the college hill inside:

Finally: coffee milk beer | 5

Argentina’s Dirty War | 9
independent Fetish flogging tutorial | 13
Iron Wok reviewed | 17
the brown/ r i s d w e e k ly | M a r c h 4 , 2 0 1 0 | Vo l um e X X i s s u e Iv

“No Spock and Kirk here, just a couple of nipple-clamped old men
harnessed together, gagged and clopping about nobly.” - pg. 13
 table o F c o n t e n t s F ro M t h e editors

news

2 Vice in reView The 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics came to a close
Sex, Lotto, Hummers, Dueling this past Sunday. Over the course of about two weeks, na-
gb, mb, bi-b, hs-d tional pride spread virally throughout the globe as concerned
citizens routinely tapped media outlets for up-to-date medal
3 Monroe liVes counts.
Even as Latin American states unite I, however, sat out on this one, feeling absolutely no com-
simone landon munal ties to my bob sled-bound brethren. Instead I did my
best to elude every image, article, and utterance related to
metro the frosty faux-spectacle. I have an aversion to winter sports;
I don’t even like cool runnings (though I’ll admit, the film’s
4 pVd talks tagline—“One Dream. Four Jamaicans. Twenty Below
Hotel union struggle Zero.”—remains enticing 17 years post-production).
Jesse strecker The Winter Olympics—showcasing a haphazard hodge-
podge of physical feats—is absurd and, dare I say, unasham-
5 coFFee Milk beer edly inequitable (a meager percentage of the population has
Only in RI, we’re guessing ready access to a snowboard…let alone a fiber-glass skeleton
maggie lange sled). Yet, pools of ink and energy were drained crafting nar-
ratives around bogus competitions like the biathlon—which
sketchbook demands dual proficiency in riflery and cross-country ski-
Part 1 ing. One reassuring quotation happened to surface amid the
Jeremy silberberg
media maelstrom. John Shuster, member of the USA curling
team, broke down during his final match, exclaiming, “I hate
this stupid game.”
While thrusting projectiles in the snow is indeed, rather
stupid, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than assuming the
role of said projectiles (the basis of the bobsleigh, the luge,
and the skeleton). According to the official Winter Olympics
website, luge racers “now regularly reach 140 kilometers an
hour or more and G-forces reach over 5G.” Unfortunately
for these arctic daredevils, reverse mountain climbing will
never match the gritty, raw spectacle of genuine physique—
and practical technique—that is the Summer Olympics.
—JC

features

7 west Meets east

Deep Springers at Brown
emma whitford
epheMera as iF you c are
8 talk it out
New legislation for medical malpractice
alice hines

9 Justice oVerdue
For Argentina’s Desaparecidos From: XXXX XXXXX XXXX_XXXX@nmh_school.org
francesca barber To: XXX XXXXXXX<XXX.XXXXXXX@gmail.com>
date Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 6:58 AM
opinions subject Re: He always stays near you. . .

11 youtube>art
Including Urs Fischer I met your friend Abby Huber that night. She immedi-
lee g. brooks ately came off as sharpand thoughtful. We discussed you
and other things at length. . I think it was a nice talk for
science both of us. I do regret that I fell into the campfire,naked
pool, naked sauna, more beer pattern and did not talk to
12 transForMers! her much more. I think that would have been nicer. Also,
Dog-droids and bat-bots I taught the bassist of Marcy’s playground how to use
sam dean Lexis Nexis this morning.

kink

13 Fetish Flea Market

The booth babes had bull whips
emily segal & simon van Zuylen-wood

arts

15 Mr. & Mrs. crawFord g e t i n touch

A literary interview
miguel morales & Kaela myers
Email: theindy@gmail.com
Blog: theindy.org/blog THEINDY.ORG
literary
Twitter: @maudelajoie THEINDY.ORG
16 strangers
The College Hill Independent THEINDY.ORG
Creative nonfiction
PO Box 1930
THEINDY.ORG
laura brown-lavoie
Brown University
Providence RI 02912 THEINDY.ORG
reviews

17 chinese Food s taFF

Chinese Iron Wok
werle + wong
Managing Editors: Erin Schikowski, List: Lola Bates-Campbell, Margo Irvin
Kat Stoeffel, Alex Verdolini Mega Porn Star: Raphaela Lipinsky
noise pop News: Marisa Calleja, Beatrice Igne- Cover Editor: Emily Martin
So Cow at AS220 Bianchi, Marguerite Preston Illustrations: Samantha Ballardini, Becca
emma Janaskie Metro: Rachel Levenson, Katie Lindstedt, Levinson, Emily Martin, Robert Sandler
Jesse Strecker, George Warner Design: Robin Davis, Liat Werber, Yue Pang,
sports Opinions: Jordan Carter, Eli Schmitt Natalie Uduwela, Joanna Zhang
Features: Alexandra Corrigan, Alice Hines, Katie Web: Daniela Postigo, Adam Zethraeus
17 tenure or terM liMits? Jennings, Hannah Sheldon-Dean, Laura Tsunoda New Media: Kate Welsh
Rethinking collegiate coaching Arts: Erik Font, Pablo Larios, Ryan Wong Senior Editors: Nick Greene, Simone Landon,
malcolm burnley Literary: Kaela Myers, Rachel Sanders Margo Irvin, Miguel Morales, Emily Segal
Science: Sam Dean, Nupur Shridhar Staff Writer: Malcolm Burnley
Sports: Simon van Zuylen-Wood
sketchbook Cover: Christina Graham
Food: Nick Werle
Part 2 X Page: Gillian Brassil MVP: Jesse Strecker, Daniela Postigo
Jeremy silberberg

the college hill independent m a r c h 4, 2010

 news | 2

Week in reVieW
b y b e at r i c e i g n e - b i a n c h i , h a n n a h s h e l d o n - d e a n ,
gillian brassil, MalcolM burnley

i l l u s t r at i o n b y r o b e rt s a n d l e r

bU m m e r , h U m m e r
Let the obituaries begin. Reminisce the prom
queen’s misfortune when her Hummer limo ran out
of gas and when you claimed that Transformers had
no impact on your purchase of an HX. Then date
the scrapbook 1992- 2010, because as of February 24
Hummer is finished.
After two years of trying to auction off the brand,
General Motors says that without an unforeseen buy-
er, it plans to permanently wind down its production
of the brand. The announcement comes after a $150
million deal with China’s Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy
Industrial Machines fell through. A combination of
Chinese government intervention and insufficient
capital has killed the acquisition.
Following a government bailout, GM first estab-
lished the deal in June, trying to sell a brand with
declining profits and unshakable anti-environmental
taint. Hummer’s emissions-monger reputation caused
the Chinese government reversal. Facing blame for
the climate change impasse in Copenhagen, China
hopes to indicate its environmental commitment by
disallowing Hummer.
Many signals pointed to Hummer’s fatal demise,
including criticism from Governor Arnold Schwar-
zenegger, who once claimed he would buy a fleet of
Hummers. Although steroid-raging to tree-hugging
is a trendy move these days, when the Kindergarten
Cop disowns you, it’s time for termination.
—MB

K e n t U c K y t h r ow s
d ow n t h e g aU n t l e t
Remember that moment in US
History class, in your junior year of
high school, when you found out that
Alexander Hamilton was killed in a
duel with Aaron Burr? And you were
all like, “Wait wait wait—a duel?!”
Well, you’re not the only one who
giggles incredulously at the once-
widespread (and often lethal) practice
of dueling: former dueling hotbed
Kentucky is looking to amend the
portion of its state constitution that
bars state officials from having ever
participated in duels with deadly
weapons.
Fed up with the chuckling that
routinely greets the swearing-in of
present-day officials, Democratic
State Representative Darryl Owens
is sponsoring a bill to remove any
mention of dueling from Kentucky’s
oath of office. Last week, Owens told
the Associated Press that “the laugh-
ter as a result of the dueling portion
detracts […] from what should be a
solemn and important occasion.” His
proposal has already been approved
by the House Committee on Elec-
tions, Constitutional Amendments,
and Intergovernmental Affairs. It is
now up for review by the State House
and Senate, and should they deem the
proposal worthy, the issue will be put
to voters come November.
While the paranoid among us
might worry that an amended oath
could trigger reenactments of the
Burr-Hamilton showdown, Andrew
Malcolm of the l.a. times, for one,
speculates that a broad resurgence
in dueling might not be such a bad
thing. He writes, “Have those elected
political folks put their own bodies
where their overblown rhetoric is.
See if that tones things down a bit on
the sound bites that pass for political
dialogue these days.” And from that
point of view, Dick Cheney has never
looked scarier.
—HS-D
mile-high madness
Once upon a time—which is to say, on
February 26—there was a Ryanair plane
flying from Krakow to the East Midlands,
which sounds like the name of some islands
but actually refers to the region in England
where Weetabix cereal is made.
A man on this plane felt an itch in his
brain, and realized it was the itch of feeling
lucky! So he decided to buy a lottery scratch-
card on the plane, which is apparently some-
thing you can do on discount European
flights.
The man got his card and then scratched
and scratched, and suddenly, his prize was
revealed: he had won €10,000!
This man was so anxious to claim his
winnings that he demanded it from the
cabin staff immediately. The staff got their
feathers all ruffled and said, “Sorry, sir, but
we don’t exactly have that kind of cash kick-
ing around the aircraft!” The man did not
like this news one bit. Red-faced and hornet-
angry, he decided to eat his ticket.
“No, no!” said the other passengers.
“No, no!” said the crew members.
“Do not eat your ticket!”
But he did, and then he could not claim
his prize winnings at all, so Ryanair is now
letting passengers vote on the charity it will
go to instead.
That’s why you should always fly Luf-
thansa, now offering great winter-season ski
deals.
—GB

t h e y g ot g a m e
Olympic athletes are famous for
their discipline and endurance. It’s in
their DNA to give 110 percent. And as
reported last week, giving it one’s all is
not limited to the rinks and slopes—it ex-
tends to the bedroom. The winter wonder
men and women have already polished
off Vancouver’s supply of rubbers, which
prompted an emergency shipment to the
Olympic site.
Luckily, the Canadian Foundation for
Aids Research (CANFAR) came quickly
to the rescue. In three large boxes, the
organization expedited 8,500 party hats
for the Olympic-sized libidos. “When
we heard about the condom shortage
in Vancouver, we felt it important to
respond immediately,” said Kerry White-
side, CANFAR’s Executive Director, as
reported by Canada’s national post.
At the start of the games, health repre-
sentatives in Vancouver provided 10,000
free condoms to the 7,000 athletes and
officials—that’s roughly 14 condoms a
head. But less than two weeks into the
start of the Olympics, raincoats were
running dangerously low. So if everyone’s
doing it that comes to a grand total of sex
once a day during the week, and twice
nightly come the weekend.
The Olympic Games popped a cherry
of its own—this is the first time there has
been a shortage of preservatives since the
distribution of free condoms began at the
1992 Barcelona games. Not a bad way to
warm up before a routine.
—BI-B

m a r c h 4, 2010 t h e i n dy. o r g
n e w s a n a ly s i s | 3
SPHERE O F
IN F LUENCE
A n U p d at e d M o n r o e D o c t r i n e
for the Obama Era
By Simone Landon
i l l u s t r at i o n b y b e c c a l e v i n s o n
L ast week, 32 Latin American and Caribbean leaders
met in the resort town of Playa del Carmen, Mexico,
to forge a new regional organization that explicitly ex-
cludes the United States and Canada. The conference closed
on February 23 with the establishment of the Community of
Latin American and Caribbean States (CLACS), to hold its
first official body meeting in Caracas in 2011.
At the opening ceremony, both Mexican president Felipe
Calderón and Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez invoked
the legacy of Simón Bolívar, the South American indepen-
dence leader and advocate of Latin American unity.
“If we are together, we are stronger, we are free, more
democratic,” Calderón said, quoting Bolívar. Chávez added
the organization was a move to “retake the path” of the re-
gion.
This implied taking the region’s direction and control
away from the US, something Chávez made explicit in an
interview with CNN en Español. “The gringo empire has
always wanted us to be at odds,” he said, adding, the US has
tried “to impede what has started here: true integration from
Mexico to Argentina.”
The North American
media’s coverage of the
Some are h a i l i n g t h e n ew
Summit was sparse and
focused mostly on the
organization a s a n e x a m p l e o f
fact that Chávez told
his rival, Colombian
Latin America b re a k i n g f re e o f
President Álvaro Uribe,
to “go to hell.” But after
Yankee domina t i o n .
the spat, the conference
managed to pass several important resolutions, among them
a statement in support of Argentina’s claim to the Malvinas
(Falkland Islands) against Britain and a call for the OAS to
take greater steps to incorporate Cuba. While the “Unity
Summit” lived up to its name on paper, it remains to be seen
whether the new organization in fact signals both a practical
and rhetorical shift in hemispheric relations.
Some are hailing CLACS as a defiant challenge to the
Organization of American States (which is largely dominated
by US interests), and an example of the decline of the re-
gional power and privilege of the US. Its formation is part of
a broader sense that Latin America may be breaking free of
Yankee domination.
T he king is dead!
Many analysts and journalists insist that US foreign policy
in Latin America has moved from Monroe Doctrine (‘Latin
America is our sphere of influence’) and Roosevelt Corollary
(‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’) diplomacy to more nu-
anced negotiation. They point to the rise of socialist-inspired
governments like those of Chávez in Venezeula and Evo Mo-
rales in Bolivia, as well as more moderate leaders like Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Michelle Bachelet in Chile,
as signs of a new Latin America unafraid to defy the US. A
2008 report from the Washington think tank The Council
on Foreign Relations declared the Monroe Doctrine “obso-
lete,” claiming Latin America is “no longer Washington’s to
lose, nor is it Washington’s to save.”
In December’s New Republic, former Mexican Foreign
Secretary and current NYU Professor Jorge Castañeda asserts
the US is exhibiting a “new passivity” and “indifference”
regarding Latin American affairs. Citing US inaction dur-
ing last summer’s coup in Honduras, Castañeda writes, “For
the first time in centuries, the United States doesn’t seem to
care much what happens in Latin America.” Bidding adios to
Monroe, he calls for a new doctrine that might keep the US
out of other countries’ domestic policies, while still main-
taining the right to enforce international agreements.
Since President Obama’s inauguration, the US govern-
ment has worked hard to support this image of a supposedly
softer Latin American policy. At last April’s Summit of the
Americas, Obama called for “an equal partnership,” adding,
“there is no senior partner and junior partner in our rela-
tions; there is simply engagement based on mutual respect
and common interests and shared values.”
But the State Department has continued to use language
that harkens back to Cold War-style diplomacy, bent on
the college hill independent
preserving North American over local interests.
In her first trip to the region as secretary of state,
Hillary Clinton objected to Brazilian and Venezu-
elan openness to Iran, suggesting those nations’ lead-
ers “take a look at what the consequences might well
be for them.” In the wake of the Honduran coup, State
Department spokesman Philip Crowley said the experi-
ence “would be a good lesson” for ousted president Manuel
Zelaya and that the “current leadership in Venezuela would
not be a particular model” if he wanted US support.
Still, in a February 26 press conference, US Assistant
Secretary of State Arturo Valenzuela insisted on a US-Latin
American partnership based in common interest. “There
really isn’t that much significant difference between the
United States and the countries of the Americas. We have
very common goals. We’re seeking the same objectives,” he
said.
CLACS may appear to refute that assertion, as Latin
Americans are explicitly attempting to strike out on their
own. Yet US response remains critical; even Castañeda
admits that on most
matters, anyway, “almost
nothing can be done
without US cooperation
or leadership.” For all the
Obama Administration’s
emphasis on hemispheric
unity, foundational
policy. Instead, he said, “It’s changing the way they’re dealing
tenets of US policy and
with their interests.”
their current implemen-
tations still prevent any “new era” of diplomacy marked by
The long goodbye
cooperation rather than coercion.
Instead of using outdated or politically unsavory aggression,
the State Department may just be biding its time. Rather
Long li ve the king!
than confront or negotiate with the “Left Turn” governments
In a February 8 article in The Nation, Greg Grandin argues
of Chávez, Lula, and Bachelet, it can just wait for them to be
the Monroe Doctrine “has not expired so much as slimmed
term-limited out of office. Right-wing president-elect Sebas-
down,” and that the US continues to “promote a volatile mix
tián Piñera will soon replace Bachelet in Chile. Brazil faces a
of militarism and free-trade orthodoxy” in the region.
presidential election in which Lula’s Workers Party holds no
“I would never use the word ‘passivity’ to describe US
guarantees. Venezuela and Argentina have upcoming legisla-
relations with Latin America,” Grandin wrote in an email.
tive elections. If centrist or right wing governments come to
He cited the ongoing drug war, Plan Colombia, Southcom,
power in those countries, the current so-called unity of the
NAFTA, and CAFTA as indicating “a very active engage-
Latin American leftist bloc will be broken.
ment.”
Especially significant and belying ‘non-interventionism’ And this unity is more an affinity than a path to a coher-
is Plan Colombia. Now eleven years old, Plan Colombia is ent political agenda. The Community of Latin American and
currently the primary US military operation in Latin Amer- Caribbean States may turn out to be more than a symbolic
ica, focused on stopping the drug trade and suppressing the counter-organization to the OAS, but “it’s not such a united
activity of Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) guerillas. In front,” Oliven said. Although he called the formation of the
October, Colombia agreed to allow the US access to seven organization “natural,” he said, “it’s an organization [that]
military bases to conduct counterinsurgency operations. obviously is going to have different perspectives.”
Free military rein is part of why the US calls Colombia Grandin agreed that “ideological divisions will be strong.”
its closest ally in the region, despite the fact that the right But he sees the organization as demonstrating a “willingness
wing Uribe regime is considered one of the most repressive. to think and act in concert” that “could provide an important
The International Trade Union Confederation has reported stabilizing counterweight to Washington’s increasingly reck-
more than 500 trade unionists killed in Colombia since less willingness to play one region or country off another.”
Uribe took office. So far, the official US response to CLACS has been lim-
Southcom is the US Department of Defense’s agency for ited to a statement by Assistant Secretary of State Arturo
operations in Latin America and, Grandin wrote, “has more Valenzuela downplaying the new organization’s significance.
staff devoted to Latin American issues than all other US “We do not see the fact that the countries of Latin America
government agencies combined.” This seems a far cry from are trying to put together some of their own mechanisms
the “indifference” that Castañeda touted. for integration as, in any way, deleterious to the objectives
So, too, are the primary US-Latin America economic that the United States are pursuing” he told reporters. But he
agreements, NAFTA (which includes Canada and Mexico) cautioned that the Community “should not be an effort that
and CAFTA (NAFTA for the Central American states). would replace the OAS.”
Both take a decidedly hands-on approach to promoting Secretary of State Clinton will be traveling throughout
neo-liberal, laissez-faire economic policy. Latin America this week to offer post-earthquake aid to
Whatever the facts on the ground, US foreign policy Chile, and to meet with leaders in Uruguay, Brazil, Costa
makers are trying to craft a better public image—at least Rica and Guatemala. The State Department is billing the
at home, if not abroad. And in many instances, tactics for trip as part of the effort for “greater engagement” with “bi-
promoting US interests truly aren’t what they used to be. lateral issues” in the region. The US continues to talk softly
“Military interventions in Latin America don’t look intel- while waiting to see what to do with its big stick.
ligent in this moment,” said Ruben Oliven, a visiting profes- ______________________________________________
sor at Brown’s Center for Latin American Studies. However, SIMONE LANDON B’10.5 is a Latin American Stud-
he noted, “I don’t think the United States is passive. This ies concentrator.
idea is misleading, and it’s based on the presumption that
you are only active if you show your [military] power.” Nor
does he think the US is becoming more progressive in its
m a r c h 4, 2010
 M e t r o |4

PRO V IDENCE TALKS

W i t h H i p o l i to R i v e r a , H ot e l w o r k e r
By Jesse Strecker

H ipolito Rivera is a houseman at the Renaissance Hotel
in downtown Providence. He came here with his fam-
ily from Puerto Rico about 20 years ago and has been
working in Rhode Island ever since. Presently, his job description
includes bringing clothes to housekeeping, taking out trash, car-
rying extra beds, and a variety of other odd jobs. A soft spoken
man, he has taken a prominent leadership role in organizing a
campaign for unionization at his job.
On January 5, 2010, Rivera, along with over 100 Providence
Renaissance workers and community members representing
clergy, politicians, and students converged at the hotel. Together
they told management they had organized for change at work.
Indy: How did you begin organizing with the union?
Riv era: A co-worker, Veronica, spoke to me about them.
They came to visit me at home.
Before we presented to managers, everything was secret.
We spoke to our co-workers about the proposals of the
union. We talked with housekeepers about how they give
people so many rooms to clean, and almost no supplies. We
talked about the rooms people have to clean that are very
dirty, with vomit or where people have defecated.
We said, when the union comes, that’s all going to
change; If you do this work, you’re going to get paid extra.
We talked with people, trying to get them to unite with us.
Now, almost everyone wants a union.
Since we announced ourselves at work, a lot of things
have been fixed.
there’s better treatment, we’ve got the materials we need,
it’s helped us a lot. But what was the ultimate goal? To sign a
contract with us to secure these good things they were doing.
I: Have there been any more changes?
R:Oh yes. For example, it had been nine months since I
moved from laundry to houseman, and I still didn’t have a
uniform. They called me into the office, and they quickly
got me one. There weren’t supplies for us in housekeep-
ing. They bought more. And they’ve been good at getting
people their pay on time.
Some of the managers left—others had been letting them
do a lot of things that aren’t allowed.
And they treat us better. They’re treating us with more
respect. Before, they spoke to us with harsh demands. Now,
they’re very attentive.
I started out at $10 an hour. I’ve been there two years and
six months, and I still haven’t gotten a raise to $11. They
haven’t given us the raises we’re supposed to get. If we had the
union, we’d see these changes.
I: What else do you hope to gain?
R: We hope they’ll pay us fairly. We hope they’ll give us a
better medical plan. Right now, I pay $52 for my medical
plan that doesn’t have many benefits. The union guarantees
a better plan that we pay less for.
I: What was it like to be in the room for the first time with
the other committee members?
R: I liked it a lot. You start to see who’s part of the union,
one by one. It was exciting to know that we’re going to have
a change at work.
I was very surprised too. I had no idea there were so many
leaders at my job. When I came and saw all these people, it
gave me strength.
I: How did you participate in the first delegation?
R: We went in a big group, basically all the employees of
the Renaissance, and people from the Westin from the Bilt-
more. We felt very supported. There were nine people who
wanted to speak directly with them. Five employees and
four politicians also came to speak. We waited and waited,
but no one came out.
Eventually someone from Human Resources came out.
Betsy from the kitchen and Benjamin from the kitchen both
spoke. But when we went to speak, she turned her back on
us, she just walked away. They listened to the politicians, but
they turned their back on us.
And she represents human resources. Her job is to listen
to us, but she just left. She’s not supposed to be on the side of
the owners, or the side of the employees. She’s in the middle,
she’s supposed to be neutral. I felt disappointed with them. I
thought she would do her work. But this demonstrated that
they only stand with the owners. I learned this that day. In
reality, it’s not like they say, that we’re taken care of by them.
No, it’s a lie.
But this gives me more strength to fight with the union.
I : Why did workers from the Westin and the Biltmore
participate?
R : We’re united, because they know the mistreatment we
experience. It happened to them for a while. The union
unites us all.
We’re all fighting for the same cause. The Westin is still
negotiating their contract, and there are some problems
there, but they have the privledge of having a union.
I : Has this experience changed you?
R : Yes, it’s changed me a lot. I feel more secure in my job
because I see that since we spoke with managers, there’s
more respect. I’m more satisfied, more secure.
I : Any last words?
R : I’d like to say, to anyone who reads this and has a job
where there’s not the guard of a union, that they rise up.
It’s the best thing that can happen to an employee, to work
with a union. You work equally with managers. They look
at you as though you’re somebody as well, not just an em-
ployee but somebody who matters.
_____________________________________________
Jesse Strecker B’10 is the Independent’s deputy
editor in labor and union relations.

I: Why do you work with the union?

R: The union gets an employee all the benefits he deserves,

like better pay, more respect, so you’re not just dependent
on the employer. They always have someone tending to
what an employee needs. They do the things that managers
and supervisors don’t do.
The union is just. They try to make sure employees are
paid fairly. They watch out for us. They’re there when the
bosses mistreat us, when they make us do things that aren’t
in our job description. Right now, they have us housemen
doing the work of laundry, they have us doing the work
of housekeeping also, which sends us to clean rooms with
vomit, rooms where people have defecated. They send us to
get dirty, wet clothes from rooms. They need to pay us extra
for these things, and they don’t.
m a r c h 4, 2010 t h e i n dy. o r g
METRO | 5
BEERI F IED RI
h ow r h o dy ’ s o f f i c i a l d r i n k g ot d r u n k
I t’s a curious union. In December, a sugary children’s drink
from the 1920s and a beverage old enough to feature in
the Code of Hammurabi joined for a brief and unex-
pected marriage.
This winter, Rhode Island’s only microbrewery, Coastal
Extreme, decided to turn coffee milk, the official state drink,
into a beverage for the 21+ crowd. “We beerified it,” said
Adam Truesdale, the brewer of Coastal Extreme Brewery’s
Coffee Milk Stout, “we took the local Rhode Island drink
and made it alcoholic.”
And alcoholic it is, with a seven percent content. It’s a bit
dusty, a bit thick, a bit pungent—miles from the aggressively
saccharine and creamy coffee milk on the taste spectrum.
The Coffee Milk Stout—Truesdale’s first project for
Coastal Extreme, best known for their beer Newport
Storm—he researched both milk stouts and coffee stouts.
An affable and earnest guy, he chatted excitedly about the
science behind his concoction. Milk stouts are made with
lactose, an unfermentable sugar. When yeast ferments the
barley in this beer, it essentially rejects the milk. It doesn’t
touch the lactose, “leav[ing] a residual creaminess and sweet-
ness to milk stouts.”
For the coffee flavoring, Truesdale contacted Autocrat,
Rhode Island’s producer of the coffee syrup that flavors cof-
fee milk. Truesdale said that what really excited people was
the union of Rhode Island’s coffee syrup makers to the state’s
only microbrewery. “We are getting creative, trying to make
a more Rhode Island product with another Rhode Island
business,” he explained. “This is a movement supporting lo-
cal business and locally grown products.”
From the sketchbook of Jeremy Silberberg
by maggie lange
Autocrat was founded in the late nineteenth century by
Frank O. Field, a man with unabashed expectations for his
product. According to The History of Autocrat Coffee, Field
named his company Autocrat after reading a series of essays
entitled “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” in the Atlantic
Monthly. Field named his product, hopeful that his coffee
would also rule the breakfast table “with undisputed influ-
ence.”
Autocrat was based in Providence proper for almost 100
years before it moved to a larger space in Lincoln, Rhode
Island. In their new 3.3-acre distribution center, 40,000 gal-
lons of coffee syrup are made monthly. That’s enough syrup
for approximately 31 million glasses of coffee milk a year;
31 glasses a year per Rhode Islander. And it’s probably only
Rhode Islanders drinking it; coffee milk is hardly known
outside the 401 area code.
Diners and drugstores in the 1920s Rhode Island first
served coffee milk to give kids a softened and sweetened ver-
sion of a grown-up beverage. However, its origins may be
from the old country. In her book about Italian immigrants
and cuisine in Rhode Island, We Called It Macaroni, Nancy
Verde Barr wrote, “In Italy they often made a bitter coffee
with grain. The brew was then heavily sweetened […] then
the tradition of sweetening continued here.”
In the ’90s, Rhode Island State Legislature decided it
didn’t have enough to debate and decided to select an of-
ficial state drink, entering a heated three month-long debate
between Del’s Lemonade and coffee milk. On July 29, 1993,
the Rhode Island State Legislature announced that coffee
milk was “the Official State Drink of Rhode Island.” There
was one dissenting vote, however, from East Greenwich
Senator J. Michael Lenihan, who announced, “I’m holding
out for Narragansett beer.”
Now it seems that Mr. Lenihan might be appeased.
Thanks to Newport Storm, beer and coffee milk have en-
tered into a brief but significant union.
Truesdale said that loyal coffee milk drinkers have shown
enthusiastic support: “The people at Autocrat said they could
really taste the syrup.” He also said that at his beer tastings
around the state “Rhode Islanders come up to me and tell
me stories about how they have to send the Autocrat syrup to
their son or daughter who lives in California or overseas, and
they told me they are going to include this beer for them.”
Though the combination of lactose, espresso, and barley
makes this beer taste forced, its novelty makes it exciting. “It’s
popular with people who know what coffee milk is; Rhode
Islanders. Rhode Island pride, that’s the whole motivation,”
concluded Truesdale. Unconventional as it is, it makes sense
in its own Rhody way.
____________________________________________________
MAGGIE LANGE B’11likes her coffee, her milk, and
her beer all on their lonesome.

ONE RING TO PERUSE THE M ALL
R i c h a r d R i n g & t h e P r ov i d e n c e Pu b l i c L i b r a ry ’ s S p e c i a l C o l l e c t i o n s
i l l u s t r at i o n b y s a m a n t h a b a l l a r d i n i
W hen Richard Ring graduated in 1998 with a
Master’s degree in Library Sciences in 1998,
he said he didn’t care where he ended up as
long as there was “a river of corruption running underneath
the city.” Upon landing at Brown University’s John Carter
Brown Library (JCB), he was sated.
He became the Reference and Acquisitions Librarian, go-
ing to auctions and book fairs to purchase new items for the
collection. It was a great first job, he says, but after nine years
a desire for fresh terrain spurred him to find new challenges.
At the Providence Public Library he found an opportunity to
shed a feeling of staleness that had enveloped him, and the
freedom to explore some of his “more radical ideas.” 
Ring started garnering money for Special Collections
by selling informative booklets and mugs he’d designed
with historical prints on them. He sees such promotional
merchandizing as a critical part of the department, akin to
a museum’s shop--not only for raising money, but also for
informing the world about invaluable artifacts.
The JCB has roughly as many items in its Special Col-
lections department as the Providence Public Library (PPL),
yet the former department has a staff of 30 while the lat-
ter has a staff of one: Ring. The endowment for the JCB’s
special collections is equal to the endowment of the entire
PPL, technically a private library. Moreover, the only money
the PPL’s Special Collections receives from its endowment is
for whaling literature and a small amount for Irish materials.
The rest of the objects have come from donations, which
have been many. Dealing in tens of thousands of dollars,
the JCB was not interested in Ring’s merchandizing; at the
PPL, Ring makes a huge difference by raising a few hundred.
When Ring arrived at the PPL, the rest of the library was
unaware of the collection’s composition and worth; much of
it was unprotected. He is now the guardian, the sole expert,
and even a benefactor.
The Collection
When Ring talks about the Special Collections Depart-
ment at the Providence Public Library, his normally calm
demeanor is transformed.
“The thing is this stuff can suck you in!” he exclaims,
throwing his arms apart toward the room behind us. “It’s
perilous to get lost in!” Ring presides over 40,000 differ-
ent articles spanning more than 4,000 years of civilization,
including manuscripts, pamphlets, artifacts, newspapers,
maps, books, broadsides, and art.
Ring’s realm encompasses various works never seen in the
library’s other sections, including the original the Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglas, pre-Civil War maps, and a
first edition of The Hobbit (which he let me pet). There is
the first edition, first issue of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter
Rabbit, with Potter’s original illustrations. She arranged the
printing herself when six different publishers rejected the
book. One can find cartoonish WWII propaganda, 17th
Century religious pamphlets by the little-known cult called
the Muggletonians, and seven cuneiform tablets dating back
to 2000 BCE.
In his blog Ring writes, “I know rare-book folks hate to
refer to this stuff as ‘treasures’, but hey—purists make life
dull.”
His work does have a scavenger’s side to it. Ring makes a
new discovery almost every week. When combing through
his shelves, he stumbles upon new objects that are cultur-
ally—and sometimes monetarily—priceless. The collection
contains certain 18th century prints that would go for
around $1,000,000 if sold.
“The market will put a price on everything,” Ring says,
“but those of us in rare books deal in a multiplicity of values
simultaneously.” The librarian is disdainful of people who
see special collections only for their pecuniary worth, as the
historical, literary, and artistic value are immeasurable.
m a r c h 4, 2010
M e t r o |6
b y N o r a B o s w o rt h
His most recent find was the stained shirt collar of Sul-
livan Ballou, a famous Civil War veteran of Rhode Island
who died at the battle of Bull Run. Ring was incredibly
excited when he found it, but not surprised; stumbling upon
fresh material is now a regular part of his work. A lack of
organization and of a polished inventory (due to paltry fund-
ing), have presented him with undiscovered territory. He sees
these items as more than just academically stimulating.
“Scholarship is great…blah, blah, blah,” says Ring, “but
what really excites me is artists, creative writers, fiction writ-
ers, people who are doing historical journalism …people
who are just doing stuff that is creative.”
The Proj ects
When Ring became the Special Collections Librarian at the
PPL in 2007, the works needed someone “with a fire in his
belly,” he said.
Ring has just that. In addition to managing the Special
Collections, he directs 18 volunteers, manages an active and
extensive blog, publishes his own quarterly publication, Oc-
casional Nuggets, and runs the “History of the Book” seminar
at the John Carter Brown Library.
He prints 200 copies of Occasional Nuggets quarterly, a
booklet that explains and sometimes offers a sample of a par-
ticularly interesting item within the collection. He gives its
historical context and other relevant tidbits; and he is brim-
ming with tidbits. He uses the revenue he makes from the
issues to buy basic necessities for the collection, like folders
to protect the more fragile works.
His program on the history of the book follows in this
vein of bite-size pieces of information. Held every Thursday
of this semester at the John Carter Brown Library, he calls
the 30-minute lessons, “Short Attention-Span Seminars,” as
he wants to avoid “long droning, pedantic bibliographic in-
struction.” Ring talks about just one resource relating to the
history of the book each class, like papermaking or typogra-
phy. “It’s really for undergrads,” he says. “I don’t care about
graduate students, I don’t care about faculty.” He is trying to
reach people who aren’t already library veterans.
As the number of his volunteers suggests, Ring loves
working with students, giving them access to typically inac-
cessible materials. He is eager to aid in any project he can.
He says librarians in special collections need contact with
students to pull them back into reality from “their happy
hunting grounds.” His current volunteers are doing inven-
tory; scanning whaling logs, portraits of historic printers,
and late Victorian pictures of New England; and curating
exhibitions—one on Civil War ballads, the other on Civil
War prisons.
“If there is anything that I really want to promote, it’s
Special Collections as a place for inspiration.” Inspiration can
be found by appointment only—call 401-455-8021—but
Ring makes sure to note that all are welcome.
______________________________________________
Nora Bosworth B’10 is a happy hunting
ground.
t h e i n dy. o r g
f e at u r e s | 7
F RO M AL F AL F A TO I V Y
T h e d e e p s p r i n g s - b r ow n c o n n e c t i o n
i l l u s t r at i o n b y b e c c a l e v i n s o n
S itting in a booth with five Deep Springs transfers is
equivalent to huddling with a quarter of the school’s
entire student body. As they shift awkwardly on the
hard booth benches of a basement eatery, it’s hard to picture
them against the backdrop of mountains and desert brush.
All of them have operated heavy machinery and tended
alfalfa fields, milked cows and butchered them. They've lived
in the desert for two years and retained enough momentum
to leap back into society.
Charles Pletcher, Brown class of 2011 and Deep Springs
class of 2007 (Deep Springs students are labeled by their
matriculation year), is two weeks into his first semester at
Brown after a semester off in California. He’s sitting across
the table, elbows pulled in close, awkwardly sawing at an
eggy crepe. Sam Allen, DS ’06, is on his right. He keeps
brushing his hair out of his eyes and glancing anxiously from
side to side, occasionally turning all the way around to scan
the room behind him. Michael Lubin, DS ‘06, looks more
at ease, leaning back in the wooden chair he has pulled up to
the booth and grinning. Brian Judge and Nate Sibinga, both
DS ’07, don’t seem thrilled by our close quarters. I can feel
their energy humming.
 
Nunn’s Ideology
Deep Springs College is an all-male two-year institution.
The brainchild of L.L. Nunn, it was founded on an
operating cattle ranch and alfalfa farm in California’s High
Desert. In Nunn’s utopia, students practice manual labor,
self-governance, and a Socratic style of learning, far removed
from the distractions of material society.
Lucien Lucius Nunn’s twin brother Lucius Lucien died
unexpectedly at the age of three. L.L. later pinpointed this
trauma as the source of his lifelong sadness and loneliness—
it may have served as inspiration for a male-centric
community. It is impossible to graduate from Deep Springs
without knowing all of one’s classmates intimately. Michael
explains, “Nowhere else would you get to know people
you don’t like so well.” Contact with the nearest outpost of
civilization, the small town of Bishop located 40 miles away,
is strongly discouraged. This extreme isolation fosters deep
connections—both to the desert and between the students
who live and work there.
Deep Springs has a radically conservative code of
social conduct—alcohol, drugs and girlfriends are strictly
prohibited, except on interterm breaks. Surprisingly, these
rules are enforced by the students themselves. Students pay no
tuition, room, or board. They earn their keep through labor.
An U nlikely Pairing
Deep Springs has long been the object of media attention.
This is partially due to its history of ushering its graduates
into some of the highest-ranked institutions in the country.
Until Harvard stopped accepting transfers, it was a favorite
Deep Springs’ postlude. These days students transfer to
Yale, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and, in the
greatest numbers, to Brown. Currently, Brown has seven
Deep Springs transfers.
The most popular explanation for the magnetic attraction
between these schools and Deep Springs is that they all attract
a specific “type,” a self-selecting category of young men who
can’t handle the convention of a traditional university at age
18, and at age 20 can only stomach notoriously unstructured
elite institutions.
However, Brian Judge argues that the decision to go from
Deep Springs to Brown isn’t necessarily so weighty. “I was
choosing between Brown and Williams, and I chose Brown
because there would be people here [fellow Deep Springers].”
Brian and the other Deep Springs transfers at Brown refer to
themselves laughingly as a cult.
Academic and social idealism intersect at Deep Springs.
The students decide which professors come to the school
each year and design the curriculum. The only two required
courses are Composition and Public Speaking. Sciences
are notoriously second best, due to the lack of laboratory
resources on the campus. The desert setting tends to attract
humanities professors, who can enjoy the desert without
worrying about teaching supplies. The schools to which
Deep Springers transfer, although less idyllic, offer similar
academic freedoms with the added bonus of far more
resources. Nate reflects, “It’s pretty ironic that I’m majoring
in marine biology [at Brown].”
 
the college hill independent
b y Emm a W h i t f o r d
A Mark
All five seem to agree that whatever drew them to the desert
in the first place—a need for adventure, isolation, an escape
from modern conventions—had been satisfied by the time
they graduated. They also agree that those two years left a
mark.
Sam explains, “[Brown] is not going to leave as profound
a mark, because it’s an institution geared towards a four-year
experience. Brown is a less difficult place to live.”
Steve Carmody, DS ‘08, will graduate from Deep Springs
in May. A letter home details his first days as a Deep Springs
student in the fall of 2008: “I am about to move an irrigation
line in field two, which I have to do before dinner. Then […]
we are going on a camping trip, hiking into the mountains
and camping out for the night. This morning I awoke to
loud music at four in the morning, as the second years ran
up and down the halls shouting, «labor party!» and getting us
all out of bed. We went to the boarding house for cereal and
then all of us went to the garden around 4:30 and harvested
a year's worth of garlic. […] Last night we had a dance (sort
of ) and a campfire.”
Deep Springs alumnus L. Jackson Newell revists Nunn’s
questions in “Maverick Colleges: Ten Notable Experiments
in American Undergraduate Education”: “Why, Nunn asked,
should colleges concentrate almost exclusively on intellectual
development? What about character? Responsibility? Physical
and spiritual growth?” By giving his students more than a
traditional classroom experience, Nunn hoped to shape their
characters. He believed that there is less to be gained from
a strict focus on academics. Sam explains, “This [Brown] is
just the place where I’m finishing up my education, not a
part of myself.”
However, the Deep Springs exeperience is spiritually
taxing as well. Laughing, Michael suggests that scarred,
rather than marked, may best describe his current condition.
“I’ve been listening to the Magnetic Fields—this song on 69
Love Songs called “I think I need a new heart.” I felt like that
upon graduating from Deep Springs.”  He adds with gravitas,
“Brown hasn’t given me a new heart, but at least it’s helped
me sew up the gaping wound.” With confidence, verging on
indignation, he insists, “I feel like a Brown student.”
Romance of Place
For Sam, the desert lies at the core of the relationship
between Deep Springs and its students. He explains, “There
was no appeal to going back to the East Coast for school.
Not to be cynical, but if I could have stayed out there
I would have. I would have left Deep Springs certainly,
but I wasn’t pining for the East Coast or home.” The
desert affords so much excitement, so much rich material
for storytelling, that parting with it is more emotionally
devastating than the academic and social rigidity of the
college.
Nunn had his own explanations as to why young men
were attracted to the setting. In an oft-quoted address to
the student body in 1923 he stated: “The desert has a deep
personality; it has a voice… ‘Gentlemen, for what came ye
into the wilderness?’ Not for conventional scholastic training;
not for ranch life; not to become proficient in commercial or
professional pursuits for personal gain. You came to prepare
for a life of service, with the understanding that superior
ability and generous purpose would be expected of you.”
There’s a certain elitism in the valorization of labor, and it’s
reflected in the attitude of Deep Springs students towards
civilization outside the valley.
In his memoir, Kirby describes walking through
Northwestern’s campus during a term break with another
Deep Springs student. “In our blood-smeared Carhartt
coveralls and muddy work boots, we imagined ourselves two
sun-bronzed beacons of virility [...] it felt so good to believe
that we were kings of a world that wasn’t ours.” When the
young men leave the enclave of rusticity behind, they give
up the labor tasks that served as a source of legitimacy. Kirby
recalls,“We were confident [at Deep Springs], assured, cooler
than we would ever be again.”
Lov e Construct
Grinning, Nate explains, “The really interesting thing about
love at Deep Springs is that it is entirely one-sided and
imaginary. But no less potent.” There is a certain romance
to being marooned in the desert, to rising before the sun
and tending alfalfa fields, to milking cows and baking bread.
Sentimentality breeds.
All five compare graduation from Deep Springs to
ending an intense romantic relationship. After two years in a
microscopic community, larger settings offer an escape from
scrutiny. Michael says of his classmates at Deep Springs,
“You’re required to live with these people, but not necessarily
to like them. I used to tell people that Deep Springs was a
lot like having 25 brothers [...]. You don’t get to choose your
brothers.”
What follows the break up with Deep Springs is like take
two—the second marriage. There is a fundamental difference
between the two relationships. On a superficial level, the
Deep Springers fit right in at Brown; they seem to share
the self-awareness of wardrobe and attitude characteristic
of students here. However, they’ve come from a place where
calluses are from butchering and harvesting, and T-shirts
turn threadbare from labor and sun bleaching. To Brian, it’s
simple: “The uniqueness of Deep Springs isn’t an affect. [In
other places] it seems that people try to be unique.”
Newell quotes Nunn: “Students...acquire a sense of duty
only if they [are] granted responsibility.” Nate admits how
deeply this belief is instilled in him: “I miss…feeling I was
responsible for all the space around me. Now I’m not even
responsible for changing light bulbs. I went for a month
and a half with no light bulb [in my room], because I didn’t
want to have someone else do it.” Charles expresses similar
indignation, “‘Well’, [I said to the custodian], ‘thanks for
giving me the light bulb, I can do it myself.’ But he stood on
a ladder and did it for me.”
In the end—how hav e we changed?
Deep Springs is an exercise in constructing and
reconstructing utopia. Each group of students designs a
curriculum and chooses the class of Deep Springers that will
succeed it.
The natural beauty of the desert valley is so breathtaking
that it is hard to live there without being emotionally
stimulated. Sam admits, “It was easy to make an experience
meaningful there.” After two years of intense study, manual
labor, and separation from modern distractions, other
schools and jobs can start to seem grey. He explains, “Since
I left, I’ve been […] trying not to be a misanthrope. It was a
really beautiful place.” 
Maybe Deep Springs cannot ultimately be compared to its
postludes; it is too tiny and self-selecting, and too removed
from the Ivy-induced scramble for a brand-name education.
However, that doesn’t mean that special insight, maybe even
enlightenment, hasn’t been afforded to the young men who
get two years at each institution. Michael believes that “we
have evolved—both in our relationships with the institutions
and in our relationships with living, breathing people. Not
that the second marriage is kinder, or more gentle, than the
first, but we’re doing better now. We’re more patient.” Brian
adds, with a grin, “We’ve been hurt before.”
______________________________________________
It’s pretty ironic that Emm a Whit ford B’12 is ma-
joring in Desert Studies at Brown.
m a r c h 4, 2010
 f e at u r e s |8

THE TALKING CURE

C a n c o m m u n i c at i o n f i x m a l p r ac t i c e ?
by Alice Hines
i l l u s t r at i o n s b y a n n i k a f i n n e

G ertrude Trigo, a 73 year-old Warwick native, first tion which runs disclosure training programs for doctors and
began noticing symptoms around 1998. “I was hospitals, confirms that patients often choose to sue because
with my two sisters driving. My older sister said, they are angry about being kept in the dark or being treated
‘You know something’s wrong with you.’ We always beat without empathy. Before founding Sorry Works, Wojcieszak
each other up. So I said, ‘Yeah, you too!’” Trigo recalls, lost an older brother to a medical error. “The judge forced a
laughing heartily. “My sister said, ‘No, your mouth and your settlement and it was basically a ‘here’s money now go away’
tongue. And your hands are never still. I said, ‘I’m having a situation,” he says. “It was a hollow victory, with no emo-
breakdown.’ I thought I was.” tional closure.”
Trigo says she was first prescribed Reglan to help her This “culture of fear,” as Wojcieszak calls is, is reinforced
digestion by her primary care doctor, Dr. Thomas Millerick, by the fact that doctors are frequently and often frivolously
in 1991. When taken for long periods of time, the drug can sued. A 2000 study published in Med Care showed that, in a
cause Tardive dyskinesia, a nervous condition provoking sud- sample group from Utah and California, only 12 percent of
den, involuntary movements. Trigo had symptoms of Tardive malpractice claims involved actual negligence. Of those who
dyskinesia for several years until one day a new pharmacist were really victims of negligence, only 3 percent filed claims.
noticed the side effects. “Even when negligence isn’t involved, doctors think
A friend convinced her to talk to a lawyer. As it turned they’re going to get sued anyway,” says Dr. Stephen Smith,
out, Reglan is meant to be taken for several weeks. Trigo had professor Emeritus of Family Medicine at Brown. “This cre-
been on it for over 11 years. She ended up suing her long- ates a veil of secrecy and a mentality of covering up.”
term doctor, Dr. Millerick, who never noticed the symptoms. And when lawsuits are filed they cost money, whether they
After their last appointment, she never spoke to him again are justified or not. Big payouts cause insurance premiums
until the court hearing. The lawsuit was concluded in 2006 to rise for everyone, and doctors in states like Florida and
for a sum of $1.25 million. Illinois can pay upwards of $100,000 per year for insurance,
The last day of trial, she was hoping he would say some- especially in high-risk fields like obstetrics or neurosurgery.
thing. “I would have liked for him to talk to me. Just to say Norcal, the largest malpractice insurer in Rhode Island,
he did, he admitted it, and it’s over,” she says. But the day of raised its rates by 43% in 2004. A broken system ?
the decision, neither the doctor nor his lawyer showed up to There are also the harder-to-measure costs of legal fees Such innovations are relatively new, and some are skepti-
trial. Despite everything, she says, an apology would have (on average, malpractice cases in Rhode Island take 6 years cal as to their efficacy and range. One concern over the
helped. “I would have cried.” to settle) and “defensive medicine,” when doctors order extra “Benevolent Gestures” bill is whether legislation can really
tests and exams to avoid being later held accountable for an change the norms of medical culture. As Wojcieszak points
undetected problem. out, Michigan, home of one of the most successful disclosure
If protecting “benevolent gestures” helped doctors be programs, is not one of the states with a disclosure law. “It
more open with patients, and patients chose not to sue, mal- has to happen one hospital, one insurance company, one
practice costs would decline. So would the cost of health care doctor at a time,” he says.
in Rhode Island. In a health care system that costs $2 trillion And if things like empathy and effective communication
yearly, there is much at stake for anything that promises to are difficult to legislate, they are also difficult to teach. As
cut costs. Dr. Taylor points out, each doctor and medical student has
a different communication style. While one can’t necessarily
teach or impose something like empathy, she says, “we can
try to create a structure in which students’ natural empathy
can show best.”
Others wonder if such a bill could actually backfire. Mark
Decof, a personal injury lawyer, does not oppose the bill. “In
many cases, even though a patient is grateful that the doctor’s
upfront and isn’t angry at the doctor as much, the patient
will still explore his or her legal rights,” he points out. It is
possible that, when made aware of a mistake, patients would
B enevolent gestures be more likely to sue, even if they couldn’t use the doctor’s
In Rhode Island, the “Benevolent Gestures” bill proposed on words as evidence.
February 2 by Representative Joseph McNamara, a Democrat Some doctors also wonder whether a lack of communica-
from Warwick, would protect any doctor’s gesture of apology tion with patients is part of larger, structural problems in the
or sympathy from being used against him in court. health care system. Dr. Vishnu Chundi, an infectious disease
The bill defines a “benevolent gesture” as any statement specialist in Chicago, believes the problem to be that is that
or writing “expressing or conveying sympathy, apology, Teaching ref lection doctors are sued because of adverse outcomes, not necessarily
responsibility, commiseration, condolence, compassion, re- Sorry Works and other patient advocacy groups also hold negligence. The one time a claim was filed against him, it
gret, grief, mistake, error or a general sense of benevolence that communication can prevent malpractice suits even be- was for giving a woman a standard diabetes treatment that
(including the word “sorry”).” fore a mistake has been made. If patients have developed a had nothing to do with the liver failure that killed her a few
Currently, in Rhode Island and any of the 15 states with- relationship with their care provider, they are less likely to months later. While the case never went anywhere, it cost
out apology laws, apologizing could be construed in court as suspect negligence or attribute blame. around $100,000 to go to deposition.
an admission of guilt, and be used to prove negligence. In the Medical schools are also restructuring curricula to teach “Then horrific things happens and no case occurs,” he
US, when something goes wrong during treatment, the only clinical and communication skills as early as possible, and says. While Dr. Chundi was a resident, a cerebral shunt he
way for a patient to receive compensation is to prove that to educate future doctors with a more empathetic perspec- requested was performed on the wrong patient while he was
someone was at fault. tive on medicine. At Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School, away from the hospital. “The neurosurgeon had never seen
“Health care providers are human beings, and as such this initiative has resulted in a recent curriculum reform, my patient before. So he took the patient in bed number 3,
want to be considerate of and forthcoming with their pa- finalized in 2009. Part of the reform included the creation like a game show,” Dr. Chundi exclaims, still astounded 17
tients and patients’ families,” said Rep. McNamara in a press of a “doctoring course” that teaches clinical skills to first- years later.
release. “In today’s litigious climate, they often have to pre- and second-year medical students. Students work in groups The patient who happened to be in the wrong bed at the
vent themselves from showing compassion. That shouldn’t of eight and are co-taught by a physician and a social or wrong time was never informed that he underwent a sur-
have to happen.” behavioral science (SBS) faculty member. “As for our SBS gery. Both patients were homeless, both had advanced cases
According to McNamara, the bill will not only give a doc- faculty, we’ve had nurses, social workers, medical educators, of AIDS, and both passed away. Because the patients didn’t
tor the protection to communicate with patients freely, but a Chaplain, a medical writer, and a school psychologist teach have any family to contact, no one was informed and no
also lower the number of malpractice suits. McNamara cites in the doctoring course,” says Dr. Julie Taylor, director of the lawsuits were filed.
the University of Michigan as an example. The university’s course’s curriculum. “People won’t release information if they think the insti-
hospital has cut its number of malpractice suits in half since Reflective writing exercises are one of the new tools to tution will get away with it,” Chundi says. The current sys-
the it implemented an open disclosure policy in 2001. help students think about empathy and relate to those they tem encourages communication to be valued only in terms
A 1994 study from the University of Rochester that are treating as people as well as patients. Students write on of a possible trial. Because compensation is based on how a
examined malpractice court records determined the top prompts such as: “How do your own personal and profes- patient appears to a jury, patients who never make it into
four common motives of patients to sue, besides that they sional experiences inform your views of depression?” Accord- the court systems fall through the cracks. Perhaps the lack of
all sought compensation: the doctor deserted the patient ing to a 2009 study by Warren Alert Medical School profes- communication is more a symptom of a broken system than
(32%), devalued patient and/or family views (29%), deliv- sors, these reflective writing narratives “promote deeper and it is a cause.
ered information poorly (26%), or failed to understand the more purposeful reflection and help to promote an empathic ___________________________________
patient and/or family perspective (13%). stance in medical student–patient interactions.” A lice Hines B’11happened to be in the wrong bed at
Doug Wojcieszak, founder of Sorry Works, an organiza- the wrong time.
m a r c h 4, 2010 t h e i n dy. o r g
 the case of the de
s c e n e s f r o m a r g e n t i n a’ s d i
by Francesca Barber | design by

S ons of bitches! Liars! Tell them the truth!” one of the

184 victims cries from behind the glass pane as she is
escorted out of the courtroom by security guards. The
judge orders silence. A courtroom camera zooms in to reveal
the morbid, crinkled faces of 15 former military men, filing
into the dock for their last judgment.
They are at Oral Federal Tribunal No. 2 in Buenos Aires,
one of six currently open criminal cases dealing with Argen-
tina’s ‘Dirty War,’ the period between 1976 and 1983 charac-
terized by a repressive military regime primarily under Jorje
Rafael Videla. During the Dirty War, official death squads
kidnapped, tortured, and murdered thousands of civilians
across the country, all in the name of defending the state
against Freemasonry, Marxism, and Zionism.
“Justice has arrived, but it has arrived late,” one of the
victims explains to me as we wait patiently inside the court-
room, watching the accused men, in handcuffs, take their
seats. The tension is unbearable; family members are hold-
ing photos of their loved ones and trying as best they can to
identify and make eye contact with the perpetrators. One
woman recognizes her torturer and falls into her husband’s
arms, tears rolling down her face; “He made me call him
Hitler over and over again,” she says.
In the name of “national purification,” between 9,000
and 30,000 people, ‘los desaparecidos’ were disappeared
during the military dictatorship. The systemic plan stemmed
from an ongoing historical struggle between the upper class-
es—including the military—and the working class leftist
movement. During Juan Perón’s presidency in the 1950s, a
populist movement rose to power, agitating the military elite.
Trial and Punishment. Here genocides are tried. Outside the courthouse, graffiti by Andrea Troitero's brother, a witness in the Oral Federal The tension peaked in Perón’s final years, after two failed
Tribunal No. 2. Photo by Francesca Barber. military coups and a stark division amongst two Peronist
political factions. In 1974, when Perón died, his wife Isabel
took over. However, with an increase in political violence
between the two Peronist parties, the Marxist guerrillas and
the Armed forces, Isabel’s government was unable to sup-
press the chaos. This resulted in a military coup in 1976. At
this time, guerrilla movements were associated with anyone
believed to be against the government—confusing innocents
with radicals. Under military rule, ‘order’ was to be achieved
through violence.
People were thrown, unconscious, into the Rio de la Plata
from airplanes, newborns were appropriated and adopted or
sold to military couples, and innocent citizens were threat-
ened, kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in clandestine de-
tention camps—generally within military or police facilities.
Children were tortured in front of their parents; parents were
tortured in front of their children.
____________

Today, most bodies have still not been recovered, and the ma-
jority that have been are unidentifiable. The Argentina Na-
tional Commission on Disappeared Persons (CONADEP)
was established in December 1983, almost immediately after
the installation of democracy. The organization published
the paper Nunca Más (Never Again) with the intention of
revealing the truth about the Dirty War and reconciling with
the past.
The victims, families, and human rights organizations,
however, were dissatisfied and continued to demand that
perpetrators be tried. As a result, the newly democratic
government under Raúl Alfonsín began prosecuting those
considered most responsible for crimes against humanity.
This proved difficult. With over 2,000 accusations, a
A banner hung on the Plaza de Mayo with the faces of the disappeared. Photo by Francesca Barber. paucity of evidence (due to the military’s ability to cover its
tracks), and the debate surrounding degrees of responsibil-
esaparecidos
i rt y wa r t r i a l s
r o b i n d av i s One of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo at a demonstration with
the photo of her disappeared children around her neck. Photo from
http://dawsr.wordpress.com/.

ity (is there such a thing as ‘just following orders?), progress “What happened to my daughter? What did they do to
proved impossible. The process was too overwhelming for her? Where is she? Tell me!” These are the questions Carmen
THE ANGEL OF DEATH
the Alfonsín government, whose priority was political and Lapacó, mother of a disappeared, keeps asking as the trial
Carmen Lapacó is one of the original members of the hu-
economic stability—not managing ghosts of the past. goes on. She tells me about her friend, another mother, who
man rights organization Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (an
President Alfonsín backtracked and in 1983 decreed legis- recently discovered her daughter—“When her bones were
association of Argentine mothers whose children disap-
lation that prevented trials against most of the military. Then found, she was so happy, because her circle finally closed.
peared during the Dirty War). On March 16, 1977, army
in 1989 and 1990, Alfonsin’s successor, President Carlos But me, I have an open circle.”
forces ransacked her home and kidnapped her, along with
Menem, pardoned the remaining perpetrators of the “crimes As hear each man deny his knowledge of any such crimes,
her family. Blindfolded and taken to an unknown location,
of lesser humanity.” The one wonders whether these
they were tortured for hours. On March 19 Carmen was
objective was to shut the trials are being held in a fair
door on the past and move “ W h e n h e r b o n e s w e r e and appropriate context. released. She said, “they must have thought I was too old.”
This was the last time she saw her daughter Alejandra, then
the country forward. Justice f o u n d , s h e wa s s o h a p p y,
____________ aged 19.
and reconciliation remained
elusive. 
b e c au s e h e r c i r c l e f i n a l ly Since then, Carmen, now 84, has dedicated her life to
Between 1983 and 2006, c lo s e d . bu t m e , i h av e a n As Claudia Bellingeri of the
fighting for truth, justice and memory. She explains, “we
Provincial Comission of have had so much patience. Now we demand justice.” The
successive Argentinian gov- o p e n c i r c l e .”
Memory (PCM) contends, sense of community amongst the victims is overwhelm-
ernments failed to provide
the Argentinian Penal Code ing—it is not just a fight for her daughter but everyone’s
a solution to the divided
is not the best tool to pros- children and loved ones.
and traumatized population. Officials focused on the crisis
ecute these types of crimes—genocide and crimes against Carmen remembers protesting with others mothers
in the economy, but international governments and pressure
human beings do not appear in the Code, and therefore the in the Plaza de Mayo, outside La Casa Rosada (The Pink
groups kept the subject of the missing persons alive. After 30
crimes are instead tried as murder, illegal detention, and tor- House, seat of the executive branch of the government),
years, the legislation banning the trials was annulled, and the
ture. Many human rights organizations, such as the PCM, demanding the whereabouts of her daughter from the
new trials opened in 2006.
argue that the crimes against the Argentinian people were military. The military would not allow the women to stay
Today, according to the Center for Legal and Social Stud-
unique—and therefore warrant unique juridical treatment, in one place and protest, so they would march around the
ies (CELS), there are 330 open cases in the whole country,
plaza in circles. Nowadays, marching around in circles,
with more predicted to open in the future. The Oral Federal as in the case of the Nuremberg trials.
And yet Oral Federal Tribunal No. 2 remains an example with the photos of their children around their necks, con-
Tribunal No. 2 mega-case in Buenos Aires began on Novem-
of the symbolic power of justice. Argentina, whose social tinues to be the signature of the Mothers of the Plaza de
ber 24, 2009, and lumps together three detention centers
norms and political framework were destroyed by the mili- Mayo. Carmen distinctly recalls one young man, Alfredo
(Banco, Olimpo, and Club Atlético) in order to accelerate
tary regime, is now upholding and promoting both the na- Astiz, “the sweetest looking boy,” coming to the group
the process. This tribunal is one of the most representative
tional and international law of human rights and spreading protests and meetings. He was their ‘adopted’ child. “He
court cases to date because of the number of participants
the doctrine of democracy and associated judicial freedoms told me he had to be here for his missing brother,” she
and its illustration of the dimensions of state terrorism that
that have eluded Latin America for so long. says. They would walk “arm in arm” in the Plaza de Mayo,
existed in the city of Buenos Aires. 
These cases are a search for justice and a means for re- grieving for their loved ones.
The tribunal is predicted to last eight months and brings
membering a tragic and perverse moment in Argentine his- As Carmen found out later, Astiz was an intelligence
17 men to trial (two are absent from the hearings; one died,
tory. The tribunals are forcing an excavation and return to officer in the Argentine Navy. Known as El Ángel Rugio de
and the other is in another simultaneous trial) charged with
the past, a remembering of sorts that may allow Argentines la Muerte (the “Blond Angel of Death”), Astiz was respon-
the kidnapping, torture, and murder of 184 victims. There
to come to terms with what took place on their own soil. sible for the kidnapping of many activists, including the
are 400 witnesses and 47 plaintiffs from various human rights
They are also a means of ensuring the democratic process in founder of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. He would
organizations participating in the trial. They are demanding
the country’s future. infiltrate human rights organizations and signal those to
life sentences for the accused.
In the words of Andrea Troitero: “It didn’t just happen kill by kissing his victims outside of the local church, while
____________ to me, it happened to our society. A Holocaust took place his comrades looked on.
here. We can never forget what happened to all of us. We Today Carmen, along with many other mothers, is
All of the defendants are called to the stand, and the judges will always have an open wound but if there is justice, it will determined to achieve justice and to testify. To speak, how-
ask whether they have any words to say before the trial be- hurt less.” ever, is not easy. Carmen explains, “when I was a witness
gins.  “As requested by my lawyer, I will not be entering a ______________________________________________ for the Oral Federal Tribunal No. 5 I started to look like
plea,” states Raúl Gonzalez, one of the accused and a former FRANCESCA BARBER ’11 attended the Oral Federal this,” she focuses her eyes on me, tears welling up;  “I told
member of the Argentine Police Force. Tribunal No. 2 from November 24 to December 14 2009 everything with a fixed gaze. My voice broke. It was not
Each of the elderly men, making a seeming effort to look while studying abroad in Buenos Aires. that I forgot anything, but speaking in front of so many
tired and frail, chose not to speak a word. Their lawyers read people, it’s quite painful. I get nervous and very emotional.
statements of denial, one by one. The victims and families Memory can always fail you after so many years, but as
sitting behind the glass panel, which separated them from long as my brain works I will go 10,000 times. I will do
the perpetrators, do not conceal their disgust and hatred. what is necessary. I have to continue my daughter’s fight.” 
“They should all pay for their actions. They acted with
such impunity. They should all go to prison, prison for life
until they die. It does not matter about their health. They
committed atrocities,” said Andrea Troitero, a woman in her
mid forties, whose parents were beaten and tortured in their
own home, in front of her and her siblings, when she was
just 10 years old.
As she sits and watches the trial, she hears the names
of the victims, including her parents, read aloud, and her
memory, like everyone else’s, is jolted once again. Families
and victims sit and listen, searching for answers and closure.
The result is an opening of old wounds and an evocation of
the collective social memory, a fight for truth and, ultimately,
a judicial reckoning.
o p i n i o n s | 11
S o yo u t h i n k yo u r s h i t
don’t stink?
C o n t e m p o r a ry A rt s h o u l d b e m o r e l i k e Y o u t u b e
b y L e e G . B ro o k s
A recent feature on the Huffington Post collected
some of the greatest public access television clips
that have made their way to YouTube. Among the
highlights are an awkward performance of “Go Tell it on
the Mountain,” an eccentric and verbally violent preacher
whose body swirls around the frame, courtesy of rudimen-
tary green-screen technology, and my personal favorite, a
call-in show entitled “Let’s Paint TV!”—in which the host,
Los Angeles–based artist John Kilduff simultaneously runs
on a treadmill, makes abstract expressionist brushstrokes
on a canvas, blends fruit juice, and takes calls, the majority
of which come from young men using this most visible of
platforms in order to make defamatory statements, such as
“Fuck fucking Santa Monica.”
My first reaction to “Let’s Paint TV!” was to write it off
as absurdist performance art, meant as some kind of ironic
comment on a society of multitasking dilettantes, but I soon
came to realize that Kilduff might very well be serious. Any-
way, I’m not so worried about his intent. It seems that what
matters is the presentation of the thing—and here, Kilduff
exhibits a quality uncommon in the world of contemporary
art: earnestness. He carries out his frenzy of experimenta-
tion without a smirk, with an almost uncanny sincerity. The
result is a beautiful mess of improvised television (according
to his website, Kilduff is also available for live shows—Spring
Weekend, anyone?).
In contrast, there is often marked lack of sincere and clear
intentions in contemporary art. But someone is already sure
to admonish me: whether art is sincere or not is beside the
point. The lack of sincerity is in itself sincere. Art is not sup-
posed to be clear. The lack of clarity is exactly what contem-
porary art is after. Or any number of statements that I myself
am supposed to use when I take my younger brother to the
contemporary wing of the Chicago Institute of Art and try
to hold his attention, and end up feeling pretty stupid—as if
I’m in on an inside-joke that isn’t that funny, yet has a whole
wing of a museum dedicated to it.
So I wonder about the value of contemporary art in light
of supposedly lower forms of culture, such as Kilduff ’s videos,
or more generally, the countless scores of videos on YouTube
of people acting in the spirit of Kilduff—saying and doing ri-
diculous things, and meaning it. Unlike art, Youtube doesn’t
claim any cultural superiority. One can share videos that lack
any semblance of expertise, with the result that the viewer
doesn’t have to expect anything in particular from a clip, but
can simply decide whether he or she likes it. The YoutTube
community encourages this kind of unpretentious sharing:
users communicating with each other directly, engaging with
each other’s media. I am reminded of the participatory spaces
and happenings fostered by avant-garde groups like Fluxus
in the ’60s, where a sense of community could be created
outside the usual expectations of what is valuable or worth
one’s time, whose members to impact social and political dis-
courses. YouTube, albeit in a different way, has been wildly
successful in both of these aims, since mainstream culture
actually pays attention to it.
Of course, I don’t mean to conflate YouTube with avant-
garde art. YouTube videos generally do not aim to aestheticize
the world or spur viewers to think critically. As with “Let’s
Paint TV” or, for example, the performance of “Chocolate
Rain” (highly recommended) and its numerous parodies,
the response tends to be something like pure fascination at
the college hill independent
I l I l l u s t r at i o n b y E l i S c h m i t t
the brute fact that the clip exists, that there is, out there in
the world, someone who actually did this. YouTube shows
us what people are capable of when their eccentricities are
allowed to flourish openly. In this way, I like to think of You-
Tube as an earnest celebration of individual personhood. Not
citizenship in some artistic utopia, but the personhood we
actually possess: eccentric and strange, with a need to share
ourselves. Not that the art-people aren’t worthy of celebra-
tion, but it’s refreshing that something closer to actual social
experience can be valorized too.
So I want to emphasize two features of YouTube videos
often lacking in contemporary art: the earnestness or lack-
of-irony in presentation, performance, and sharing, and the
creation of a space primarily meant to be experienced with-
out the baggage of high-culture. YouTube is a sensory, bodily
experience, before it is a thoughtful one.
The world of high art presents us with something rather
different. The relationship of viewer to artwork is one of
expectation. We know beforehand that the performance,
image, space, or text will exhibit some combination of criti-
cal distance, irony, reflection, and message. As viewers, we
are ready to receive something, but that something may or
may not be apparent in the work. So we must have faith
that the work intends to illuminate some presumably impor-
tant aspect(s) of existence. This creates an aura of mystery
in which the viewer tends to expect the work to eventually
reveal its secrets. Whether it has any worthwhile secrets to
reveal is another matter. But one can see clearly why Kilduff ’s
ADHD-inspired lessons on active living do not seem to
count as art—the lack of obfuscation seems to damn it as a
lower form of culture.
And unlike a YouTube video, which calls for immediate,
strong reactions, we must generally be quiet and placid in
front of the artwork. To appreciate a painting or sculpture,
one must contemplate. To read a poem, one must concen-
trate, because a poem is a difficult thing to understand. The
artwork is a strict teacher—it demands our respect even
before the lesson begins. Art always has the high ground in
relation to its viewer, whereas a YouTube video has to earn its
viewer’s continued attention. It’s nothing to close the window
on a Youtube link—but you are bound to feel a little guilty
leaving a poem half-finished or not taking in a painting or a
performance sufficiently (as if art is looking down on you for
being so uncultured, so unsophisticated!)
I could imagine that the artwork might in fact deserve
our unconditional respect if it always gave us something
meaningful. But I think it would be fair to say that, although
plenty of compelling art is produced all the time, you have
to wade through a lot of shit to get to it. In this way, the
art-world is no different from the Youtube-world. We can
mercilessly mock bad Youtube clips through a variety of
media: comment sections, blog posts, Facebook, and so on.
Yet with bad art, we seem to require a politeness of tone, akin
to the hushed atmosphere of a museum or gallery. This is
convenient for an art-world patronized by academics, agents,
collectors, and the wealthy—those who want to convince
you that high art is a valuable cultural institution with a
deep, profound import for society.
Instead, I want to suggest that we have no reason to place
art on a pedestal before it has given us anything—and more
reason not to treat the artist as an ironic sage but as just an-
other YouTube user in the sea of humanity, who may or may
not have something impressive to say. Our faith in art often
makes us take trivial things too seriously. According to an
article in Slate, around 27 percent of the poetry in The New
Yorker is about poetry. Apparently, the world is so lacking in
subject matter that poets often have no choice but to take
inspiration from themselves—which would be fine, if the
intended audience for poetry consisted entirely of poets and
poetry scholars. To take another example, a piece entitled
“Noisette” at the recent Urs Fischer exhibition at the New
Museum consisted of a hole which had been drilled into the
wall, through which a tongue would stick out as a viewer
approached. But once the viewer actually came to inspect the
piece, the tongue remained inside the hole, only faintly vis-
ible. So viewers would wait and wait for its reappearance, and
nothing would happen. Finally, they would walk away and
the tongue would stick out again for the next approaching
viewers. The tongue seemed to be saying, “How pathetic you
are right now, viewer, expecting something from me, a piece
of art in the New Museum.”
In a sense, the work illustrates my point. It seems to be
suggesting that an artwork may not live up to the viewer’s
expectations, rendering those expectations somewhat comi-
cal, and yet it continues to insist that there is something
there to merit attention in the first place (that initial flick
of the tongue). The work suggests to viewers that it may
not be worth their time, and yet still continues to draw in
viewer after viewer, since it was, after all, an installation by
Urs Fischer in the New Museum. Which in itself is a pretty
banal assertion, and one only acquired after deep reflection
on the possible meanings of the piece—a task which is sure
to interest only a small and isolated world of art-enthusiasts
(including myself—but that should be obvious by now. It is
possible to criticize and love something at the same time).
If I had not unconsciously assumed that “Noisette,” be-
ing a work of art, demanded my respect, I might have said
aloud to friends and strangers alike, “this is fucking insipid.”
Artworks generally do not come with a comment section,
but I think every museum and gallery should install them,
preferably right on the wall, next to the work. This would be
a first step toward dissipating the myth that we must neces-
sarily respect art before it has interested us. Perhaps then, we
could begin to treat works of art more like YouTube videos,
experiencing them without the expectation that important
truths will necessarily be unveiled. We could even treat art as
a shared space and a shared community, rather than a privi-
leged space of cultural profundity that requires both erudi-
tion and a taste for cynicism. Who knows, we could even
affirm things in an open and sincere fashion as Kilduff does,
without hiding behind the aura of art—the sky’s the limit!
Anyway, if given the choice, I want to experience art-
works, rather than respect them. In fact, I would like to see
more disrespectful artworks, the kind that spit and throw
their feces, and do it earnestly and without pretension, so
that I, the viewer, can reciprocate. I am sick of being polite
and soft-spoken in front of art, in order to hear its sage-like
whispers—I would rather have shit. Just not ironic shit, as
in Piero Manzoni’s jars of fake feces that sell for $80,000,
but rather genuine cultural shit, something more like http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUOPA08jJeY.
___________________________________
Lee G. Brooks B’10 is saying and doing ridiculous
things—and meaning it.
m a r c h 4, 2010

b at t l e b at s
J
anuary 12, 1942: Just one month prior, the attack on
Pearl Harbor had flung the US into a war in the Pacific,
and American bats weren’t pulling their weight in the war
effort. Luckily, a lone dentist in Pennsylvania had a plan that
could both beat Japan and get our furry little friends fight-
ing: strap tiny, tiny bombs to them, and let them burn the
island nation down!
Dr. Lytle S. Adams wrote a letter to the President detail-
ing his proposal: Americans attach incendiary time bombs
to bats and release them at night over Japanese industrial
centers, where they land at dawn. Then, timer goes off, the
sleeping bats burst into flame, and anything nearby is reduced
to charcoal. Surprisingly, President Roosevelt OK’d the plan
and Army brass gave it a new name, Project X-Ray. Special
bombs were designed to to be filled with sleeping bats and
dropped out of planes, releasing them on the way down, and
special bombs were designed as incendiary bat backpacks,
but the bats themselves either kept dying too early inside the
plane, or dying too late, when they didn’t wake up before
hitting the ground. 2 years and 2 million dollars later, the
project was scrapped.
In spite of the WWII SNAFUs, bats still have a place in
today’s military. Well, robot bats, anyway. Micro Air Vehicles
(MAVs), the little cousins of the Unmanned Air Vehicles
(UAVs) recently put to shady use in Pakistan, are just what
they sound like—small robotic things that fly. Some are like
little UAVs, simply robot planes or robot helicopters, but
some MAVs, the ornithopters—a combination of the Greek
for “bird” and “wing”—flap.
Here’s where the bats come back—one lab in Brown’s
BioMed center is doing the research that might some day
lead to MAVs that fly like bats. As Joe Bahlman, a PhD
student in the lab working on a flapping robot, noted, “if
it’s flapping, people think it’s a real animal, so you can hide
in plain sight,” making them ideal for reconnaissance. But
not just any flapping will do; hummingbirds excepted, birds
are designed to fly forward, fast, which is good for getting
somewhere but lousy for sticking around if you don’t have
any legs. Bats, on the other hand, can hover, fly backwards,
and turn on a dime—perfect for staying mobile but stealthy.
Dan Riskin, the lab’s leader, explained the basic research
process: inject live bats with a saline solution to simulate a
payload (“which they pee out very fast, but they’re kinda
bloated for a while”), put them in a wind tunnel, and take
super-high-speed (1000 FPS) video for later analysis.
Thanks to the unique way bat wings work, their flight
merits special study. Riskin described how bats differ from
bugs and birds in terms of control: bug wings are like rigid
paddles, thwacking the air; birds can slightly change the
pitch and angle of their feathers, but each feather is still inert,
like the rigid insect wings. Bats, in contrast, have 17 joints
per wing and muscles within the wing membrane itself, dis-
connected from any bones. This means that they can make
minute adjustments in wing tension and shape at will, but
also makes studying their flight especially tricky.
Since bat flight is made up of so many parameters, track-
ing the effect of one flexed muscle is nearly impossible. To
simplify the observation, Bahlman hopes to isolate individual
variables with his robot model. So far, it’s made of materials
imitating the organic, has two degrees of shoulder motion,
and can flex its major joints, but future versions might have
an active membrane, à la Batman’s cape in the recent movies,
based on work coming from collaborators at the University
of Michigan.
While the Air Force provides some of the bat lab’s fund-
ing, no future plans to integrate time bombs, X-Rays, or oral
surgery were mentioned.
m a r c h 4, 2010
c ry h av o c !
l e t t i n g s l i p t h e b ot s o f wa r
by sam dean
i l l u s t r at i o n s b y p a o l a e i s n e r
danger dogs
J une 22, 1941: A peace had held on the Eastern Front
since the outbreak of war two years prior, but with West-
ern Europe in its hands, Hitler’s Third Reich turned on its
Soviet neighbors. Stalin had prepared for this, but thought
that Germany would wait until ’42 before breaking the non-
aggression pact. The Soviet army was desperate to stop the
Blitzkrieg’s eastern advance.
So, in a move prefiguring future Allied enlistment policies
(cf. Project X-Ray), the Russians strapped bombs on dogs
and trained them to run at tanks. The concept started out
more humanely, as trainers tried to teach the dogs to run
to a tank, pull a quick-release tab with their teeth to plant
a time-bomb, then run back to safety. But the dogs, being
dogs, couldn’t quite pull off the procedure.
Following the Soviet tradition of brutally simple technol-
ogy (cf. AK-47s, Molotov cocktails), they then decided to
simply tie some mines to the dogs’ backs and rig the triggers
up to a big stick. Ideally, the dogs would run under tanks,
the stick would get pushed down, and everything would
explode, destroying tank and dog.
While the plan seemed airtight—foolproof, even—it ran
into some snags on the battlefield. The dogs were scared by
the real life, bullet-spewing Panzers, and often ran for alter-
native cover, including friendly tanks, leading to alternative
explosions.
In spite of the program’s flaws, the dogs did manage to
down a few enemy tanks (if not the 300 claimed by Soviet
propaganda), but when German soldiers were ordered to
shoot any dogs on sight, effectiveness dropped. By 1942, the
kamikaze canines had been mostly discontinued.
Long before the ill-conceived Soviet program, though,
dogs have fought our wars for us. Going back as far as
ancient inter-city-state strife, man’s best friend has fought
beside human soldiers in close combat. In recent centuries,
however, the advent of firearms has demoted them to scouts,
messengers, or pack animals, and even those auxiliary roles
are dwindling in modern warfare.
Despite the downward trend, there’s at least one dog that
has a definite future in 21st-century combat, and its name is
BigDog. With progress comes sacrifice, though, and even bi-
ology has its limits. BigDog, unlike his poochy predecessors,
doesn’t have a tail to wag, a mouth with which to bite, or
even much of an appetite. Which makes sense, since BigDog
is a robot.
Developed by Boston Dynamics, a robotics company
s c i e n c e |12
based in Waltham, MA, BigDog is probably best known
through the YouTube videos of its eerily lifelike legs, or-
ganically striding beneath a featureless metal body. Anyone
watching usually starts shuddering when the waist-high Big-
Dog, walking through an icy New England parking lot, gets
kicked from off-screen. It reacts, which is startling enough
to see in a machine, but then proceeds to scrabble on the ice
like a hideous, all-black, headless fawn getting its first legs.
But the creators of BigDog built the thing for more prac-
tical applications than online creep-out celebrity. The Boston
Dynamics website calls BigDog “The most advanced rough-
terrain robot on earth,” with the ultimate goal of being
able to “go anywhere people and animals can go.” One step
toward that goal is letting the robots think for themselves,
to a certain degree, and BigDog enjoys semi-autonomy. The
company has designed optics systems to let it follow a human
automatically, useful in its most immediate role as a robot
military pack-mule. If there aren’t enough soldiers to carry
the equipment, there probably aren’t enough to fiddle with
remote controls, either.
Following, carrying stuff, going “anywhere [...] animals
can go”—all these seem like jobs well-suited for the animals
the robot might replace, bringing BigDog’s necessity into
question. Marc Raibert, the leader of the BigDog and LS3
(the prototype BigDog 2.0) efforts at Boston Dynamics,
noted the hassles that come with biology. Animals need to
eat, even when not on duty, and refuse to continue working
when scared or overtired. “Pack animals can only go on mis-
sions where a human is leading,” Raibert added, “we believe
that future robots will be able to take the lead.”
“BigDog Weaponized” is the title of a recent YouTube
video posted by Boston Dynamics employees, but it’s only a
bullfighting spoof, with horns tacked on BigDogs non-head
and engineers waving red capes around. Raibert said that the
company has “no plans to weaponize any robots” for real,
and pointed out some more peaceful applications for this
potentially scary machine. BigDog can help anywhere that
legs work better than wheels. Raibert mentioned rescue from
rubble after disasters, mountainside farming, and even per-
sonal transport, saying, “imagine a day when roads become
obsolete, with us all driving legged vehicles from home to
work through pristine forests.”
______________________________________________
SAM DEAN B ’10 is designed to fly forward fast.
t h e i n dy. o r g
 CON V ENTIONAL KINK
reflections on the fetish flea market
B y Em i ly S e g a l AND S i m o n v a n Z u y l e n - W o o d
i l l u s t r at i o n s b y a m a n d a g r e e n b e r g
V alentine’s Day at the Westin Hotel: a gigantic leather
and fetish expo, no photography, interviews, or
journalists allowed. The convention gave us—two
vanilla neophytes—a new context for fetishes, consumerism,
and clamps. Strapping us with wristbands, staff asked, “You
want it tight or loose?” For the third year in a row, Provi-
dence hosted the New England Leather Alliance (NELA)
Fetish Flea Market (FFM), which has run biannually since
1992.
Bruce, I Have a Feeling We’re Not in
the Westin Any more
Floors one through four of the Westin are all but cordoned
off for the privacy of the leather enthusiasts. The ground
floor is designated for check-in ($20 for non-NELA mem-
bers) and for hands-on tutorials: Military and Interrogation
Scenes, Pony Paddock, Ask A Rope Expert. Waiting at the
top of the second-floor escalator are two stamp checkers,
who are vigilant about making sure FFM patrons don’t go
wandering down the wrong hallways. Past them, on the sec-
ond and third levels, are the goods. More wide open rooms,
carpeted wall to wall. Everywhere we look: sex gadgets,
clothing, and accessories for sale. A rubber role-play doggie
helmet qualifies as all three, we suppose: $75. A high-quality
leather bodybag, fitted with metal clasps, $1000. The say
it’ll last you a lifetime.
We ride the escalator up from the lobby, out of the last
zone of vanilla, what everyone here calls people like us.
There’s a traffic jam getting through the second floor hall-
way to the first room—people are being too polite instead
of hustling through the crowd. But then we notice a leash
between one couple. Is the sub(missive) in front not permit-
ted to say “excuse me” without permission? Is that why we’re
entering so gingerly?
There are a lot of clothes on the second level. Your cor-
respondents fumble with a black latex corset, can’t quite
get it to fasten. Bruce, a leather daddy, intervenes. He is
fastidiously tightening and loosening the stays, as if your
correspondent has their hands around a bed post and it’s
Gone with the Wind. “Lean forward, if you don’t want my
boot in your ass,” Bruce says. And then, “I could lace you
up for hours.”
The place has a certain medieval vibe to it, the abun-
dance of torture instruments aside. All jammed together,
small business owners and independent artisans peddle their
homemade wares. We try to soak it in without sticking out.
Our jeans and t-shirt outfits were seriously deviant and elic-
ited stares, hinting dangerously at our outsiders’ interest in
the fair. With respect to dress code, the sex trade fair is not
that different from a Star Trek or comic book convention:
everyone’s trying to look the part. No Spock and Kirk here,
just a couple of nipple-clamped old men harnessed together,
gagged and clopping about nobly. Minor celebrities in
the local fetish community, they’re known as ‘the horses.’
Most fair-goers kept it low-key (leather pants; dog collar;
fishnets)—which in these circles doesn’t necessarily mean
tasteful. A remarkable portion of the overwhelmingly white,
middle-aged crowd was spilling out of its clothing. But in
an environment where limits are meant to be pushed, and
open-mindedness is mandatory, that was just fine.
FETISH COMMODITIES
Bruce unwittingly encapsulates the thing about
there being, at the convention, all this stuff but
absolutely no fucking, the fetish being a deferral of
any genital sex act via toys and preparation: those
hours spent loosening and tightening the stays of
the corset just as Penelope weaves and unweaves at
her loom.
In psychoanalysis the fetish is an object that
stands in for an absence, a memory, a trauma, a
parent—so it shouldn’t be surprising how much
the event seems to be about gear. There aren’t very
many traditional sex toys (when a dildo shows up, it
seems a little crass and cheap) and besides canes and
paddles, the clichés of mainstream kink, not even
everything is necessarily so overtly ‘sexy’ or ‘kinky.’
The way everyone’s chatting, this stuff could be
bike parts or audio equipment. And as with ma-
chines and gadgets, the stuff here is more than just
a replacement: it’s got a particular material presence
of its own, the aura of delicacy absent elsewhere at
the fair.
The goods here cover a spectrum from the kind
of non-explicit junk sold at Newbury Comics to ex-
tremely high-end artisanal objets, like the gorgeous,
handmade, three-foot-long suede and wood flogs
we found at one stall. Turns out the guy manufac-
tured them in his basement. Your correspondents
had not yet been instructed in flogging—that came
later—and one of us complimented him on the
beauty of his “tassle thing,” another embarrassing
revelation of our vanilla status. In the next stall over
was Eric, by day a carpenter at Tufts Medical Center
and by night a fetish-artist who specializes in erotic
gas masks, most of which came with dangling faux
dreadlocks. He also had a high-concept photo
album full of harness-driven 69s, lots of dungeon
imagery, and close-ups of his face, pierced and
bleeding, thanks to a tiny stainless steel pitchfork.
Eric said business was okay but his work wasn’t about the
money—this was his first real trade show.
Eric was an anomaly: the convention was very much
a business event, putting the commodity in fetishism, not
so much a lifestyle summit as a place where wholesalers,
retailers, and consumers could network. For example,
upstairs, where the stalls filled the hotel rooms like a
live pun on the bedroom-meets-commerce theme of the
whole event, your correspondents started chatting with a
Big Baby, one iteration of a fetish that involves primarily
older dudes wearing frilly little dresses, sissy socks, mary-
janes, and big curly wigs. One of your correspondents, in
an honest but gauche moment, wondered out loud: “I’m
trying to figure out what this is all about, like, uh, who
gets off to this stuff really.” The Big Baby sneered. “Not
me! I’m here to sell. We import from every continent ‘cept
Antarctica. Then again, if you got an ice fetish...” Without
the pancake makeup, he could have been selling us a used
car.
The Princess and the Flog
Back down on the ground floor, in room Narragansett
B, we bright-eyed pupils sit in the front row, ready for
a flogging tutorial. As the place fills up, one of your cor-
respondents marvels that “anything goes here,” and the
other disagrees. Just because we’re vanilla and can’t read
the codes of a culture doesn’t mean they’re not there. The
polo-shirted fat guy sitting next to us added, “there’s a lotta
different kinds of kink in one building today.” It was a
collision of niches that all happen be in close proximity
in the banal atmosphere more befitting Model UN or a
company retreat: conference rooms, meet’n’greets, lots
of free swag with logos (admittedly, most of it was lube
and condoms). At the FFM, there are codes of a bunch of
different niche scenes, all subsumed into middle manage-
ment trade show model, with those rules too. So even if
the guy giving the lecture happens to feel up his model’s
tits in front of the crowd, even if a lot more flies than usual
at the Westin during Saturday lunch time, it’s certainly not
that anything does—walking around topless, for example,
is 100% prohibited.
Our flogging tutor, Dark Teddybear, is a prosthetic-
legged, “fancy school”–educated redhead with lots of fuzzy
facial hair. Also, he’s an ordained minister. He takes the
stage, sub in tow, audience captive. He’s going to hit this
girl over and over, and we get to watch. The flog, he tells
us (though it’s plain to see that those who need telling are
 GLOSSARY
Ta l k l i k e a B D S M i n s i d e r

Ag l o p h i l i a : S ex ua l a ro u s a l f rom e xp e r i e n c - M o n o g l ov e
i n g pa i n Lat ex s l e eve i n to w h i ch both ar ms are placed

A lto ca l c i p h i l i a : H i g h - h e e l s h o e f e t i s h R i s k Awar e C o n s e n s ual Kin k

Ba s t i na d o : H e e l to rt u r e
B DS M: B& D ( b o n dag e a n d d i s c i p l i n e , D/ s ( d o m i-
n a n c e a n d s u bm i s s i o n ) a n d S & M ( s a d i sm a n d
m a s o c h i sm )
Cat h e r i n e ’ s W h e e l : a l a r g e w h e e l , u s ua l ly
m a d e of wo o d, to w h i c h o n e i s affi x e d a n d
rotat e d
Cat o ’ Ni n e Ta i l s : A l e at h e r w h i p w i t h n i n e
thin strands
Dr ea d Ko o s h F l o g g e r :A ro p e h a n d l e i s
affix e d to s ev e r a l Ko o s h b a l l s . Th e u lt i m at e
thud
Th e t y p i c a l c o n s e n t agreement at play parties
a n d b e t w e e n t wo pa rtners, to ensure every-
o n e i s o n b oa r d w i t h what’s going to go
d ow n
S o ft L i m i t: L o o s e im p osition set with respect
to h ow pa i nf u l o r da ngerous a scene be-
c om e s . Co m pa r e to a Hard L i mit
S q u i ck : A v e ry s u d d e n repulsion to so mething
a pa rt n e r d o e s
Wa rt e n bu r g W h e e l: A little instru ment
w h i c h l o o k s l i k e a p izza cutter, e x cept the
w h e e l h a s l i t t l e s p i k e s. Also used by neurolo -
g i s t s to t e s t n e rve f u nction

Ed g e p lay : R i s k d e at h o r s e r i o u s i nj u ry b y i n-
c o r p o r at i n g g u n s , b l a d e s o r ax p h y x i at i o n

in severe minority) consists of a handle, usually made of
wood, and several ‘falls,’ made of rope, suede, or rubber.
It is a versatile instrument and can find its way into pretty
much any ‘scene.’ It becomes apparent through the day
that much of the appeal of BDSM (Bondage-Discipline/
Dominant-Submissive/Sado-Masochism) activity lies in
role-playing scenes, in visually stimulating performance.
The sub pulls down her skirt and lets Dark Teddybear hit
her with a series of flogs, some more painful than others.
She shimmies, she grins, she yelps. As the actors become
further entrenched in the scene, especially in front of an
audience, their interaction becomes almost totally medi-
ated by rhythm of the flog. The act becomes a surrogate, a
fetish object itself.
The flog can be used in a gentle, soothing manner.
Dark Teddybear, in a move called The Florentine (see
Glossary for more terms) wields two flogs, making a figure
eight as he hits her with each, one at a time. The repetitive
motion seems to put her into a meditative state. On the
other hand, violent flogging produces one of two sensa-
tions. Flogs with shorter, lighter falls slap the skin sharply.
Longer, heavier falls hurt more like a punch. In Fetish
lingo, thud vs. sting. The sting is felt immediately, whereas
you might not fathom the force of a thud until you see
bruises the next morning. Despite the surreal, jovial at-
mosphere of the whole ritual, Dark Teddybear reminded
the audience of the crucial importance of communication,
trust, and precision in certain scenes. Especially when us-
ing blades, whips or canes (all common sights at the Flea),
he told us, the dominant must stay level-headed. Danger-
ous “edge-play” that gets out of hand can cause the sort of
bodily or psychological thud that doesn’t stop hurting for
a long time.
Ta k i n g t h e DS M o u t o f BDS M
It’s these kinds of misunderstandings, both between tops
and bottoms, and also between fetish and vanilla commu-
nities, that has led to legal recourse. Almost all cases deal
with the issue of consent between partners. So-called “slave
contracts,” or consensual non-consent agreements, do not
hold up in court. Advocacy groups like the National Co-
alition for Sexual Freedom recommend lawyers, doctors
and therapists from a large network of specialists in cases
related to BDSM, swing and polyamory.
In an infamous case in the late nineties, a Barnard
undergrad took Columbia grad student Oliver Jovanov-
ich to court for binding, raping, and torturing her over
the course of twenty hours. The case was dismissed after
Jovanovich spent a year and a half in jail, when written
evidence emerged that the plaintiff had enjoyed and en-
couraged the experience.
In 2000, police broke up a consensual Attleboro, MA
SM “play party” whose guests all knew one another. Two
individuals were arrested. The incident is a well-known
outrage in the online BDSM community.
The NCSF has also pushed for the removal of the ‘para-
phernalia’ section of the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual
(DSM-IV) that classifies certain BDSM practices as indi-
cators of mental illness.
____________
Before leaving, your correspondents stopped by Bruce’s
stall to say goodbye, and ended up trying on another cor-
set. One woman approached, and secured our firm per-
mission before simply saying, “you look great.” This was
another revelation of the strangeness of the sexual subtext
here—as much as the event can be painted as just another
consumerist scene, kink is about sex, and the potential for
breach was perpetually hovering.
“I used to have a great wardrobe, latex cat suit and ev-
erything, now I have too much mom weight,” she added,
just a plain middle-aged woman, too much wobble belly
showing but otherwise straight-dressed. Her wrists were
chained together.
“Now I’m a sex slave,” she added, “so I don’t have to
wear much.”
“What does your master wear?” we asked.
“Whatever he wants,” she answered, serious as death.
We couldn’t afford the corset.
____________________________________________
EMILY SEGAL B’10.5 & SI MON VAN
Z UYLEN-WOOD B’11 kept it professional.
a rt s | 15
GOING HO M E
TO A STACK
O F BOOKS
a c o n v e r s at i o n w i t h
t h e c r aw f o r d s
by miguel morales & Kaela myers
I magine Donald Barthelme sending messages in a bottle to
Gertrude Stein.” This is how the LA Times described Stan-
ley Crawford’s The Log of the SS The Mrs. Ungeuntine,
recently reprinted by Dalkey Archive Press. The Log—like all of
his work—creates its own logic, flouting literary tradition as it
spirals in and out of the thoughts of Mrs. Unguentine, an aban-
doned wife on an equally abandoned ship. Crawford is also the
author of the fictional works Gascoyne and Petroleum Man,
as well as several works of nonfiction and memoir, including A
Garlic Testament. He and his wife Rose Mary sat down with
the Independent after his reading last Thursday to discuss his life
and work.
_________
Indy: What drew me to The Log of the SS The Mrs.
Ungeuntine was this notion of self-sufficiency: how Mrs.
Unguentine is married to this man who has created a my-
thology out of self-sufficiency, who has created this barge,
created this world for both of them to inhabit. As the au-
thor and as someone who lives off his farm, how important
is this notion of self-sufficiency?
Stanley: I very quickly came to understand that self-
sufficiency is an illusion. First of all, I don’t want to address
that issue at all—or, Mrs. Unguentine does not address that
issue at all, in the Log. The tools that we use have evolved
through the sort of open-source method of development
over thousands of years. So even if you have every tool in
the world, you still are tapping into cultural history, until
the beginning of time. So it’s not truly self-sufficiency. The
other thing is, even when you’re growing your own food
and providing a lot of your own fuel, there is the whole
thing of fossil fuels, of electricity…. I think one of the
reasons that I was attracted to the life that we took up there,
was the element of community cooperation. To me—and I
think that still distinguishes where we live from most other
places that we know about—the community’s still support-
ive. Our greatest sense of security is in our neighborhood.
Not financially, we don’t have financial security, but we have
the social, the sort of real social security in our community
there. So, I haven’t answered your question.
I: That’s totally okay.
Rose mary: When we came to this country—we met
and married in Greece, and we had six months in Ireland,
where I actually had our first child, Adam. When we got to
San Francisco, it was a pretty miserable year. We were there
for, what, about eight months? And Stan was wondering
why he’d come back to the States. Were you? [He nods]
And I was looking after the baby. It was a strange time. I’d
go to take him to Golden Gate Park and someone would
say, You’re not taking that kid to Golden Gate Park, you’re
going to get murdered, and I said, What? And I took him
anyway and wasn’t murdered. And it was quite a lonely
time… And it was, he was wondering why he was back.
I: Was the sense of community that you ended up finding
in Dixon, New Mexico, something that you were looking
for, or was it something that became important after you’d
found it?
S: No, it was not expected. What induced me to come
back, I was beginning to realize that as an expatriate I
couldn’t participate. You were always a foreigner. You had
no civil rights, even property rights were questionable in
parts of Greece. So I was beginning to miss something; I
wasn’t sure what it was. It was probably that sense of com-
munity, which we found there somewhat accidentally.
R: I think when I arrived in Greece you were getting sick of
the expatriate life.
the college hill independent
S t a n l e y a n d R o s e M a r y C ra w fo rd
S: Well…
R: So he just—
S: The good life, the good life of drinking a lot at night—
R: Oh yeah, you were a smoker, drinker—
S: Writing in the morning, going to the beach in the
afternoon—
R: You were actually stingy, too.
S : Now some of this.
R: Don’t worry, Stanley.
I: We clean up well.
R: They’ll leave the juicy bits in.
S : It was also a destructive life, I could see that. I could feel
that myself, and see it in other expatriates too, they weren’t
going anywhere. They were losing touch. And, they’re all
dead.
R: Yeah. [Laughs] Sorry to laugh about that. It’s just the
way he says [it].
I: I guess this might be a little off the beaten path but
maybe not so much with all this smoking and drinking.
What draws me to your work is the fact that it doesn’t fit
with the Beat movement or something that was happening
when these folks were being published. Anyone can pick up
the Log today, or pick up Gascoyne, and it would read like
today’s literature. Maybe you didn’t consciously move away
from the writing at the time, but what drew you away from
the prevailing literary trends of the day?
S : I was blessed with a certain amount of ignorance. I was
at Chicago as a student when William Burroughs got in
trouble with something.
I: Not surprising.
S : And I was not aware of it. When I was in San Francisco,
I didn’t [really] know any other writers… I can’t remember
when I read Brautigan first. Maybe New Mexico, maybe
I read it there. You know, the question came up yesterday,
when do you really feel like a writer? Maybe I didn’t feel
much that I was a writer…. But that wasn’t the thing I was
trying to figure out. It wasn’t the writing. It was more the
peculiar question of, you come back to your own country
after five years of being away, and the changes have been so
fast and so deep that you don’t know how to act. I think I
represented that in Unguentine’s silence, and his difficulty
in speaking, because I didn’t know how to address people.
I had come from France and Greece, where you address
people in very formal ways, whether you know them or not.
It was a ritual there.
R: And we weren’t at all happy in San Francisco. You didn’t
know what you were doing with your life. I had the baby. I
was wandering around. We had no friends. It was awful.
S : It was also this time of horrible polarization. It was really
dreadful.
R: And you were writing Log. You gave it to me to read. I
said, “Cut out all the other characters. Just leave him and
her.”
I: That’s really interesting that there were more characters.
R: There were a lot more characters.
S: There was one more. Maybe two.
R: There were several, Stan. I knew it was a stunning book.
S: I was worried it was too short.
R: It was wonderful. I absolutely saw it was wonderful.
S: Gascoyne came out after a year or two of other attempts.
It came out from a binge of reading Ian Fleming and Ray-
mond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and those guys who
were not in the canon in school at all.
I: Speaking of the Log, I remember an interview in which
you said that you had come to think of the Log as a purely
apocalyptic tale and hadn’t read it in years until you were
approached about the reprint. How has your reading of the
book changed in the few years since its republication?
S: Maybe since I’ve read from it twice, once at Dartmouth,
and once last night, I’m a little more comfortable with it.
When I reread things within a few years, I’m also reliv-
ing a kind of shadow experience of writing it, and I’m not
really in the writing of it. I’m a little away from it, but I’m
not entirely away. So it’s this anxious kind of thing… I
don’t quite feel that anxiety because it’s so remote. But Log
always stayed kind of close, so it wasn’t a surprise. It is also a
surprise in the sense of, “Oh, I used to be able to write like
that. Why can’t I now?”
I: There’s a younger cadre of writers, really exciting writers,
in my opinion, who are championing Log. Writers like
Blake Butler, Brian Evenson, and Deb Olin Unferth are
coming out and saying, “This is really great. I don’t know
why people aren’t talking about this. This is something that
needs to be taken to the masses.” What are your thoughts
about these writers taking the Log up? Do you find there
might be a reason why it’s that book and not others, like
Petroleum Man, or Travel Notes?
S: It’s very gratifying. It’s lovely being connected to a
younger generation of writers in that way. It’s inspiring me
to reciprocate and catch up with all these books I haven’t
read. We’re going home with a stack of books.
I: That’s great.
S: The other question, maybe you might say the book’s
time has come because there is an apocalyptic element
there, but it’s not as familiar as I remember it. I think it’s
the concern with the fate of the planet, and I’m not certain
what else. It seems to me an unconscious glossary of all the
things we’re worried about but in a poetic way. Petroleum
Man, whether it’s going to have its day, I don’t know. That’s
a hard book to love. It was a hard book to love when I was
writing it. Whereas I think—and I hope this doesn’t sound
arrogant—but I think one can love Log.
R: I certainly love Log.
S: The other books don’t have that warmth, and passion
perhaps, that expansive passion.
I: Have you read much of Ben Marcus, or Brian Evenson,
or Deb Olin Unferth?
S: I’ve read three or four stories of Brian’s. I’ve been liking
them. I haven’t reached a place to read Ben Marcus’ stuff.
I: I’m in love with the novel he wrote, Notable American
Women. It does something similar to the Log, where it’s tak-
ing this apocalyptic, very claustrophobic place, and giving
it an incredibly personal voice to it. That’s something I see
in contemporary literature. George Saunders does it, Ben
obviously does it, and there are other writers like Gary Lutz
and Sam Lipsyte who use this very strange but personal
end-times discussion. I think that’s why people really get
drawn to the Log.
S: I have the sense that by reading some new territory here,
this time is going to be very helpful in advancing that. So I
may finally get to that place where some of the writers out
there who I have trouble with will become accessible to me.
I had coffee with Marcus in NY last March. I wanted to
thank him for writing that fantastic afterword, which made
me feel like the novelist I wish I really was.
______________________________________________
m iguel m orales B’10 & kaela myers
b’10 are ready for garlic season.
m a r c h 4, 2010

STRANGER E X PERI M ENTS
E xperiment #1: Talking to Strangers
Have a day of no strangers. Find out the first name
of every person you interact with for an entire day
(including, but not limited to: the librarian, the homeless
woman, the janitor, and the gentleman behind you in line).
Ideally you will also determine where they were born and
what winter was like there. If this is a person you interact
with regularly, remember his or her name. (Tomorrow will
be a day of fewer strangers.)
Have a day of only strangers. Wear an inconspicuous
disguise and go about your daily routine. Do not speak up at
times when you usually would. Eat your meals alone or at a
large table in a cafeteria with people you don’t know. What
does your silence sound like? You may also choose to go to a
place where you don’t speak the language or where you speak
at the level of a kindergartener. Now what does your silence
sound like? How do mouths look when they are just making
noises?
Experiment #2: Intimate Stranger
Take off your clothes in the presence of a stranger. Do not
use your real name. Do use protection. Without your iden-
tity are you more or less naked?
Experiment #3: ‘Real’ Strangers
At night, listen to the loved ones in your kitchen as if they are
on the radio. If you happen to bump into them in the hall-
way, pretend they’re on TV. Practice looking at your friends
from far away, notice how their clothes drape on them and
how you never saw it before.
Experiment #4: Guarding Strangers
Spend the summer working as a lifeguard at a local pool.
Capitalize on the fact that you are required by your job to
stare at people. Listen to their conversations from the neu-
tralizing height of the guard chair. Mask the intensity of your
eavesdropping behind dark sunglasses. Grow accustomed to
watching without being seen; guard your strangeness. Learn
the names of all the regulars, and be startled when they ask
you yours. Watch these strangers vigilantly. Be constantly
prepared to save their lives.
Experiment #5: Beating up a Stranger
Tell the story about how a man was going down from Jerusa-
lem to Jericho when he fell into the hands of robbers. They
stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving
him half dead.
Experiment #6: Killing a Stranger
View an execution. If you are in the United States, this may
have to be a hypothetical experiment: the last legal public
execution in the US—a hanging, outdoors, replete with
reporters and an angry mob—was in Kentucky, in 1936, the
hanging of a man convicted of raping and killing a 70-year-
old woman. American executions are now conducted behind
closed doors. What kind of example do closed doors set?
Timothy McVeigh was killed on closed-circuit television for
victims whose families lost the lottery to be physically pres-
ent, but that’s as close to public as it gets these days. There are
no longer strangers allowed at a killing.
For the sake of the experiment, there are some alternatives
to actually attending an execution: for example, the Texas
Department of Criminal Justice has a page on its website
with links to information about each executed prisoner since
1982, including his crime and his final statement, and often
a picture.1 You will find ample material there for imagin-
1
http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/executedoffenders.htm
M a r c h 4, 2010
N o n f i c t i o n b y L au r a B r ow n - L av o i e
ing the event. Alternatively, if you have the gumption, there
are amateur videos of countless public executions (in North
Korea, in Iran…) easily found online.
Experiment #7: Mourning a Stranger
Find the obituaries section of the local paper and read the
brief life stories of the recent dead. Note what these stories
make you feel (Anything? What’s the difference between
an obit and a fiction?). Then select one of them and attend
the funeral (choose one whose obituary includes informa-
tion about services.) At the funeral, behave with the utmost
solemnity, so as not to appear a stranger to the deceased.
Note how the funeral makes you feel. Is the deceased still
a stranger once you have listened to his eulogy, once you’ve
seen his children and their children in their pews?
Experiment #8: Praying With Strangers
Go to a strange church. Just follow along. When they say
“let us pray,” close your eyes. Pray, or feel the people around
you praying (fidgeting, breathing). If you don’t know how
to pray, imagine what it sounds like inside the head of the
person next to you. When you open your eyes, look at each
other lovingly.
Experiment #9: Praying to a Stranger
In a moment of total helplessness—“He is missing… He
won’t pick up the phone… No honey, there’s nothing you
can do, just sit tight…”—slide down onto the floor, close
your eyes, be very still, and begin to think in imperatives.
Make him safe, make him unharmed and harmless, find him,
please let him be found, protect him, tell him I love him, please,
be with him out there, be out there, be there, be, be… Continue
in this manner until you feel heard, or tired enough to sleep.
Experiment #10: Playing a Stranger
Choose a character quite unlike you. Memorize all his lines.
Really get into the role. When you walk down the street, do
it holding all of your character’s baggage.
Experiment #11: Playing with Strangers
Create a cyberself in an online gaming community and
develop at least three acquaintances with whom you play
regularly (elf, warlock, demon-hunter). As you beat levels to-
gether, do you ever start to imagine your “friends” out there,
without their horns and wands?
Or join an online forum as someone you are not. (The
online Hermit Crab Enthusiasts come highly recommended.
Or, if you have the gumption, you may posture as the wife
of a soldier in Iraq—they are supporting each other all over
the internet.) If they believe you are one of them, have you
served your purpose (group enthusiasm or group comfort,
respectively)? Does it matter that one cannot corroborate the
authenticity of cyberstrangers? The internet is a realm of only
strangers. Situate yourself at random among them. “Friend”
them.
Experiment #12: Solidarity with Strangers
Go through something with a bunch of strangers. Ideally
your bus gets a flat tire on the interstate and you are stranded
together by the side of the road for hours. Alternatively, at-
tend a weekly meeting with other people who have survived
what you have survived, but to whom you have no other
connection. Introduce yourself: Hello, My Name Is, I too…
I too… I too…
Experiment #13: Walking by a Stranger
Go on to tell what happened next on the road from Jerusa-
L i t e r a ry |16
i l lu s t r at i o n b y i s a b e l k h o o
lem to Jericho, how a priest happened to be going down the
same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the
other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and
saw him, passed by on the other side.
Experiment #14: Writing to a Stranger
Look in the phone book and choose an address and a name
at random. Compose a very non-threatening letter in which
you propose beginning a correspondence. (Ideally you have a
PO Box and so do they, so as to avoid surrendering/invading
domestic privacy.) Start with the banalities of new friend-
ship, tell him about the conversation you overheard at the
coffee shop, the way your injury hurts before a rain storm.
If things are going well, tell him a secret. Do not tell him
your full name, where you are from, or where you are going.
Good strangers are hard to find; if you can, try to maintain a
long-term strangership.
Experiment #15: Cheering with Strangers
When you move to a new city, start to follow the biggest
sports team. Buy the appropriate paraphernalia (cap, jersey)
and don it on game day, alone in your living room—DO
NOT go to the bar until you know every player’s name.
Learn to roll your eyes with the weary patience of the virgin
mother: “They just had to pitch Biggums into the ninth.”
When you find yourself waking up mornings to read the
summary of the game you watched the night before, then
you are ready to cheer in public. Stand around with the
other fans and make occasional eye contact (even if you are
all looking at the television, it should feel looking like into
each others’ eyes). In moments of great jubilation or disap-
pointment, you may touch each other.
Experiment #16: Touching a Stranger
Mentally catalogue your physical contact with strangers
throughout the day. Perhaps try to be a little more forward
than usual. Shoulders touching on the subway, hands brush-
ing in the passing of money, elbows contiguous on the el-
bowrests at the movies. Later, in bed, rapidly replay these
encounters until your body buzzes with the memory of tiny
trysts. (Conversely, go an entire day without being touched.)
Experiment #17: Holding a Stranger
Volunteer to hold infants at the local hospital. (An orphaned
or abandoned newborn will not thrive if it is deprived of
physical contact in its first few days. Volunteers are called
“baby cuddlers.” You simply hold a baby. That it may thrive.
Such opportunities abound.)
Experiment #18: Stopping for a Stranger
If anyone is still listening, tell of how finally one traveler came
to where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on
him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on
oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took
him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took
out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. “Look
after him,” he said, “and when I return, I will reimburse you
for any extra expense you may have.”
Experiment #19: Go
And do likewise.
t h e i n dy. o r g
r e v i e w s |17
CHOWING DOWN AT CHINESE IRON WOK
T h e C h i n e s e f o o d t r u c k g o e s a l l b r i c k a n d m o rta r
T
his was my fortune after a meal at the new Chinese
Iron Wok. As far as I know, this isn’t a Confucian
saying but a quirky, cookie-borne byproduct of Chi-
nese-American food culture. You might remember another
curiosity of that world: Providence’s famous Chinese food
truck, recognizable by its garish, painted-on swordsmen. In
years past, it would park outside the Sci Li and draw a line of
students and professors at lunch. The truck was an offshoot
of owner Tom Liang’s first restaurant, which used to be in
Seekonk. But Liang recently closed the Seekonk location,
traded in his wheels for walls, and now offers a full menu at
Brook and Benevolent.
My dining companion remarked that the staff hasn’t
heard they’re not in a truck anymore, and after multiple visits
I’d have to agree. Our hungriest companion actually stood
up to get the waiter to take our orders. But the staff is cordial
,if indifferent, the tea was hot and refilled regularly, and after
ordering the wait wasn’t long.
The decor mixes the tasteful and the bizarre. In general,
it outdoes the typical stuccoed Chinatown restaurant. The
designers took stabs at feng shui with a glass bamboo-pat-
terned screen dividing the main dining area on the second
floor. Another glass piece, printed with circular images from
around Providence, looks like it came second-hand from an
’80s science museum. The lacquered tables are square and
ideal for the large groups of professors and graduate students
that fill the restaurant at midday, taking advantage of the
well-priced and generously portioned lunch specials.
The delivery menu doubles for table duty: call it tacky,
H e y N o w, S o C o W
F ebruary 19, AS220: A crowd of twenty stood silent.
Gangly and guileless, So Cow fumbled about the stage
as they set up, adjusting the levels on their guitars
amid the sound-check fuzz. Front man Brian Kelly grinned
sheepishly, inched closer to the mic, and began to recount
an experience from his trip to Canada, something mumbled
about touring in Ontario and related driving distances. After
a good two minutes, his face cracked into a laugh, and soon
a guffaw. Unfortunately for him, no one else caught on.
Awkward pause. Realizing he wasn’t quite the raconteur he
thought himself to be, he squinted to the back of the playing
space. The production assistant gave them the thumbs up,
and Kelly gestured to his drummer.
My boyfriend and I turned to each other and cocked
our heads partly in confusion, and partly in good spirit.
No sooner did we turn back did So Cow begin to sputter
out an aggressive and untidy melody at a breakneck tempo.
Considering the lulling, slightly rickety, and conscientious
nature of recordings like “Halcyon Days,” it was as if So Cow
had instead taken up shop inside a sweltering garage party
with sparse refreshments and equally sparse breathing room.
Gone were the winsome harmonies, the tight guitar twangs,
the invitingly hazy atmosphere. Instead came lyric-shrieking,
bass-noodling, guitar-booming noise.
So Cow—initially just the open-mic-attending, travel-
ing college lecturer Brian Kelly—originated in late 2006 in
Seoul, South Korea. He’s released two full-length CDs, an
EP, and a few singles on his own. His first LP, So Cow, was
released in 2009 by Tic Tac Totally Records, and in 2010, he
plans to release a new LP entitled Meaningless Friendly and
an extensive tour in North America and Europe. Falling vic-
the college hill independent
Rya n W o n g & N i c k W e r l e
but you have to appreciate the pragmatism. It offers around
100 items, but don’t get overwhelmed. Besides the fact that
many are riffs on the same theme, the restaurant does not yet
have its full stock in. The ginger chicken with string beans
($9) became chicken with broccoli for us. They were out of
soup dumplings, and don’t yet have a full dessert range (no
big loss, it turns out).
To reinterpret the cookie, don’t expect of Providence
what you might of New York or San Francisco’s Chinatowns,
but step carefully through the large menu and you won’t go
wrong. Friends have told me that this was the worst meal of
their lives; others swear they have best Chinese food around.
It’s really less dramatic than that.
A rule of thumb for Chinese restaurants is to follow the
chef ’s own culinary heritage within China. The specialty
here is Szechuan. Just as Philly cheesesteaks are best in their
hometown, and you wouldn’t trust a Sicilian chef with ragù
bolognese, at Chinese Iron Wok you should stick to the
Szechuan. This southwestern Chinese cuisine is character-
ized by the unique spiciness it derives from its native pep-
percorns and chilies. And if your lips are a little numb by
the end of the meal, it wasn’t merely an overload of the spicy
stuff. Szechuan peppercorns, which are actually a tiny fruit,
contain a unique chemical that causes parethesia, a harmless
but stimulating tingling sensation. A wonderful example of
this is the double-cooked pork ($12), perhaps the restau-
rant’s finest dish. Indulging and ordering the fatty belly meat
will reward you with succulent slices of richly spiced pork.
The cumin beef was also simple and satisfying. The spice was
there, but didn’t overpower the thin-sliced, tender beef.
The chef has a way with Chinese eggplant, producing
thin spears that nearly melt in your mouth. A high point,
the eggplant with garlic, was both sweet and spicy without
tasting like it came from the big buckets in the Ratty. It’s the
type of dish that invites you to pile on a plate of rice and
shovel. Meat eaters should go with the chicken and Chinese
tim to the dubious nomenclature of “noise-pop,” and often
compared to bands like Television Personalities or the Clean,
So Cow tries to bring earnestness to a genre that usually con-
notes jangly guitars and abstruse lyricism. Aiming for those
“Oh, I get it” moments in his music, Kelly writes relatable
lyrics: he writes for the underdog, for the kid who fell in love
with Jenny Cooper next door but didn’t have the balls to ask
her to prom. Kelly couples these lyrics with a homemade
sonic feel without sounding like scrabbling, buzzing lo-fi.
His self-titled LP evinces this intimacy in song: the guitars
are sparse and deliberate, the drums are tight, and his lyrics
and harmonies twinkle over top.
Kelly and his rhythm section tore through their set list
in 45 minutes. The thin-framed devilish drummer plowed
through songs and the lumberjack of a bassist plucked thick
bass lines as he tromped about the stage. Kelly would take
the opportunity during solos to simply “rock out” and eke
out soaring riffs. These melodies, however, were like pebbles
skipped across a pond: nice for a short gander or consider-
ation, but quickly sunk and forgotten.
Take “Casablanca,” for instance. The cutesy, Beach Boys-
esque chord progression is a treat initially, but wears a listener
down after repeating for three-plus minutes. That, coupled
with Kelly’s pained cries of “Casa! Blanca!” in the chorus,
is a red flag for a pop song in need of rehab. The distortion
obscured any sort of nuance in the songs, yet did provide a
sort of basic three-note progression to hold on to, in case you
became lost in the flurry of So Cow–frequency.
The intrigue for a song like “Ping Pong Rock” lies in its
lyrical play. The distortion, however, made the song gurgle,
as words began to pile up against each other and gush over
eggplant ($14).
The Lion Head meatballs ($11), traditionally from Shang-
hai, were appropriately juicy but not as gravy-smothered as
one would want. They’re not terribly common outside Chi-
natown and are worth a try.
The appetizers, Szechuan dumplings and sesame cold
noodles, were swimming in hot oil and small for six dollars.
The dumplings were almost all skin, with maybe a teaspoon
of ground meat. The noodles tasted like vinegar, and the
few slices of cucumber tossed in were a half-hearted attempt
at variation in texture. Restaurants around campus tend to
overcharge for small, cheap-ingredient appetizers. Skip them
and order an extra entrée.
For a world-class cuisine, Chinese food is notoriously
lacking in the dessert realm. The sweet red bean congee ($2)
they comped us at the end of the meal did nothing to break
this image: a few dozen beans drowned in a watery soup.
Price should be a prime concern of anyone targeting stu-
dent dollars. At $10-$15 an entree, Chinese Iron Wok prob-
ably won’t take the $6 East Side Pocket’s place in anyone’s
circuit. The exceptions are the massive lunch specials, which
at $6-8 are a great value for a proper restaurant.
But when you want to sit down, sip unlimited tea, bask
in leisurely service, and play your chances at hit-and-miss but
overall quality dishes, go for Iron Wok. Listen to the cookie:
with restaurants like this, a dose of humor and nonchalance
goes a long way.
______________________________________________
RYAN WONG and NICK WERLE B ’10 are tingling.
S o c ow at a s 220
b y Emm a J a n a s k i e
into something that amounted to a sound not unlike a pul-
sating dial tone.
Considering the insistent sonic clash of So Cow’s per-
formance, Kelly’s lyrics sounded sprinkled onto the songs:
tender, almost saccharine-sweet croons amid the crash-bang
of stentorian noise. Kelly deploys his signature adolescent
tropes with lines like “growing old ain’t no fun.” These lines
are no doubt endearing, but cloying song after song after
song and moreover, completely irreconcilable with the tim-
bre of the music blaring from the amps. Drunken audience
members appreciated the lyrics, however, as they tottered
across the room arm-in-arm ecstatically reciting Kelly’s lyrics
back to him (and to whomever happened to fall within their
trajectory).
So it seems that So Cow has two personalities. Which So
Cow am I supposed to root for? The kid at home, tossing
his head back and forth as he croons sweet nothings from
upon a stool, or the badass punkish rock stars with the sound
to match? Though the intent to bring a new dimension to
their music is admirable, the sound So Cow produces in a
live show is ultimately incompatible with recordings and
their musical identity. Some incongruity can be attributed
to equipment malfunction, but the hard-rock intention was
still there, and it doesn’t really make sense. I’ll pass on the
noise-pop identity crisis, thanks.
___________________________________
Emm a Janaskie B ’13 is ready to rock and dance her
ass off.
m a r c h 4, 2010

six! more! years!
c o n s i d e r i n g t e r m l i m i t s f o r c o l l e g i a t e coaches
On Selection Sunday, March 14, bubbles will burst across
the college basketball scene as unworthy teams fail to qualify
and unworthy coaches are removed. Sayonara, Ernie Kent
(Oregon); Pension plan for you, Norm Roberts (St. John’s);
and oh-wait-you’re-already-fired, Jerry Wainwright (Depaul).
Today, the fan and the voter relish turnover by treating
invincibility as relic, with both Washington officials and col-
legiate coaches. Fired coaches, booted incumbents, airhead
pundits; we wouldn’t have it any other way.
In the past, Washington officials and college coaches were
immovable pillars of their respective establishments. Bear
Bryant coached football at the University of Alabama for 24
seasons before retiring in 1982. Dean Smith spent 36 years
at Chapel Hill with UNC basketball. Sam Rayburn served
48 years in the House as a Texas representative. Mississippi’s
Strom Thurmond, despite his outdated social politics, served
‘til death. All were mainstays of their communities, granted
seemingly permanent tenure. Today, political and coaching
positions are heavily scrutinized in the media and, thus, sub-
ject to fluctuating public opinion.
In the past twelve months the likes of Senators Chris Dodd
(D-CT), Kit Bond (R-MO), and Byron Dorgan (D-ND)
ended their decade(s)-long careers, as did Bobby Bowden
(Florida St. Football), the second winningest coach in 31
years in Tallahassee. More Doppelgangers: Louisville Basket-
ball Head Coach Rick Pitino and former Sen. John Edwards
(D-NC) have seen scandal undermine their squeaky-clean
careers. Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass) and Lane Kiffin (USC
football) are the maverick heartthrobs, newcomers who de-
mand attention for their unpredictability.
Disgruntled citizens wish they could invoke sports in firing
representatives, as though ousting an underperforming 3-27
head coach, and guaranteed terms prevent this. Collegiate
coaching transitions are much more volatile, with squabbles
breaking out over contract money, unfulfilled promises, or
unfair expectations. For coaches, change is smoother since
terms are inherently temporary. But why couldn’t electoral
systems work for sports?
By Malcolm Burnley
The current college coaching system isn’t broken, but six-
year term limits would cure one of its flaws: uneven tenures.
For example, hoops coach Billy Gillespie got only two years
at Kentucky Basketball between Tubby Smith (decade ten-
ure) and John Calipari (currently under eight year contract,
poised for extension).
If there’d been consistent six-year coaching terms instead
of arbitrary contracts, think how much grief Notre Dame
Football would’ve been spared. Over the past decade, the
prestigious program has been ripped for its handling of two
coaches, Tyrone Willingham and Charlie Weis. Willingham,
the university’s first black head football coach, was fired in
2004 after an overall record of 21-16 in just three seasons.
Controversy surrounded the termination, given that Willing-
ham had a six-year contract, constructed a team of promising
underclassmen, and maintained a scandal-free reign. Many
believe that Notre Dame fired Willingham prematurely, in
hopes of luring Urban Meyer from the University of Utah,
who instead chose the University of Florida and won two na-
tional championships there. Notre Dame settled for Charlie
Weis instead, the offensive coordinator of the New England
Patriots. In his first season, the team compiled a 10-3 record,
identical to Willingham’s inaugural run. Weis was rewarded
with a ten-year contract extension, unlike Willingham,
which led to further scrutiny. After five years with a lower
winning percentage than Willingham (35-27 record), the
school bought out Weis for an estimated ten million dollars.
Notre Dame football is a microcosm of the system’s inef-
ficiency. Willingham deserved more time, and Weis single-
handedly spiked tuition. The combined eight years hurt
the players, the institution, and the fans. Players struggled
with systemic change, a dramatic mid-career shift for most.
Once-promising recruits had underwhelming careers due to
transitional inconsistency.
Guaranteed term limits would eliminate impulsive coach-
ing changes. It would conserve money, resources, and worry
for all athletic programs. Calmer climates would ensue, given
that firing storms could only surface every six years, and fan
From the sketchbook of Jeremy Silberberg
s p o rt s |18
bases would unify. Term limits would funnel enthusiasm into
positive encouragement of programs, minimizing the energy
expended in crying for another coach.
Fixed term limits are better suited for evaluation of college
coaches than elected officials. Politicians can disguise their
records by hiding behind party decisions or making excuses
over Washington gridlock.
Six years is not always equal in opportunity. Chairman-
ship on the Ways and Means Committee may hold more
power than a rookie representative. However, everyone plays
roughly the same amount of games in sports. Coaching term
limits would offer level effective analysis. This would be an
especially effective tool for comparing successors to prede-
cessors in collegiate sports, to gauge the success of turnover.
Willingham to Weis would have happened with careful con-
sideration of a completed six years.
An altered system could also reverse recruiting corruption.
When coaches are fired, players’ commitments to schools are
relinquished, allowing them to sign wherever they would
like; recruiting scandals are commonplace given the hyper-
fluctuating pool of players.
Coaching term limits is a hopeful thought experiment,
but the hypothesis will go untested. ESPN ratings are largely
driven by non-stop sports speculation, and the potential lost
revenue makes term-limits implausible in college sports. It’s
also more fun to dream of the infinite possibilities of the
college coaching carousel. These fantasies keep our attention
constantly attuned, without six years of delay. Ultimately,
sports is spectacle. Term limits would be a beneficial over-
haul to collegiate coaching, but more stability is not more
entertainment. We love sports precisely because of the un-
predictability.
______________________________________________
Malcol m Burnley B’12 is third place, without
the hairy chest.
FRI 5
11:30AM-2PM The Museum of Westminster St., a 3D out-
door museum experience, also tomorrow noon-4PM @ West-
minster St. between Dorrance + Union // 100% free
7PM Picturing Palestine: Images of an Occupation - Open-
ing! @ List 2nd Floor // free
7PM Brown Student Exhibition - Another opening! // Bell
Gallery, List 1st Floor // free
8PM SOL(t)O, a hypnotic and otherworldly sound palette by
Victor Gama @ Grant Recital Hall // free
8PM LULU: A Pandora’s Box, deotic sexual rhetorics thru
March 14 @ Stuart Theater, 75 Waterman St. // $7/10
10PM Live Bait: True Stories From Real People: Second
Chances @ Perishable Theater, 95 Empire St. // $5
10PM Ivy Film Fest Partay @ Bravo, 123 Empire St. // $

SAT 6
11AM-2PM Winter Farm-
er’s Market @ Hope Artiste
Village, Pawtucket // brus-
sel sprouts, turnips, squash
etc.
3:30PM + 8PM The Me-
chanics of the Sprit, a mul-
timedia liturgy @ PW Up-
space, TF Green Hall
10PM Speakeasy Sessions:
Vol. III @ Grad Center
Lounge // Free
SUN 7
8PM The Oscars! @ ABC on your TV
9:30PM Around a Small Mountain @ the French
Film Festival, The Cable Car, 204 S. Main St. //
$8.50 general, $6.50 student

MON 8
5:30PM New Perspectives in Arabic + Comparative Litera-
ture “Nostalgia and Egyptian Cultural Icons” @ Maddock
Alumbi Center, 38 Brown St. // free
6:30PM Sunset Boulevard @ The Cable Car // $5

TUE 9
4:30PM Blue Vinyl, a toxic comedy look at vinyl @
Smitty-B 106, 95 Cushing St. // free
9:30PM Crunk Witch, 3D Mystery, & Roman Pho-
tos @ AS220 // $6

WED 10
7:30PM Harriet Jacobs, thru the 13th @ Perishable
Theater // $15-20
9PM Fuzz Orchestra, White Mice & Stress Ape @
AS220, 115 Empire St. // $$

THU 11
4PM Robert Coover reads from his new novel Noir @
Brown Bookstore // free
7:30PM BACAP Lecture: “Aristotle on the Form and
Definition of a Human Being” @ Gerard House, 54
College St. // free
7:30PM A reading by poet Lee Ann Brown @ McCor-
mack Family Theater, 70 Brown St. // free
7:30PM An evening with Garrison Keillor of Prairie
Home Companion fame @ Providence Performing
Arts Center, 220 Weybosset St. // $32-$67
12PM The Chinese Stars, Tin$el Teeth & Arcing @
The 201, 201 Westminster St. // $6

MARGO MATEO & LOLA R EXQUISITE CORPSES