo episo de I just watch ed becau se
bank will be fine. plot of the Scooby
The rest of us will become peasants. Like ng six, and my little broth er was six
, real-deal, third- my sister was turni
world, no hot water, vitamin deficient
, socially immobile months old and needed to be “changed.” You know
peasants. This death of the American
dream is romantic what needs changing? This bullshit system.
though, because soon there will be gent
ry again - and the
two hundred years between 1850 and
2050 when anyone Frig gin ’ Foo d pt. II
could make a buck and feel important
will be scoffed at as EarthBalance is too salty, too yellow, and too
foolish times. spreadable to satisfy the need for butter. Maybe it’s
s
a parody of butter, not sure. Vegans use it on thing C o ll eg e C a
t sh it
but it doesn’t
that are supposed to be fun to eat, Don’t ignore me
when I wave hello
g
make them any tastier. It’s also a piss-poor bakin Fiction I first sem
ester freshman ye
, asshole. Did
substitute.  ing? Now you ju ar mean noth-
L a p to p dge me under th
Losers Ray-Bans as you e guise of your
I sometimes sit on the Faunce
dream of a w pants on, it’s not steps. Put some
Because ther orld in whic that warm. And fu
e is no reaso h I could step I thought that sh ck you, Brown.
more power n to ever use on people in it would be serend
to you; you a laptop in lecture classe this spring. Senior ip itously closed
an entire ye ar e already m cl ass, unless it s wh
ar as a Prose aking more is a compute o use their laptops. social anxiety. No,
year continues to
be laden with
justify shelli P oet or Chee d u ri ng your sum r class, in w seriously, fuck yo
ng out $475 se Expert. B mer internsh hich case: u all. 
celebrity blo 6 p er class to sl u t for everyon ip than I ev
gs or picture ug about in e else, sham er will in
why bother s of lectu e on you: h
coming to cl cats doing hilarious thin re halls checking Faceb ow can you
skateboard ass, you pois gs. It is not ook or sport
accidents th onous turd, only disresp s scores or
your time to at are wildly dis if yo u are just g ec tf ul but flabb
ngue-waggin tracting for oing to wat ergasting:
anything to g students wh ch videos-o
o fast for yo at me about how you o actually w n-mute of
ta g e m
slides that ar u to write it use it to tak ant to learn
Se m in a r Sa bo Because I’ve met hi
e available o
nline is pure
with your g
od-given han
e notes, bec
ause no one
? Don’t was
te ve a cla ss wi th Ca ptain Pretentious? ha ve to o, yo u
your skull at Do you ha if you
the soonest
possible dat
monkey’s-pla
y and anoth
d , and further
, taking note
has ever said
ra l tim es at Br ow n, and I know that m ou th , ju st to
e. er reason w s of lecture and her se ve Captain in the
hy my boot ing desire to punch turn,
should mee have this overwhelm ad yo u no d an d smile and wait your
t .  Inste though,
shut ’im (or ’er) up pe op le di sa gree .  One of these days
civilize d ’s hear-
because that’s how
. An d on e of us is going to have a dean
one of us is going to
burst civilized
e vic ar io us ly th ro ugh this brave, un
Book s 4 Bitch es will liv and the
s that have ing. And all of us ete nt io us , then you are one
Worse than any ‘chick lit’ are instructional books aimed at women for activitie hero. If you don’t kn
ow Ca pt ain Pr
ck up.
nothing to do with being a woman. Highbal ls High Heels: A Girls’ Guide to the Art of
I as k yo u ki ndly to shut the fu
Home Repair Guide are just two example s of this same, and
Cocktails and The Woman’s Hands-O n
to the Idiot’s Guide series. They cut the informa tion
publishing trend that must be related
irration al or empowe red, and present it in a smaller
with aphorisms about feeling either
less useful.
format with a matte cover and zany/soothing photo collages. Less intimidating,

the college hill independent m a r c h 11, 2010


T h r o u g h T HE L o o k i n g GLASS CEILING
Bu rto n’ s F o u rt h - Wav e A l i c e i n w o n d e r l a n d
T im Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (which debuted
March 5) takes the director’s signature darkness as
a lens for Lewis Carroll’s famously warped children’s
classic. Carroll’s psychadelic motifs have no better comple-
ment than 3D technology. The chatty poppy flowers and
effervescent Cheshire Cat are enough to justify your $14.
But Burton’s Alice, with the eponymous maiden played by
Mia Wasikoska, is no moribund Victorian fairy tale.
The beginning of the new Wonderland shows Alice as a
frustrated, bookish girl on the brink of marriage to a rich
Lord meant to keep her from “being a burden” on her re-
cently widowed mother. “If you have an idea,” says her fiancé
during a waltz, “It’s best to keep it to yourself.” If you missed
this Austenian wrinkle last time your read Carroll, it’s because
Burton has added a (rather lengthy) frame to the “Alice falls
down hole; opium ensues” narrative we are familiar with. It
has the advantage of setting an oppressively staid standard for
normality; and its cleverness is the contrast between the live-
action English gardens and the computer-animated world
into which she escapes.
It is when her future mother-in-law (Geraldine James)
is interrogating Alice on her cooking plans among the box
hedges that she sees the (CG) White Rabbit in a waistcoat
darting between the bushes. So she flees the gaze of the Lords
and Ladies, dashes across a field and tumbles into the rabbit
hole.
In Wonderland we get to Burton’s home turf: the universe
of children’s imagination. The recent career retrospective
on his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
showcased the origins of the dark humor undergirding his
most famous movies. The show, which runs until April 26,
devotes some space to films like The Nightmare Before Christ-
mas and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but the heart of
the exhibition lies in pages torn from reams of sketchbooks,
showcasing a psyche forged in the doldrums of suburban
CAHIERS DU CABLE CAR
c’est pas moi, je le jure!
[i t’s not me , I swear!]
Any movie that opens with a ten-year-old hanging him-
self is sort of asking for trouble.
“Oh ho!” you might think, “What about Harold &
Maude? There is a hilarious and finely-crafted movie about
young suicidal thoughts.”
The difference, though, is this: Harold’s suicide attempts
are jokes, merely intended to distress his high-strung mother.
But there’s nothing at all funny about the despair of Léon,
the protagonist of C’est pas moi, je le jure!; he’s legitimately
miserable. Unfortunately, the film’s director and co-writer,
Philippe Falardeau, spoils this strength—the exploration of
depression at such a young age—by drowning it in clichés:
Léon’s despair brought on by his parents’ turbulent marriage;
his relationship with a girl who also has a troubled home life;
the envy and hatred of neighbors who seem to have it all.
When Léon’s mother takes off to Greece—prompting
many baffling references to the Odyssey sprinkled throughout
the script—he deals with his unhappiness by acting like a
little shit. He flashes the finger like it’s a new dance move,
swears incessantly, and breaks into his neighbors’ home to
destroy everything in a jealous frenzy. We’re clearly supposed
to find his antics funny—precocious kid actin’ bad!—and
indeed, many audience members laughed uproariously, but
I found Léon’s unpleasantness far from charming. Who pays
for a muddied carpet and a ruined harpsichord when the
snickering stops?
Ultimately, it’s these unsuccessful attempts at crowd-
pleasing that make this film the hardest to watch. Falardeau’s
super-saturated 1970s colors seem garish instead of lush;
inter-spliced shots of ships on the Mediterranean prompted
eye-rolling rather than appreciation. There may be an artful
way to tell a story about wanting to die when you’ve just
started living, but Falardeau hasn’t found it.
– GB
M a r c h 11, 2010
by nick werle & Nick Greene
ILLUSTRATION BY ISABEL KHOO
California. In these pencil drawings and oil paintings his
grim honesty about the world of adults becomes clear. Bur-
ton’s visual power lies in his ability to condense the painful
normalness of the adult world into caricatures.
Although he got his start drawing signs about city
ordinances for Burbank, CA, Burton seems to be gener-
ally skeptical of social standards. His sketches condense this
suspicion into bodies: love is two sweethearts skewered on
cupid’s arrow. In one pair of paintings, grotesque monsters
feast at a long table; in the other frame, children play below,
between the legs of soberly dressed adults. Alice in Wonder-
land echoes this view, which finds its motivation in equal
parts from childlike wonder and disgust with convention.
Burton characters embody the uglier aspects of human
nature in both the sketchbooks and the Wonderland char-
acters. In a scene where the Mad Hatter (Burton’s favorite
actor, Johnny Depp) dresses the Red Queen in a number
of chapeaux, fawning courtiers praise each and every one:
“You’ve never looked more splendid,” one says of a hat whose
brim flops over the Queen’s face. Her half-yard nose belies
the compliment.
Burton’s most conspicuous addition is a traditional Hol-
lywood plot for what is an essentially plotless novel. His most
conspicuous subtraction is any reference to hallucinogens—
surprising, considering the source material. The film be-
comes a crusade in which Alice must regain her “muchness”
by saving Wonderland from the Sauron-like Queen of Hearts
(Helena Bonham Carter). In this version, Alice is anointed
“Champion” of the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and
must slay the Jabberwocky, which—no longer a mere non-
sense rhyme—has become Alice’s rival, the tool of the evil
Red Queen, and the nemesis of benevolent rule. Her guide
is a mumbly Johnny Depp who aces the role of the Mad
Hatter, but can’t quite overcome his previous personal bests
as Willy Wonka and the immortal Captain Jack Sparrow.
B y G i l l i a n B r a s s i l , K at s t o e f f e l
& Alex Verdolini
journée de la jupe
[skir t day]
In Journée de la jupe, director Jean-Paul Lilienfeld mixes
two familiar genres: the gritty ghetto-schoolkids flick (enjoy-
ing something of a vogue in France lately; cf. Entre les murs
[The Class], winner of the 2008 Palme d’Or at Cannes) and
the classic hostage drama. Isabelle Adjani plays the baby-
faced Sonia Bergerac, lit instructor at a troubled, mostly-
Muslim high school—which is to say, the object of a good
deal of catcalling and all-purpose disdain. She’s besieged, it
seems, on all sides: the students’ treatment of her verges on
the assaultive, and the administration has it in for her, ap-
parently because she insists, against school regulations, on
provoking the students by teaching in a skirt.
She’s just trying to teach a class on seventeenth-century
French theater when two students get into a scuffle and a
handgun falls out of someone’s bag. She seizes it and pro-
ceeds to hold the class hostage. Now, she says—with a copy
of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme in one tremulous hand and a
semiautomatic in the other—she can teach a real class, a
proper class. “Une classe,” she declares in manic sing-song,
“sur Molière.”
The plot is meant to provoke—at points, it’s almost
a white French revenge fantasy—and for a while, it seems
like Lilienfeld might be pushing the envelope in a politically
incorrect and interesting way. But eventually we learn that
Bergerac (whom another character had earlier termed a catho
coincé, an uptight Catholic) is actually Muslim by birth—
just like the kids in her crosshairs.
It’s an easy out. We empathize with both hostages and
hostage-taker, without feeling any conflict of sentiment. The
film still moves, saddens, confuses us, but it’s an unconstruc-
tive confusion, a sadness without traction. It’s possible for an
audience to be moved—and still not change.
– ASV
a rt s | 14
Streamlining the plot is one thing, but Burton goes too far
trying to wrap up the new plotlines so neatly. After emerg-
ing from the rabbit hole—no spoiler alert necessary—Alice
leaves her fiancé on bent knee. But she attracts the attention
of his father, Lord Ascot, a shipping magnate who recently
bought out her late father’s business. He is intrigued by Al-
ice’s idea to begin trading with—you guessed it!—China. In-
stead of a daughter-in-law, he gets an imaginative apprentice.
This exchange, in which Alice’s whacky imagination frees her
from marriage and gets her a job, turns the moral of Alice
in Wonderland into: “Think outside the box; you may get
an Emerging Markets internship.” The last frame is Alice in
a business suit–looking frock on the prow of China-bound
ship. Burton’s visual masterpiece suffers from these final two
minutes. Nothing would have been lost—but much would
have been gained—if Alice in Wonderland had ended in the
brilliant world down the rabbit hole, where Burton’s talents
show best.
______________________________________________
NICK GREENE B’10 and NICK WERLE B ’10
haven’t lost their muchness.
L a belle personne
[T he beautiful person]
Would you like to watch a movie with an intercepted
note, passed in Calculus class, as a major a plot device? Y/N
This is the litmus test for enjoyment of La Belle personne,
Christophe Honoré’s latest Louis Garrel swoon-vehicle.
La Belle personne is loosely based on La Princesse de Clèves
by Madame de Lafayette, a novel of debatable value to France
(Sarkozy vs. Everyone else). La Princesse de Clèves is about
courtly heartache; Honoré’s interpretation takes place at a
Parisian high school. This is actually totally appropriate. La
titular princesse was only fifteen—and high school is the only
place where you can find such abundant angst these days.
Plus, it’s the only place anyone ever reads it.
I think it’s best to watch it as a French version of Twi-
light: expect melodrama, an intolerably beautiful, older male
lead (Louis Garrel) reforming his skirt-chasing (in lieu of
bloodsucking) ways to win the PG-rated love of an ingénue
(Léa Seydoux), burdened equally by her convictions and
her glowering good looks. If you think the Twilight kids are
good-looking, wait ‘til you see their French equivalents. They
have thicker hair, huskier voices. They show their tits.
Most refreshing, La Belle personne is set in Paris, but
Paris, for once, is not a character. Honoré found the outer
arrondissements’ most crumblingly Gothic corners on their
most gouache-overcast days, the better to offset Garrel and
Seydoux’s matching high color and matted black hair. Even
if you titter and groan at the histrionic dialogue and the
campy, impromptu musical number (Just one [1]! This is
a restrained follow-up to Honoré’s 2007 musical Chansons
d’amour), you can’t call it false advertising.
In the grand French tradition of Raymond Queneau: turn
off your critical faculties, call the whole thing an “Exercice de
style,” and enjoy.
–KSS
t h e i n dy. o r g
ART S | 15
CURBSIDE CURATING
A P r ov i d e n c e G r o u p R e i n v e n t s t h e M u s e u m
P h oto g r a p h s b y A n n i e M ac d o n a l d
E veryone on Westminster Street last weekend became
part of a museum. Volunteers distributed stickers
reading “CURRENT EXHIBIT,” and more than
a hundred white labels papered the two blocks between
Dorrance and Union Streets. Most took the cue: dozens of
perusing pedestrians clustered around labels describing the
stories of subjects as diverse as “The Kresge Building,” “Trash
Can,” and “Ted.” Like the museum labels we know, these
made you look again at the objects they described. One label
explained that the tree it was affixed to—a special hybrid of
honey locust and kwanzan cherry—was planted because of
its resistance to urban conditions and could live up to 130
years. Another label pointed your eye upward, to a ceramic
peacock adorning a building’s facade.
This was the Museum of Westminster Street: a project
bringing curatorial practice to a public space. The street
becomes museum, the buildings and people its collection.
Lyra Monteiro, a PhD candidate at Brown, and Andrew
Losowsky, a writer and photographer, created and co-direct
the Museum On Site, an organization that rethinks the pur-
pose and methods of the traditional museum.
The experiment we call museums—buildings open to
the public (not just the itinerant aristocracy) showcasing art,
culture, and history—is still in its infancy. Only in the last
couple hundred years have these institutions existed, and the
Museum On Site wants to remind us there is potential for the
concept to grow outside its traditional walls. This philosophy
can be traced to numerous sources: from the ‘60s performance
art blend of high and low culture to museum education pro-
grams and oral histories. The website for the organization
cites inspiration from projects as diverse as The New York
Times’ “One in 8 million” series, Le Cool’s travel guidebooks,
and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Last century’s
“white cube” model is under attack; its critics are dismantling
and reassembling it on the web and outdoors. The Museum
On Site’s inaugural exhibition in October 2008, A Thou-
sand Ships, commemorated the bicentennial anniversary of
the abolition of the slave trade. They drew on research from
Brown’s Slavery and Justice report, bringing it to those who
wouldn’t otherwise read it. Using Barnaby Evans’s WaterFire
as a staging ground, a hundred people poured water into the
canal, after an African ritual, then walked through the crowd
taking on the personae of historical abolitionist figures. Two
hundred years after slave ships traveled up the same canal, it
became a site for art, celebration, and remembrance.
As with the Westminster project, the idea was to force the
performance-exhibition onto the public, rather than drawing
the public into the space. Monteiro explains that “traditional
humanities presentations tend to happen away from site, and
to intellectualize the content. We want to provoke an intui-
tive reaction first,” which she hopes will inspire the interested
viewer to explore topics further. Losowsky points out that
museum-goers tend to be students or of the upper-middle
class; by using the streets, one offers a free public experience
to a chance audience.
A MODEL MUSEU M
The Museum of Westminster Street started as Westminster
Stories, part of Providence Art Windows; an organization
funded by local and federal arts endowments that transforms
the college hill independent
b y Rya n W o n g
Providence’s empty storefronts into creative spaces. Since people have is, “which building is the museum?”
December 2009, 191 Westminster has displayed a photo- Unlike museum labels, some of those on Westminster
graphic diorama of people and buildings along the street, described objects and buildings no longer present, adding an
along with their stories (the display ends this week, but new historical bent to the project. Monteiro wants to “help people
stories will continue to be posted at themuseumonline.com/ develop a greater sense of ownership” of the street, by equip-
westminsterstories). ping them with history and anecdotes they can share with
A team of about 30 researchers and photographers con- their friends the next time they pass through. For example,
ducted 160 interviews with well-known personalities and the plot of land hosting the museum’s diorama was once the
random passersby. A sort of This American Life for the street, Chin Lee Chinese restaurant, opened in 1914 by a Chinese
the dioramas are organized around themes like “Work,” immigrant. In 1924 he moved to New York and started a
“Love,” “Christmas,” and “Getting Around.” Each week, a restaurant there with a capacity of nearly a thousand.
new set of printed texts float above the cutouts on the street. But the goal here is not to privilege Westminster street
Like the radio show, they value everyone’s story. For example: itself. Monteiro says they didn’t choose the street because
Most days, you can find David writing poetry at a table for any particular quality, but to point out that the project
in Tim Horton’s, on the other side of Dorrance Street. “I could be replicated almost anywhere. That is, the idea of the
have an international following.” He worked in technology street—any normal, busy, downtown walking area—inspires
until 2005, when his $98,000 job went overseas. “I lost my the project. As Losowsky said, “a lot of people ask us why we
home, my job, my marriage. I was homeless for 13 months. do this. My response is, because we want to live in a world
But I’m better off now then I was before. When you have to where things like this happen.”
start over again, you appreciate what you have.” He’s been ______________________________________________
writing poetry for almost 40 years. Ryan Wong B’10 is a Late 20th Century work.
Then there are recognizable figures like “Buddy” (Cianci):
his blurb tell of his childhood memories of streetcars on
Westminster and of his unrealized plans to revitalize the
street as mayor. The window generates a community feel; as
Monteiro points out, “Providence is small. Everyone knows
someone in the window.” She says exclamations like “Hey,
did you see me?” and “There’s my secretary!” are common
by the display.
HITTING THE STREETS
B S R to p t e n
For two days the Museum of Westminster Street took that
6
Gorillaz Andrew Thomas
1
diorama, itself modeled on the street, and magnified it back Plastic Beach Between Buildings and Trees
to life size. The small photos of people became five-foot cut- Parlophone/Virgin Kompakt
outs and the labels 8.5” x 11” sheets. Virtual Hip-Pop Drowned In Sound puts it
A small crowd gathered around Jane, one of the “exhibits” in the realm of “cuckoo
Dez Cordas washy ambient kerfuffle”
2
in the museum with a label around her neck, as she stood
next to her near-life-sized cutout. Asked how she made it Dances Songs Inventions
7
Centaur Broken Social Scene
into the museum, she said “I was just walking down this
Classical Guitar Forgiveness Rock Record
street, and they approached me. I thought, I’ve got time, I’ll Arts and Crafts
just talk to them.” One girl remarked, “You’re like a celeb- Pantha Du Prince Canadian Indie Rock
3
rity now!” This underscored the privilege we grant to the black Noise All-Stars
curated: though she was selected for no other reason than Rough Trade
being in the area one day, we look more closely at her story Ambient Techno Hooray!
8
and her cardboard likeness. The labels parody the formula Daydream EP
Joanna Newsom Self-Released
4
of the plaques that guide visitors through museums. Each
object has a date and “accession number,” the date a building Have One on Me Rock
Drag City
opened, or for people, “Late 20th Century,” along with a
Freak Folk Born Ruffians
9
code like WSM.101. Say It
Though these riffs on museums might raise a smile, they Yeasayer Warp
5
are serious critiques of the staidness of institutions and our Odd Blood Indie rock
assumptions about the cultural value of objects. The logo for Secretly Canadian
the Westminster project literally inverts the Metropolitan Psych Rock Four Tet
10
Museum of Art’s iconic “M.” It’s a telling target for the two There is Love in You
year-old project. The beaux-arts 130 year-old New York Domino
institution claims to house the greatest artistic achievements IDM
of the last 5,000 years, entirely indifferent to the stories of
people on the street.
But it’s difficult to break people of their familiarity with
traditional institutions. Losowsky says a common question
m a r c h 11, 2010

BE A
GOOD SPORT
OPEN LETTERS FROM Beatrice Igne-Bianchi and Sim on van Zuylen- Wood
Dear Pittsburgh Steelrs QB Ben Roethlisberger,
We don’t know whether the latest allegations are true—we’d like to think not—but your
reckless habits are becoming cause for concern. On March 2, the night of your 28th birth-
day—Happy Birthday!—you allegedly raped a 20 year-old student at Georgia College and
State University. Out with a 300 pound trusty offensive lineman Willie Colon and two
bodyguards, you hit the Milledgeville, GA bar scene well protected. Which was not the case
two years ago, when you allegedly raped another woman at a Lake Tahoe Casino. After the
incident, she told a co-worker she was hoping (in vain) for a “Little Roethlisberger,” which
pretty much got you off the hook. I’m sure you haven’t forgotten your other little Over-
Armor mishap either, when you crashed your motorcyle sans helmet in 2006. You do have
the burden of wearing one all year long, so you’re forgiven on that count.
But in 2009, as the autumn trees changed, you too seemed to turn over a new leaf. Yeah,
it was strange to host a WWE Raw event during the season, but at least you brought along
seven offensive linemen, including Colon, as backup. It seemed like a step in the right direc-
tion, so no one wanted to break the news about the whole rigged thing.
You seem like a nice person, but a misguided one. Example #1: The Ben Roethisberger
Fund specializes in training police dogs. That’s fine, but you recently signed an $100 million
contract. You could be the Betty Ford of athlete sex rehab. Example #2: You spend your off-
seasons in Tahoe casinos and Milledgeville beer-holes. The world is your huddle, Ben. Break
it! Even Broadway “I wanna kiss you” Joe Namath is ashamed of you.
At least your thrill-harvesting began after stardom was reached. Shortly after an outstand-
ing performance at the recent NFL combine (where college studs strut their stuff for pro
scouts) it was revealed that Tony Washington, an offensive tackle at Division II Abilene
Christian, in Central Texas, became a registered sex offender at 16 when he had consensual
intercourse with his 15 year-old biological sister.
Big Ben, here’s what the NFL is okay with: fathering many children via many mothers.
Thirty year-old Travis Henry was a productive running back for seven years, with three differ-
ent teams, despite fathering at least eleven children with ten different women. New York Jet
cornerback Antonio Cromarie, at only 24, is on pace to shatter Henry’s pace. Seven children,
six women, five paternity suits.
- SvZ-W
M a r c h 11, 2010
s p o rt s |16
Dear Michael Lewis,
Nice going with the film adaptation of your book, The Blind Side. Everyone is a sucker
for a triumphant sports movie: The Mighty Ducks, Friday Night Lights, Million Dollar Baby
(oops). Who would have ever imagined that the former Miss Congeniality herself would
go on to win the world’s most coveted acting award last week, joining the decorated ranks
of Meryl Streep and Katherine Hepburn. It’s safe to say that there was cause for shock and
awe (the dread with regard to the Academy’s decline), you know, like when Tim McGraw
appeared alongside Bullock on the silver screen. At least to balance it out you opted to use a
bunch of former and current NCAA coaches to give it an authentic touch. They needn’t act
the part.
Lucky for your fans, news that yet another book-cum-blockbuster, Moneyball, about the
Oakland Athletics’ pivotal 2002 season, is finally slated to start filming this summer. We
know Moneyball the movie will make you some money, but it looks like they’re going to
butcher this one worse than The Blind Side. First the guy who directed Marley and Me, then
Steven Soderbergh, walked away from the project. Now Capote director Bennett Miller,
whose only other feature film was also about a real-life narcissist, is all set to direct. The
film doesn’t have any real actors lined up either, besides Brad Pitt (General Manager Billy
Beane) and Jonah Hill (batboy). Just kidding, Hill recently got the nod to play super-scrawny
statistics geek Paul DePodesta.
Michael, one of the similarities between your two sports books/movies, besides their con-
tributing to your bank account, is their focus on very recent stories. To avoid the awkwardness
of fans complaining that the actors look nothing like their real-life counterparts, Soderbergh
had originally picked a lineup former players and coaches, including Moneyball-era A’s like
Scott Hatteberg, Art Howe and Rick Peterson, to play themselves. Now that Miller and new
screenwriter Aaron Sorkin are pinch-hitting, it looks like they might just try to make this
thing a buddy comedy. We know Demetri Martin (previously playing DePodesta) can’t do
much besides mumble with a guitar, but at least he looks exactly like the guy. Which is all
that really matters when it comes to getting your sports flick some Oscar credit. So get Sandra
Bullock’s hair stylist to paint some Grecian 5 on the whole 2002 roster—75 percent of them
are out of work—and get your boys filming already!
-BI-B
t h e i n dy. o r g
l i t e r a ry | 17

POETRY, DA M N IT ALL

T h e B ot to m NU M B ER S
by Abigail Chen
b y Emm e t t F i t z g e r a l d
I IV
You are a grower and am a lone. Not alone.
The bottom grows down, am the man. The sanctity the lintel empty and the head
Curling ribbon am the wolf. And then he
To the base of the bed. am the southern tip of
am tired of nonsense. John— V
Your wrappings am looking for you. Don’t vernacular myths:
(Nest-like around old shoes and tearing carpet) am sleeping in poverty. Tired of if you are forehead slut,
Grip the floor am I am tired. Often am I pimp’s fingers will shrink.
Better than toes.
“Baby, have my fingers gone short-
You are only here, II er?”
Squeezing the open space in position. this boy touching her leg
touching manacles touching VI
her man’s trousers short long This password pushing!
look at the man’s man *************
is the length unbelievable Did you know the memory
legs on that woman has an 8 digit cap cap cap?
like peaches his face like boys
A CERTAIN S LANT O F and girls’ hands likes
touching manacles VII
S UNLIGHT III
man on
one woman no
by Jeff Sanford child and
[text missing] father on
mother no
[believe the figure to be of demi- child and
As Dante lurked in shadow, man lurks, Da- god stature; poss. herakles… tho
guerre lifts his head. Light takes the mountain and we shuffle past so on and on
likely as close to pos. or medu. or
shameful at our kid parts on the grand tour Virgil grants us. Z. … and as for aprho…] VIII
Niépce writes Daguerre a letter about their love of shadow. No How to politely squeeze someone
& out of a subway conversation.
response, no light, no postal service on a sunlit day, which turns life to
silhou-
ette. Each object a fragment of its self. Dort. See above.
                                    There, Cabestan
 
in the dish a paper cut-out. Light falls and breaks items IX
in half. Who’s that? The Great Axe.
                        Put neon in museums, humble glow, the Who’s that? The Negative One.
hum of hunger fever chills. This good life, What’s that? An inanity
life of light, off the mountain, of God my rock. of your inanity.

X
(the end)

And thank god for that

F U S CHIA II ( e xc e r p t )
by Eran Hornick

Do you remember what fuchsia is like?  How it scintillates against a backdrop rampant of
incarnadine luster?  And lacquered symbioses, paneled wood panels, ply upon ply upon
flying through the blue void up above, or black ink-of-pearl backdrop that so valiantly falls,
so reliably envelops every night every evening every dusk of every day of every year.  Like
rain falling through the skach into our harsh soup, illuminating what tears might be reflected
therein, letting us know that nature is a choice given us, that we are a choice given unto
nature, that the outdoors are a window and that we choose to keep it open or closed, to
make love to the world’s beauty, or to curl into the succor of a warm hearth. To flounce, to
bounce, to toss small buckyballs, to slit them open like so many ripe melons, like citrons
or lemons, to pull out the succulent innards and filling meat, skin and bones, seeds, hard
knobby gourdskins and all, and to make rice pudding, cakes, and lakes from its guts.  With
tiny tins of snuff, bottles of coins, girders of loins, sharpened antelope skulls and surging
muscles beneath reflective hide shiny in its multi-layered, saliva-cleaned fur coats; Ahmad
tea, fresh from the resilient grapefields of Arabia, with four thousand and one stories
behind every grape, behind every bee, behind every mind and gnarled hand that so tenderly
touched, with absence of mind and care of heart, the growth of those leaves, those paddies,
those sugarcane upshooting forests.

the college hill independent m a r c h 11, 2010

 THE LIST
FRI 12
6PM How to Conquer America in One Night–Ayiti Cheri Haitian Film
Festival
@ MacMillan 117 // $5 minimum donation–proceeds benefit Partners
in Health
8PM MEME Electronic Improv Ensemble reinterprets Jurassic Park.
Maybe
this time Jeff Goldblum gets eaten @ Grant Recital Hall // free
8PM Three Sisters. Thru March 15 @ PW // free for Brown students
, faculty +
Staff with ID, but too bad, tickets are already sold out
9PM Buffalo Bangers, Living Things, Devil Eyes, Diana Joy, + Amil
Bleckie @
Building XVI // $donate l
tica
N au oon
,
hd M
e Blu ai, + h
s f s
14
y r
te / $5 i
s, W Wa /
N Pu ko, Attic
SU a c k i k s
l M rio u
SAT 13 M B c,
9P ana Hill
a
9AM-10PM Haiti Teach-In @ RISD Chace Center. m @ ing,”
Al ma
n: “ pegg
Full schedule: risdhaiti.wordpress.com // free Ma ussio
6PM How to Conquer America in One Night–Ayiti r disc
Cheri Haitian Film Festival @ MacMillan 117 // $5 T o p ics fo / free r // fr
ee
k
K 2 010. Center / ily Theate Maddoc
minimum donation to Partners in Health W E E e n ’s a m ” @
EX om ck F erparts
t of S le W orma
15
1PM The Agronomist–Ayiti Cheri Haitian Film t e
–par arah Doy @ McC an Coun volum
MON
Festival @ List 120 // $5 donation n 1 0 1 S a e s sive
ap - O ! @ s h id r o p M a
N Str more oko Y
o
its E
u ord. t
3-5PM Community Skating @ Meehan Auditorium,
NOO ecock,” + ing by Ky raphy & ark L Even
235 Hope St. // free, but only come if you have m d g le s ,+M d Music Dark
“ f e m R e a t o b io e e n o w w a r h e
fr K t-For
your own skates PM A ic Au m // Paul $6 y@
T
5:30 M “Arab rian Roo Wittmer/ pire St. // k Feminis nch Bets
7PM On the Verge of a Fever—Haitian Film 0 P r B r it t m P in 8 I
5:3 nte ek, Ger 15 E Paint It Choir, +
Festival @ Salomon 001 // $5 donation ni Ce c 20, 1
Alum issy Spa @ AS2 March–A ns’ Boys
S ls f e
7:30PM Carrie Underwood Live @ Dunkin’ 9PM eme leve Brides o odic, Ath
tr e th
Donuts Center // probably costs a lot of $ at ex eware th athy Ca
B C
PARTY O’CLOCK EMS’s 21st. The theme of the 9PM aphone, St. // $4
party is: A GOOD FUCKING TIME @ Ask where / S e x n o w
w S
, 124
Lady

// $6 rd,
arco
A S220 i’s Am free
16 awin
g@ ellin
ts F the Avon
//
TUE 0PM
L if e Dr presen
Film ovie
@
6-8:3 Brown avorite m
M r ’s f
8P Fost
e
Drew

WED 17
10:30AM A Conversation with Three Literary Editors
who will A your Q’s about the literary publishing world @
McCormac Family Theater // free
7PM “Transgender Inclusion, or Demilitarizing the
Borderlands of the Binary Gender System” A Talk by Emi
Koyama, a multi-issue social justice slut synthesizing feminist, Asian,
survivor, dyke, queer, sex worker, intersex, genderqueer, and crip politics @
Rhode Island Hall 108

THU 18
4PM The State of Brown address with President Simmons.
Will she be rocking the red power suit??? @ Salomon 101
6-8:30PM Annual Friends of Rochambeau Limerick Contest
Awards + Blarney Bash @ Rochambeau Branch Library,
708 Hope St.
8:30PM Sex & the MTV Culture–part of SEX WEEK 2010
@ List 120 // free

Listing by Lola & Margo

Murder of Crows by MATEO