THE

COLLEGE
HILL

THE BROWN/RISD WEEKLY | NOVEMBER 11 2010 | VOLUME XXI ISSUE IX

4 TOUGHER JOB MARKET FOR FELONS

5 BARCELONA SOCCER SCANDAL
6 STIEG LARSSON: IKEA, NAZIS, AND HOLLYWOOD
9 THE INDY ON WIKILEAKS

“they were my brother, my girlfriend, and my

disapproving parents all wrapped in one.”
-p. 14
 The
College
Hill Independent
contents from the editors
then. now.
NEWS interracial marriage. same-sex marriage.
2 Week in review black blood donors. gay or bisexual blood donors.
Eli Schmitt, George A. Warner, Simon van Zuylen-Wood blacks serving in the army. gays serving openly in the army.
9 Seven years of Leaks
Ashton Strait and Emma Whitford
you call me faggot, i’ll hit and break and make your words real. self-inflicted violence as an ultimate signifier. i
want you to see what you mean. the bruises on my body are real. these are manifestations of hatred. they are
METRO
3 Who’s stealing your $$? representative of a civil rights struggle. they are evidence of clear persecution and systematic refusal of equality.
George A. Warner
4 Say no to checking ‘yes’ on crime history when we do it i want to see your eyes. i want to watch your pupils writhe. i’ll see it and i’ll feel it and we’ll do it like
Kayla Rosen no other day, like the best of all. dress up like a fireman and we’ll fuck. my nose buried in your hair, every hair and
inch of skin i’ll deal with. lick your tongue and dine. 999 you. 16 you. 666 you. -RJS
SPORTS
5 FC Barcelona, gone to hell
Harrison Stark

FEATURES
6 Swedish invasion
Margo Irvin

7Bistros, for real

Cerberius S. Wertz

8 Insane computer virus F A L L 2010

Drew Foster and Adrian Randall
MANAGING EDITORS Katie Jennings, Tarah Knaresboro, Eli Schmitt • NEWS Ashton Strait, Emma
OPINIONS Whitford, Jonah Wolf • METRO Maud Doyle, George A. Warner, Simon van Zuylen-Wood • OPINION Mimi
11 Sex? Power? God? Dwyer, Brian Judge • FEATURES Alice Hines, Natalie Jablonski, Marguerite Preston, Adrian Randall • ARTS
Nupur Shridhar and Jonathan Storch
Jordan Carter, Alexandra Corrigan, Erik Font, Natasha Pradhan • SCIENCE Katie Delaney, Nupur Shridhar •
ARTS SPORTS Malcolm Burnley • FOOD Belle Cushing • LITERARY Rebekah Bergman, Charlotte Crowe • X PAGE
1 2 Talking to the Future [Islands] Katie Gui • NEW MEDIA Kate Welsh • LIST Simone Landon, Erin Schikowski, Dayna Tortorici • DESIGN
Erik Font Maija Ekay, Katherine Entis, Mary-Evelyn Farrior, Emily Fishman, Maddy McKay, Liat Werber, Rachel Wex-
1 3 Reflections on reflections on the hipster ler, Joanna Zhang • ILLUSTRATIONS Emily Martin, Robert Sandler • COVER EDITOR Emily Martin • MEGA
Jonah Wolf PORN STAR Raphaela Lipinsky • SENIOR EDITORS Margo Irvin, Simone Landon, Erin Schikowski, Emily
14 Losing it with the Strokes Segal, Dayna Tortorici • STAFF WRITER Zachary Rausnitz, Dan Stump • PHOTOGRAPHY John Fisher •
Gus Wenner
MVP Robert Sandler
LITERARY
1 5 Borders of Compassion COVER ART: Emily Martin
Aliza Kreisman
The College Hill Independent
FOOD PO Box 1930, Brown University
17 Thayer Street’s cone-undrum Providence, RI 02912
Dan Stump
theindy@gmail.com
X Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The College Hill Independent is published weekly during the
18 Robert Sandler and George A. Warner fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

The College Hill Independent receives support from Campus Progress/Center for American Progress.
Campus Progress works to help young people — advocates, activists, journalists, artists — make their voices heard
on issues that matter. Learn more at CampusProgress.org.

as if you care... ephemera

1) The bottom of the boot is raised or embossed with the UGG insignia in a Classic tall or
short Authentic Ugg. A fake is flat.
2) Uggs are Manufactured by Deckers Inc. They have been making them in China for the
past 3 years. The Uggs that are advertised as made in Australia or New Zealand are FAKES.
4) The ones that are fake do not have a raised or embossed insignia on the bottom of the
soles.
7) The quality of the stitching on the fakes is very bad.
10) Fake Uggs do not run a size larger as the real uggs do.
11) Fake Uggs are smaller with a wider ankle.
12) Fake Uggs are taller than real uggs.
13) The heel of a fake Uggs is much narrower than a authentic UGG
14) Some fakes are not sheepskin but wool dyed and will smell of the dye. it smells of
paint/lacquer which comes from the dye used on the synthetic materials.
16) The UGG label on the rear of the boots is higher up on a fake and the lettering is differ-
ent from the genuine Ugg. The letters may have gaps between them in the fake in the real
they are overlapping.
15) The shape of the front part of the fake ugg is shorter and goes up at more of an angel
than the genuine UGG which has a rounder longer finish.
16) The Black Uggs have a black Sole and a Black Label with Ugg in white. The fake have
tan soles and a brown label.
17) The sole in a real ugg is flexible. The fakes are rigid.
18) The sole in a real ugg is about a half inch or more, the sole of a fake ugg is very very
thin maybe 1/4 inch
19) The height can be either taller or shorter than the authentic Ugg.
22)The font of the inside label on a fake is different from a Genuine UGG. The label inside
should say made in China. If it says made in New Zealand or Austraia it is a fake.
24) If the Nightfall is any other color but Chestnut it is a fake. Deckers only makes Night-
fall in Chestnut.
THEINDY.ORG
W E E K IN R EVIEW
by Simon van Zuylen-Wood, Eli Schmitt, and George A. Warner
Graphics by George A. Warner
O B A M A G O E S TO I N D I A
On the heels of an election season de-
fined so much by national mood and
presidential inability to connect, Obama’s
10-day trip to Asia has received a few
grievances regarding “timing.” Instead of
humbly picking up the pieces of his own
broken economy, especially after last
Tuesday’s  “shellacking,” the president
picked up and left town. The common
association of India with cheap labor
further intensified the outcry: outsourc-
ing certainly won’t address unemploy-
ment. The White House announced the
trip would net private sector business
deals worth 50,000 jobs and $10 billion.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich
speculated that the junket was “hastily
rebranded” as a jobs mission to save face.
  But in Mumbai, the timing issues of
Obama’s weekend arrival raised a whole
different set of questions regarding ap-
propriateness. The President arrived on
November 6, the fourth day of Deepavali
or Diwali, the nation’s most important
holiday. The annual five-day festival
celebrates spiritual enlightenment over
evil with ritual lighting of lamps and
gleeful fusillades of firecrackers. Diwali
falls after the Monsoon rains and the
harvest period. The holiday marks the
start of the new business year and usu-
ally signals a weekend of big sales for
city merchants. But police barricades for
Obama’s visit rendered Mumbai’s cen-
tral arteries either clogged or inacces-
sible and many tourist attractions were
cordoned off. The Diwali patron saint
Laksha is the Goddess of Wealth, but the
consumer was unable to play his part.
  A photographer who makes 200 ru-
pees (5 dollars) a day photographing
tourists at the blocked-off Gateway of
India monument said, “my Diwali is
ruined. My meagre savings will be just
enough for my family” to Daily News and
Analysis, an news site based in Mumbai.
A shopkeeper in South Mumbai,
where Obama’s inner circle of 3,000
booked the entire Taj Hotel, closed his
business for the weekend. He told Time
2
News
Magazine, “the last time these roads mir and vouch for a permanent seat for
were so deserted and there were barri- India on the UN security council.
cades all around was during the 26/11   Mumbai’s own paranoiac security
attacks. The attacks caused us big losses, concerns over a 26/11 attack repeat
and this Diwali too there is no business.” spoiled Diwali not only for business
  The decision to land first in Mum- owners but for children. In a show of un-
bai, then to stay in the Taj—which was precedented Grinchdom, the city’s police
bombed in the November 2008 terror- spent a good part of their nighttimes
ist attacks by Pakistan-based radical running around confiscating firecrack-
Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba—was ers from children and banned any loud
meant to “send a message,” according to noise after ten PM, which Time journal-
the President, presumably about having ist Madhur Singh compared to “banning
India’s back, as with his resolve to ad- Christmas trees on Christmas.”
dress systemic border violence in Kash- -SvZW
CIGGGA ARRRE T T TESS
ARE SPOOOOKK Y Y Y
big gay blogosphere picked up Gardere’s
One big problem with smokers, according to the FDA, comments, demanded an apology from
is that they aren’t scared of smoking; dumb smokers. the Doctor, and then quickly received
If they could see their own rotting internal organs, maybe one, proving the incredible power gays
they would cut it out! Filthy smokers; anyways, cool have to control the media.
new FDA plan: NOW THERE WILL BE PICTURES OF The biggest success of the story,
SPOOKY THINGS LIKE YOUR ROTTING INTERNAL though, might be that a Google search of
ORGANS ON CIGARETTE BOXES. REALLY BIG (prob- “my son is gay” now brings up the blog
ably not actual size, unless you have wee little lungs). But post as the first listing. But, just in case
bigger than the warning labels now. There might also be Sarah changes her mind about loving
pictures of kids with inhalers, and actually maybe just her child regardless of his (ambiguous/
straight up corpses. The FDA is currently deciding be- non-)sexuality, another website Google
tween an array of different SPOOKY SCARY labels (you listed, www.bible.ca, shares with parents
can see them on the internet). The new spooky labels the “vaccine to prevent Homosexual-
will be mandated just in time for Halloween next year, ity!” Unfortunately for Sarah and moth-
on October 22. BOO!  ers around the world, homosexuality is
-EJS mainly a father’s problem; the site ex-
plains: “The vaccination for homosexu-
ality is in fact this: Fathers, spend time
with your children and hug and kiss and
cuddle them and show them love and af-
fection!”
Careful to provide a nuanced perspec-
G AY VACC I N E S , G O I N G V I R A L tive, bible.ca does say that some moth-
When Boo, a five-year old boy from Kan- soon featured on both The Today Show ers, “dominant mothers,” can be part of
sas, decided to dress as Daphne from and CNN. the problem. “One of the sociological
Scooby-Doo this Halloween, he learned It can almost be expected that an er- phenomena of our times is the enor-
an important lesson: freedom is not free. rant mom or internet commenter will say mous increase in the dominant role of
His mother paid the price for his might- something nasty, but Dr. Jeff Gardere, a the mother and the renunciation by the
as-well-come-out-now-because-we-all- clinical psychologist and frequent media father of his responsibility to lead,” the
already-know outfit. When he arrived at commentator, took the prize for bone- site elucidates. “Nothing ruins the sexual
school, the other kids loved the outfit. headed comments when he appeared adjustment of children more surely than
Unfortunately, three other mothers did on CNN with Sarah. After defending the an oppressive wife and mother. Such
not, and let Sarah, Boo’s mother, know mothers who bashed Sarah, calling the children build up an intense hostility to-
about it. response a “natural reaction” to seeing ward the opposite sex that either makes
But Sarah made lemonade out of her a five-year-old boy in a Halloween cos- it difficult for them to show love and af-
lemons, blogging about the story. The tume, Gardere explained exactly what fection in marriage or creates a predispo-
blog post—titled “My Son is Gay” but ‘nature’ the reaction was coming from: “I sition toward homosexuality.”
then continuing “or he’s not. I don’t care. have to tell you, I work with many het- In other news, the Great Falls Tribune, of
He is still my son. And he is five.”—went erosexual—as well as gay couples—and the great state of Montana, broke an im-
viral, receiving over a million hits and it is the worst nightmare of both the het- portant story this Monday. “Coming Out
over 30,000 mostly-positive comments. erosexual and the gay couples to have to to Family is a Difficult Decision,” read
Sarah, who has kept the family’s last fathom that their child may be gay,” Gar- the headline.
name and Boo’s real name private, was dere explained. By the end of the day, the -GAW
3 N O V E M B E R 11 2010 T H E C O L L E G E H I L L I N D E P E N D E N T
Metro
C R I M I NA L E N T E R PR I SE S
Wage Violations Grow in
Rhode Island
by George A. Warner
Graphic by Eli Schmitt
W
hen Miriam Medina
took a cleaning job
at the Macy’s de-
partment store in
North Attleboro’s
Emerald Square
Mall last June, it
was out of necessity. When the recession
hit, Medina had to close down the small
daycare center she ran out of her house
for the last seven years. The families she
relied on for business could no longer af-
ford it.
After applying for the job with the
help of a friend who worked there, Me-
dina started working part-time, a total
of 44 hours every two weeks. To log her
hours, she had to make an on-site phone
call to the USI Services Group Inc., an
outside cleaning contractor based in
New Jersey. The pay, Massachusetts’s
state minimum of eight dollars an hour,
was scant, and barely worth it, Medina
says. Working for so little and missing
weekends with her family “was a sacri-
fice,” Medina says through a Spanish in-
terpreter, but it meant food on the table
for her two children.
After a month on the job, Medina
started noticing discrepancies in her pay.
Her second paycheck was missing four
hours. When her third check arrived, it
too was missing four hours. When her
fourth paycheck arrived in August, it was
missing seven hours.
Medina complained to her supervisor,
who at first told her that it was normal—
that misreported hour cuts happened to
everybody—before saying he would look
into it. After nothing happened, she
eventually asked him for the contact in-
formation of the company headquarters
in New Jersey. He refused to give her the
number, so she asked her daughter to
find the phone number on the internet.
Medina called and explained the situa-
tion to the secretary. When she asked to
speak to someone in Human Resources,
the secretary told her that person didn’t
speak Spanish and couldn’t talk to Me-
dina.
By the time Medina quit in mid-Sep-
tember, the company had deducted sev-
enteen hours out from her paychecks.
Medina says she could not keep working
for USI—she had no idea how much—
or how little—she would be paid at the
end of the week. After she told her su-
pervisor she was quitting, her biweekly
check, and her final weekly check, never
arrived. USI Services Group has not re-
turned requests for comment.
Medina took her case to Fuerza Lab-
oral, a Central Falls-based organization
for immigrants and workers that focuses
on combating labor abuse. Fuerza Lab-
oral has tried to help Medina, first get-
ting in touch with USI and now trying
to match her up with a pro bono lawyer.
Despite Fuerza’s efforts, Medina still has
not been paid for 17 hours she alleges
have been cut from her paycheck or for
her last three weeks of work.
E V E RYO N E ’ S D O I N G I T
Medina’s experience is not an anomaly.
Even before the recession hit, wage theft
was a fact of life for the working poor.
Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers, a
study of nearly 5000 low-wage workers
across the country by the National Em-
ployment Law Project of UCLA and the
University of Illinois, found that nearly
70 percent of the respondents reported
experiencing a wage violation within
their last week of work. The data was col-
lected before the brunt of the recession,
in early 2008.
Since the recession hit, reports of
wage theft from across the country sug-
gest the problem is becoming a larger
issue—although there is still little coun-
trywide data. “It’s rampant,” John Phi-
lo, the Legal Director of the Sugar Law
Center for Economic and Social Justice
in Detroit told the Independent. “It’s the
new productivity of the American work-
place.” Philo hears stories of employ-
ers paying regular wages for overtime
hours—or not paying workers overtime
at all—and employers who charge their
workers $30 for ID badges. Often, the vi-
olations “are putting [worker’s salaries]
below minimum wage,” Phillo says.
In Rhode Island, Heiny Maldonado,
an organizer for Fuerza Laboral, says
“it is amazing to see how many hours of
unpaid labor” people who have come to
Fuerza Laboral for help have reported.
While Medina’s case is simple—hours
were simply removed from her pay-
check—Fuerza Laboral has had people
come in for help with many different
types of violations: from being forced
to work through legally required meal
breaks to being forced to pay back their
employers for equipment damaged on
the job. Because the workers are often
already in marginal financial positions,
Maldonado says wage theft means peo-
ple “cannot meet their basic needs.”
Some of the largest and most recog-
nizable cases of theft have come when
large companies abruptly close without
giving their workers the 60-day warn-
ing or severance pay required under the
federal Worker Adjustment and Retrain-
ing Notification (WARN) Act. In Janu-
ary 2009, at the height of the recession,
workers at the Colibri Group, one of
Rhode Island’s most prominent jewelry
manufacturers, showed up to the factory
on the Cranston-Providence border to
find the doors locked.
Two hundred and eighty workers
became unemployed—illegally unem-
ployed—overnight. As Shirley Samayoa,
who had worked at the factory for 27
years, explains, the workers were faced
with three main problems, “We didn’t
get our money, didn’t get our compensa-
tion, [didn’t get] our medical [insurance]
paid, according to the federal law. Every-
thing that should have been done was
not done.”
WAG I N G WA R
With the help of Fuerza Laboral, both
Medina and the Colibri workers have
fought back. Unfortunately, fighting
back is not the norm. Many workers
choose not to speak up, fearing job loss,
hour loss, or wage cuts. The workers who
do report violations to their employ-
ers, Broken Laws found, are often fired,
suspended, or reported to immigration
authorities. Samayoa says that she has
run into a few of the workers who have
stayed out of the action. When she asks
why they have not joined the other work-
ers, many of them say that they fear they
won’t be able to find a job if they speak
up, she says.
On February 4, 2009, a month after
the Colibri factory closed, 250 workers
and supporters showed up at the factory
to protest the handling of the plant clo-
sure. “We began making a lot of noise,”
Samayoa said, referring to a slew of pro-
tests the workers organized and press
they received.
“Even in the beginning,” Samayoa says
the Colibri workers were making a dif-
ference. Workers from other companies
going bankrupt in the recession called
up to thank the Colibri workers, telling
them that “at least [management] called
us in and told us” before the closing, as-
suring the workers that they would get
proper compensation. Samayoa says
the protests made the other companies
think twice about breaking the law.
In May 2009, 180 of the 280 Co-
libri workers filed a class-action lawsuit
against Colibri, Founders Equity, the
New York based private equity firm that
owned the majority stake in the business,
and Phoenix Management, the manage-
ment company in charge of daily opera-
tions. The workers announced the deci-
sion on the steps of Providence’s Federal
Courthouse. For Samayoa, the lawsuit is
simple: “It’s saying we want our money;
it’s time you paid it; you broke the law;
and we’ll take you to court.” But, now
over a year and a half later, the lawsuit is
still at the beginnings of what could be a
long judicial battle. It is unclear whether
Colibri workers will get the pay and ben-
efits.
S E E YO U I N CO U R T
Since the beginning, the ex-Colibri
workers have fought for something larg-
er than their pay. When they announced
the federal lawsuit, they also pushed for
Rhode Island to pass its own legislation,
so that their fight would not need to be
played out by workers from other facto-
ries again in the future.
Enacted in 1988, the Federal Worker
Adjustment and Retraining Notification
(WARN) Act appoints no government
authority to enforce it. To apply the laws,
workers themselves have to file the law-
suit. At the 2009 press conference, Sa-
mayoa said, “It is ridiculous that we have
to sue to get our rights.”
Fuerza Laboral and the Colibri work-
ers hope that a Rhode Island version of
the WARN Act could help. Unlike the
federal version, the Rhode Island law
currently proposed would give author-
ity to the State Department of Labor
and Training to investigate violations
and to bring suits on behalf of workers.
It would also give the workers the right
to recover their wages from the closing
company’s assets, putting them on the
same level as banks. State Representa-
tive Bob DaSilva (D-63) introduced this
legislation last year. But the House La-
bor committee held the bill for further
study, which spelled inaction for the rest
of the session. Representative DaSilva
plans to sponsor the legislation again in
2011, and the measure has already re-
ceived support from the Service Employ-
ees International Union.
Fuerza Laboral hopes two measures
Rep. Grace Diaz (D-11) plans to intro-
duce next year will help people like Me-
dina receive Justice. One will double
or triple the amount of damages work-
ers can seek from companies that steal
their wages and increase the size of
fines Rhode Island can assess companies
found guilt of wage violations. The other
bill would charge companies with larce-
ny if they don’t pay workers after being
found guilty of wage theft by the RI De-
partment of Labor and Training.
Both laws would provide meaningful
penalties for employers. “You only get
accountability when it’s more expensive
to do things the unlawful way.” John
Phillo of the Sugar Law Center says.
From his perspective, the state WARN
Act does not go far enough. “That is the
same exact amount they would have to
pay anyways,” he says. “For your bad
faith employers, it is pretty easy to say,
‘Well, I’ll just wait and see if anybody
does sue.”
But, Heiny Maldonado and Fuerza
Laboral know counting on potential leg-
islation is not enough. In the near future,
wage theft and labor violations need to
be combated with support for workers
and legal action. “If we stay quiet, it’s go-
ing to continue,” Medina says. “I’m not
afraid because I’m not stealing. I’m fight-
ing for what I’m owed.”
GEORGE A. WARNER B’10.5 is just
going to wait and see if anyone does sue.
THEINDY.ORG
A N
B
TO
ME
TI
A t age eighteen,
ExFelonGirl—who
prefers to remain
anonymous on her
personal blog www.
exfelongirl.com—
met her father for
the first time. Three
weeks later, he died of cancer. ExFelon-
Girl writes, “everything around me
seemed to spiral out of control. I had
a lot of anger toward my mother.” She
began to slowly self-destruct, skipping
her job and ignoring her college work.
When her mother received a check from
her father’s widow, ExFelonGirl felt en-
titled to the money, and forged a $4000
check from her mother’s checkbook so
she could “run away with her problems.”
When the bank discovered the fraud, it
demanded that either her mother press
charges or the bank would. Her mother
contacted the police, and ExFelonGirl
was soon arrested and pleaded guilty to
fraud.
Today, after thirty days in jail, $4000
in restitution fees, and a three-year pro-
bation sentence (of which she still has
one year left to serve), ExFelonGirl is
trying to rebuild her life. Before begin-
ning online classes from the Grand Can-
yon University in October, ExFelonGirl
began looking for jobs, which as it turns
out, is no easy feat for an ex-felon. Every
time she applies for a job in her home
state of South Carolina, there is that
one, unavoidable dreaded box: Have you
ever been convicted of a felony? Yes or
No. No room for explanation.
B OX I N G YO U I N
ExFelonGirl isn’t alone. Approximately
25 percent of American adults have a
criminal history, and every year another
600,000 to 700,000 state prison inmates
and 9 million county jail inmates are re-
leased, according to the National Reen-
try Resource Center. Due to the financial
burden of prisons and prison overcrowd-
ing, many states, including California,
Michigan, and Rhode Island, are releas-
ing prisoners before their sentences are
over. However, as Bruce Scottus Reilly,
an ex-convict and author of NewJack’s
Guide to the Big House, an insider’s
guide to surviving prison, says “the av-
erage prisoner is released with money
ranging from flat broke to  $1000, and
needs to know where their food will
H E BOX?
T Removing the Criminal
come from when that money runs out.”
To reenter society, ex-convicts need jobs.
Yet that tiny box on nearly every job
application leads to a dreary, sometimes
hopeless employment climate. Often,
when an employer sees the box checked
“yes,” they will immediately throw out
the application without inquiring into
the nature of the crime. Galen Clagett,
a state delegate on the Maryland House
Appropriations Committee and small
business owner, said in an interview
with ABC News that the box can be a
useful screening tool for employers to
streamline the hiring process by elimi-
nating candidates they would not hire
anyway. However, for ex-convicts trying
to assimilate back into the world outside
prison, the box inhibits forward prog-
ress. Currently, less than 50 percent of
recently released ex-convicts find jobs.
Studies conducted by the National Re-
entry Resource Center have shown that
ex-convicts who explain their prior con-
victions in person have a much higher
chance of being hired.
B OX I N A B OX
Because of the growing number of
ex-convicts, several grassroots orga-
nizations, such as All of Us or None of
Us based in Oakland, California, have
sprung up around the nation to ban the
box on job applications. Their purpose
is not to eliminate criminal background
checks or hide criminal histories from
employers, but merely to ban the ques-
tion on all initial applications. In this
way, qualified ex-convicts will be fairly
considered and thus have a better chance
of landing the job.
The Ban the Box movement has been
successful in enacting legislation in Ha-
waii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New
Mexico, and Minnesota, as well as over
two dozen counties and cities, including
Providence, Rhode Island. In 2009, the
Providence Human Resources Depart-
ment removed the question regarding
criminal background from their paper
and online applications. An applicant
now has to sign a waiver allowing a back-
ground check after they have been deter-
mined to have the minimum qualifica-
History Question from
Initial Job Applications
by Kayla Rosen
Illustration by
Elizabeth Filth
tions for the position.
The specifics of Ban the Box legisla-
tion varies by state and county; so far
only Massachusetts and Hawaii have
required that private employers remove
the box, while the other states passed
legislation applying the ban to state job
applications and businesses that have
contracts with the state. With such a
measure in place, employers could in-
quire about criminal history after inter-
viewing the candidate or offering a con-
ditional job, but not before.
Studies have shown that securing a
job is a critical factor in keeping ex-con-
victs from returning to prison. LaResse
Harvey, the director of criminal justice
reform advocate group A Better Way
Connecticut, said in an interview with
the New Haven Advocate “a person with
a job is not out there getting involved in
crime just to sustain a family or his or
her own livelihood.” In the first six years
after Hawaii passed Ban the Box legisla-
tion, the recidivism rate, or repeat-of-
fense rate, dropped from 63.3 percent to
52.5 percent. Ban the Box legislation has
already proved to correlate with, if not
cause, decreased recidivism rates.
B OX O N B OX O F F
Pending legislation in Rhode Island
would make it the sixth state to enact
some form of Ban the Box law. In April,
2010, State Representative Scott Slater
(D-Providence) introduced a Ban the Box
bill in which state employers and busi-
ness that contract with the state would
be required to remove the box from their
initial applications. Employers may or-
der a background check if the candidate
is otherwise qualified for the job and the
position is of a sensitive nature, such as
working with the sick, elderly, or chil-
dren. Hiring decisions must take into
account the nature, severity, relevance,
and number of crimes as well as the age
of the offender when the crimes were
committed. The bill has been stalled in
the House Finance committee since its
introduction.
Opponents of the legislation say that
Ban the Box would make hiring process-
es slower and less cost-effective by re-
4
Metro
quiring more interviews and paperwork
for candidates employers will ultimately
not hire. Besides, the measures are re-
dundant because of preexisting anti-
discrimination laws that ban employers
from blanket job discrimination against
all criminals based solely on their ex-
convict status. Opponents also argue
that the legislation unfairly allows crimi-
nals to apply for jobs on an equal playing
field with other applicants.
Proponents of Ban the Box say that
current laws are not sufficient to aid ex-
convicts searching for jobs and that the
measures will benefit the larger commu-
nity as well as ex-convicts. If recidivism
rates decrease, then the prison system
will have fewer inmates and the cost of
maintaining prisons will decrease. Cur-
rently, Rhode Island spends $185 mil-
lion per year on prisons, or $50,516 for
each of the state’s 3674 inmates, which
is 43 percent more per inmate than the
national average. Also, since ex-convicts
are disproportionately African Ameri-
can, Ban the Box could help break the
crime cycle in the African American
community and enabel young, ex-con-
vict males to be rehabilitated.
The Ban the Box argument—which is
now being seriously considered in New
Jersey, Michigan, Nebraska, and Rhode
Island — is a microcosm of the larger
theoretical debate regarding the overall
purpose of the criminal justice system:
punishment or rehabilitation. This ongo-
ing debate over what the system should
strive to achieve manifests itself in hot-
button issues such as the death penalty,
parole, drug addiction, and now Ban the
Box. Legislators grappling with Ban the
Box decide whether criminals should
continue to be penalized after their sen-
tences are over with continual rejection
from jobs or should be aided in their re-
entry into society.
For ExFelonGirl, at least, the hori-
zon is brightening as she was recently
offered a part-time position at Lane
Bryant. When handing in her paper ap-
plication, ExFelonGirl was asked for an
impromptu interview. After the “fantas-
tic interview,” ExFelonGirl writes, the
manager told her “she wanted to hire
[ExFelonGirl] on the spot.” Personal con-
tact made all the difference.
K AYLA ROSEN B’14 opened a Pan-
dora’s Box...
5 N O V E M B E R 11 2010 T H E C O L L E G E H I L L I N D E P E N D E N T
Sports
B A RC E LONA BE T R AY E D
Did the planet’s favorite sports team make a pact with the devil?
T hat’s what many FC
Barcelona fans are
beginning to wonder.
Soccer club FC Bar-
celona is the world’s
most popular team
playing the world’s most popular sport.
Because of its artistic style of play, and its
history of opposition to Spain’s centralist
government, FC Barcelona has become a
global icon—a symbol of international
sporting success merged seamlessly with
good-guy corporate conscience. For its
entire history, FC Barcelona (or ‘Barca’
as it is affectionately known) has de-
fined itself as the ‘other’—an alternative
to corporate spending and bullying as
epitomized by its historical archrival and
political enemy—Real Madrid CF. But
although the team has long stayed true
to its anti-establishment roots, defining
itself by everything Madrid is not, the
club’s recent financial behavior has been
suspiciously close to that of its counter-
part. FC Barcelona’s popularity makes it
more of a religion than a sports team; if
it is truly abandoning its counter-cultur-
al principles—as it seems to be—then
the problem dwarfs Spanish soccer. The
planet will need a new role model.
N O B O LO G N A , C ATA LO N I A
For at least the past century, Catalonia
has struggled to define a cultural iden-
tity distinct from the rest of Spain, and
some have even called for the region to
become its own sovereign nation. Un-
surprisingly, moves for Catalan auton-
omy have found resistence from Spain’s
central government—and particularly
from those in Madrid. Since its founda-
tion in 1899, FC Barcelona has been a
political symbol for Catalan identity. The
club’s official motto is ‘mes que une club’
—“more than a club.” Spanish novelist
and Barcelona native Manuel Vazquez
Montalban once called the team’s sup-
porters “the unarmed army of Catalo-
nia.” The club’s official crest contains the
flag of Catalonia, and there have been
attempts to conduct all official club busi-
ness in Catalan. The last club president
was elected because he was a founding
member of a Catalan secessionist group.
When Catalan symbols were banned
under an oppressive Spanish centralist
government for much of the 20th centu-
ry, Barca became a counter-cultural sym-
bol in much of Spain, embodying a Cata-
lan identity and therefore a challenge to
dictatorial rule. Under General Francisco
Franco’s regime, FC Barcelona’s players
and coaches continued to speak Catalan
during its matches and fans waved the
banned Catalan flag. FC Barcelona was
the only team in the country to match up
to Franco’s beloved Real Madrid during
the Spanish Cup, beating them 3-0. Af-
ter the match, Franco’s Chief of the Se-
cret Police supposedly entered the locker
room and told the team “you are only
playing because of the generosity of the
regime that has forgiven you for your lack
of patriotism.” FC Barcelona, fearing the
safety of its players, lost the next match
to Madrid 11-1, but were hailed as resis-
tance heroes throughout the country.
Even today, flaunting Catalan au-
tonomy and harboring an obligatory ha-
tred of Real Madrid are integral parts of
the club’s identity. But it’s on the field,
rather than in the club’s political offices,
where this is most evident. The team,
for as long as anyone can remember, has
played its own unique brand of soccer—
a supposed embodiment of the city’s ar-
tistic nature. Sports writer Simon Kuper
one wrote that FC Barcelona performs “a
dance in space.” Barca plays a fluid, dy-
namic style of soccer, inspired by Dutch
visionary Johan Cruyff ’s ‘totaalvoet-
bal’ or ‘total football’ from the 1970s,
where players often switch positions and
spread the ball around the field as much
as possible. With its short passes and
intricate runs, FC Barcelona dominates
possession of the ball, starving other
teams. The result is a style is dominant
but appears effortless.
Former Barcelona midfielder Yaya
Toure described the club’s style of play
as an artistic and political performance:
“The most important thing at Barca is
the kind of football we play, beautiful
football…it’s football for the people.”
The manager, Pep Guardiola (picture Bill
Belichick 150 pounds lighter in an Ar-
mani suit), said before the 2009 Cham-
pions League Final—the biggest match
in European club soccer—that he didn’t
care about the result; instead, he told the
media, “I want the players to feel beauti-
ful.” Whereas most managers spend the
hours before a big game preparing their
team’s tactics, conditioning players, or
finalizing the lineup, Guardiola showed
his team an inspirational film about the
Catalan history of the team. The result?
Barcelona walked away with the title,
upsetting the defending tournament
champions Manchester United, 2-0.
YO U C A N ’ T B U Y C H A R AC T E R
In contrast to many of the other big-
spending teams in Europe, FC Barcelona
claims to have raise, not buy, its players,
and in doing so have instilled in them a
sense of Catalan identity. The club trains
players—brought in from all corners of
the globe at an early age—at its prolific
youth academy, ‘La Masia,’ where a pat-
ented Barca brand is taught: quick, fluid,
attacking football. Andrés Iniesta, a mid-
fielder for Spain’s 2010 World Cup win-
ning team, recalls the mantra drilled into
him since he was a kid: “Receive, pass,
offer, receive, pass, offer.” Although not
from Catalonia, he is nicknamed “the
anti-Madridista.” A quick glance at the
rest of Spain’s World Cup roster reveals
a host of Masia graduates: Xavi, Gerard
Pique, Carlos Puyol, and Cesc Fabregas.
Barca’s talismanic Lionel Messi, who
is widely considered the best player in
the world, arrived there from Argentina
at the age of 12. (As former Barcelona
president Joan Laporta put it: “Madrid
buys European Footballers of the Year—
we make them.”) Messi, although he
plays for the Argentina national team,
has been accused by his native press for
being more Catalan than Argentine.
Barca has since cultivated its good-
guy status. Drew Carey, who owns
the Major League Soccer team Seattle
Sounders, said, “what they represent to
me is that rebelliousness and [the will-
ingness] to keep fighting against the
man. Their whole history attracted me.”
Earlier this year, a member of Kosovo’s
parliament welcomed a soccer training
camp run by Barcelona because the team
“stood for independence.” Unlike almost
every other soccer team in Europe, FC
Barcelona refused to print a corporate
sponsor on its shirts. Today, the team
wears the UNICEF logo for free. The club
also claims to be leading the global fight
against racism in soccer. If they weren’t
already topping the karma rankings,
Pope John Paul II was an official, fee-
paying member of the fan club.
Due to the team’s alternative image
and unique style of play, FC Barcelona
has achieved an unparalleled popular-
ity. Through ex-pat FC Barcelona fan
clubs and the club’s official member-
ship list, it is estimated that the team
has over 45 million fans world-wide, a
number slightly less than the population
of Spain, making it the most supported
sports team on the planet. The club’s
museum, housed in its stadium, draws
significantly more visitors the Picasso
museum across town.
UNHOLIER THAN THOU
Although it would make a supporter
shudder, today there are more similari-
ties than differences between Real Ma-
drid and FC Barcelona. As a pair, they
are the two richest clubs in Spain, and
amass extraordinary wealth at the ex-
pense of the league’s other 18 teams
through exploitative television deals.
The Spanish soccer league, “La Liga,”
allows each team to negotiate its own
TV deal, negotiating how much will be
earned for broadcasting rights and com-
mercial breaks. In theory it sounds like
a fair idea, but Real Madrid and FC Bar-
celona—because of their global popular-
ity—share over half of the league’s total
revenue, a whopping 260 million euros
(no wonder Barca doesn’t need that shirt
sponsor). The third richest team, Sevilla
FC, has a budget not even a quarter of
that of Barca or Madrid.
La Liga’s gross financial inequality
has given way to an unequal distribution
of talent on the field, creating an un-
holy perpetual cycle: the top two teams
dominate the standings, re-invest their
higher revenues, and continue to expand
the discrepancy of spending power—
Madrid by buying the world’s best play-
by Harrison Stark
ers from other teams, Barca by pouring
more money into its already uber-prolific
youth academy. Last year, Barcelona won
the league and Madrid came in second;
the third place team, Valencia CF, fin-
ished 25 points behind Madrid, closer to
the rock-bottom team than to the team
above it.
Recently, the other 18 teams in La
Liga have publicly revolted, demanding
a new league structure that provides a
fairer system of support. Meetings dur-
ing the past month between all teams in
the top two tiers of Spanish soccer have
proposed a collective television package
for all teams, which is the way every oth-
er league in Europe operates.
In order to squash an uprising from
La Liga’s lesser-knowns, Barcelona and
Real Madrid have effectively joined forc-
es for the first time ever. To preserve
their stranglehold on Spanish soccer,
Barcelona and Real Madrid have appar-
ently been unwilling to approve a truly
collective deal for the league. Progress of
any kind has been at a crawl: the latest
proposed deal still had Barca and Madrid
keeping 34% of the league’s money. The
lawyer for the case is at a loss, having
told reporters in what may be the quote
of the year: “We hope to get an agree-
ment. But it’s very complicated: it’s like
cutting up a cured ham among 42 peo-
ple.”
Because of their unwillingness to
negotiate, for the first time some are
discussing FC Barcelona and Real Ma-
drid in the same breadth—equating the
two. Calling attention to the parallels
between the “big two,” some have called
for smaller teams to overthrow the Bar-
celona-Madrid dynasty directly. Sevilla
FC’s chairman Jose Maria del Nido sug-
gested an out-right revolt: “the other
eighteen clubs should get together and
kick Barcelona and Madrid out,” he said
in the first week of November. “Let them
go and play in France or Portugal.” Fer-
nando Roid, the president of Villarreal,
another team in the league, seemed to
summarize the feelings of many when he
remarked “[Barca and Madrid] seem an-
noyed at the prospect of us getting even
half rich; they think it’s in their interests
to keep us poor.”
FC Barcelona is currently the most
successful soccer team on the planet. In
2009, it won more trophies than any club
had ever won in a year. It contains more
World Cup winners than any other team.
Its international fan club exists in every
country in the world. And yet, Barca’s
popularity may not stem so much from
its soccer dominance, but from its anti-
corporate stance—its message of social
good and counter-cultural politics. If FC
Barcelona abandons these principles,
soccer—the world’s religion—may be in
need of a new god.
HARRISON STARK B’11 is an intra-
mural hero.
THEINDY.ORG
T H E GIR L W HO S AT IN
THE VERKSAM CHAIR
Hollywood, translation, and
the Scandinavian imaginary
by Margo Irvin
Illustration by Katherine Entis
H
ollywood movies account for
63 percent of international
box office sales—but in the US,
foreign-language films repre-
sent less than one percent of
the domestic box office. Perhaps
this as much a case of American
isolationism as it is a mere reluctance to tire our eyes
reading subtitles. Nonetheless, since 1980, only 24
foreign-language films have grossed over $10 million in
the US. The farthest down on that list, in 24th place, is
the Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,
which so far has brought in $10,084,273 in US ticket
sales (internationally, the film has grossed nearly $100
million).
In all likelihood, the forthcoming Hollywood block-
buster version of Dragon Tattoo, directed by David
Fincher, will gross at least that much in its opening
weekend—The Social Network, Fincher’s most recent
film, debuted at $22,445,653. The astronomical success
of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy (The Dragon Tattoo
book and its sequels, The Girl Who Played with Fire and
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest) coupled with the
muscle of the Hollywood marketing machine virtually
ensure that Fincher’s version of The Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo will eclipse its Swedish predecessor. But rather
than Americanizing Larsson’s books, Fincher’s remake
of the film will be set in Sweden: his actors had to per-
fect their Swedish accents and crews are filming on lo-
cation in Stockholm. One thing that attracts American
audiences to the Millennium series is, in fact, its very
Swedishness, and Fincher’s film will continue to pro-
voke the American consumer’s fascination with the
Scandinavian exotic—a fascination that begs scrutiny.
H O L LY WO O D I Z AT I O N
Larsson’s Millennium trilogy became an international
publishing phenomenon when the books were released
after his sudden death in 2004, selling over 45 mil-
lion copies worldwide. In the US, the novels have gone
through almost 200 printings, a huge number by any
standard, but especially for a work in translation. The
second installment of the series, The Girl Who Played
with Fire, was the first book in translation to debut at
the top of the New York Times bestseller list in 25 years.
Only three percent of books published in the US
were originally written in another language. In western
Europe and Latin America, that number is between 25
and 40 percent. In her recent book Why Translation
Matters, Edith Grossman tries to understand why Eng-
lish-language publishers resist publishing translations.
“The market-driven publishing industry,” she writes,
“seems to be caught up in a chicken-and-egg conun-
drum: is a limited readership for translations the rea-
son so few are published in the Anglophone world, or is
that readership limited because English-language pub-
lishers provide their readers with so few translations?”
Larsson’s novels did not find immediate success out-
side of Sweden; after causing a brief stir when they were
published by Random House in Germany, they only
started making the rounds on bestseller lists when the
independent press Actes Sud published them in France
in early 2008. Editor Christopher MacLehose acquired
the rights in England. He’s also the one who jettisoned
the Swedish title—Män som hatar kvinnor, “Men Who
Hate Women”—in favor of the more anodyne Girl with
the Dragon Tattoo. Steven T. Murray, who translated
Larsson’s books into English, accuses MacLehose of
changing the translation without his permission—in
fact, Murray was so dissatisfied with the way the trans-
lation came out that he opted to publish it under a
pseudonym, Reg Keeland. Nonetheless, Murray hasn’t
exactly shied away from Larsson’s limelight: these days,
Murray’s blog (reg-stieglarssonsenglishtranslator.
blogspot.com) has the subtitle “Comments and ques-
tions about translation of Swedish, German, Danish,
and Norwegian crime fiction as well as ‘real’ literature.”
The US market for foreign films, like that for books
in translation, is limited. Aside from a few notable ex-
ceptions (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Life Is Beauti-
ful), foreign-language films tend to be relegated to art-
house, indie-flick status. And when foreign film do reach
the American mainstream, it’s as English-language
remakes which erase the foreignness of their origins:
The Ring, for example, an adaptation of the Japanese
film Ringu, is set in Seattle, not Tokyo. Moreover, the
English-language remake of The Ring grossed over twice
as much in Japan as the original Ringu had. The recent
Steve Carell screwball comedy Dinner for Schmucks is a
remake of the French film The Dinner Game; No Reserva-
tions, an adaptation of the German Mostly Martha; The
Magnificent Seven takes after Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.
Fincher’s remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,
however, deviates from this domesticating formula. In
the novels, as well as in the forthcoming Hollywood
films, the not-so-silent presence of the welfare state
gives consequence to the detective-novel content of
torture porn and chase scenes. The Swedishness of the
Millennium trilogy is, in a way, Larsson’s calling card,
and to efface the books’ Scandinavian identity in the
films would be to reduce them to run-of-the-mill crime
novels.
I K E A F I C AT I O N
When we think about Sweden, we think about a Europe-
an welfare state, whose gentle hand proffers prosperity,
gender equality, and plenty of vacation time. Although
Swedes pay high taxes, under the ‘Nordic model,’ the
state provides comprehensive universal health care,
paid maternity and paternity leave, and other social
programs. Especially in the midst of a recession, Ameri-
can consumers are captivated by this illusion of pseudo-
socialist bliss and order. IKEA, the consummate global
commodity lifestyle brand, is perhaps the most iconic
signifier of an idealized Swedishness.
Larsson’s books perpetuate the myth that all Swedes
drive Volvos and shop at IKEA. In a passage from The
Girl Who Played with Fire that in its utter banality is al-
most poetic, Larsson narrates his protagonist’s trip to
IKEA in excruciating detail:
“She drove to IKEA at Kungens Kurva and spent three
hours browsing through the merchandise, writing
down the item numbers she needed. She made a few
quick decisions. She bought two Karlanda sofas with
sand colored upholstery, five Poäng armchairs, two
round side tables of clear lacquered birch, a Svansbo
coffee table, and several Lack occasional tables. From
the storage department she ordered two Ivar combina-
tion storage units and two Bonde bookshelves, a TV
stand, and a Magiker unit with doors. She settled on
a Pax Nexus three-door wardrobe and two small Malm
bureaus. She spent a long time selecting a bed, and de-
cided on a Hemnes bed from with mattress and bedside
table. To be on the safe side, she also bought a Lilleham-
6
Features
mer bed to put in the spare room.”
He continues in this vein for seven paragraphs.
IKEA has a place in the American cultural imaginary
as the benevolent “anti–Wal-mart,” as The Atlantic
phrased it. And when IKEA shows up in American pop
culture, it is a legible referent, a marker of aspirational
consumerism. Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-
Levitt play house in IKEA in (500) Days of Summer;
Jimmy McNulty gets too frustrated to put together an
IKEA bunk bed for the weekends he has custody of his
kids in The Wire. Fincher exploited this trope before in
his 1999 film Fight Club. In one scene, Edward Norton’s
apartment turns into the IKEA catalogue, as he sits on
the toilet ordering dust ruffles and lamenting the de-
cline of masculine agency in late capitalism: “Like so
many others, I had become a slave to the lKEA nest-
ing instinct…. I’d flip through catalogues and wonder,
‘What kind of dining set defines me as a person?’”
IKEA’s marketing scratches the mainstream Ameri-
can’s consumerist itch: infinite particleboard shelv-
ing units with alluringly unpronounceable names, a
floor plan that leads the shopper in circles and makes
it impossible not to find something she didn’t know
she needed. And IKEA’s charming Nordic exoticness—
Swedish meatballs, lingonberry jam, the blue and yel-
low of the Swedish flag, umlauts—almost obscures the
fact that it is, in fact, a multi-billion dollar corporation,
one whose finances are tied up in a shady chain of com-
panies, including a tax-exempt Dutch non-profit.
This October, IKEA released its earnings report pub-
licly for the first time since it was founded in 1943.
IKEA has faced additional scrutiny since a bribery scan-
dal and last year’s publication of The Truth About IKEA,
a tell-all by founder Ingvar Kamprad’s former personal
assistant (yet to be translated into English) that levies
charges of racism, chauvinism, and environmentally
destructive practices against the company, and revisits
Kamprad’s involvement in the Swedish Nazi party. Like
IKEA’s Kamprad, the villainous industry magnate in
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo turns out to have been
involved with Nazis in his youth. Larsson, who devoted
his life to exposing government corruption and ex-
tremist right-wing groups by no means abandons that
tendency in his novels.
In Larsson’s books, the suggestion that there is
something rotten in the Swedish welfare state un-
dermines the fairy tale of an idealized Scandinavian
imaginary—and provides the tension that makes the
Millennium trilogy compelling. For American viewers,
signifiers of Scandinavia romanticize and exoticize
the Sweden of our cultural imaginary—clean, well de-
signed, prosperous, IKEAfied—even as Larsson’s crime
drama suggests a dirty underbelly of corruption and
vice.
The consumer-friendly ‘Sweden’—a semi-domes-
ticated otherness that Americans can purchase in the
form of Billy bookshelves or Larsson’s paperbacks—is
seductive. America’s fetishized Sweden finds a place
in our low-budget living rooms and Kindles, even as
other—and perhaps more provocative—foreign titles
rarely break the best-seller’s list. The foreignness that
American moviegoers, book-buyers, and furniture-
shoppers choose to consume nevertheless belies a de-
sire for familiarity.
MARGO IRVIN B’10.5’s personal hell is being lost in
IKEA. Forever.
7 N O V E M B E R 11 2010 T H E C O L L E G E H I L L I N D E P E N D E N T
Features
T HE A M E R IC A N
BI ST RO
Authenticity versus
nostalgia in NY’s
Meatpacking District
by Cerberius S. Wertz
Illustration by Adela Wu
T he day starts in the
dark at the edges of
Manhattan’s once-in-
famous Meatpacking
District on the Lower
West Side. At four AM,
trucks unload their bloody cargo into
low-rise brick buildings, as they have for
decades. These few remaining refriger-
ated warehouses on Washington street
face Andre Balazs’ enormous new Stan-
dard Hotel—fourteen stories of clear
glass on multi-story concrete pilings. The
rooms are famous for their exhibitionist
tenants whose unorthodox sexual activi-
ties are visible for miles.
B LT S A N D E S C A R G OT
Around the corner, 69 Gansevoort Street
(two stories) formerly housed Restau-
rant Florent, which closed in June 2008
after nearly 23 years in business. Florent
Morellet, the man behind the downtown
legend, came to New York from Paris
in 1978, from what he calls Bumfuck,
France (which appears on most maps
as Cholet). “When I grew up I wanted
to kill myself every Sunday because
nothing happened,” Morellet told New
York Magazine just before his restaurant
closed. “So I moved to Paris, but you
know what? Paris is awful! … It is always
gray, it is always the same. So I came to
New York for the reason everyone comes
to New York, because it is the city of
changes. People forget this is what they
love about New York. They get old, they
get grumpy. They get … nostalgic.”
Restaurant Florent opened in 1986,
when the Meatpacking District still
stank from bovine sides hanging be-
neath corrugated tin awnings. Morellet,
affectionately known as the Queen of
the Meatpacking District, reinvigorated
the neighborhood almost single-hand-
edly—drawing outsiders with his restau-
rant and battling politicians over crime
and drugs. Florent was populated by the
marginalized—slaughterhouse workers,
artists, truckers, transvestites, prosti-
tutes, party kids at who frequented bars
with less-than-subtle names like Man-
hole and Mineshaft. Florent at 4 AM was
dinner and a show. Even up to the mo-
ment the restaurant closed, men in blue
dresses danced in front of the Formica
counter.
Florent embraced the American diner
that had previously occupied the space
and then re-conceptualized it. Host-
esses with beehives served sweetbreads
to people sitting under maps of imagi-
nary places. Morellet retained the for-
mer Greek eatery’s Formica counter and
quilted, chrome-plated walls, then added
a red vinyl banquette along one wall in
the style of French brasseries. He served
an idiosyncratic menu of BLTs and escar-
got, boudin noir and hamburgers.
Above the counter, the servers made
up ever-changing lists. In 1991 or ’92,
a list of taboos cautioned against wear-
ing white shoes to the Lure, a nearby
leather club. In 1999, predictions for
the New Year included, “The Internet is
a hoax,” and “Martha Stewart is a Man.”
In 2005, “abolish Congress” appeared on
the spring To-Do list. Below the lists, a
row of numbers tracked Morellet’s T-
cell count since he had been diagnosed
with HIV in 1987. Restaurant Florent
was personal, the regulars knew Morel-
let and each other, the staff knew the
whole neighborhood; it was integrally
connected to the Meatpacking’s mash-
up landscape.
New York City “belongs to no one,”
Morellet told me when we chatted two
weeks ago. “At the same time, it belongs
to everyone.” The establishment was re-
markable because of the safety it found
in openness—everyone belonged there,
whether they were an Upper East Side
Republican or a pre-op transgender. It
was half French brasserie, half American
diner. Morellet laughs, “It’s a hybrid.”
Florent’s hybridization came from mov-
ing forward, not from looking back. He
refused to reminisce about “the way
things were,” accusing my generation of
a nasty case of nostalgia. Instead he de-
scribed how much the Meatpacking Dis-
trict has improved over the years.
N E W YO R K ’ S PA R I S
A block north of 69 Gansevoort and a
block west of the Standard and the re-
maining meatpackers, the gleaming
white and tungsten yellow tiles of res-
taurant Pastis summon tourists from
around the world. Keith McNally, the
unassuming Irish restauranteur who has
created an empire of New York restau-
rants, opened Pastis in 1999. Pastis is
the platonic ideal of the French bistro—
shoestring fries are served in parchment
cones with mayonnaise, menus items are
written in white and red grease-pencil
on antiqued mirrors, food is flavored
almost exclusively with butter. This is
New York’s Paris—it is rooted in fantasy,
completely disconnected from the ‘real’
Meatpacking District of Restaurant Flo-
rent.
It is loud—even the bar is packed on
Sunday mornings at brunch time. The
wait for a table is anywhere from half an
hour to an hour and a half, depending
on the time of day. The time that passes
on the big factory clock is galling. Noth-
ing sells like Old World charm in this
forward-looking, fast-moving metropo-
lis. Since the dot-com boom, simulations
and chains have become increasingly
common as nostalgia for a mythical pre-
Blackberry small town landscape grows
increasingly popular. People crave a
rose-tinted ‘authenticity’: the vinyl ban-
quettes of Restaurant Florent are boring
because they’re there to sit on, whereas
the vinyl banquettes of Pastis are excit-
ing because they represent the ‘good ol’
days,’ and allow you, briefly, to partici-
pate in them.
McNally is an interior designer rather
than a restauranter—it is not the food
that drives him, but the creation of a to-
tal, theatrical world. Pastis makes salable
the Hollywood glamour of the American
Dream: chic sets over which chic crowds
can play out that ideal of mid-century
metropolitan chicness—all the while
watching themselves do it in a kaleido-
scope of antiqued mirrors that line the
rooms. Where Florent provided spec-
tacles, Pastis itself is a stage where the
diners make spectacles of themselves.
Both Florent and Pastis take lessons
from the Old World and the New, merg-
ing New York City with, in the case of
Florent, tradition, and, in the case of
Pastis, the fantasy of tradition estab-
lished by McNally. At Florent, everyone
was welcome to be themselves. At Pastis,
everyone is welcome to be the person
they want to be. The “authentic self” is
dull—all human idiosyncrasy, all depth,
must be photoshopped out, the setting
turned to “antique” to drain the color
from the picture.
The theater lands somewhere be-
tween trendy chic and EPCOT absurdity.
By the time it closed its doors, Florent
didn’t belong in the meatpacking district
anymore. As Morellet put it, “New York is
the city of changes,” and Florent became
a non sequitur among the Meatpack-
ing’s new, excessively decorated theme-
park—Spice Market with its three-story
colored lanterns, Buddakan with its vast
central chamber out of Indiana Jones and
the Temple of Doom, and of course the
new Standard Hotel and its panoramic
Boom Boom Room, complete with pool.
Florent, a wholly original enterprise,
“became redundant.” Pastis, a wholly re-
dundant enterprise, became wildly pop-
ular. Nostalgia for a glamour-gone-by is,
paradoxically, authentically contempo-
rary.
CERBERIUS S. WERTZ B’14 has a
boom boom room.
THEINDY.ORG 8
Features

sticky net:
blood, god, steel, fiber optic
by Adrian Randall and Drew Foster
 October Leak
DIGE ST IN G T HE

On October 22, 391,831 classified Iraq War logs were made public on the internet. The
logs are written primarily by low-ranking officers in the field. They are full of acronyms
and military jargon. Some are mundane—bridge closings and lightning storm adviso-
ries—while others are horrific—denials of prisoner abuse and friendly fire. The logs
document events between January 2004 and December 2009. The source of these logs
was WikiLeaks, an international organization that publishes classified documents from
anonymous sources.
According to wikileaks.org, the full report details 109,032 deaths in Iraq, 60 per-
cent of which were civilian. At a press conference in London on October 23,
WikiLeak’s editor-in-chief Julian Assange called the war logs “the most compre-
hensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered public record.” They
even dwarf WikiLeaks’s release of 90,000 pages of classi-
fied material about the war in Afghanistan this past July.
When Daniel Ellsburg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, the
only way he could ensure mass circulation was to publish the
classified documents in a highly respected and widely-read news-
paper. Had the New York Times refused to publish his leak, it
could have been effectively suppressed. A few weeks ago, when
WikiLeaks offered its documents to the New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, and
Der Speigel, its intention was to have the useful information parsed by sophisticated
news organizations. But regardless of whether or not it was broken into manageable
chunks and printed for the masses, the ‘leaks’ were instantaneously globally available.
The excerpts the Times chose to publish on its website are accompanied by concise sum-
maries. Scroll over an acronym in the text, and its definition pops up in a little speech
bubble—IZ is the ‘International Zone,’ SAF is ‘Small Arms Fire,’ KIA is ‘Killed In Action.’
By publishing its own digest of the documents, the Times exercises its power to collabo-
rate with WikiLeaks and publicize what it finds to be most significant about the leak.
Our timeline highlights the contrast between the Iraq War of news headlines and the
Iraq War of gritty field reports. US Journalists have been immersed in the Iraq conflict
from the outset. As of September 29, 143 journalists had died in
the war. But the War logs, fact-based and hastily written, provide a
glimpse of the war that journalists cannot—the incidents as they
were communicated by troops. The logs present the Iraq War as
a series of moments—rather than a summary of milestones—in
the language of war itself: ungrammatical, often present-tense,
coded military shorthand.

March 19, 2006

April 28, 2004
CBSNews.com. “Abuse of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed: 60
Minutes II Has Exclusive Report on Alleged Mistreatment.”
...photographs surfaced showing American soldiers abusing
and humiliating Iraqis being held at a prison near Baghdad.
The Army investigated, and issued a scathing report...
June 28, 2004
U.S. transfers sovereignty to Iraq. Bush’s response: “Let
freedom reign!”
Time Magazine. “Collateral Damage or Civilian Mas-
sacre in Haditha?” On the morning of Nov. 19, 2005, a
roadside bomb struck a humvee carrying Marines... on a
road near Haditha... The next day a Marine communique...
reported that [Lance Corporal Miguel (T.J.)] Terrazas
and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by the blast... According
to eyewitnesses and local officials... the civilians who died
in Haditha on Nov. 19 were killed not by a roadside bomb
but by the Marines themselves, who went on a rampage in
January 12, 2005 the village after the attack, killing 15 unarmed Iraqis in
WMD search in Iraq is declared over. their homes, including seven women and three children.
October 15, 2005 November 5, 2006
Iraqis vote to ratify draft constitution. Saddam sentenced to death by hanging.

2004 2005 2006

F E B R UARY 2
“ACC I D E N TA L S H O OT I N G . . . ”
BCT [Brigade combat team (US)]___ CONVOY INADVERTENTLY
ENGAGED A CIVILIAN CONTRACTOR SECURITY ELEMENT VIC
[vicinity] ___ (ACCESS ROAD TO FOB [Forward Operating Base]
___). THE ___ CONVOY HAD USED AN ___ TO BLOCK TRAF-
FIC AS IT WAS EXITING THE FOB. 2X FORD EXCURSIONS AP-
PROACHED THE CONVOY AND WERE WAVED THROUGH. A SOL-
DIER IN THE CONVOY DID NOT REALIZE THE VEHICLES WERE
ALLOWED TO PASS AND ENGAGED THE ___ WITH ___. THE ___
WAS HIT THREE TIMES. THERE WERE NO INJ AND THE VEHI-
CLE WAS ALLOWED ON FOB ___ UNTIL IT COULD SAFELY CON-
TINUE ITS . ___ HAS INITIATED A COMMANDERE___ INQUIRY.
Gist: Civilian contractors were waved through a check-
point. One soldier didn’t realize a civilians’ vehicle was
okayed to pass. He fired three shots at the vehicle.
N OVE M B E R 13
“ D E TA I N E E A B U S E R P T D. . . ”
AT 1600C, 2BCT REPORTS, 173 MOI [Ministry of Interior] DE-
TAINES BEING HELD AT AN MOI INTERMNMENT FACIL-
ITY NEXT OT THE KARADA DAC HALL. MANY OF THEM BEAR
MARKS OF ABUSE TO INCLUDE CIGARETTE BURNS, BRUISING
CONSISTENT WITH BEATINGS AND OPEN SORES. MANY OF
THE DETAINEES ARE COUGHING AND ARE BEING DESCRIBED
AS WALKING WOUNDED. APPROX 95 X DETAINEES WERE BE-
ING HELD IN 1 X ROOM AND WERE SITTING CROSS-LEGGED
WITH BLIND FOLDS, ALL FACING THE SAME DIRECTION. AC-
CORDING TO ONE OF THE DETAINEES QUESTIONED ON SITE,
12 X DETAINEES HAVE DIED OF DISEASE IN RECENT WEEKS.
MARNE 66 RESPONDED AND IS ON SITE. D/4-64 AR IS RE-
SPONDING TO ASSIST WITH SECURITY AND TO FACILI-
TATE THE RELEASE AND TREATMENT OF DETAINEES FROM
THE FACILITY...THE 4-64 AR SURGEON WILL BE ASSESS-
ING THE MEDICAL REQUIREMENTS OF THE DETAINEES
AND WILL CASEVAC ACCORDINGLY. 0 CF INJ/DAMAGE
AP R I L 1 8
“A L L E G E D D E TA I N E E A B U S E . . . ”
(LATE REPORT) AT 181000APR2006 THE ___ AD DIN PROV-
INCE POLICE ___ TEAM (___) DISCOVERED A REPORT OF AN
ALLEGED CASE OF IRAQI POLICE ABUSING 2X IRAQI PRIS-
ONERS IN THE ___ AD DIN PROVINCE IN TIKRIT vicinity ___.
THE REPORT STATES THAT THE ABUSE TOOK PLACE AT THE
DETENTION FACILITY IN THE COMMUNITY CRIMES COM-
MITTEE BUILDING LOCATED ON OLD Forward Operating Base
DANGER...AN INVESTIGATION IS CURRENTLY BEING CON-
DUCTED. Nothing Further to Report. CLOSED 200700APR2006
Gist: An alleged case of Iraqi police abusing two Iraqi
prisoners. An investigation was made into these
claims.

Gist: American Soldiers found 173 Iraqis detained

by Iraqi police. Many of the prisoners bore cigarette
burns, bruises and open sores. The American soldiers
responded by releasing detainees from this specific fa-
cility and treating their injuries. Some would remain
in custody.
 by Emma Whitford and Ashton Strait
Illustrations by Charis Loke
Design by Liat Werber
February 10, 2007
Gen. David Petraeus officially takes charge of U.S. forces
in Iraq.
March 14, 2007
The Pentagon acknowledges Iraq is a civil war.
July 4, 2007
LA Times. “Contractors outnumber troops in Iraq.” The
number of U.S.-paid private contractors in Iraq now exceeds
that of American combat troops, newly released figures show,
raising fresh questions about the privatization of the war ef-
fort and the government’s capacity to carry out military and
rebuilding campaigns.
October 11, 2007
CNN.com. “Iraqi families sue Blackwater in U.S. Court.”
A Philadelphia law firm filed suit against Blackwater USA on
Thursday on behalf of the families of Iraqis killed and injured Worldwide, the private security contractor...
in last month’s shooting in Baghdad’s Nusoor Square.   The
suit calls the incident a “senseless slaying” and claims it was
part of “Blackwater’s lengthy pattern of egregious miscon- September 16, 2008
duct in Iraq.”
2007
F E B R UARY 2 2
“ S M A L L U N I T AC T I O N S . . . ”
CRAZYHORSE 18 REPORTS AIF GOT INTO A DUMPTRUCK
HEADED NORTH, ENGAGED AND THEN THEY CAME OUT
WANTING TO SURRENDER...
CRAZYHORSE 18 CLEARED TO ENGAGE DUMPTRUCK. 1/227
LAWYER STATES THEY CAN NOT SURRENDER TO AIRCRAFT
AND ARE STILL VALID TARGETS...
CRAZYHORSE 18 REPORTS ENGAGED AND DESTROYED SHACK
WITH 2X AIF. BDA IS SHACK / DUMP TRUCK DESTROYED.
Gist: A US Apache helicopter fired on two enemy
insurgents. When the insurgents tried to surren-
der, US troops consulted an army lawyer, who told
them that the enemy could not surrender to an
aircraft and were therefore still targets. The sol-
diers fired a missile at the two men, killing them.
January 1, 2008
Iraq Body Count: Iraqi civilian violence in 2007 still at
2005 levels.
From Iraq Body Count, “Civilian deaths from violence in
2007: Analysis of the year’s toll from the Iraq Body Count
Project.”
Another 22,586–24,159 civilian deaths have been record-
ed in 2007 through Iraq Body Count’s extensive monitor-
ing of media and official reports. These figures... show
beyond any doubt that civil security in Iraq remains in
a parlous state. Figures for the most recent months in-
dicate that violence in Iraq has returned to the monthly
levels IBC was recording in 2005, a year which was itself
(until 2006) the worst since the invasion.
January 10, 2008
NY Times. “2005 Use of Gas by Blackwater Leaves Ques-
tions.” ...the copter dropped CS gas, a riot-control substance
the American military in Iraq can use only under the strict-
est conditions... An armored vehicle on the ground also re-
leased the gas, temporarily blinding drivers, passers-by and
at least 10 American soldiers operating the checkpoint... Both
the helicopter and the vehicle involved in the incident at the
Assassins’ Gate checkpoint were not from the United States
military, but were part of a convoy operated by Blackwater
Odierno Succeeds Petraeus as Iraq Commander.
April 21, 2009
Hill Confirmed As U.S. Ambassador To Iraq.
May 29, 2009
The Washington Post. “Push to Block Photos.” The
Obama administration asked a federal court of ap-
peals in New York on Thursday to recall its order requir-
ing the release of photographs held by the Pentagon that
depict the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
President Obama... said their release would “further inflame
anti-American opinion” and “put our troops in danger.”
JUNE 30, 2009
Jubilation as U.S. Combat Troops Withdraw From Cities.
2009
AU G U ST 9
“ (C R I M I N A L E V E N T ) M U R D E R R P T. . . ”
DETAILS AS WE KNOW THEM AT THIS TIME. 1 X BRITISH PSD
CONTRACTOR HAD ALTERCATIONS WITH 1 X AUSTRAILIAN
AND 1 X BRITISH CO-WORKERS. ALTERCATION ESCALATED
WHEN WEAPON WAS UTILIZED TO KILL CO-WORKERS. SUS-
PECT THEN FLED SCENE AND RAN THROUGH A INTERNAL
CHECKPOINT OF RTI COMPOUND (MANNED BY US- 1-7TH
FA SOLDIERS) AND SMASHED WINDOW OF GUARD SHACK.
SUSPECT THEN CONTINUE ON AROUND THE CORNER AND
ENCOUNTERED A LN [Local National] WHICH HE PROCEEDED
TO SHOOT WHILE RUNNING BY. HE CONTINUED ON TRY-
ING TO FLEE AND THAT IS WHEN HE RAN INTO A ROVING
PATROL (1-7TH FA SOLDIERS) WHICH ESCALATED FORCE
AND HAD SUSPECT DROP HIS WEAPON. 1-7TH FA SOL-
DIERS HELD SUSPECT UNTIL IZ POLICE ARRIVED AND PUT
HIM INTO CUSTODY. CURRENTLY SUSPECT IS HELD BY US
IZ POLICE UNTIL FURTHER DETAILS CAN BE OBTAINED.
Gist: An employee of Armor Group, a Brit-
ish private security company, shot and killed
two coworkers after getting into a heated argu-
ment. He attempted to escape but was detained.
11
Opinions
M A K I N G SE N SE OF SPG
by Jonathan Storch
I
Graphic by Emily Martin
did not go to SexPower-
God (SPG, Brown’s annual
Queer Alliance-sponsored
orgiastic dance party that
apparently boasts hand-
jobs and blowjobs and real
live fucking right there
on the dance floor, which
prompted Bill O’Reilly to denounce
Brown a few years ago for anybody
who cared to tune in). Instead, I spent
my Friday evening across the quad in
Metcalf lounge, at an alternative party
thrown by one of my Catholic friends
called “Less Sex, More God”—a party
featuring polite conversation, a sketch
of Cardinal Newman on the wall, and
a bonafide (and hilariously self-aware)
speech in praise of chastity. Part of the
reason my activities were so outrageous-
ly Victorian was the simple fact that I’m
far too awkward to show up to a party
mostly naked; kudos to the attendees
for stepping out. Still, that’s only part of
the reason and I’ll be damned if I can’t
back my awkwardness up with convic-
tion.
I’m a freshman, so last week was my
first encounter with SPG and it kind of
threw me for a loop. Not its existence per
se—we’re at Brown, after all—but what
seemed to be its fundamental creepi-
ness. The whole institutionalized aspect
of it, the institutionalized transgression,
felt weird, sort of like my parents giving
me tips for different sex positions.
Which leads me to the following: All
throughout Freud’s Vienna, the elephant
in the drawing room was Sex. The nasty
paternal superego was looming large,
forbidding the open expression of de-
sire, forcing the sexual impulse to retreat
into sundry closets and back alleyways,
and generally causing all sorts of infelic-
ity. But after half a century of increasing
SEX Y/ E M 
POW E R IN G /
GOOD
HOW BROWN’S INFAMOUSLY WILD
QUEER DANCE PARTY IS PROGRESSIVE
I
by Nupur Shridhar
n his essay “Times Square
Blue,” novelist and literary
critic Samuel R. Delany de-
constructs his [homo]sexual
encounters in the [straight]
porn theatres of 1960s-90s
Times Square: “Most of the
guys I had met…day in and
day out, year after year, though they
pretty much tended to be more working-
class than not, were pretty much like
you, were pretty much like me.” Delany’s
point is that, unlike us, the men—there
were hardly ever any women—who
frequented these theatres had a space
where they could forget their cultural
frankness and liberation, Freud’s daugh-
ter Anna was sounding a different tune.
In a 1970 interview at Yale, she mused:
“In the early years of psychoanalysis we
could take the Super-Ego [sic] for grant-
ed: it was there . . . Now it is the instincts
that are—how is it put these days?—all
over the place, with no voice saying no,
no, no, or maybe I should say, a mere
whisper.” This is to say, the famous talk-
ing cure seems to have worked its magic,
but better than expected: today we don’t
feel guilty about having sex, we feel
guilty about not having sex. In Freud’s
day the superego was assisted in its re-
pressive function by the institutions of
the church and bourgeois marriage. To-
day our postmodern superego seems to
have its own counterparts—the whole
machinery of contemporary advertising
foremost among them—but this time
it’s just commanding us to go ahead and
have some fun.
SexPowerGod is supposed to be a
space for empowerment and liberation.
Insofar as the event might be the vehicle
whereby someone felt able for the first
time to express his or her sexual iden-
tity, then it would seem to serve a posi-
tive function. For genuine liberation,
though, it’s providing us with the wrong
kind of forum. Aside from all the talk,
what are the real reasons most of us go
to SPG? From friends and acquaintances
who attended, I gather they went 1) to
see just what the hell is going on, and 2)
to have some sort of sex. But what sort
of sex are they getting? On the one hand,
SPG sex doesn’t meet the requirements
of legitimate Dionysian revelry, which
screams its primal lust for life right in
the face of death. The institutionaliza-
tion and the watchful safe-keeping of the
University pretty clearly preclude that.
(According to my friend who attended,
“SPG was as cathartic as any Greek rit-
ual—a combination of sweat, skin and
salvation”—but he was having long-
obligations to wives/boyfriends/bosses
and consensually explore their homo-
sexual desire.
Of course, these theatres were still
marketed exclusively to heterosexual au-
diences, and even that didn’t stop the city
from eventually shutting them all down.
Yet Delany is right to mourn the loss of
these spaces and right to encourage us
to create our own. I’d like to believe that
our generation, also, in a great-circle-of-
life kind of way, values sexual desire and
gratification. So are there places where
we’re free to go down on strangers? To
negotiate sexual intimacy in semi-public
spaces where we feel safe, respected,
N O V E M B E R 11 2010 T H E C O L L E G E H I L L I N D E P E N D E N T
distance girlfriend problems at the time,
and he said he blacked out anyway, so
I’m calling bullshit.) On the other hand,
and the explication seems a little silly, it
certainly doesn’t meet any definition of
love. We’re left to just enjoy ourselves...
like we’re supposed to do.
What kind of world are we left with in
the absence of, on the one hand, Diony-
sus, and on the other hand, love? Michel
Houellebecq’s novel The Elementary Par-
ticles portrays precisely this sort of an-
tiseptic dystopia, except that it’s not set
in the future, but in late ’90s France. The
prevailing social consensus is composed
of the apparently innocuous norms we
seem to hold at Brown: you should love
your body (note the connotations of
disembodiment from the get-go), sex
is something you do for fun and plea-
sure, it’s bad to restrain your desires.
As an aside, the norms both here and
in the novel suspiciously coincide with
the basic anthropological assumptions
of capitalism, which view the individual
as an atomistic ego motivated solely by
desire for gain. But what Houellebecq
does so well is show—with pornograph-
ic force—the effects these norms, and
the capitalization of the body they en-
tail, have on human life. It’s not a pretty
picture. In Houellebecq’s materialistic
world, his sex-
obsessed protago-
nists get action
more or less, but
it doesn’t matter,
since they know
they’re just isolat-
ed subjects trapped
in their own skin
anyway until the
day they die. The
world is all ratio-
nal egoism and
pleasure: religious
transcendence isn’t
an option, love has
and, ultimately,
deeply pleasured?
Ideally, SexPowerGod would func-
tion as such a space. It has all the key
elements Delany outlines for creating an
environment that celebrates queerness,
in whatever form.
Sophomore year, in front of a DPS
officer (how far we’ve come since Stone-
wall!), and very proudly, I sucked a
strawberry-flavored pasty off of some-
one’s nipple—I wouldn’t say friend, re-
ally, because I haven’t seen her at any of
the parties I’ve been to since—but mine
and Delany’s point is that she and I have
been intimate, and I’m happier for it.
If not everyone’s SPG experience is
ideal, then it’s not because there’s any-
thing more the Queer Alliance or DPS
(they’re there to protect us) can do to
police our behavior. We’re told to come
sober, play safe, and always establish
consent. If we’re having a hard time de-
fining and/or asserting our boundaries,
it’s not because of the gays.
In fact, as Delany notes, (potentially)
safe places like SPG can only exist be-
cause of queers: “[T]here are many rea-
sons to promote public heterosexual sex
become impossible, and life is self-con-
scious despair.
An Orthodox kid I met on Friday says
he didn’t go to SPG because he believes
the body is sacred. Somebody apparently
got offended and told him that that’s
his personal belief—but if the body is
sacred, the body is sacred, right? G.K.
Chesterton presents an idea along these
lines, about the essential revolt of moral
order and transcendence against the re-
gime of cosmic entropy and chaos. If I
were around a hundred years ago I don’t
think I would have bought it—the re-
pression and guilt associated with sex
then was pretty real and pretty shitty.
Today though, in an era of institutional-
ized transgression, the idea seems way
more relevant. Houellebecq’s egoistic
world seems to be the world we’re living
in—would chastity and self-denial just
be more repression? Could they be part
the way out? Of course, SexPowerGod
isn’t the heart of any problem. In that
sense, my reaction to it was immature.
But I’d wager that it is a symptom. Or at
least, that these are the terms on which
we might consider talking.
JONATHAN STORCH B’14 is going
to take you out and make it rain.
on the model public gay sex has followed
for years and, in one form or another,
likely will continue to follow. But if we
are going to do such a thing, it is only
sensible to put its control into the hands
of women and set it up for their use and
convenience from the start.” And while
SPG isn’t run by only women, I do think
that queers have taught us everything
we know about how to develop (sexual)
trust and consent. This emphasis on con-
sent in a context like SPG teaches us how
to find empowerment in the inherently
gendered and seemingly passive act of
saying, “No.”
After all, the problem isn’t that men
don’t respect women. It’s that no one re-
spects femininity. Unsurprisingly, SPG
isn’t going to live up to its full queer po-
tential until heterosexuals acknowledge
and obey the purposefully gender-neu-
tral, gender-bending circuits of power
and consent that queers have established
and defended—for everyone’s pleasure.
NUPUR SHRIDHAR B’11 feels deeply
pleasured.
 THEINDY.ORG
F U T U R E I SL A NDS
The Independent: Before Future Islands, you guys were
called Art Lord and the Self Portraits, which was maybe
less about music and more about performance. How did
everything first start?
Sam: Gerrit and I were eighteen when we did our first
show and then two and half years later that band broke
up and then Future Islands started kinda on accident. It
was a weird transition of just falling into something. Wil-
liam wanted to make music and I wanted to start a hip
hop project, but I don’t know if we ever thought about
being in a band together.
I: With Future Islands there is definitely still a sense of
performance and interaction with the audience. In my
experiences, this immediacy has really only happened in
small, intimate shows. Has it changed a lot since you’ve
started playing bigger venues?
S: Well I think that’s the challenge, to still bring a sort of
intimacy to the performance even though you can’t nec-
essarily see the people. I’m looking into blank space and
trying to grab something. Cause I try to be very personal
as a performer, or maybe personal isn’t the right word,
but emotional, give some theatrical element to it, some
real drama. And that does change. Two days ago we did a
sold-out show in Manhattan and last night we did a house
party in Albany for 50 kids, and that made it special.
Will: I think the shift from those living rooms and kitch-
ens and basements to bigger venues like AS220 has been
a long, gradual process. To me it just feels like its been
a natural progression, but we like playing in basements.
But we got a lot of experience with opening for Dan Dea-
con and being in the ensemble, having a sea of people at
some shows just blew our mind.
I: Dan Deacon has always been a favorite in Providence
and there has always been a kind of connection be-
tween here and Baltimore.
S: Yeah, I see the similarities in this being an old city
that’s always got an influx of young kids doing things
because of RISD and MICA. But then you’ve got other
people that move to those cities because of the ware-
house scene. I’m pretty sure the Wham City kids took a
lot from Fort Thunder when they were comign togeth-
er. So there are definitely those connections. Dan Dea-
con just did that tour with Lightening Bolt, and that
was like a dream come true because those are guys he’s
loved forever.
W: Also, both cities have a prominent noise scene,
which most scenes don’t have. In Raleigh, NC where
I’m from there are hardly any noise bands at all. There
are a ton more in Baltimore and the next place I think
about is Providence.
I: So after living in North Carolina you guys moved to
Baltimore to continue with Future Islands?
S: We weren’t really moving as a band. It was more
about personal choices. But I moved there because I
said I want to be a musician and where I’m living wasn’t
allowing me that. At first, even though we had a lot of
friends, we felt that we had to prove ourselves in this
city and I think that drove us to work hard.
W: One of my favorite things is that everyone there is
really open to different ideas and there are a lot of peo-
ple from different genres working together. There are
no imitators in Baltimore, everyone is sorta doing their
own thing; it’s pretty rad. It’s a really great place, people
are also batshit crazy there and I like that. You’ll see the
most insane interactions, like a mom walking down the
The Indy interviews the
greatest Baltimore Post-
Wave band of all time
by Erik Font
street cussing out her three year old son.
I: Yeah, Providence is kinda like that too. Your sec-
ond LP In Evening Air was released on Thrill Jockey
Records, how did you guys get picked up?
W: Our friend Bruce from the band Double Dagger
thought they’d like it and sent our demo. A month
later we got a call from Bettina [the head of the label]
saying she loved the record and it kinda went from
there. We had been booking our own shows for like
seven years and now we have a team and an inter-
national publicist behind us. But we’re really excited
about the exposure and people have been responding
really well to what we’re doing and you can’t really ask
for much more.
I: Speaking of which, you guys just got back from Eu-
rope How was it?
Gerrit: It was great but exhausting, we played every
night.
W: We played this show in Croatia where all the kids
went crazy. Also going to Athens for the first time was
great. We played with this new band Baby Guru that
I’m really into right now. I think the big difference is
that the audiences in the US dance a little bit more,
but that’s not necessarily a scale for if they like it or
not.
I: What’s it like playing for college kids vs. warehous-
es?
G: Pretty fun.
W: College kids just want to get drunk and rock out,
they don’t care. It’s great. I feel like you could suck and
play for college kids, is that bad to say?
I: Nah, its cool.
12
Arts
Photography by the Author
W: There’s the old B-52s’ quote where Fred Schneider says if
you’re in the South at a college all you need is a beat and a catchy
melody and kids will go crazy. At Warehouses people can be
more standoffish and not as eager to get in. Maybe the ware-
house parties are more stoned and the college parties are more
drunk.
I: I generally hate it when people come up with labels like “chill
wave” for contemporary music, but you guys came up with
“post-wave” yourself.
W: Yea, we made it up forever ago when were like 18 or 19. Sam’s
brother once said that our music is too noisy for new wave and
too pussy for punk. But I think our aesthetic has always been
punk from the beginning, to kinda use what we have. Other
than New Wave, we’re also really into the Misfits and early punk
stuff. So for what it’s worth, in a way I think we’re a punk band.
I: Have things changed since you’ve gotten a lot of exposure?
W: Well, we’re starting to be able to pay our bills from being
in a band. There’s a lot of the whole music industry and music
business that we’re still learning about. That’s the biggest kind
of shock, how we’ve been accepted into this world that we origi-
nally set about making fun of. Art Lord was making fun of it all
and now we’re part of the beast.
G: I dunno, some weird stuff has happened like when we went to
LA and this screenwriter threw us a party for us at her mansion.
There was catered food and an open bar and we met Alex Mack,
which was pretty cool. But we ended up just getting drunk and
getting locked out on the balcony. Also when we were in LA we
learned about bros icing bros, you know about that?
I: Nope.
G: I don’t know if it’s a secret Smirnoff Ice campaign or what,
but basically if you have a Smirnoff Ice you can Ice your friend
and on the spot they have to get on one knee and drink it as
fast as they can. They can’t get up until they’re finished. But
if your friend also has a Smirnoff then he can challenge you,
and you have to race. This is when we iced Juiceboxxx. [Takes
out cellphone and shows me a picture of the rapper on one
knee chugging a Smirnoff Ice.]
I: Awesome.
After the interview, Sam, Will, Gerritt and I sat in front of
AS220 until the show started. Although the street in front
of AS220 quickly filled with tons of people excited about
the show, the guys from Future Islands were the nicest and
maybe happiest people there. A few kids came up to Sam
and told him how happy they were Future Islands was back.
Sam would happily talk to them, hug them and later play the
songs they requested. The opening acts Young Male and Amil
Byleckie Band had the crowd dancing before Future Islands
came on, but Will was right. The crowd went wild when they
started. Over the past few months, all of the shows I’ve been
to in Providence had heavier, harder music than Future Is-
lands, but the energy and craziness of Future Island’s set
topped all of it. People were making out, dancing, and crowd
surfing all at the same time. Songs like “Long Flight” and “Old
Friend” had everyone dancing, but I was most surprised to
see everyone still packed and going crazy for Future Islands’
slower songs. Although this was Future Islands’s first time
playing AS220, the intimacy of their set was not lost at all.
Sam was often on his knees growling into the audience and
kids were leaned over the front of the stage singing back and
freaking out. But at times it was nicer to watch the show from
the edges of the crowd where it was easier to listen to and be
absorbed by the thick bass line and synthesizer of songs like
“Inch of Dust.” After the show, Will asked AS220’s bartender
if they had any Smirnoff Ice. Unfortunately they didn’t. 
 13
Arts
H I
H E A Sociological Investigation
S T
A Mark Grief, Kathleen Ross,
T W and Dayna Tortorici, eds.
H A n+1 Foundation, 216 pp., $10
W by Jonah Wolf
G
rowing up in the
epicenter of hipster-
dom, New York’s
Lower East Side, I
wasn’t sure what was
going on, other than
that I wanted to be part of it. When I
wasn’t commuting to private school up-
town, I checked lastnightsparty.com for
glimpses into the 21+ nightclubs around
the corner, where I would linger outside
watching bands load their equipment. I
longed to translate what seemed like an
esoteric knowledge, acquired online, of
Wire and William S. Burroughs into the
scenester swag that emanated effortless-
ly from so many arrivistes clogging Lud-
low Street in the early part of the last de-
cade. Even though I compared members
of the Clash to Norman Mailer’s “White
Hipster” for a ninth-grade history pa-
per, it took a couple years to become
comfortable with the contemporary use
of the term. It wasn’t until early 2009,
when I was a college freshman here in
Providence, that I finally figured it out.
As I posted on my Tumblr then: “Just
bought two pairs of skinny jeans. Am I
a hipster yet?”
All of which puts me way behind Mark
Greif, co-founder of Brooklyn-based lit-
erary journal n+1, who writes in n+1’s
new pamphlet What Was The Hipster? A
Sociological Investigation:
I’m certain I knew to call the new
migrants “hipsters” from the first
time I explained to my family the
changes happening north of Delanc
ey in the late 1990s. If true, this
means it was possible to read the
term off of hipsters’ appearance and
behavior. ‘Hipster’ referred, in part,
to an air of knowing about exclusive
things before anyone else — that they
acted, as people said then (and do
still), “hipper than thou.”
This footnote occurs on page 140, be-
low Greif’s 31-page “Epitaph for the
White Hipster” (recently excerpted as a
cover story for New York Magazine), and
summarily answers the question on the
cover of a 216-page book. Yet What Was
the Hipster? remains informative, nearly
fulfilling Greif’s boast in the preface,
“Everything in this book is true, and
its impressions are perfect.” After that
preface, the book provides a transcrip-
tion of an April 2009 panel at the New
School (where Greif is an assistant pro-
fessor) featuring Greif and two other
R ?
T E
P S
n+1 contributors: Christian Lorentzen,
who tongue-in-cheekily recants his 2007
Time Out cover story, “Why the Hipster
Must Die,” and Jace Clayton, who offers
anecdotes from his world travels as DJ/
rupture. Two re-printed reports of the
panel follow, from the New York Observer
and Popmatters.com, then seven commis-
sioned essays on such subjects as “Hip-
hop and Hipsterism” and “Hasidim vs.
Hipsters.”
The fact that, in addition to his pref-
ace and panel remarks, Greif wrote the
longest and most comprehensive of
these essays is mitigated by his endear-
ingly earnest combination of self-depre-
cation and self-confidence. His preface
warns, “We have resisted the impulse
to correct mistakes by the panelists
(though a few factual errors are annotat-
ed),” but all of the mistakes and errors
are his own. When he asks the panel au-
dience, “What year is the WTO Ministe-
rial Conference…the Battle in Seattle?,”
the transcript is annotated with “[For-
getting own presentation].” Greif knows
that he can create a definitive document,
just not alone: he eagerly revises his own
opinions and solicits others’. With its
multitude of voices, What Was the Hip-
ster? reads not so much like a book but a
Google search.
As such, it is difficult to criticize the
book as a whole. Lorentzen’s snark (“Iro-
ny perpetrated 9/11”) and Margo Jeffer-
son’s ignorance (“I can’t pretend to know
much firsthand about the new hipsters
of the last decade”) aren’t particularly
informative, while Clayton offers a fasci-
nating explanation of how philo-Ameri-
can Peruvian hipsters only noticed local
cumbia music when a New York record
label repackaged it. Independent Senior
Editor Dayna Tortorici’s inquiry into the
“hipster feminine” veers pleasantly into
a history and aesthetics of mid-decade
photoblogs Last Night’s Party and The Co-
bra Snake.
The book is most enjoyable when
dealing with these details and detritus
of hip culture instead of trying to define
it—a fruitless task Greif attempts four
or five times throughout the volume. The
hipster is, in the end, too diffuse to de-
fine: is he (as one reader asked on Twit-
ter) the coked-out nihilist reading Vice
or the bespectacled mama’s boy reading
McSweeney’s? Is he the bearded hippie
listening to Animal Collective or the
slick fashion plate pumping SebastiAn?
The product page for What Was the Hip-
ster? on Amazon.com (where the book is
already sold out) recommends Jonathan
N O V E M B E R 11 2010 T H E C O L L E G E H I L L I N D E P E N D E N T
Graphic by Emily Martin
Franzen’s Freedom, Animal Collective’s
Merriweather Post Pavilion, and The Wire:
The Complete Series: all possible props
from hipster culture (if you bought into
the claim, discounted by Greif, that only
hipsters care about hipsters).
Though the term originated in the
’40s and ’50s to admiringly describe jazz-
listening, slang-speaking African-Ameri-
cans and the Anglo-Americans who emu-
lated them, it became dormant for half
a century. “Hip”—the a priori cultural
knowledge Anatole Broyard identified
in his 1948 “Portrait of a Hipster”—lin-
gered on in musicians like Lou Reed and
writers like Terry Southern, but the out-
lines of the current hipster only emerged
in the early ’80s as punk rock gave way to
“indie” or “college” rock. This figure was
codified by 1991, which (as Greif notes)
“is remembered, because of a famous
documentary, as ‘the year punk broke’—
which was to say both that it broke into
the mainstream, as the most successful
post-punk bands moved to corporate
labels, and that its spirit was broken on
the shoals of mass commercialism.”
The rise of “hipster” as a pejorative
over the last decade correlates to more
recent events like 9/11 and the rise of
the internet, but causation is hard to de-
termine. Perhaps Generation X began to
feel threatened, culturally and geograph-
ically, by its successors. Certainly the in-
ternet granted hipsters exposure: what
once might have been published in a fan-
zine with a double-digit circulation was
now available to anyone with a modem.
Along the way, “hipster” came to define
not the possessor of arcane knowledge,
but the aspirant. In 2007, business stu-
dent Carlos Perez started the post-ironic
mindfuck HipsterRunoff.com, using the
persona of “Carles” to mock so-called
“entry-level alts” from an ostensibly
more assimilated position; posts had
titles like “What is the most authentic
alt job?” and “Which shoe company rep-
resents U?” Perez’s business background
helped him identify hipsterism as a com-
petition somewhere between capitalism
and Darwinism: his alts develop their
“personal brands” mainly in hopes of
getting laid. (The intellectual touchstone
for this paradigm is Pierre Bourdieu’s
discussion of “cultural capital” in Distinc-
tion, which Greif prescribes “as a kind of
required generational exercise in self-
criticism.”)
For a moment, then, complaining
about hipsters was hip. It was to Greif’s
credit that he saw the moment fading a
year and a half ago, when he organized
the New School panel. Six months later,
Law and Order based an episode on a
New York Observer article headlined “The
Hipster Grifter.” This August, New York
Times style editor Phil Corbett issued
a moratorium on the word that his col-
leagues had used “more than 250 times
in the past year.” Corbett wrote, “In any
case, hipster’s second life as hip slang
seems to have lost its freshness. And
with so many appearances, I’m not sure
how precise a meaning it conveys. It may
still be useful occasionally, but let’s look
for alternatives and try to give it some
rest.” If you’re already too hip to care
about hipsters, What Was the Hipster?
won’t do anything for you. But if you’re
not afraid to admit your ignorance, this
new pamphlet might make you a little
hipper.
JONAH WOLF B’12 has the most au-
thentic alt job.
THEINDY.ORG
A brief memoir of my
musical adolescence
by Gus Wenner
Graphic by Robert Sandler
T
he first cigarette I ever
smoked was a Marl-
boro Red when I was
twelve years old. That’s
what older brothers
will do to you. It wasn’t
until my teen years hit
full stride that tobacco
became an honest habit, though. When I
was fourteen I thought I was in love with
a girl who wore a black derby hat and had
long blond hair. She smoked Camel Fil-
ters, so I did the same. Then I saw Annie
Hall and realized she was a phony. Not
until five young men called the Strokes
invaded New York with Camel Lights
dangling from their lips did I meet my
match. Perhaps I was a fraud as well.
The Strokes were my brother, my girl-
friend, and my disapproving parents all
STROK ES OF GENIUS
wrapped in one.
Is This It, the Strokes’ 2001 debut al-
bum, embodied my years of angst, time
mostly spent on some Upper West Side
stoop with a pal or two lamenting how
green the grass might be on the other
side. Although at that point in my life
most of the music I discovered was
through my brother, I happened upon
the Strokes on my own. That was no feat,
however, because in their early stages
they were truly New York’s band. Their
music seeped up through the sidewalks
like vapor emerging from a manhole.
Their style rapidly took over schools,
public and private alike. Even though I
was one of the many, the Strokes felt like
they belonged to me.
Everywhere I walked, frontman
Julian Casablancas’ deep growl came
with—usually lurking in the back of my
brain, if not projecting from my head-
phones. Their second album, Room on
Fire released in 2003, came just in time
for growing up. The Strokes didn’t even
give me the chance to throw them away
like an old pair of shoes, instead they
stuck in my mind for good. I lost my vir-
ginity while listening to that record—I
knew I couldn’t set the room on fire my-
self so, in an act of youthful deception, I
let the Strokes do it for me.
After their third album, First Impres-
sions of Earth, which, I must admit, ta-
pered slightly from the sound I was so
fond of, the band vanished into thin air.
Their ripped jeans and undersized shirts
were nowhere to be found. But like most
things, I got over it—I moved past An-
nie Hall and in favor of Manhattan. I
struck up a relationship with Bob Dylan
and the Rolling Stones. Previously, I had
thought song lyrics were not much with-
out melody or rhythm, something like a
carcass lying limp in the snow. But when
I heard Dylan wail “yonder stands your
orphan with his gun, crying like a fire
in the sun,” all that changed. Music be-
came more than just a soundtrack to my
fumbling adolescence; it altered the way
I spoke, communicated, believed. I thank
god each day that I discovered the Stones
when I was older and less malleable, or
else I wouldn’t have settled on Camel
Lights, but rather a needle hanging from
my arm, or a mullet (Ron Wood circa Tat-
too You).
This past summer the Strokes an-
nounced that they were getting back
together, to play a few shows in Europe
and then headline Lollapalooza in Chi-
cago—their first concert on US soil in
four years. In their absence, I lamented
them as one laments the deceased. I kept
them somewhere off in the distance,
able to admire and observe, but too dis-
heartened to look closer—my inexperi-
ence, my formative years, New York City
draped in all its grime and splendor. I
don’t mean that I cremated them; I just
mean that their halt was a tough pill to
swallow.
Lollapalooza was set in Chicago’s
Loop, anchored by two stages on oppo-
site ends of Grant Park, a mile apart. The
Strokes headlined the first night along
with Lady Gaga. My friend Jenny and
I stopped to catch a glimpse of Gaga’s
set—complete with pyrotechnics and
a fountain spewing blood—which be-
gan 30 minutes before the Strokes. She
looked more like a half inflated blow up
doll than the real deal; in the face of the
Strokes’ return, her shtick felt tired, her
lipstick smudged. After feeling like voy-
eurs to some strange cult gathering, in
which Gaga played the role of Charles
Manson, maybe even Jim Jones, we
walked over to the opposite end of the
park with time to spare. Jenny is close
to the band so we sat on the side of the
stage—a simple set up with their black
and white logo flashing behind the drum
kit. I peered out at 100,000 fans waiting
in anticipation. Although half of them
were turned in the opposite direction to
witness Gaga’s spectacle, from my per-
spective the crowd looked like an end-
14
Arts
less sea. Once Gaga’s contingent realized
that they weren’t going to be pleasured
by something that doesn’t have a pulse,
the majority of the audience was waiting
to see the five kids from New York, all
grown up.
When the band walked onstage,
adorned in leather jackets, a wave of
nostalgia shot through my body. They
blasted off with an electrifying version
of “New York City Cops.” All those mem-
ories returned at rapid speed over the
course of their 16-song set. As they went
into a stripped down version of “Under
Control,” the lights from the stage went
low, and Casablancas stepped forward
like a crooner. Gaga’s fireworks, visible
over the trees from across the field, shot
into the air, casting an orange hue upon
the audience—like palm trees exploding
in the night’s sky. Casablancas howled
into the microphone, accompanied only
by Albert Hammond, Jr.’s tender guitar
part. The fireworks suddenly felt like
they belonged to the Strokes. As Julian
sang “We were young, darling, we were
out of control,” tears crawled down my
cheeks. I was too entranced to wipe them
away. Those words didn’t need music; on
their own they were honest enough.
The performance hit me hard. I
couldn’t put my finger on why they were
so good, mainly because I don’t have
that many fingers. Most things that are
worthwhile aren’t so cut and dry. I had
the sense that I was all choked up be-
cause that frustrated feeling of being six-
teen was in my past. The poetry of youth
was no longer my reality, but rather an
object in my rear-view mirror. For a mo-
ment the anxiety of high school rushed
down my spine—trudging to class every
morning at eight AM like a zombie. Their
songs even allowed me to visualize that
time I lost my virginity. I cringed, and
then sucked down on a Camel Light.
I realized that music was not worth
quantifying, but rather a mysterious led-
ger to track my life. The Strokes, Dylan,
the Stones: they were all unofficial guides
through the muck and the mire.
Later that summer I went to Argen-
tina, travelling on my lonesome. Amid
a flourish of homesickness, I went to
lunch at a friend’s house up in the hills of
Mendoza. After lunch, he took me down
his driveway where a congregation of
horses chewed grass and whipped their
tails back and forth.
“Please, mount the horse,” he said.
“Are these horses wild?” I asked.
My dad told me once that when Mick
Jagger was dating Marianne Faithful
she tried to kill herself by overdosing on
prescription pills. When he arrived at
the hospital she lay in her bed frail and
beautiful and said to him “wild horses
couldn’t drag me away.”
My friend responded by saying they
were in fact wild, but that this specific
breed of horse was fairly tame and would
not harm me. He didn’t know that harm
was not my concern; I just wanted to
know if they would drag me away…
GUS WENNER B’12 isn’t going to be
pleasured by something that doesn’t
have a pulse.
Vulnerable,
A river forms about half of the border
between Mexico and the United States.
Called the Rio Grande in the United
States and the Rio Bravo in Mexico,
paired towns line its banks: Browns-
ville, Texas and Matamoros, Tamauli-
pas; El Paso, Texas and Juárez, Chihua-
hua. Slaves in Texas used to escape to
Mexican freedom through the water,
but today the running people almost all
flow in the other direction.
The river makes fools of us, of our
notion that bodies and economies and
aspirations can be easily partitioned.
Every so often, it moves. This has led
to territorial disputes, an international
border commission, the United States
invading Mexico in 1848, and to divert-
ing the water into concrete channels,
attempting to force nature to mimic
human folly. In some places the river is
now only a trickle. It often peters out
miles before where it should empty into
the Gulf of Mexico.
Before it becomes border, the Rio
Grande flows down the entire length
of New Mexico. In May Tom Mullins,
who was a Republican nominee for one
of that state’s congressional seats, pro-
posed putting landmines along the US-
Mexico border. Later, he backtracked.
But first he suggested mining the bor-
der, and then he won the primary in
June.
Just when Tom Mullins was cele-
brating his election victory, Gilber left
Guatemala and three children, climbed
up through Mexico, crossed the Rio
Grande, and arrived in Providence. Last
week he told me that his wife, Blanca,
has been in federal prison in Texas for
the past two months. She was caught
while they were crossing the border.
“Why weren’t you caught? Why aren’t
you in prison?” I asked.
“I could run,” he responded.
Miki mikiztli califas means “Califor-
nia, the house of death,” in Náhuatl,
a Mayan language spoken in Central
Mexico. In that country, people who
have crossed the border to the United
too
States, who reside in this haunted house,
are called “the disappeared.” Ambiguity
can be easier than knowing the truth.
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum said
that human compassion requires three
things:
1. Recognition that a bad thing has hap-
pened to someone else.
2. Belief that it was not their fault.
3. Realization that you are vulnerable, too.
I told Gilber I would research immigra-
tion attorneys. “Lo siento,” I said. I feel
it. He thanked me and smiled, his eyes
weary and drooping at the corners. All
was bleak. All was hopeful. It was more
than I could imagine.
I do not know what the impetus was for
the first socio-political borders. It prob-
ably had something to do with military
protection; it was most likely connected
to a man’s ego. The only way borders
make sense to me today is as a way to
make everything more manageable:
imagine devising a school system for the
world. Trying to bribe the voting block
of the poor. Suppressing the might of all
those mothers.
The teacher’s union in Rhode Island
recently raised the idea of creating one
statewide school district – music classes
that are cut in Pawtucket would be elimi-
nated in Barrington as well; gifted and
talented programs in Newport would
also exist in Central Falls. People say it
will never happen, citing political feasi-
bility and virulent parents. If educational
equality within Rhode Island’s borders is
so easily dismissed, is there hope for us,
flawed and flailing?
But there is some collective under-
standing of the reciprocal responsibility
we have for those who happen to land
inside our borders. It has to do with feel-
ing a kinship with their circumstance, a
sense of shared values, an understanding
and comfort with the kind of food they
eat and clothes they wear. Without any
effort the fallacies are revealed: that two
people will share these things because
they are both American, that they won’t
if one is Mexican or Pakistani.
I think that this protectionism of
heart, too, has something to do with
manageability: how could a person stand
upright if the heaviness of every human
was on her back? Maybe, we would cre-
ate more lightness.
---
In 1947 some men drew a few long lines
across the land south of the Himalayas,
west of British Myanmar, and east of the
Iranian Plateau. The Southern borders
were liquid, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of
Bengal, the Indian Ocean, and the place
at the tip where their salts intermingle.
If you stand on the sand at Kanyakumari
and orient due South you can see three
shades of sea and the green gray grada-
tions sift through each other.
ar·bi·trary (adj)
1. Based on individual discretion or judg-
ment; not based on any objective dis-
tinction, perhaps even made at random;
Determined by impulse rather than rea-
son; heavy-handed; Any and all possible.
2. Random or despotic. An unreasonable
act of will.
These men drew some lines based on peo-
ples’ gods and divided many things, like
railway engineers, the land where wheat
proliferates, desks, chairs, and families.
Prisoners were exchanged. Muslim mur-
derers here, Hindu thieves there.
If you were Hindu and lived in Karachi
you had to load everything you could fit
on a train or on the back of your donkey
and travel to India. If you were Muslim
and lived in Delhi, you were most likely
forced to do the same thing in reverse,
destined for Pakistan, a baby country,
only days old. There are 681 miles be-
tween Delhi and Karachi. Before parti-
tion 47.6 percent of people who lived in
Karachi were Hindu. Muslims made up
33.22 percent of Delhi.
by Aliza Kreisman
Illustration by Kah Yangni
Design by Emily Fishman
Twenty million people were displaced.
Twenty million people left the cow they
milked every morning, the bed where
their children were born. They did not
have an assured destination or a home.
They entered the nebulous, managed po-
litical terrain of refugees, following close
on the weary, traipsing heels of those dis-
placed a few years earlier by the Second
World War. There were twenty million of
them, too.
In the aftermath of whim, of political
bravado, the scholar Benedict Anderson
says that we live in a world of imagined
communities—‘communities’ because
there are inliers and outliers, ‘imagined’
because we will never meet all of its mem-
bers. There is beauty in our ability to spin
webs of invisible fibers.
Ideally, relative locality allows people
to vote, legislate, and march in the streets
with some real understanding of the roads
they tred. Global subdivision theoreti-
cally allows different cultures to find their
own fit. Heal, police, teach in the way that
works best. I would like to use my tools,
for you to use yours, for us to share gener-
ously.
Though we easily forget their fragility,
webs are delicate, permeable creations.
We do not remember that more often than
not, we have been asked to guard borders
that were carved out only by other human
imaginations. They require such bitter
defense that in the process we embellish
their weight. Bad things that happen to
humans on the other side are a little less
bad. The people are a little more to blame.
We are not similarly vulnerable.
Yet it is not fair, and it is not true, to
say that our hearts are not huge. I walked
through the slush of Manhattan winter in
the first days after Haiti cracked open. The
city was effervescent with connection. Ev-
ery block in Washington Heights was col-
lecting clothes, bottled water, and cans of
beans. Every church was organizing, every
wallet was open. A doorman ran after me
to give me his umbrella so I wouldn’t get
wet while I was fundraising.
I was overwhelmed; my eyes kept fill-
ing. I felt the final lines of a James Wright
poem in my breastbone:
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would
break
Into blossom.
For the first two weeks after the Haitian
earthquake, 85% of mainstream news in
the United States focused on the after-
math. In the first three weeks, American
relief organizations raised $644 million.
People adopted Haitian orphans and set
Haitian bones.
We can be exquisite.
And yet, we have bipolar, hypocriti-
cal souls. On August 14, 1791, a voodoo
priest gave a sign, and an island of slaves
revolted. In 1804, Haiti became the first
black republic in the world. Even after
the Haitians defeated Napoleon’s army,
France would only grant Haiti indepen-
dence if the new country paid reparations
for France’s lost investment. The Haitians
bought their own bodies. By 1900 Haiti
had to spend 80 percent of its national
budget on debt repayment. In 1947, it had
finally paid off its debt to France, plus in-
terest.
In 2008 France bailed out its six larg-
est banks with $10.5 billion. There was no
debt relief for Haiti. It was charged inter-
est.
Nicolas Sarkozy pledged that no French
bank would collapse.
It’s only someone else’s country col-
lapsing, eternally collapsing. Only that.
---
People hold their breath until the mon-
soon comes, and the heat crescendos up to
the moment of the first rain. This year, the
sky over Pakistan wouldn’t close, the In-
dus River was overwhelmed, and an area
the size of Italy submerged. Like a recur-
ring nightmare: twenty million people, no
place to go.
There was no shortage of wrenching
pictures. Unphotographed devastation
was boundless. It was six months after the
Haitian earthquake. The bone-deep sor-
row that still throbbed in Haitian tissue
erupted in Pakistani femurs and skulls.
Disaster victim transformer dolls—new
outfits, different hairdos, but whichever
way you twist them, the same crestfallen
faces.
Were our eyes glazed over by summer
heat and recreation? Was our empathy fa-
tigued? Did our tongues lie heavy on the
bottom of our mouths, thick with orange
threat levels and tortured terror detain-
ees?
One fifth of crops, irrigation systems, and
livestock were destroyed. Every aid work-
er interviewed said it was the worst natu-
ral disaster they had ever encountered.
We could have collectively, grandly
said: the US government’s values are not
the US people’s fundamental beliefs. We
do not buy into the narrative that All
Pakistanis are Terrorists. If it were up to
us, we would direct more than 2 percent
of US aid to Pakistan for education. We
would show that we care that one third of
Pakistani women are illiterate.
We did not say those things.
News anchors commented on the dis-
crepancy, on the absence of any public
response. Their faces were composed,
and their voices were steady. No one pro-
nounced it revealing or frightening. No
one called it an abomination. Did other
people think these words? Did they curl
their tongues around them but decide not
to open their lips? The silence about the
silence about the
The throbbing splinter was ignored; it
was not dug out, its composition was not
explored.
Richard Wright was a digger. Black Boy
was published in 1945, and it was hard to
swallow. Something makes it stick in the
throat even today, and the most probable
explanation is that it could have been pub-
lished this morning.
Our too-young and too-new America,
lusty because it is lonely, aggressive be-
cause it is afraid, insists upon seeing the
world in terms of good and bad, the holy
and the evil, the high and the low, the
white and the black; our America is fright-
ened of fact, of history, of processes, of
necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning
those whom it cannot understand, exclud-
ing those who look different, and it salves
its conscience with a self-draped cloak of
righteousness. Am I damning my native
land? No, for I too share these faults of
character! And I really do not think that
America is ready to probe into its most
fundamental beliefs.
I had those thoughts about my country
this afternoon, about myself last night,
about how we evade exhuming our most
fundamental beliefs all the time.
One of the flood victims I read about
is a man who prays to Allah and hates the
United States. An American drone attack
killed his sister, and then his niece, and
then a levee was broken so floodwaters
would spare a US army base and drown
him instead. That man tells tales of his-
tory, of processes, of necessity, and we re-
spond with the simple storyline of damn-
ing those we cannot understand. “Floods
Terrorize Pakistan,” announced CNN Aus-
tralia. Why can’t we think of another verb?
I wonder if I crave a richness of language
because of the vocabulary that could be
used to describe the people I’m from, the
borders they have traversed. Kike, spic,
refugee, foreigner, you-who-do-not-be-
long-here.
My grandmother worked so hard to slip
around those words by losing her German
accent that not even a wispy intonation
or odd vowel remain. She says “ruff ” for
“roof,” like everyone else in Chicago, and
rants about the Mexicans who work at the
local grocery store and do not speak Eng-
lish adeptly. “If you want to be here, you
have to learn the language. That’s exactly
what I had to do,” she said as we pulled
away laden with food. She who lost a fa-
ther, a life, cousins and aunts and uncles,
and then found a safe haven here precisely
because this land is circumscribed by bor-
ders. They said Nazis Not Allowed. When I
was thirteen she, my parents, my brother,
and I drove from Germany to Switzerland.
I remember her white knuckles, muscles
taut as she gripped the car door and told
my dad in a clipped voice not to give the
border guards any trouble. They’re going to
let us out, I wanted to tell her.
My maternal grandmother does not
have trauma wired into her synapses.
She prattles away to me in Portuguese,
oblivious to the fact that I cannot re-
spond. My Vovó and Vovô were married
in Belo Horizonte when my grandmother
was 19 and my grandfather was 28; we
don’t know what she thought of that, or
of moving to New York four years later.
They maintained a few square feet of Bra-
zil inside their new house on Long Island,
their property lines marking the borders
of a Lusophone island. My grandfather
crossed them every morning to go to work
at the linguistic maelstrom of the United
Nations, but my mom ate feijoada and flan
and did not speak English until she went
to kindergarten.
I have never faced discrimination or
racial profiling or dehumanization. “My
greatest strength,” I say with a laugh but
not in jest, “is my ethnic ambiguity.” Peo-
ple think I am South Asian, Middle East-
ern, Latina, Persian, part black; people
think I am what they are. I have to carry
a passport, but at the unofficial border
checkpoints where people decide if you
belong, if you should be let in, I usually
sail through. In South Providence a man
on the bus asked me for directions in
Spanish; in Bombay a woman asked for
directions in Marathi. I am blessed with a
rare fluidity of borders. Human instinct is
not easy or clean, though; under the lay-
ers of grime, does something redeemable
reside? Am I welcomed because everyone
thinks I am part of their club? Or perhaps
in my ambiguous features they see the
borders sift and shift and melt away, and
in my face they glimpse something more
whole.
17
Food
C W N I N G N 0 0BS:
M Y SPEC I A L NIGHT AT TOL E DO
A
s someone who frequently
needs an easy, budget-
friendly way to shovel
cheese, meat, and grease
into my mouth late at
night, I fall right into To-
ledo’s target demographic.
In case you haven’t seen
the shop with signs adver-
tising a suspiciously global list of food options, Toledo
is the new pizza-in-a-cone shop on Thayer. Middle East-
ern, Mexican, Greek: they will put extra-greasy generic
versions of an array of ethnic foods into a doughy cone,
conveniently wrapped and ready to be smashed into
whichever face has the three dollars to pay for it.
So, at 1:30 AM last Friday, I paused my Seinfeld mar-
athon, got out of bed, and put on my robe and slippers.
I was going to do this right. I expected the shop to be
a shit show—pizza in a cone becomes that much more
alluring on the night of Sex Power God. And if I couldn’t
find any underwear-clad SPGers, I was sure I would en-
counter at least a few of the loud, muscled party boys
who crowd the sidewalks in front of Thayer’s many
Mediterranean restaurants/clubs/money-laundering
operations. Assured of some interviews, which would
at least keep me entertained if they failed to provide
any useful material, I shuffled into the intensely white
light of Toledo.
Then I realized that atmospherically speaking, To-
ledo sucks. It’s not just that the mostly bare, beige walls
and vaguely cone-shaped light fixtures don’t come off
as overly fun; Toledo looks like whoever was in charge
of decoration quite plainly did not give a shit. Before I
got in line, I had already scribbled “Probably a money
N O V E M B E R 11 2010 T H E C O L L E G E H I L L I N D E P E N D E N T
laundry, too,” in my notes.
The other instant disappointment was the shop’s
clientele. These were not the raging partygoers I had
expected. I wanted people puking and falling off of
stools. I wanted people singing. I wanted someone to
start yelling at the guy behind the counter for a turkey-
and-gravy pizza cone (not one of the featured options).
I wanted to start yelling at the guy behind the counter
for a turkey and gravy pizza cone (it really should be
one of the featured options). Instead it seemed like I
was stuck with the ten people who couldn’t find a hook-
up at SPG. Toledo was less like the Pizza Party Shack of
my imagination and more like the Pit of Eating Away
Your Disappointment.
I scrapped any plans of interviewing customers, in
part because of how bored they all seemed, but mostly
because of my overwhelming bitterness at being some-
where other than my bed. I stepped up to the counter
and after being asked three times what I wanted and
then completely ignored, I ordered the Mediterranean
meat cone. All the standard pizza options were there,
but I figured how often can I get any food I want, “All
by Dan Stump
Illustration by David Emanuel
in a cone”? The ingredients were listed as beef, onions,
peppers, and mushrooms, and, for $1.99, I felt like I
was getting a bargain. Then, I waited. Toledo bakes the
pizza cone to order, so the food is hot even if it isn’t
fast.
My first bite was what I had expected: all dough, stiff
on the outside and hardly flavor-packed. I soon real-
ized, however, that the dough served a greater purpose.
Structurally, the dough is the perfect consistency; the
cone stays together, is easy to eat, and its flavor is en-
tirely secondary to that of its contents. Not that the
contents would win any awards; it was essentially a
glorified Manwich. But I love Manwiches. As I moved
through the cone, the dough became barely noticeable.
I stopped thinking about it as pizza in a cone; it was
more like a cup of hot meat and cheese—a hot pocket
with less self-loathing. The only downside was that the
cone built up a reservoir of hot grease at the bottom,
which exploded on my face as soon as I broke through
the last seal of cheese.
It’s true, I enjoyed my Toledo experience. I felt as
though together, the restaurant and I forged a mutu-
ally beneficial, wholly reciprocal relationship built on
self-awareness—the culinary equivalent of fuck bud-
dies. When I want some food that causes every instinct
I have to scream “horrible idea,” Toledo is there to pro-
vide it, and they know it. Neither of us expects any-
thing more from it, and I don’t expect that I’ll be hang-
ing out there any time before midnight, but when the
dripping meat cone comes out, we have fun. Just watch
out for the hot oil explosion at the end.
DAN STUMP B’14 is all dough and no sauce.
 AMERICA NEEDS PROGRESSIVE TAXATION
EQUALITY

MOST OF AMERICA’S PROSPERITY IS IN THE HANDS OF A SELECT FEW.

AMERICA AS A LAND OF EQUALITY IS UNDER ATTACK. IT IS MORE ECONOMICALLY UNEQUAL
THAN IT HAS BEEN FOR THE LAST 80 YEARS.

AS RECESSION HIT IN 2008, ONE PERCENT OF AMERICANS MADE 23.5 PERCENT OF THE NATION’S
INCOME. THE LAST TIME SO MUCH INCOME HAD BEEN CONCENTRATED IN SO FEW HANDS, IT
WAS THE EVE OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN 1928.

IT HAS NOT ALWAYS BEEN THIS WAY.

DURING THE 1970S, THE RICHEST ONE PERCENT OF AMERICANS CONTROLLED LESS THAN
NINE PERCENT OF THE NATION’S INCOME.

WE CAN BRING BACK ECONOMIC EQUALITY.

IT STARTS WITH BRINGING BACK A MORE PROGRESSIVE TAX STRUCTURE.
BETWEEN 1936 AND 1981, THE RICH PAID TAX RATES OF OVER 70% ON INCOME WITHIN THE HIGHEST BRACKET. SINCE THEN, THE RICH HAVE
BEEN ASKED TO CONTRIBUTE LESS AND LESS. NOW THE RICHEST PAY 35% IN THE HIGHEST BRACKET (HEDGE FUND MANAGERS MAKING
BILLIONS OF DOLLARS PAY AS LITTLE AS 15% ON THEIR INCOME).

THE PRODUCT: GOVERNMENT DEFICITS, DECLINING INFRASTRUCTURE AND SOCIAL SERVICES, AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, A STAGNANT
ECONOMY FOR WORKING AMERICANS.

THE SOLUTION: RAISE TAXES FOR THE RICH. THE HIGHEST RATE SHOULD BE 75%—OR THE 90% RATE THAT WAS INSTATED FOR MOST OF
THE ’40s, ’50s AND ’60s. MAKE MORE TAX BRACKETS FOR THE SUPER-RICH. THE HIGHEST TAX BRACKET SHOULD NOT BE AT $375,000. A
PERSON MAKING $20 MILLION A YEAR SHOULD BE TAXED LIKE A MULTI-MILLIONARE.

AMERICA POSSIBLE
PROGRESSIVE TAXATION MAKES EQUALITY