EDIT - AS OF 3:30PM ON APRIL 7TH THIS IS BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD, REDACTIONS IN PLACE AND MORE COMING

I have been trying to center these essays in specific places, because to really go deep on a place, even one nearby is a form of travel. My intuitive plan for navigating the encroachment of autocracy has been to keep all of my energy focused close to home. There is a time for learning from other places & lord knows that I was born with the curse of the crazy legs, the insatiable longing for wandering and the tasting of new fruits. The insularity and smallness of RI, which I love, but can at times be low-key oppressive, has also led me to firmly believe that regular travel is a form of civic duty for Rhode Islanders, like for all of our sakes, please go get some perspectives from other places! But everything in my heart is saying now is the time for hunkering in. Tunneling deep. But I am not here to write about a tunnel, but rather a bridge. Or actually three bridges that are commonly grouped together and referred to as the singular “Washington Bridge”. But warning, this essay might not actually turn out to be about this bridge, but might actually be about a place on the internet, specifically on instagram, a place that I was lured to, in order to learn more about the bridge.

I used to drive over the Washington Bridge a lot. Now not so much. In the early 2000s I worked in Fall River, and for those who aren’t locals reading, to get to Fall River from Providence you have to take 195 over the Washington Bridge. Most of the time my commute fell outside of rush-hour and so took less than half of an hour. Occasionally I’d have to come back to Providence for a 5:30 meeting or something and it would take like an hour and I, and everyone around me would be melting down in their cars. One of the things that I love most about Rhode Islanders is that fairly uniformly everyone considers sitting in a car for more than half an hour a big deal. Depending on the circumstance it could be a welcomed adventure or if it’s because of something like traffic, mark it as a crime against natural law. But it is not something to be taken lightly. Snacks are required. Listening material, perhaps a suitcase. A hotel room? Don’t laugh! This is actually a really important attribute of who we are as a people. Quality of life is non-negotiable and having your precious time wasted sitting in a car is not what you sign up for living in a state that is constantly used as a unit of measurement that doubles as the butt of a joke. The oil spill was the size of Rhode Island, the family farm was the size of Rhode Island, Alaska was 450 times the state of Rhode Island, his nose was the size of Rhode Island. Laugh away but the jokes on you suckers in Texas driving hours to get to the grocery store. We need our time for going to the beach, for being outside, for chatting with neighbors, for far flung hobbies, for cracking jokes at ourselves, for wading through history, or wading in the water pulling up shellfish, for drinking endless ice coffee, or coffee milk or whatever. Another god-given right of Rhode Islanders is basking in the things that make Rhode Island special, which has been part of the lure of the popular instagram page that I came to start to pay attention to when the bridge started falling down.

I seem to have skipped over the part about the bridge falling down. The first bridge in the place of the Washington Bridge that is really three bridges connecting Providence and East Providence, and in turn the rest of the East Bay was built in 1793 by John Brown, the prominent Rhode Island merchant and slave trader. The same year his brother Moses, who was an abolitionist also built a bridge to East Providence, in the place where the Red Bridge is now. Replacements came and went in the 1800’s. In 1930 the part of the Washington bridge that is now for pedestrian and bicycle traffic was built out of concrete as a four lane bascule bridge.

In 1959 the span of the bridge as well as the roads coming and going from it were designated as part of the newly created Interstate highway system I-195. At this time it was determined that the four lanes were going to be way too clogged for future use. By 1967 there was already some controversy as the Federal Bureau of Public Roads wanted to put up a cheap steel bridge next to the 1930’s more decorative concrete bridge. RI Public Works refused to go along with a plan for a new bridge to manage additional traffic that wasn’t aesthetically aligned with the current bridge.

From Wikipedia:

“As a compromise, the decision was made to utilize a new construction technique: “pre-stressed concrete with false arches.” This technique of pre-stressed and post-tensioned concrete spans, locked in place with steel anchors, promised the beauty of concrete at the cost of steel. Construction was completed by late 1968, however, this technique never caught on with the industry, and by the 1970s was largely abandoned as a building technique. This meant that the westbound span would remain a relative rarity, a “curiosity of another era;” a fact which would come back to confound engineers a half-century later when the span was discovered to have critical failures. A 2024 report on the bridge suggested that such pre-stressed and post-tensioned concrete structures are poorly understood due to their rarity.”

In 2008 a new Eastbound structure was built between the 1930’s concrete bridge which became a linear park/bike path and the 1968 Westbound bridge built out of the pre-stressed concrete. For a long time it was understood that the Westbound (1968) bridge needed a lot of work and in 2020 25 million in Federal funds were allocated to bridge repairs that at the time were estimated to be in the 75 million dollar range.

On December 11th 2023 after a “young engineer” found some critical structural failures the Westbound (1968) bridge was suddenly closed. A trip that once took a few minutes from East Providence to Providence suddenly took hours. All Rhode Island citizens effectively lost their marbles at once. East Providence resident and filmmaker Kelly Riley passed out hot-dogs in the stalled traffic, probably saving the lives and stomachs of many commuters who had not prepared to be stranded in traffic for hours on the wrong side of the Seekonk River when they had left home in the morning. We were still on the edges of the pandemic, and were accordingly hardwired to come together to figure out how to get through crisis, but what the fuck? How would we be led out of this quagmire? A ferry was set up between Bristol and India Point Park. Which was fun and kind of a novelty, but turns out a very expensive and not super effective novelty for actually getting commuters where they needed to go. Turns out that if your whole transit infrastructure is based on car traffic, then trying to replace it with something else overnight is just not going to fly. Eventually the EastBound bridge was set up to handle traffic going in both directions and it still gets jammed up at rush hour. But it’s generally settled down quite a bit from the early days. But still people are frustrated, freaked out that something as dangerous as a failing bridge was not caught immediately. And it’s looking like a replacement Westbound bridge won’t open for another 34 months in November of 2028. To reduce hundreds of news stories to one sentence, its dredged up all kinds of stuff about politics and the history of corruption and municipal mismanagement in Rhode Island that maybe people had hoped was water under the proverbial bridge.

To be honest, I’d found keeping up with it all kind of tedious, and mostly I just cut back on my canoodling in the East Bay. Did I really need to go to the flea market at the Speedway every Sunday? Definitively no. But for many Rhode Islanders getting across the Seekonk River wasn’t as optional as it was for me, and people wanted answers. DOT and Gubernatorial leadership seemed profoundly bad at giving answers that didn’t exude the sweet smell of absolute garbage or require a PhD in bridge engineering to decipher.

In 2024 I started seeing more Washington Bridge content in my Instagram feed and I started to follow an account that seemed to post about The Bridge as well as cute things like dogs up for adoption, Nibbles Woodaway (the giant blue bug overlooking the highway), RI Nostalgia: Benny’s and the like. It was called What’s Going On In Rhode Island, and it seemed benign. I wanted to know what was going on in Rhode Island, so I thought that it might be for me! I also like dogs, donuts, and pictures of sunsets which seemed to be the other main categories of what this account was posting about. You know, the stuff that brings us together as Rhode Islanders.

From the best of my mediocre internet sleuthing abilities, I have gleaned that What’s Going On In Rhode Island seems to have started as a Facebook page around May of 2016, so Happy Birthday What’s Going On In Rhode Island, you are 10 years old and the discourse in your comments sections does track with that of 10 year olds, so here we are.

My first clue that the account might be a bit sketchy was when a photo of a dead shark that washed up in Westerly appeared in the feed on August 17th of 2025. The shark was breathtaking, pale and toothy, giving a side-eye towards heaven as it rested on its gills, human feet surrounding it in the frame, sand and the foamy spittle of tide. The caption read:

WESTERLY, R.I. — Beachgoers in one of Rhode Island’s most exclusive spots were stunned this afternoon when a shark washed up on the sand near in front of the Ocean House.

The cause of the shark’s death has not been confirmed, but the unusual scene has already fueled speculation. Some locals point to the offshore wind farms as a possible factor, adding to the ongoing debate about their impact on marine life.

The post had garnered nearly 10,000 likes and about 2,000 comments. Rhode Islanders like to talk about sharks I guessed. I’m not usually one to dig-into the comments on posts like this, but I noticed that one of the top comments was made by @candydasain, an old friend of mine. And whoa, actually it looked like it had been my friend who had been at the shark scene and took the pictures that he then sent in to What’s Going On In Rhode Island. His reply was:

@Candydasain: I provided the photos and videos here, and just want to say that I strongly disagree with this interpretation. The account owner claims that others messaged them speculating about wind farms. I guess I believe that, but I can tell you no one at the beach was talking about wind farms. Everyone was just fascinated and concerned.

The account @zephyr_vision responded: the account owner is a right wing hack. FYI

@Candydasain: I kind of knew that but I was excited to share something fascinating in RI and I know this account has reach. I didn’t expect them to use my images to support their politics, and they gave me no sense that they would. Pretty dirty, disappointing stuff, but whatever. If people want to be that way, they have to live with themselves. I don’t really care that much.

I filled away this information somewhere in the recesses of my dusty brain where I sweep minor betrayals and things that leave a sour taste in my mouth, but mostly I thought about the shark and all of its toothy majesty, its muscly flesh and beautiful mean nose.

Posts came and went on What’s Going On In Rhode Island about classic end of summer Rhode Island things: street fairs, Newport mansions, movies being shot in Providence, Narragansett Pier, aerial shots of bridges. There were a few posts about whistle blowers and the bridge and maybe it was the beginning of when What’s Going On started reporting out on YouTube bridge vlogger Casey Jones’ coverage of the Washington Bridge. To be honest I wasn’t tuning in that hard. It was summer in Rhode Island, and I was trying to get myself into the ocean as much as humanly possible, which is the opposite of paying attention to social media.

But then it was nearly fall and political violence was ripping us into a new reality, like it or not and I was surprised to see What’s Going On In Rhode Island posting about Charlie Kirk. I came to follow this account for dogs and donuts, not division. What was happening? Who ran this account anyway?

On September 17th there was a What’s Going On post about a Barrington School Committee meeting, and a teacher potentially being put on leave over comments about Charlie Kirk. I had already read about this meeting via local independent journalist Steve Ahlquist’s Substack. The What’s Going On recap of the meeting was vastly different from Ahlquist’s. While Ahlquist definitely has a position, he often posts full transcripts of meetings, video documentation and other primary source documents as part of his stories so that readers can encounter first hand what is being written about. In short, I trust the content that he publishes. The What’s Going On post was poorly written, at some point referring to the teacher, Ben Fillo, as “the Fillo” which seemed either like a lazy typo, massively disrespectful, or both. But the thing that really got my attention about this post was that it had over 11K likes and nearly 5K comments. This is Rhode Island, tiny little Rhode Island and I had rarely seen so much engagement on a “local” news story. Was it robots commenting? This was the moment when I began asking What’s Going on With What’s going on in Rhode Island? On this post was a really astute comment from the account @baldwints:

This account is a clear example of how social media and opportunists are ruining the fabric of our society. He reposts a small scale local story connected to a hugely incendiary national event, makes some low effort comment about it, and invites controversy to have people fight extensively in the comments. This drives up engagement and monetization. He is literally profiting off of Americans fighting with each other. Social media is a cancer.

That night I went home and went down a rabbit hole. I had honed my skills at looking up business documents for an article that I had written the previous January called A PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER IN PROVIDENCE and the case of the mysteriously disappearing student cooperatives. So I was confident that I could get to the bottom of who was behind What’s Going On In Rhode Island by looking up basic business filing public documents on the Secretary of State’s website. But if an owner of a business really does not want to be traced via business docs they can pay some money to “registered agents” and keep their identity obscured. And it turned out that that was exactly what WHAT’S GOING ON IN RI LLC had done. They had formed an LLC in Delaware (classic sketch-o business move) and then paid a service based in Pawtucket to be the name on the RI business forms. Their domain name was registered by a proxy account. Why was someone with a popular public Instagram that was ostensibly about fun things in Rhode Island so dead-set on not being able to be identified? I wasn’t buying What’s Going On as a “news” site, but it seemed like they were starting to think of themselves in this way. Weren’t journalists supposed to be transparent and accountable?

I couldn’t stop thinking about it all night, so the next day I went into work and did what any self-respecting busy-body who wants answers would do: I messaged the account from my work Instagram account which can look like a touristy hospitality business. I kept it simple and said “Hi, we run a bed and breakfast and want to learn more about collaboration”. Within two hours I got a response that included a link to set up a meeting about advertising with Joe Russo. I never set up that meeting, but I did google the shit out of Joe Russo and it kinda fit, like the guy reposted articles from SOCIALMEDIATODAY.COM on his feed. J&R Marketing, Joe Russo’s business was the only hint of a nod to anything specific on the What’s Going On In Rhode Island website. On the very bottom of said website it says that the site has been designed and managed by J&R Marketing.

I started crunching numbers and doing an analysis of how much deeper WhatsGoingOn’s social media reach was than ALL OTHER RHODE ISLAND NEWS MEDIA combined. I made graphs, I was freaking out. I had a sense of doom about our media landscape somewhere deep in my gut. I was chicken little and we were fucked. We were fried. We were fried chicken. This anonymous guy could be taking money from anybody to post anything. They were posting about a brand new wing-stop in Johnston, it didn’t say paid post, but were they taking money from wing-stop? Oh god we are so fried, fried being sold corporate fried chicken. Chicken-little was actually a relatively late Americanized rendition of a classic European folktale making light of mass-hysteria. I am not trying to make light of mass-hysteria, because c’mon, we all know that there have been times when Chicken Little was spot the fuck on. Other earlier versions were called Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Ducky Daddles, Drakey Lakey, Goosey Loosey, Goosey Poosey, Gander Lander, Turkey Lurkey, Foxy Loxy, or Foxy Woxy. You can see where this is heading since my name happens to rhyme with Gander and this newsletter is down with the ducks. So here I am to embody a modern version of the foul who gets hit on the head with an acorn and starts yelling at the sky. Except for that the tricky villain is not a dapper fox wearing a dinner coat but a guy who runs an ad agency in Johnston and probably has watched way too much Fox news.

So I decided that my graphs and harkoning of doom were the wrong approach. It was 2025 and no one needed more anxiety or data in their lives these days. Honestly it all just felt so absurd, and I don’t know exactly what possessed me, but I decided that the time had come for me to become a troll. So I set up a What’s Going On In Rhode Island parody account, that would obviously be called What’s Going On With What’s Going On In Rhode Island. The main problem with this is that I kind of hated instagram, felt violent pangs of self loathing when I spent more than 20 minutes scrolling, never kept the Instagram app on my phone and barely knew how to post a story. That said it was extremely easy to reverse engineer their branding - all futura bold caps all the time! The first story that I posted was about the lawyer Rob Lavine, who What’s Going On In Rhode Island had just made a post about. The thing that I like most about Rob Lavine is the cameo that he makes in the Albert DeMuth song The Big Fallout. So I just blasted this song on repeat and typed into the void.

“What comes next, they Fail to mention, All the crimes can’t be prevented, I heard it from my lawyer, He’s got a billboard, And his name is Rob Levine, Whilе the avalanche of fear, Fills my stomach full of air, And I’m throwing up my hair, To climb thе castle of despair” - The Big Fallout, Albert DeMuth

The well of anger in my veins made the bullshit flow pretty quickly from my finger tips. Sometimes I really cracked myself up and the fact that people wouldn’t know who I was right away made me not fear writing really stupid shit. Here is a sample of what I wrote in the first post.

Readers of What’sGoingOnInRI were treated to a particularly fascinating news story this afternoon when the massively legitimate news source posted a breaking story about a famous ambulance chaser type lawyer being a good person. This Lawyer is best known for being on a lot of billboards. He is in the sky! You know what they say, “the higher up on the billboard the closer to god!” Probably the lawyer is an actual angel from heaven! Definitely a good person! I don’t know why anyone would think that this news story is advertising! It is so authentic!......

From the jump off I decided that I had to set a timer and that I couldn’t spend more than an hour crafting a post from top to bottom. But still it was hard to carve out time for this shit. I was not sure that I was cut-out for troll life. Actually I’m pretty sure that I am not, that I have been a half-ass troll at best, which is in part why I’m writing this long form piece about becoming a troll, so that I can hang up my troll mask and get back to being a normal 50 year old who posts on instagram like 5 times a year when I want to tell friends about something that I earnestly care about. My partner teased me and called these activities my MATH (Middle Aged Troll Hobby). But mostly he was pretty supportive. And in the process, I learned some things about social media, the media landscape in Rhode Island, and of course, about myself.

One of the first thoughts that I had in considering this account was: There are 245K followers and RI only has a population of about 1.1 Million, meaning that about one quarter of the state would have to follow this account if the numbers were real. Which frankly felt unlikely. Albeit at the time it perhaps hadn’t occurred to me yet that there might be a lot of disgruntled former Rhode Islanders who might follow an account about Rhode Island only so that they could comment over and over “so glad that I moved away from that woke hellhole”. It also seems like lots of followers were private accounts with only a few followers and zero posts. Those are bot accounts, right? Well it turns out that there are apps that exist to evaluate the quality of social media accounts, because businesses need data to ensure that when they’re paying to “collaborate” i.e. advertise, that they’re getting what they’re paying for. I ran @whatsgoingoninrhodeisland through every free app that assesses the quality of Instagram accounts which offered a variety of results.

Collabstar: reported 28.5% sus followers and 71.5% real followers

Hype Audit: Just gave a score of 93% and said that engagement was 2.17% - does 93% mean 93% of the followers are real, or that the account was in the 93rd percentile of the realist accounts - it was unclear

Influencer Hero: reported 15.2% fake followers and 1.46% engagement - it also gave the average age of followers as 37.1 and 66% female

Modash: gave the richest free data and set the real people follower number at about 60% (see graphic below)

I suppose that now is as good a time as ever to dig into other types of data. Below are a couple of types of charts that illustrate that basically if you combine all of the RI Media Instagram accounts with more that 1,000 followers and add them up, their total COMBINED reach is about that of WhatsGoingOnInRhodeIsland. In retrospect, after I made the graphs I realized that I left out Newport Buzz from all of my data, another RI account that I would characterize as a total hellhole of right wing click bait, but I’m not going back to the drawing board and making new graphs, so just imagine another 100k readers in here consuming Trumpy junk food. On the topic of junk food, yes I am hoping that you will appreciate that I visualized this data utilizing a 3-D DONUT type graph. I realize that Instagram is just one lane of social media and that some news sources are focused on other social media platforms, but we will not talk about those because I am only an Instagram Troll and can only talk about one particular flavor of mind poison at a time. However I will note that some of these accounts that are verified Meta Accounts show aggregated numbers for comments. So like if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the WhatsGoingOnInRhodeIsland post’s comments it might say “186 Comments from Facebook”. You may hear in the tone of my writing both a deep annoyance that any of us need to engage with social media in anyway, and also a resentment that “legitimate” news sources have dropped the ball and opened up space for a non-accountable media source like WhatsGoingOnInRhodeIsland to become so powerful in our fragile local media eco-system. I hope that the resonant hum of this conundrum does not sound like finger pointing. I want the through line of this essay to be that we are in this together and that we will find a way out together and that we don’t really all hate each other, at least in Rhode Island, nearly as much as social media would make us believe.

Last September Steve Ahlquist published an article reporting on data from the RI Survey Initiative out of URI’s Harrington School of Communication and Media. He reported that 56% of Rhode Islanders get their news from television, but that most Rhode Islanders got at least some news from social media, with only 26% of respondents saying that they didn’t use social media at all for news. Nationally 53% of Americans report getting news from social media. Demographically this is split along the following generational lines: 85% of Gen Z and Millennials get news from social media, compared to roughly 66% of Gen X and 36% of Boomers.

A social media related idea that requires no donut graph, is that the rise in social media has correlated with an era of deepening polarization and animosity between people who hold differing political perspectives. But I am going to tell you, that I believe that we, as donut eating Rhode Islanders can find a hole in the logic of what is largely a manufactured disdain. A donut might seem to have a left side and a right side, but turn the donut, or bite into the donut or spell donut as “doughnut” and everything can change. Please don’t interpret this as centrist nicey-nice hoo-ha, but rather a questioning of who is profiting off of our increasing animosity, and if we’re not being manipulated into anger across the wrong axis of difference.

Trolls are big and clumsy and eat people and break-things. Also they sometimes turn to stone in the sunlight. Maybe part of why I can not sustain my attempt at Trolldum is that I’m cosmically exhausted by all of the breaking that is going on all around us, which sometimes just feels like the breaking of a country from the inside out. The thing about the combination of social media saturated polarization and the consolidation of media ownership by billionaires is that breaking is inverted into fixing and determination of the reality of what is breaking vs what is fixing gets sold to the highest bidder. Or at best we are left in a digital mystery spot being fed advertisements as if they were news. Getting sold to and sold to and sold to. Rhode Island recently got sold a couple of trolls. By that I mean sculptures of trolls by Danish artist Thoman Dambo. Five sculptures total. Which is fine, I guess. But as a state that prides itself on its artists so much, one could ask why we are not hiring local artists to build large signature sculptures. Why are we so bad at investing in ourselves? Why are we importing foreign trolls? And maybe this is also part of the question of WhatisGoingOnInRhodeIsland; which is what do we owe each other as part of this “Lively Experiment” and how do we balance the need for hard skills and competence with investing locally. Is the Washington Bridge falling down because of self dealing and a lack of local expertise? Or is the hoopla over the bridge a political land grab by those who could gain from pointing the finger at those with power. Will trolls lift all boats of a tourism economy, or would we be better to learn how to stop eating people and turning to stone in the sunlight.

Anyway, back to the story of my troll hobby. I posted about sloppy fact checking. I quoted frequent commenters with names like @pee-pee-poo-poo, and @bigguido401. I ran What’sGoingOnInRI posts side by side through plagiarism apps with articles from news sources that actually have a mast head and attribute their articles to living human beings, to find, yes, definitively plagiarism, most often with text matching up with WPRI stories. I teased them about being crybabies about not getting credit for “breaking” a news story. And on October 7th, I finally got to link to an article that had been published by a local media outlet about the anonymity of WhatsGoingOnInRhodeIsland. It was in the Rhode Island Current and the article is linked here. The RI Current does not maintain an Instagram account, but they have 2.7K followers on Facebook and about 5K on Bluesky. The article did not break the story of who was behind the account. I sent a personal email to the author of the article saying that I also had an interest in getting to the bottom of who was behind WhatsGoingOnInRhodeIsland, and that I had a lead that I’d be happy to share. I did not receive a reply. The article generated a reddit thread titled “Does Anyone Else Think it’s Weird that one of the Biggest Social Media Accounts in the State is Completely Anonymous and Won’t Reply to Media Inquiries?” This thread was kind of a mixed bag with theories about who ran the account ranging from Go Local to “the guy who runs the New Bedford Guide” to it being a shadow account for Sinclair Broadcasting. Unsurprisingly many anonymous Reddit commenters did not have tremendous issues with anonymity. Two people claimed to know who was behind the account and one person suggested that someone make a parody account called “What’s REALLY going on in Rhode Island”. Another user jumped in to to say that this already existed on Instagram and pointed to my troll account, which got some new followers that day. One of the users who claimed to know who ran the account wrote: “It is a very normal couple from North Providence that run it. They want to be anonymous and rightly so, given all the comments on this thread. How do I know? I own a restaurant and hired them for paid advertising. So they literally came in person and shot the content.” I was able to discern from this commenter’s other posts that the restaurant in question that he owns is The Souvlaki Zone on Branch Ave in Providence (now Mr. Greek) and lo and behold What’sGoingOnInRhodeIsland did a post about them on September 13th 2024. This post was in no way labeled as a paid promotion and simply stated that “Our Foodie Friday pick of the week is the newly opened Souvlaki Zone @souvlaki_zone and it’s Greek street food in Providence”.

I went to visit this restaurant and spoke with the owner Mario. He said that he didn’t want to get involved, that he had one business transaction with the owner of the What’sGoingOnAccount, that provided him with a service for a fair price. I asked what the price had been and he told me that he was not going to go into more details and that I should send a DM and ask. Say you’ve got a restaurant, he said. Which of course made me laugh. I did that and got a response from Joe I said. He darted his eyes at the utterance of this name, he was trying to keep his cards close, he wasn’t going to let his face confirm or deny this identity, but the vibes that I was picking up were “go back to the drawing board, that’s not it”.. He said something about it being a hard time to be a small business and that staying neutral was important. I didn’t want to get that deep into it with Mario then and there, plus I wanted to actually eat the falafel that I had ordered without worrying that it had gotten the “asshole customer accidentally dropped on the floor treatment”that we all know all restaurants have some version of. I will report that the caramelized onions included in this wrap qualified it as one of the best falafels that I had ever eaten. But dude Mario its 2026 and neutrality is a hard line to walk, in part because of social media accounts like What’sGoingOn that are going all in on the spoils of division.

This reddit thread got me thinking a lot about privacy and anonymity and how and when it is deserved. How people act when it is something that they believe that they are entitled to. I am deeply not a fan of internet doxxing, but also What’sGoingOn has certainly done all kinds of things that have led to reputational loss for various Rhode Islanders. A regular feature on the account is what I call the “weird photoshop and public shame posts”. These posts are basically a modern day incarnation of crime blotter journalism, sometimes referred to as “Penny Press” posts, they focus on sensational local arrests. To be clear the people in the mug-shots have been arrested, but not convicted, they have yet to receive due process. We know that policing and arrests in this country certainly have flaws and biases. One major critique of crime blotter journalism is that news outlets rarely follow through in covering mundane trials and while accused people may find themselves acquitted in the courts, there is almost never follow up in the press apologizing for blasting their names and faces all over the place. We have certainly seen this in What’sGoingOnInRhodeIsland. When the search was on for the Brown University shooter, in an attempt to “scoop” other local sources What’s Going On in Rhode Island published a post at 8pm on Dec14th that included the leaked name and a photograph of the person of interest being held in connection with the shooting at Brown. Law enforcement never officially shared the identity of the person of interest and by 11pm on Dec 14th he was being released. What’s Going On in Rhode Island edited their post and removed the photograph, but made no note of their overstep or apologized for circulating a photograph of a person for whom there was not enough evidence to support pressing charges.

Many news outlets changed their relationship to crime reporting after 2020, and abandoning mug-shot galleries was a chief hallmark of these changes instituted by GateHouse media and Tribune publications. In 2021 the Associated Press stopped naming suspects in minor crime stories and the Boston Globe launched a program called Fresh Start that allows people to appeal their presence on older stories on their website. This happened because the media knew that it had to face its role in fostering systemic racism through how it covered crime. What’sGoingOn was like fuck-it who cares if this click bait is widely understood to be deeply structurally racist, we’re going all in on the police blotter thing. Though actually they are not posting EVERY mug shot or arrest, they are curating what crime becomes prime time and again, because the account is anonymous we don’t know whose preferences and biases are behind what the spotlight gets shone on. Literally on every single one of these posts someone in the comments writes “usual suspects” or posts a blingy gif spelling out those two words. Ok, occasionally its a slight variation like, “no surprises there” and then a bunch of squabbling about racial stereotypes ensue. Not a single comment on any of these posts needs to exist. They are all mean and ugly. Everytime. But this kind of coverage that cuts and pastes from police press releases is cheap and easy and generates engagement. And I will not pretend that I don’t sometimes find myself reading about a knifefight or whatnot and when I do, I feel even worse about it knowing that there is absolutely no way in hell that if someone is proven innocent that this IG page, with no actual masthead or reporters is going to run an update or apology or retraction. So long winded way of saying that there is a lot to think about in relation to ethics and privacy, but I don’t think that naming a person in my dinky Substack newsletter who I know has at least some connection to WhatsGoingOnInRI is that ethically grey within the context of the thousands of faces that this so called news outlet has plastered across the internet over the past years. And I promise you dear reader, that if I’m totally wrong I’ll write a follow up & apologize.

I know what you are thinking…”I’ve read all this way and you still haven’t actually told us who is behind this account”. Dear readers, your patience is not taken for granted, and I promise you that when we get there, it will dead end and go absolutely no-where. But what is a Wild Goose Chase but a journey that takes you on lots of digressions and may not even get you where you thought you were going, but maybe to where you actually needed to go

Anyway, one thing that I learned was that as much as I was deeply disturbed by some of the What’s Going On In Rhode Island tactics, I couldn’t bring myself to summon any real animosity toward the person/people behind it. Yes, on an emotional level twisting something that seemed rooted in commonality into something brimming with divisiveness felt like a dangerous betrayal a la the old wolf in sheep’s clothing. But I couldn’t help but to also perceive the people behind the account as having a charmingly intense work ethic, and in ways they were trouncing every legitimate RI media outfit. In short, I was maybe letting myself be bamboozled by my imagined sense that this was some kind of New England work ethic underdog operation. Something that I’ve been wrestling with as I write this is that I am not at all a black & white thinker. I think that harsh binarization is often done to dumb things down and build antagonisms and that the pursuit of truth and honesty unusually involves holding uncomfortable simultaneous incongruous realities at the same time. My sub-cultural homebase is the feminist underground and we’ve come so far in terms of debinarizing our thinking as it relates to gender and sexuality, but I think that to really get to the next level in terms of offering each other the gift of seeing and attempting to understand each other, that we need to debinarize a lot more. And right now maybe a good part of that involves politics. And so the finger trap that I find myself in is that I want to acknowledge that there are aspects to What’sGoingOn that I admire; the grit, the work-ethic, the stick-to-it-ness, the photographs of sunsets, the figuring out of how to game the algorithm and being relentless about it. And also some of that relentlessness had led to things that I disapprove of and think are deeply harmful to the community that I care so much about: sowing divisiveness to generate comments & engagement, police blotter journalism, plagiarism, illegally passing off paid advertising or pay to play coverage as news or content.

On the topic of relentlessness, my investigation into this account put me face to face with a part of myself that refused to take no for an answer. A part that is dogged and feral and that in some ways I’m uncomfortable with. I pushed myself to do things that made the potential of failure more brutal. I made not just a troll of myself, but maybe at times a pretty big fool of myself. I DMed people out of the blue asking for help and advice and tips. I’m pretty sure some might have started thinking that I had some screws coming loose. Other’s will be pissed that their intel went towards this purpose. I cold called What’sGoingOn’s advertisers telling them that I was doing research into social media ads, which wasn’t 100% a lie, but was also misleading. My mind raced over all of the information again and again. I spent $80 hiring a digital private investigator in Bangladesh who told me that Joe Russo from J&R Marketing was behind the account. I heard my gut tell me over and over that yes, Joe was involved running the website and maybe helping with the ads (that are never actually labeled as ads), but that he wasn’t the end of the story. My brain pushed against its ability to accept limitations. I turned the puzzle inside out like an obsessed kid in the 80’s with a rubix cube. I stopped being able to relax or turn my brain off. I refused to believe that in Rhode Island, the land of loose lips and 2 degrees of separation, that I, a reasonably connected person who has lived here for thirty something years, could not make six phone calls and dig up the necessary amount of dirt to figure out who was behind something so brazenly public. Yes, as a matter of principle, I believed that the person behind the account should be unmasked, but also I was witnessing myself confront what felt like existential limitations. I understood from past moments of grief, that there were things in life that just needed to be let go of. That needed to be allowed to be unknowable. But I could not accept that this was one of them, and so I was letting it make me weird. I was twisted up and unfocused all of the time. But on some primal level I knew that I had to crack the case so that I could stop being a troll.

On Easter I got a call from my oldest friend who lives in NY. We hadn’t talked in a while and our conversation goofed and meandered and I told her about all that I had been doing to get to the bottom of the situation. She is also relentless and dogged and plus I had gotten her daughter into Nancy Drew books, so she was all up in it with the fun of mysteries. And while basking in her Sunday sense of adventure I suddenly remembered that I could actually just have fun with it. She was like have you tried AI? And I was like fuck AI and so she asked Ghat GPT all kinds of questions on my behalf about who was running What’sGoingOnInRhodeIsland so that I would’t have to have the blood of machine learning on my hands. Chat GPT pointed the finger at Joe Russo. That’s not it I said assuredly. And spoiler alert. I will tell you right now that AI did not crack the case, but the screen shots of the AI answers that she texted me, did give me the hint, that I thought was cracking the case, but that actually turned out to be wrong. It pointed out that there was some connection between What’sGoingOnInRhodeIsland and another RI LLC. So I just started searching the North Providence address on the business filings and searched everyone associated with this address. Yes this involved a spreadsheet and a lot of lists. A name came up. In my mind I was looking for someone who had some background in marketing and also maybe local political campaigns, and this name had a lot of resume pieces that fit the profile. So I went deeper and deeper and the pieces kept fitting more and more tightly. And then found a tiny post liked by only 5 people that named him directly. That said “Thank you (name redacted) and their team at @What’sGoingOnRhodeIsland”. I decided that this was the smoking gun that I needed. I reached out to this person’s personal account and got no response. In retrospect this was probably because my message was enigmatic and weird. I stayed up way later than usual trying to write everything up. To crack the case, to get it off of my chest. I made the post. I posted it. There were some juicy tie-ins to a disgraced former politician, a great sensational plot twist if one wanted to be in the business of flashy content. Which I should have known was a trap. Anyway, I was wrong! Totally wrong! About 5 hours after posting, the person who I pointed the finger at reached out. And he was shockingly cool about it all. He was like, I liked the story and laughed, but I’m not your guy, would you mind taking the post down? And I was like, oh my god. I owe you a public apology. I sent him the post that I had found that named him directly. He was like that’s my sister’s boomer friend who was confused because I do a food blog. It added up and he was just so gracious and kind. In some ways it brought me back to the idea that I had been chasing all along that when we do actually talk to each other and offer each other grace, instead of taking the rage bait and fighting in the comments, we may have more in common than we think. We may like each other more than the sum parts of our political geolocation. The benefit of the doubt that he extended to me is not something that I take for granted in these days of polemics, anger and confusion. In its own weird way it felt like a kind of Providence (in the spiritual rather than geographic sense). So the saga continues. More tips have come through DMs. But I’m definitely going to take a break from being on the trail. Art has taught me that a path that involves first making a frenetic mess, crashing and burning, sleeping it off, and after all that is usually when the real breakthroughs happen. Perhaps the real plot twist that I needed the whole time was getting all of the stuff that I articulated out into the ether and off of my shoulders. The desperation to know an answer can burn you with confidences built on misunderstandings. You replicate the same missteps of the thing that you are railing against. But then you do it different. You apologize and you find yourself in dialogue with someone being understanding and thoughtful, and maybe just for the day that’s the answer that you actually needed. Maybe someone else, a real journalist and not just a tired troll will get to the bottom of the story. Maybe some local media outlets will realize that this is something that people care about. Maybe someone will just DM me the answer & I will wait till the answer is verified from 4 different angles before telling anybody to become someone who finally learns from mistakes.

Sunsets are beautiful and Rhode Island is beautiful and if you have ever liked a post on @What’sGoingOnInRhodeIsland my guess is that you did it because you wanted to come together with others in appreciation for this beautiful place on planet Earth that we are sharing in together at this moment in time, not because you condone stoking political division for personal gain, corruption or unethical, illegal social media marketing.

I want to hang up my troll mask, but I also want truth and accountability. I want every business who has paid money or exchanged goods or favors for promotion on any of the What’sGoingOn accounts to be publicly disclosed by them. I want all promotional posts to be clearly labeled going forward. I want them to stop with the penny press police blotter posting that we know in 2026 to be structurally racist. I want all of the local journalism projects that are budding right now to come into full bloom and eclipse the reach and influence of rage-bait bullshit that is making us hate each other, gobbling up our attention for its own selfish ends. Its been a rough patch of weeks here in Rhode Island. The weather still sucks and home heating oil is like $6 a gallon and the money of billionaire provocateurs has butted its way into our visual landscape, but surely the next season is spring and nothing is more exquisite than how Rhode Islanders come together on the first string of beautiful days after a brutal winter.

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Big thanks to everyone who has questioned What’sGoingOnInRhodeIsland, gone at it in their comments section, DMed me or otherwise encouraged this pursuit. I have no idea of what kind of backlash I will face for this essay and don’t want to drag any other names into this directly, but you know who you are, and your support and camaraderie and encouragement has meant a lot.

The winter has been long for a long time already. Before the infinite snow piles of late February. Before the sound of tires endlessly spinning and never getting any traction. Which I can not help but to read as a metaphor for this political moment. But looking over my shoulder back towards January and Minnesota it is clear that there are beautiful things that can grow out of learning how to handle the ice and the snow. The problem is that Rhode Island never gets quite enough winter to get good at winter and so we hobble along with that scrappy pair of mittens that have had holes in them for 3 years even though it will be 4 degrees for a week here and there. Even though we will be pounded by a blizzard every ten years. But all I keep thinking about through the broken shovels, burst pipes and nights awake feeding logs into the wood stove every hour to keep the fire alive is about how hungry my heart is for MORE WINTER. MORE WINTER if it will mean that we can grow in terms of the solidarity, unity and righteous that Minnesota has modeled. MORE WINTER becomes a mantra as I channel my patience getting through the chaos that the recent storm has left in its wake.

Twenty years ago in the winter I left the USA and flew to Amsterdam, and then from there caught a train to Antwerp. Four years ago in the winter I got an email out of the blue that led me to write about some of my travels from that winter of 2006 and ultimately about how I came to buy a Risograph in the fall of 2008 that has been pointed to as the first Risograph to be used for artisanal purposes in North America. Last summer Lilli Carre sent me an email about doing a talk for the The NY Comics and Picture-story Symposium. I said “not until winter”. So then earlier this winter I gave this talk and tried to pull together the story of the rise of the Risograph in Rhode Island based on the interview that I had written out for Kenneth Oravetz. Below is my best attempt to to filter this into a halfway coherent essay. Just the other day, while googling I came across a link for Kenneth’s Dissertation. I’m not a big dissertation reader, or for that matter, not a big reader of academic writing, but I enjoyed reading it a lot, so I’m pasting the link here for anyone who wants to do a deeper dive (the RISO history part begins around page 153).

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In February of 2022 I rescued a peculiar communication from my junk email folder. The subject line was “potential interview on Risograph Printing” and it came from someone named Kenneth Oravetz who said that he was a PhD candidate at Northeastern University whose dissertation work focused on contemporary art comics, small press and materiality. This email went on to read: “I recently interviewed George from Issue Press in Grand Rapids, and he cited you as being the first person to do artisanal risograph printing in North America…….I would greatly appreciate the chance to talk and I think it could be pretty fun.”

I did not think that I knew this George. I could really only think of three Georges who I knew and one was a professional clown in Chicago another was a sculptor in Brooklyn, and then there is George of Western Mass who is famous enough to not need other descriptors. Also there was George the son in law of my elderly aunt in Vermont who moved in after her husband died and smoked in the house and it was pretty obvious to me that he was doing meth but nobody wanted to hear it but then he started stealing - it was a bad scene. Honestly I probably would have never even remembered that George if it hadn’t come up over the holidays and I’d been up in it with the murmurings of family drama. But anyway George: one of those names that seems like its regular, but then actually isn’t very common at all.

So then I googled George who did Issue Press, and I recognized some of the things that he had published, which were very cool and figured that the world was small. I wasn’t exactly sure of how he got the idea that I was the first person to do art focused RISO printing on this continent, but I figured that maybe he knew someone who I had taught to use my RISO GR-3750.

When I drove out to Long Island from Rhode Island and bought a Risograph in 2008, I definitely was not thinking that I was going to be setting off a chain reaction that was going to explode the world of zine and comic publishing into full color, albeit, weird color. It did not occur to me that my machine might be an origin point for a new type of usage. I’m still not sure if this is true or if it matters. The RISO duplicators had been sitting around for a while. People had to have done weird things with them already, right? Even if they were like hanging out in the back of a law office or church basement or pizza shop, somewhere in there while they were collecting dust someone probably got the idea to press their face to the glass and voila! Art freakyness! But also I know that when I was first scouring the internet for technical manuals, it was a wasteland out there. Chances were that e-bay searches might only lead you down the bummer lane of Don Richard Riso’s writing on the Enneagrams of Personality. Which meant that your keyword search was bottoming out and you could have all of the information that you wanted about the Ego Fixation of a type 4 personality, but fat chance that you were going to figure out how to troubleshoot the issue with the feed roller.

So anyway, I told Kennith that I’d be happy to talk to him about my history with Risographs. I started to write some things down about my path leading towards setting up the RISO at the Dirt Palace and realized that I did in fact have some stories to tell that might be of interest to various heads, but then didn’t think too much about it. A couple of months ago I was in LA, driving around with the animator Annapurna Kumar who seemed to have an endless patience for hearing about various art subcultures that I’d gotten to bear witness to. I found myself telling her about touring Europe in 2006 with some films and landing at Extrapool and then coming back obsessed with getting a Risograph. It was in this conversation that I had the breakthrough that I should expand a bit on the answers to Kennith’s 2022 questions for the upcoming New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium. I also figured that I could write it all out for this newsletter.

There is perhaps a small part of me that is drawn to telling this story out of a feeling of responsibility in crafting an argument for Rhode Island as Avant Garde/DIY mecca, but actually I’m sort of philosophically opposed to arguing in almost all cases. Particularly in the form of the essay. I also think that pride and or pride in place is only really acceptable when accompanied by self deprecating jokes and equal parts realness about what is idiotic and dysfunctional about said self or locale. So yes, I do want to tell the world that the independent printing craze that is perhaps the most interesting plot twist in the story of small press/art publishing of the past half century touched down first in Providence, Rhode Island on its journey to North America, via “the office” at the Dirt Palace that is now a bathroom. But also this machine is currently broken, nothing that exciting ever happened with it besides from that I taught a few rad artists how to use it, who in turn taught a bunch of other rad artists how to use machines like it. It may have been a node in something bigger, but it is also emblematic of aspirations set aside, things not fully realized, and/or maybe just the recognition that there are only so many things that can be done in a serious way in a lifetime.

The office in The Dirt Palace was a creepy side room off of the main show space. It had a lowered ceiling that we did, and still do store things above. It had shitty office carpet that was a puce mauve with little 1980’s geometric shapes in it.

Actually that description makes it sound cooler than it was, the rug was awful; always dirty and with gum stuck in it. The thing that was special about this room was that it had a working phone jack. However sometimes you would pick up the phone and people at the Burger King down the street would already be talking on it. I know that this is practically unfathomable to anyone younger than Gen X, but not only did seven 20-somethings once share a land line, but said land line often was crossed or “shared” with Burger King. This could be interesting if you had, say, a burning desire to listen in on how people ordered Whopers, but mostly it was just annoying if you wanted to say make a phone call. The phone jack also made it possible to hook up a computer to the internet, which we never really did until at least 2002 when a member somehow got an “extra” computer from her day job “donated”. Anyway this room was painted black, like a dungeon, had shelves upon shelves of postcards discarded from the RISD museum, epic collections of weird sized envelopes that someone had pulled from the trash somewhere thinking they would print on but never did (note I swear to god that I was not the person who hoarded these envelopes - although I am probably the person who resisted throwing them out for over twenty years). There was a small office copier that CF gave to us that we were were too cheap to buy replacement toner for, so we would get these kits where you would burn a hole in “real” toner cartridges, fill them up with bootleg powder toner and make extremely grey streaky xeroxes. Anyway, eventually in 2008 when I got the RISO it went in this office room, which was kinda controversial because it was taking up real estate in a collective space, but wasn’t totally for general house use because it a) would break all of the time b) needed to be run by someone who could fix basic things if they broke c) i was working all of the time and did not have time to fix this dang machine.

Anyway in order to properly tell this story I want to return to Kenneth’s 2022 questions which I think provide a nice framework.

Kenneth: What’s been your history with Risograph printing? How were you first introduced to it?

Xander: I still remember the first book that I saw that was RISO printed, though at the time I had no idea of what RISO was. It was the book Not for Rent, which was about the squatting scene in the UK. I think that it was published in 1996, but it fell into my hands around ‘97. Unlike most things being RISO printed today it used red (not fluorescent pink) to replace the magenta in a CMYK separation. It was a special book. The paper felt different, it was soft and cottony, rather than slick. It had a zine like vibe, but was stunning and had “full color” graphics. Pictures felt close enough to what a person was used to seeing in offset printed photographic images, but different enough for them to feel like a key to some totally other universe. This felt very fitting for a book about squatting, and all of the liberatory potential that living without rent or ownership could hold.

After that it was maybe six or seven years before more RISO stuff started to cross my path. This was mostly in the form of books and flyers coming out of Belgium and France. Every so often a friend of mine would get a box of Le Dernier Cri stuff from Marsille, or prints out of Antwerp. This was the early 2000’s so the internet was not ubiquitous and trading stuff in the mail was how a lot of underground visual culture circulated, particularly in terms of printed works. Much of the stuff in these boxes was screen printed, but in the mix there would be some zines or flyers that were clearly neither xerox, offset, nor screen printed. We would hold these prints up to the light puzzling over the type of ink used to make them, scratching our heads in quasi-luddite shop talk confusion. There was a rumor about a technology called a “stencil press” somewhere in The Netherlands. We had heard that the company that made Print Gocco which was a fun print toy that we’d messed around with to make small handbills, made a machine that was sort of like a xerox, and sort of like a mimeograph. But all of this was theoretical.

In 2005 my partner & I got invited to do some performances at two festivals in Europe in early 2006. The two festivals were putting their budgets together and bringing in a number of artists from North America and other parts of Europe. We really had no idea of what we were getting into, but knew that we wanted to do it. We also had gotten a grant the year before to make a fairy tale puppet film. It felt like this could be a good deadline to get the film made for. Then we’d perform it with a live soundtrack. We also thought that it could be good to stay in Europe for a while longer and tour around with this film. We worked on the movie night and day. It had elaborate sets and classical fairy tale elements: a goose wearing a bonnet, a tailor, a monster, sword fights etc. It was deranged.

We finished the film with a little time to go, so ended up making another quick abstract “flicker” inspired movie right after it, that I think both of us ended up liking more. Anyway, long story short, part of each of these festivals involved groups of artists camping out making books together. I don’t think that we fully understood this when we got on the plane to Belgium. The first one was a screen printed book that we made in Antwerp. The main characters involved with this endeavor were Jelle Crama and Denis Tyfus, both incredible artists and legendary characters of the noise sub-underground. This was followed by the festival at a cultural center in Hasselt Belgium.

The second festival was hosted by Extrapool in Nijmegen, which turned out to be the epicenter of “stencil press” printing in Europe that we’d been hearing about in rumors. Extrapool was the name of the Artist space/residency/venue and Kunst Press was the affiliated print shop.It was wild and pretty much a dream come true to get to spend a week at this place after wondering about this technology for so long. But also we were haggard. We’d been working so long and hard on the films, and now we were traveling hard, managing intense logistics all the while staying up late talking after shows, developing a taste for that strong beer they drink in Belgium. Neither of us had computers or cell phones or anything, so all of the booking and planning took place on borrowed computers or at internet cafes. By the time that we got to Extrapool it was a thrill to just be in one place for a week.

Making the books at Extrapool was super fun. Over the course of the week, we all drew everyday. We’d wake up, eat bread and jelly and then draw and keep drawing. Each of us would get to print a page that folded in half back and front. The binding was super weird. It utilized an arcane corner cutter mechanism that was donated from some bank printing press going out of business. I couldn’t get enough of watching the prints come off of the RISO’s. There were so many of us doing so many different prints that we got to see all sorts of color combinations, how things layered etc.

The people we were introduced to who ran Extrapool were Joyce and Jan Dirk. I was pretty instantly enamored of them beyond belief. I wanted to follow them around like a duckling. They’d managed to combine the two things that were the pinnacle of what I wanted to dig into in my life into one gorgeous universe: anarchistic (yet organized) artist-run spaces and weird publishing/printing. At some point I realized that the Not-for-Rent book had been printed at Kunst Press like a decade earlier.

It was still a time when the underground was pretty male dominated and Chloe from Seripop (in Montreal) was the only other woman (besides from Joyce) in the mix. I really liked some of the artists we were there with, particularly some of the artists from the drawing collective from Finland, but truth be told, I used to have a pretty hard time in social situations where the gender balance was super skewed. At some point I just gave up on trying to hang with the group, and totally glommed onto Joyce and Jan Dirk. At that point I was six years into being part of the feminist artist-run space called The Dirt Palace, so models that demonstrated how projects that started with people coming together around art and politics could grow into solid, lasting parts of community life were really interesting and inspiring to me. Joyce and Jan Dirk were the real deal, in terms of having lived through all of the twists that I could imagine a good life in the underground involving, from squatting and doing hands-on construction to applying for government grants. They were gracious and put up with my barrage of basic questions. My endless puppy dog fan girling. We needed to find a film projector for the next part of our tour and Joyce offered to lend us hers. Besides from saving the day, this loan also meant that we’d get to come back and return the projector to Joyce at the end of our travels and spend even more time with them, which I was over the moon about.

I got back from the trip exhausted, but ready to shake up my life in a number of ways, including that I was determined to get a RISO. It took another year and a half, but before 2008 was up, I’d found one through Ebay on Long Island for $400 and drove it up to Rhode Island in the back of my mom’s borrowed Subaru. I’d had a show in Milwaukee at Paper Boat, which was a gallery that Faythe Levine co-ran and for the first time in my adult life I’d had a full time job that more than covered my expenses and a chunk of money from selling art that I did not need to put towards basic living. Maybe this detail is not super consequential, but Faythe has been involved with so many incredible things over the years, and hustled so hard on behalf of so many artists that I think that it’s worth noting that this gallery funded said fated RISO purchase.

Kenneth: George named you as the first person to do artisanal risograph printing in North America. Do you see yourself as an “origin point”? How would you describe your relationship to the overall risograph community or scene that’s developed in the last ten to fifteen years?

Xander: I bought my RISO in 2008, which was a year in which a lot of things in my life changed. I ended up getting a job as the managing director of AS220, which is a grassroots artist run space, but one that started in the 80’s and so by 2008 had a staff of close to 50 people and a budget that topped a million dollars. So in terms of the two threads that were so inspiring to me about Extrapool; artist-run spaces and weird-o printing, my life was taking a drastic and decisive turn in the direction of artist-run spaces. It was a big job, and one that was really embedded in the arts community that had meant so much to me coming of age as a young artist in Providence. I was terrified of fucking up & threw myself into it completely. I was also determined to keep up my trajectory as an artist. I’d been part of a museum show that was sculpture based in 2006 and had another sculpture/film museum show coming up in 2009. So my dream of starting a small press was falling by the wayside. I used the RISO to make some posters for shows, and a zine/playbill to accompany a performance that the Dirt Palace was doing at PS1 as part of the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution exhibit. But printing was quickly moving out from the center of my world towards the margins. There were a few people who approached me wanting to learn about the Risograph, namely Mickey Zachilli, who was living at the Dirt Palace at the time, and Caroline Kern. I made prints with each of them and they were hooked pretty fast. Caroline moved to New York, bought a machine and started Pegacorn Press. Mickey used my RISO to print some of her RAV series and eventually bought her own. Morgan Calderini was running the print shop at AS220 and was a genius in all kinds of ways including at getting presses donated & got at least one RISO gifted to the shop there. Walker Mettling got a RISO and made incredible quantities of print materials. These things I’d say were much more influential than anything that I was printing in the late aughts. Caroline taught Dailen Williams to use the RISO. Dailen would go on to become one of the founders of Binch Press, the community print shop in Providence that has made the most out of the collective print making potential of the RISO.

It wasn’t really until after I left AS220 in 2012 that I started doing any printing/publishing that was substantial. I started doing a book series called Demons focused on artists who were or at some point had been RI based. Each book was thematic. They were a mashup of writing and images. Working with artists across media has always been really important to me. So encouraging writers to do things that were more visual, and inviting visual artists to do something more literary than they otherwise might was a natural evolution. An old friend of mine ran an offset & letterpress shop and had a perfect-binding machine that he’d let me use, so they came out looking like “real” books, which was wild considering how DIY they actually were.

In terms of the Risograph community/scene that’s developed over the last ten to fifteen years, I end up knowing a lot of folks, but often from past lives, more than from Risograph stuff. Like Kevin Hooyman who’s churning out incredible book after incredible book on his risograph. We were roommates in the late 90’s and fell out of touch for a while and then there we are at Comic Arts Brooklyn accidentally almost tablemates. This is just to say that it’s been a natural thing for people who were doing DIY art books, comics and zines to turn to the RISO now that there are no more 24 hour Kinkos staying open all night to scam copies from. So in some ways the cast of characters isn’t that different. Obviously there are new younger people doing art small press, comics and zines and the scene has grown and diversified and gotten so much cooler in ways. But at its heart much feels recognizable: earnest nerds who want to share things with the intimacy of the epistolary form. People who love mail. People who are moved to communicate through the combination of pictures and words. People who are more interested in connection than in the commodity status of fine art.

One thing that I think is really interesting is the overlap that these processes of small press printing have with artist spaces and community organizing. Its like you have a press and suddenly you have to figure out a place to keep it. And if enough people want to be doing this kind of printing, eventually people figure out ways of sharing the machines whether that’s formal or informal.

Kenneth: How have you integrated risograph into your artistic practices? What role has risograph played or do you see risograph potentially playing in underground, feminist, and activist action and art-making?

Xander: There’s always been a part of my practice that involves curation and organizing. Its sort of baked into my ethics as an artist, that I don’t just do my own thing in my studio or whatever, but that part of my work is that I make opportunities for other artists and through this actively engage with building an ecosystem that supports artists, creativity and connects people. No shade to larger institutions, but the shows and projects that have been the most meaningful to me have mostly had artists at their center, conceptualizing, organizing and manifesting. I feel like I owe so much to artist-run projects, that it has felt important to always engage in this way. Also the things that you learn about process, habits, and people when you’re organizing a cohort of artists are like no other!

Back in the day I used to do a lot of organizing around the intersections of filmmaking and soundtracks. When you’re organizing you’re also going out. You need to learn about what people are making, you need to show up to remind people to show up to the thing that you’re organizing. At some point I started to have a life where I just couldn’t go out as much. Maybe this is related to the phenomena commonly referred to as “getting old”? I just had too many early morning responsibilities to sit through twelve act noise shows that started at midnight as was the style in Providence for a while. It occurred to me that what I did have the bandwidth to do was pay a lot of attention to things that people were writing and drawing, and so publishing a compilation series with a hyper local focus made a lot of sense for me. The RISO made this something that I could do without a ton of overhead normally associated with typical publishing. It would take a LOT of labor, but I could produce a book for a little over a dollar, which meant that I could apply for grants to give contributors stipends and cover the printing myself, slowly getting paid back over time as I sold books.

In terms of the potential that the RISO has in underground, feminist and activist art-making, well any time that people have access to modes of production, a lot of interesting things can happen! I grew up with a dad who was a journalist. Next to his desk in the basement was a poster with the AJ Libeling quote “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one”. So the concept that particularly in regards to media, rights and expression are limited by ownership and access to production, was an idea that I encountered at a pretty young age.

There are people who will go on about spinach pie this, and Poached Passion that, and certainly there were things on the menu to have feelings about. But the true art that set this restaurant apart from so many greasy spoons had more to do with community and bringing people together across various chasms of class than any of Louis’ sundry approaches to eggs, toast and coffee. The artform of crafting informal 3rd spaces that cohere community is becoming an increasingly endangered species, all the while the moat around the rarified East Side institutions of Providence gets bigger and the drawbridges disappear. And this is what feels like the gut punch in Louis’ closing, this is what I lament the most. Though, I will of course grieve the loss of the cheap tofu scram with dry Italian toast sub french fries for homefries, cause theres probably some bacon grease on the griddle, and even though they fry fish in the fryolator that’s a little less gross to my vegetarian sensibilities than stray bacon grease. And then for dessert, have jelly on that toast. There’s been a rumor that Johnny makes the jelly with grapes that he grows in his yard and that’s why it’s so good and also kind of weird and runny and it flows out of squeeze bottles like no Smuckers would.

Rumors and stories are also part of what made Louis so legendary and every generation probably has their own versions of these. I likely only know a small fraction of a fraction of the stories, but I aim to set some out for you tonight based on zero research, no fact checking and just a long haul in Providence with my ears up against the proverbial grapevine. And on the topic of grapevines, I will tell you that I did once actually visit the house where Johnny and Albert lived and saw with my own eyes concord grapes growing over an arbor, which is not to say that I have been an eye witness to the making of grape jelly, but that it does seem like the circumstantial evidence for it being homemade is pretty strong.

When I first started going to Louis’ in the early 90’s Louis was still alive though he mostly sat in a chair nodding in and out of sleep, which as a stand alone phenomena felt very old world. Special and strange. America is not much of a place where the elderly are allowed to age in public and it is particularly not a common phenomena in places crowded with college students. But so many things about Louis’ were odd and neighborly; the photographs on the walls, the opera on the stereo, the beer that you could order at 6am for less than a dollar, the vaguely cryptic hand drawn specials signs that made nods to regulars. And with that, onto the topic of the regulars: the college athletes coming in as a whole team to bulk up on giant omelets before a game, plant-ops crews at 6am drinking coffee before clocking in, RISD fashion students dressed to the nines before long afternoon studio classes, RISD sculpture students dressed like contractors, local contractors on lunch breaks, Brown students bringing in famous parents like George Harrison. As a student I was in the Modern Culture and Media department at Brown which was mere steps away from Louis if you cut through a path out of the back door. I also lived across the street on Brook Street for a while and had a fire escape that looked right out onto Louis, and this was a source of great entertainment: watching who showed up to Louis together freshly tumbled out of bed on a Sunday morning. Sometime around 1995 I think Louis turned 100 and a regular had a plan to make a sheet of Louis blotter acid to commemorate this occasion. I still remember getting a phone call on a landline that I shared with about 20 people asking if I’d be down to carve a rubber stamp that could be used as a graphic on said sheet of acid. I remember thinking to myself “being an artist is great” and that I was exactly where I wanted to be in life. Though I don’t remember this sheet of acid ever manifesting, who cares! What a weird idea!

I have perhaps been a little dismissive of the importance of actual food in the Louis’ phenomenon, as I am frankly more of a scholar and fan of community spaces and subculture than like a foodie. But the menu, that was sensitive to eating habits of the most rabid vegans and also boasted things like scrapple made out of like pig head and hearts as specials, is essentially what made this place accessible and comfortable to such a wide swath of people. And then there was the lore of the weird shit. The outlaw mythology. Like the big yellow fungus growing on a tree on Charsfield street that Johnny identified as edible and fried up. Or the roadkill rumors. Did Johnny cook a squirrel in the back? News at 11. And something should be said about all of the people who worked there over the years who have become awesome or famous in various ways over decades, but were definitely feral maniacs as young people when Johnny taught them how to work the line or gave them a job waiting tables. He rolled with the chaos that this brought with the patience of a saint. Anyway, back to the food. Everybody had their things, you know. There was a time when I could not imagine not starting my day without getting an iced coffee with soy milk and chocolate syrup and maybe a cup of grits topped with fruit for breakfast, but then some friends come in and get a pitcher of beer and your hanging and hanging because you just wrapped up finals and it is before social media and we still live in the embodied world full of chance and wandering and sitting around basking in the joy of being with people and the next thing you know its 1pm and so maybe its time to get a broccoli pie with no cheese but grilled veggies on top sauce on the side and you could go up to pay, but Danny just went up to the counter and him and Laura are definitely going to chit chat at the register for at least 10 minutes, maybe 20 so why not hang out and talk to Bob who is outside with his beautiful dog and then steal some of Lisa’s fries that she has smeared around the plate with oily fingers like 20 times circling the ketchup while she flirts with oily fingers, and as if the oily flirting fingers are not sexy enough Becky comes in wearing a dress that she stayed up all night sewing but has failed to notice is totally see-through and we are laughing hysterically under Leah’s portrait of Louis where she made his ears shaped like elf ears. Diane is sent home from waitressing by Louis himself for wearing boxer shorts as bottoms, which was a thing in the early 90’s. The outfits these walls have seen.

My favorite memories of Louis are of going there when it opened at 6am. This was a time of liminality and a cosmic meeting of polar opposites: on one hand the mostly middle aged early risers making their way into the grind of the day, on the other hand the people (mostly young) who had stayed up through the night studying and tripping on the all powerful feelings of watching the sunrise without succumbing to sleep, or you know, just regular tripping. One of the more prominent locals out and about in the music scene in the 90’s was Matt Obert who wrote a regular column called “Scene Maggot” for the Nice Paper and went to pretty much every show by night and then somehow managed to get up and work at Louis. This also meant that anytime you popped into Louis you could get an encyclopedic run down of every music show coming up and/or a poetically granular recap of every show that had just happened. Matt’s omnipresence on the scene and at the drink station also meant that Louis was a popular destination for touring bands who had played somewhere in Providence the night before and needed to cheaply feed themselves before hitting the road. By the mid-90’s Matt and I had both been kind of taken under the wing of this guy Wes. Wes had gone to Harvard, did a pretty incredible zine called Wing-Nut, talked abnormally loud and was obsessive about music that was a little too weird, visionary and uncool to be indy-rock. Anyway, Wes sometimes would cook up adventures that were somehow not optional for Matt and I and we would end up in his SUV not knowing where the heck we would end up. One time Wes told us that we had to be ready at 4:00am but didn’t give us a lot more information. It turned out that they were blowing up part of the old Narragansett Electric Plant and Wes thought that it was important for us to be the first to check out the ruins and maybe snag a piece of the red glowing letters that had been flickering into oblivion over the past year. And to this day sorting through that rubble as the sun rose has been one of my more cherished memories of the old Providence. None of the letters made it through the demolition in tact, but we found some pieces of thick red plastic that we pocketed and walked off with some square glass bricks and drove over the Point Street bridge to Wickenden, clocked a left onto Brook Street and got Matt to work just in time to don his apron. And then Wes and I sat there as the early risers filtered in, hovering over newspapers and homefries. Swigging coffee and waiting for Johnny to turn his inscrutable attention to them. To offer a wry smile.

On the topic of old Providence, it is well known that for years Brown wanted to own the whole block on Brook Street and had been making offers to Louis’ for years. Around the time when they bought out the East Side Mini Market strip mall the University likely made offers on the Louis building that far exceeded the amount of money that could be made from selling chocolate chip pancakes many lifetimes over. Were it not for Louis’ Restaurant holding out against the roaring tide of economics, chances are that Brook street would currently look very different today. The Gianfrancesco family held their ground at a time when Brown wasn’t getting turned down very often in their attempts to gobble up East Side real estate. And honestly with this history in mind, I hope that whomever they are selling to, that after 80-something years of generosity that the Louis’ crew is going to be set up real good in retirement.

In early September I was packing to spend a week at a lighthouse. Or to be more specific, to live in a room that formerly housed all of the mechanical parts of the one-time steam driven foghorn attached to the Lighthouse on Rose Island, off of the coast of Newport, RI. The foghorn room has neither water nor electricity. I was to be at this lighthouse as an artist in residence with half a dozen or so other artists, most of whom would live in the actual lighthouse with electricity and water and mostly modern plumbing. But both because I longed to be a little bit outside of the fray and because the windows of this room are mere feet away from the water at high tide, I had actually been hoping to get to be nestled in the foghorn room. The children who I had been telling about this adventure had been asking about where I would go to the bathroom. It turned out that they had been imagining that I’d be pooping right down into the sea. An outhouse I told them, which I think was slightly disappointing. I didn’t mention showering, because I didn’t actually plan to shower. A thinly veiled excuse to swim everyday and wash up in the ocean. It occurred to me as I attempted to make decisions about what to fold up into what bag, that I might be too old for these kinds of roughing-it adventures, but then my phone dinged with a message from an artist who had done this residency before telling me about how magical it would be.

Rose Island is 18 acres and if you glimpse it from the Newport Bridge you might assume that it was named Rose Island because it looks like a rose with a long stem jutting out to the north. The problem with this theory is that the hunk of land has been called Rose since the 1600s, long before the Newport Bridge or aerial photography. But the shape of the island is still the leading theory in regards to its appellation, which leads me to wonder if there was a time in human consciousness where people were more adept at traversing perimeters and intuitively understanding shapes. The stem itself, and accordingly the whole island was significantly larger before the Portland Gale of 1898 when it lost about 7 acres. The Portland Gale struck the coast of New England on November 26th and 27th with 10 foot storm surges and hurricane force winds. 150 boats sunk, about 400 people died and geography was forever altered in a variety of coastal areas. The name of the island before settlers was Conockonoquit, which roughly translates to place of the long point, so again concerned with the stem. At low tide I walked around the whole of the island and put one foot in front of the other on the still wet stretch of stones and shells crackling beneath my feet along the thin and delicate stem. At high tide there is still a stem, but it is much shorter, stubby almost. I took long strides thinking that if I threw my arms forward with enough momentum they might grab hold of a bridge girder and I could slide easily into trapeze moves. An arabesque alongside the cormorants. Alas the bridge was not quite close enough to grip, but I was convinced that I could hear bridge-y sounds, like the rattle of cars driving over slabs of metal.

I went to a different lighthouse the week before my Rose Island journey, but it was a lighthouse that guides by smells. An olfactory lighthouse. I wasn’t sure if it would help to prepare me for my week of lighthouse living, which I hoped would include thinking about the lighthouse from all of the vantage points humanly possible. But it reminded me that part of my job as an artist is to loosen my grip on perception and experience in general. The lens of this scented lighthouse was not fresnel, the ridged glass that magnifies light and is found in most lighthouses, but rather unicorn horn moving in a slow rotation that counters the spiral traces of its growth, thus producing a natural secretion of the color topaz.

This lighthouse, in the shape of the medicinal cuttlefish, emits not photons, but scattering of molecular oscillations as it conveys the time of day by way of odor. Visitors luxuriate in the ever-changing bouquet of; fresh baked pumpkin pie, hot buttered popcorn, cinnamon buns, band aids, canned corn, old lady hands, chicken Tikka Masala and sugar cookie.

This lighthouse was part of the Musée Pataméchanique, which may or may not exist in a historic village on the water, but I assure you, if it does exist, it is 100% Rhode Island in its ability to break your heart with how beautiful it is. Longing and metaphysics interspersed with fart jokes and rubber chickens. I don’t usually try to peer behind the curtain at the mechanics of things that are magic, but I couldn’t help to imagine flavored jelly beans being tucked into each arm of the lighthouse like an easter octopus chewing and burping the aromas back at the sniffer through its tentacles. Plus aren’t there actually jelly beans in the flavor of band-aids in these deranged times?

I went on a preparatory visit to the Rose Island lighthouse on an evening in August about a month prior to the residency. The lighthouse is managed by a local not-for-profit that runs tours and historical programs on the site as well as hosts guests for overnight stays in the old lighthouse keepers quarters, former army barracks on the island, or in the fog-horn room. The organization’s director (recognizably) does many things, including sometimes ferries guests to the lighthouse. He’s also a first class historian and great story teller. As I anticipate most of my readers know, my day job involves running an arts organization (The Dirt Palace) with a facility that is a historic house that doubles as a bed and breakfast and artist residency (The Wedding Cake House), so I anticipated that there would be many moments where I felt an uncanny sense of reversal. Where I would be doing the thing that I do all of the time but from the flip side as a participant rather than facilitator, as a guest rather than as a host.

It was only after the residency when I dug into the Jeremy D’Entremont book The Lighthouses of New England, and read a more detailed account of the preservation of the lighthouse that it struck me that the pattern of the Dirt Palace renovation of the Wedding Cake House aligned with the Rose Island preservation project in myriad way. If I were a person in the 1600s whose brain could envision the shapes of things intuitively or by walking around them, I would see parallel lines like the steel waggon tracks that run across Rose island with intermittent cut backs, a couple of swoops like the line of flight of a seagull diving for a fish being pushed into shore by a sandshark or the like.

I had started this Substack newsletter about 6 months before I applied for the residency at Rose Island, and as my heart had gotten more deeply into the project of traveling close to home, deeper rather than wider, into histories and forgotten pasts, down quiet roads, believing that the specialness of Rhode Island is most often just out of site and slightly underground, I had become obsessed with Despair. And by that I mean Despair Island, which is located in Narragansett Bay just to the north of Hope Island. My understanding is that Despair is mostly just a collection of rocks that are barely visible at high tide, but I was fully knocked off my feet at the audacity of naming a place Despair. And so I started spending my evenings zooming in on maps of Narragansett Bay. What other strange things might I find if I read into enough fine print? I knew that there was an artist residency on Prudence Island, which seems incredible, but I feared its schedule would be a little hard to pull off between my work life and dog parenting, and so when I saw that there was a residency on Rose Island that was just a week long I jumped. I had read enough on the Rose Island website to understand that the lighthouse had been an epic preservation project after it sat empty from the time when the Newport Bridge opened in 1970 through the mid 80’s. But I didn’t know the details.

In 1967 Joan Didion wrote an essay about Newport titled The Seacoast of Despair. I don’t think that she knew about Despair Island though, I think that the title is all metaphor. In this essay she famously calls Newport ugly: “mean without the saving grace of extreme severity, a landscape less to be enjoyed than dominated.” It feels a little cheap, taking a blow at the basic looks of the place, but most of what is rankling her ire is the gross display of economic disparity and patriarchy. But also if I’m to be completely honest, Newport gets under my skin on the level of aesthetics too, which feels petty, where there is so much of actual substance to discuss.

Didion writes “What Newport turns out to be, then, is homiletic, a fantastically elaborate stage setting for an American morality play in which money and happiness are presented as antithetical. It is a curious theatrical for these particular men to have conceived, but then we all judge ourselves sometime; it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built “The Breakers” he damned himself.”

What gets to me about Newport is the ubiquity of a certain preppy style, the rigidity of landscaping that forecloses the possibility of any sweet smells that might come out of a stray honeysuckle vine. Much of the excess of chinos and investment banker casual I realize comes via daytrippers and mansion ogling wealth tourism, which if we’re being real about it, has propped up the local economy in an interesting inversion after Nixon moved the Navy base. As someone who came up in Providence at the time right when the Jewelry industry was heading out the door, I’m endlessly fascinated by moments when regional economies are forced to reinvent themselves. I can’t help but think that there is something interesting, and maybe even cosmically restorative about these obscene monuments to income disparity becoming nodes on glossy tourism maps that swooped in to support a working/middle class service economy after 14,000 jobs were lost and unemployment topped 20% with the relocation of the Navy base to Virginia in 1973. While Newport has a reputation for old money wealth and being a summer playground for the ultra rich, unlike other coastal regions in Rhode Island there has actually been affordable housing built in Newport and the Median Household income is in the 80-something thousand range, which is pretty middle of the road in the US these days. That said, for a few hours on September 10th a bump in Oracle stock moved a certain Newport mansion owner into the place of “The richest person in the world”. Yes, ahead of Elon Musk. But the ultra wealthy, much to their chagrin, never get to fully define culture, even when they occupy all of the land on one side of the waterfront. And Newport has always had layers of salty tattooed cultures and subcultures.

I don’t want to get too led astray talking about Newport, or Robber Barons when what I really want to tell you about is Rose Island, but technically Rose Island is located in Newport, and the specter of Newport speculative real estate was a core ghost in the story of Rose Island’s reimagination, and there is something that I can’t quite put my finger on about how the clean cut aesthetics of a watercolor perfect ship shape lighthouse makes potentially radical elements of the Rose Island project slide right under the radar. So in short the context of Newport, particularly Newport in the 1980s is relevant.

At the Wedding Cake House we occasionally have guests who come to Rhode Island on account of lighthouse tourism. Save The Bay offers a Lighthouse tour where you can see 20 lighthouses in one day. We have so many guests come through the Wedding Cake House that it is rare that I remember any of the specific conversations that I have while I serve them coffee and donuts. But I remember the first lighthouse enthusiast well. She was traveling alone and young, maybe in her 30s. I was making small talk and inquiring about what brought her to Providence. She seemed embarrassed, hesitant at first, but eventually said something to the effect of, well I’m obsessed with lighthouses and go travel around and see them, and its kind of a big deal to get to see 20 lighthouses in one day. I am always drawn to people with very specific passions: collectors, researchers, people compelled to know every single thing on a topic, even topics that I might be bored out of my mind by or adverse to like baseball or weapons collecting. She told me about the lighthouse passport and a subculture of people who base their traveling around collecting stamps for said lighthouse passports, most of them are retired she said, but I’ve just always loved lighthouses. And because I am a book nerd, I mentioned that I really like the character of the lighthouse keeper in the Southern Reach Trilogy. And she says that she thought that she had read most novels with prominent lighthouse plots, but that she had never heard of the Southern Reach Trilogy. So by the time that I cleared her breakfast tray, I think that I had convinced her to read Jeff VanderMeer and she had convinced me to think more about the shoreline beacons that perhaps I had been dismissive of because of their ubiquity on magnets and other kitschy posters or trinkets littered with motivational slogans or vaguely christian affirmations.

And also whenever something becomes ubiquitous, it is worth wondering symbolically what space it is holding in the popular imagination, why are there so many songs about rainbows? Why are there so many nick-nacks with lighthouses? And also so many HR approved office posters with lighthouses and the text SERVICE or LEADERSHIP or FOLLOW YOUR LIGHT in big block letters attempting to inspire something in someone who is trapped in a dystopic office where only HR approved art can be hung in the cubicle. A lighthouse might lead the way home or away. Escape or return. Architecturally they are unique: maybe like grain silos or fire houses, structures with a purpose so specific that to look at it for more than a moment can transport you quickly to thinking about what a life doing a job in said structure might be like. A flex of wonder. And in the case of the lighthouse keeper, the purpose is social, for the good of society and the safety of marine traffic, and yet solitary to an extreme. To leave society, but for the good of society. The light house keeper has their cake and eats it too, though likely there was not actually that much cake being eaten in lighthouses because a cake is a food to share amongst many. Could the one or two people stewarding a lighthouse eat an entire cake before it went moldy? To be surrounded by the sea and the squawk of gulls and to feel more connected to the ebb and flow of tides than to the ebb and flow of human history, who amongst us does not need to sit in this place from time to time. Whose nervous system would not benefit from the cadence of crashing waves? And then there are all of the metaphors about lights in darkness, which maybe are less potent to me because I have not seen a sky not hazed over with the resonant hum of light pollution for quite some time. But this light/darkness metaphor is a variation on hope, whose necessity and cruelty Rhode Islanders are intimate with in all of the forms of flag, motto, and ruggedly comedic sensibility.

And so then, there I was, arrived, surprised by how quickly my breathing was synching up with all of the ocean sounds. How quickly my neural network was letting its guard down. How easy the salt air felt. Every journey involves planning, and some running around in preparation. And then suddenly I was on a small island with nowhere to go, even if I wanted to. But it didn’t take long to realize that what I had been longing for, for a while, was to stay in one place and draw. Not forever, but for a solid few days. No errands or emails. None of my usual patterns or responsibilities. As a residency admin, I often tell artists that the work that they might make during a residency is great, but the formation of new patterns is often the most lasting and valuable piece of the experience. The strand to attempt to hold onto after the residency is over.

Artist residencies are something that I have in some ways devoted my career towards making happen, believe in fully, have personally benefited from greatly, and yet I would be lying if I did not admit to having mixed emotions about the history of their ascendence in the arts sector, which ultimately stems from reactive federal policies regarding direct payments to artists.

I am often surprised by how frequently the story of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Culture Wars of the 1990s get left out of American Art History. In the last couple of lectures that I’ve given at art schools, barely any students had heard of the NEA and once none could even extrapolate what the letters stood for. My guess is that this is because the NEA does almost nothing in regards to directly funding artists, and so even in professional practice symposia or classes focusing on building a career in the arts, the NEA is left off of the of the curriculum, despite the fact that they are (or at least until the chainsaws of this administration came out, were) the single largest funder of the arts in America. The reason that the NEA does not fund individual artists anymore traces back to the culture wars of the 1990s when the conservative movement realized that there was a goldmine of political capital to be harvested in outrage over what so-called degenerate artists in NY were doing with government money. Mostly what artists in NYwere doing with government money was attempting to eek out meager existences, grieve their friends and lovers who were dying of AIDS, and occasionally lashing out at institutions like the Catholic Church whose advocacy beyond any shadow of a doubt had contributed to the deaths of thousands of gay men. Occasionally they were doing provocative things like taking photographs of crucifixes suspended in a jar of urine. For nearly a decade questions of obscenity as they intersected with arts funding echoed through the talk radio airwaves. The right learned critical lessons about how cost effective and valuable cultural outrage was at galvanizing its base, lessons that the left has still not figured out how to strategically maneuver around or to get ahead of. On a more micro level, in an effort to preserve arts funding overall, changes were made to how the NEA distributed its funds that completely cut grants to individual artists out of the picture and cut out general operating grants to organizations. NEA grants would now be awarded only on a project basis to organizations. The short version of the story is that Artist Residencies rose up as a way of supporting artists less directly out of a political fear of putting actual cash dollars into artists hands.

And so in summary, I love artist residencies. I love getting to focus on my work. I love that the field has exploded. I love the care that has gone into conversations about accessibility and access within the field. But also what I wouldn’t give to go back to a time when the federal government paid thousands of artists decent wages. In lieu of hitching any wagons the unlikely stars of renewed federal investment in the arts, I am trying to wrap my head around ways to grow the field from the ground up, and my hunch is that this has to do with cross sector collaboration and also maybe with some new cracks in the economy. When I was coming up as an artist in Providence, there was so much empty warehouse space. Jobs were few and far between, so it could still be a pain to hustle the mind-bogglingly low rent but this access to extremely low cost of living in the 90’s into the early 2000’s should also be understood as a critical underwriter/enabler of the arts. Now obviously the whole economy has shifted particularly with the short-term-rental-ification and private equity extractions of the housing sector. But there have to be new cracks and alliances that weren’t visible before. And I have a hunch that small organizations, like the Rose Island Lighthouse Foundation, that are outside of the arts, but that get the potential value of working with artists are key to the next phase.

And so to loop this thread back to Rose Island, as an artist I wanted to spend consecutive days with a bottle of ink and reset my practice. As an arts administrator I was also so excited to see this local organization that focused on history be engaging with artists, that I wanted to see it first hand. I know how much it takes to implement a whole new program, to design it, to fundraise for it, to pull it off with grace. Which without question the Rose Island Lighthouse Foundation does with its Artists Residency.

Art takes many forms and is always changing. I have never felt like drawing is the space where I do my most meaningful creative work, but it is always a place that I return to. Bullshit is stripped away and it is just you and black and white marks on a piece of paper. Just you and your fingers and eyes and ideas and lines. Upon arriving at Rose Island I felt super happy and relaxed, but after the third drawing started to move me out of a representational space, I knew that I was just warming up and had to channel something more. I remembered that I was actually trying to do something sort of hard.

Of the other artists at the residency three were working on fairly traditional landscape explorations, one a board game, one a quilt, and another experimental photographs with fresnel lenses. I actually rarely get to intersect with representational painters, so there was something slightly exotic about the oils, and acrylics, the guaches and all of the attunement to color and light. As if it were not enough to be on an island with six other artists all moving through their own questions and uncertainties in the height of abundance of time and beauty, I had decided that I was finally going to listen to Virginia Wolf’s To The Lighthouse on audiobook. So I was also in it with Lilly Briscoe, a fictional character in the book who is a painter and feminist who is painting a lighthouse to make sense of her own experience while I was painting a lighthouse to make sense of my own experience. I know that I am indebted to the work of Virginia Wolf, but sometimes she ignites a frustration in me that I am embarrassed of. All of the other artists in the mix, the non-fictional ones, were kind and lovely. Everyone was focused on their work, but made time for marshmallows and fire chit-chat after the sun went down.

I have been trying to illustrate a book that I have been writing about renovating the Wedding Cake House, that dips back into the renovation of the Dirt Palace in the early 2000’s, which is also a book about carpentry and plumbing and feminism and being very young and living in a vivid subculture and wanting to stay up all night every night in a bubble with your best friends and start a world from scratch out of the scraps left over from the churn of capital. But it is all fits and starts. Being in the middle of it, was fun all of the time, trying to corral it into something that can cross a finish line; way less fun. Thinking about hustling and trying to figure out publishing; not really fun at all. Going back to that time of working on the house, and feeling an immense pressure to pull off something basically impossible, but also stumbling into all types of kindness and support, is a weird assed type of time travel. A multi-year roller-coaster that blurs the lines between project and life. Sometimes I really don’t want to psychically revisit that time. We were cold and dirty for seemingly years, and friends of ours kept dying so called deaths of despair. And they all add up, you know. And sometimes it would feel like punch after punch and Trump had just taken power for the first time and everything about living a basic decent life if you were marginal in any way seemed to be getting exponentially harder. And we just had to keep our heads down for deadline after deadline. Demolition and repair. Over and over, and you have no idea of what will happen if you fail or miss a deadline, but you know that it won’t be good. I pulled my own guts out while gutting a house. And of course with this backdrop everything can become very funny and absurd because it is also a classic coming of middle age story, and middle age is all comedy. You are basically a teenager with topsy turvy hormones but people are taking you seriously? And so anyway…while I am breathing with the ocean, I am trying to metabolize what this lighthouse is, and what its journey has been, what the community that stewarded it into a new phase went through, while also drawing some pictures relating to a story about renovating a Victorian mansion that started to fall into disrepair at about the time when the lighthouse was coming back to life. The mansion was built between 1865 & 1867, the lighthouse went into service on January 20th of 1870.

It is hard to not be dazzled and distracted by the story of steamships going back and forth from New York City overnight into the waters of New England as this is, after all, why the lighthouse was built in the first place. Palaces floating on the sea, but like price wise more comparable to taking a greyhound bus than a private jet, or whatever today’s form of luxury transit from New York to New England would be. The boats had names like Pilgrim, Puritan, Commonwealth and Priscilla. And ads for them and their overnight berths cracked jokes about good ole yankee hanky panky.

There are two children’s books about kids who spent part of their childhood at the Rose Island lighthouse and both of these books are wonderful. I strongly recommend them if you have any kids in your life who like history, or if you would prefer to read about history with fun illustrations, which obviously I also strongly recommend. I am always curious about place on the level of labor and the day to day. And these children’s books gave plenty of details. I stepped into the fog horn room knowing that when it was foggy the lighthouse keeper and the assistant keeper would each take turns in 4 hour shifts shoveling coal into the steam boilers that would produce the fog-horn sounds. 10 hours of fog-horning would require 1 ton of coal. Which to say, that was some no-joke heavy duty coal shoveling.

The villains of the story of Rose Island’s reimagination were a company of developers called CMTS who bought the land around the lighthouse at auction in 1968 and planned to build 125 condos and a marina and all of that kind of stuff on the island. I could not find concrete information about how much they paid for it, maybe $27,000? But the city of Newport had bought it from the federal government in 1960 for $2,300 and they were supposed to turn it into a park, which never happened and so it reverted to federal government ownership and the feds auctioned it off in ‘68 to CMTS. So maybe the city also has some seagull shit on their hands for not turning it into a park in the first place. And maybe the teenagers who had wild parties on the island in the 70’s and 80’s and trashed the lighthouse are also sort of villainous as were the birds who took to living inside and shitting everywhere as birds do. But partying teenagers and birds are sort of exempt from wrongdoing in my worldview so for the sake of this story CMTS were really getting in the way. In 1982 a group was formed called Citizens to Protect Rose Island, and in 1984 The Rose Island Lighthouse Foundation was officially created. Core to this organizing was Charlotte Johnson, a self proclaimed 1960’s peacenik. Jeremy D’Entremont writes in The Lighthouses of Rhode Island, “she has proven to be a peacenik with an invaluable understanding of local politics and public relations, and a knack for motivating others.” In 1985 the city of Newport took over ownership and RILF was given five years to carry out its plan for restoration. This was also the year when 100 protesters took to the island and encircled it with a mile long banner made of bedsheets. Which is interesting because it was only a year or so earlier when Christo and Jean-Claude made the work “Surrounded Island” by surrounding an island archipelago in the Biscayne Bay with pink textiles, which was later written about by David Antin in the poem “What it means to be Avant Garde”. Antin objects to Christo’s being identified as avant-garde “because the chamber of commerce is perfectly cheerful about” his projects. The bedsheet banner protesters wrapping Rose Island were likely indifferent to their status in terms of the Avant Garde, but here is the thing, it got the job done. And so the five year ticking timeline began. They hustled, and wrote grants and worked on policy that might make condo development more challenging and recruited volunteers and had work days twice a week. Having no resources to get a project done and splitting your time between writing grants and fixing everything possible with your cold gnarled hands is a story that I know too well. Our timeline was originally shorter than the Rose Island project deadlines but we were interrupted by a pandemic, so by the time that we really opened it had been about 5 years from when we wrote our first grant. By the early 1990s the Rose Island Lighthouse Foundation had managed to get the lighthouse all fixed up, every nail and shim and roofing shingle brought over by boat, much of the labor done by volunteers. In 1993 The Rose Island Lighthouse was relit as a private aid to navigation. CMTS still owned the rest of the island and it took another 6 years, six hundred and something thousand dollars, a designation as part of Newport’s Historic District zone and a DEM conservation easement to chase out the specter of condos, a fight that like a lot of the interesting aspects of the revitalization of the lighthouse is not incredibly visible from a quick visit. But there is a small brass plaque on the downstairs kitchen window that hints at this history: it reads something to the effect of “aren’t you glad that you’re not looking at condos?”

Sometimes in 2025 it can be hard to summon visions of what a hopeful reimagination of this land might be when it is clear that we are being dragged down a path that forecloses any kind of return to where the American Experiment was even just a year ago. It took a couple of days to viscerally feel the absolute radicalness of being on an island that for almost as long as settlers had been around had served military purposes, being taken over basically by birds and a couple of human rotating caretakers who are set up to recycle every drop of rainwater, and power almost everything with renewable energy. I realize that perhaps I have not said much about the military history of the island, sorry, not sorry - not my thing, look it up on wikipedia if you want perfect details, or take my word for that there are barracks and places where torpedoes were loaded with explosives, and stored, and where anti-aircraft guns were once mounted. The torpedo factory’s ceiling is now falling in. Keep out, keep out! The crumbling brick structure is circled by the spiky seed pods of Jimesonweed, the night blooming vixen of so many overgrown places that lures moths and nocturnal pollinators into its trumpet blaring silence. The quiet, a triumph. Preservation can mean so many things, but what a joy to see the skeletons of our munitions factories be saved as an arcade for egrets for a while and then fall into the sea! The goldenrod cheers for neglect amongst the feathers and the bones.

I spend a lot of time on Broadway in Providence. This month one of the street’s most significant landmarks will re-open as a venue focusing on comedy and music. Between the theater space itself and the building behind it where the former theater owning family rented out fairy tale touched apartments that various friends of mine lived in over the years, the stories pile up. But I will spare you the sundry details of giggling in Claudia’s kitchen or getting literally bit in the ass by a giant St. Bernard while a friend helped me to change brake pads in the parking lot. Although I will say that when that dog bit my butt there was a whole day-drinking gaggle of neighbors watching my fear betray me in real time, pointing and laughing at my pain. There is something classically Rhode Island about this scenario. I knew they would have come to my rescue if something serious happened, but anything up to the moment of the trickle of blood was fair game as amusement for their afternoon revelry. But anyway, this essay is about the Theater on Broadway that is about to re-open, re-branded and renovated, re-invigorated for a new era. But this one is about an old era, not the most recent era of artists running the show, but the one before it. And as much as it is an essay, the center piece is a film that I made in 2016 and only shared once (at the Theater on Broadway). It's really more of an audio piece that I added in-camera double exposed visuals to. It recounts the stories of three people who had gone to the Theater back in it’s days of showing blue movies.

(I guess you can continue reading, but it’s best to watch the movie above at this point. If you are trying to decide between reading the rest of the essay, or watching the movie, go with the movie)***********

I am a fan of all of Samuel Delaney’s writing, but Times Square Red, Times Square Blue has long held a special place in my heart as I’ve processed how cities and public spaces in America have changed over the past 50 years. As I’ve lived through the growth and decay of Providence in real time often feeling simultaneous ebbs and flows of optimism and despair, I’ve returned to this book a lot to make sense of it all, with a particular eye towards how to discuss the value of places and experiences that do not center children or family life. If you consider yourself someone who thinks about cities and/or blow jobs and have not read this book, do yourself a favor and just read it already. If neither of these things are your jam and you know that you will never read it: here’s the synopsis. The first part of the book is a memoir-style essay about hook-ups and other gay encounters in the porn theaters of Times Square before its Disneyfication. The second part of the book is a separate essay, drawing heavily from Jane Jacobs and urban planning discourse, dialogue about gentrification and sociological theory about relationships. It is particularly concerned with opportunities for “cross-class contact” in urban settings.

I bring up this book because I’m here to discuss the particular moment in the life cycle of the theater on Broadway that went on between about 1970 and sometime in the aughts when it had settled into a mostly quiet life of projecting pornography from clunky video projectors. I use the qualifier “mostly” before quiet life, because it was well known that for some reason Buddy Cianci, the then mayor, kept trying to get it shut down. The theater in question was built in 1926 as a vaudeville theater and named The Columbus, that then in 1929 became known as The Uptown Theater, somewhere in here switched from live performance to showing movies, then in 1962 became The Columbus again and now in 2025 is slated to return to The Uptown appellation. Good riddance, of course, to naming things for lousy explorers like Christopher Columbus. However, knowing Rhode Islanders, all kinds of people including those who have de-colonized their hearts and souls will still “accidentally” call it “The Columbus” for a good ten years, because Rhode Islanders have been hardwired to refer to things by what they used to be called, to give directions based on what used to be there. And while dead-naming human beings is unkind in all ways, I sort of think that the impulse to refer to places based on their past is different and perhaps less awful. A way of psychically acknowledging the liminality of cities; of bonding history to the present. Providence is a jewel encrusted netherworld of loosely affiliated haunted houses. Even the living humans; haunted houses.

Peering in through the windows of a creepy spirit infested triple decker, one emotion that you might see swirling in the ether is shame. When you are not feeling shame, it is easy to forget about shame. Similarly to how easy it is to forget about winter when there have been a string of 90-something degree days in July. But like excessive heat, when you are in it, shame shapes your reality with the sticky film it leaves on your skin. The sticky-ness hard to separate from the heat, just as when you are in it, it can be difficult to discern the edges of guilt from the pulsing core of shame. There can be an urge to explain. A voice in the head that won’t turn off attempting to justify, even though on some core level you intuit that explanation is a finger trap where the harder you pull the more your digits get stuck. Sometimes people talk about a shame spiral, which is what my carb-phobic friend calls fusilli, but it is actually a metaphor for an infinite loop of self loathing and not a pasta shape. The other day I felt shame about something and it occurred to me that maybe I should just melt down. I had been near children more than usual and I was impressed with their ability to release emotion by ushering in absolute mayhem and was tempted in this direction for a moment. No one was around, but the dog just looked at me like, please don’t. And so I pulled it together and took an excessively long bath. I pissed in the water. Cried into the water. Drooled a little to convince the water that I was doing everything in my power to imitate it. “And I want to be like water if I can, ‘cause water doesn’t give a damn”. - Silver Jews (from the song Horseleg Swastika)

I think that if you have been brought up in Christian traditions (which I have not) it is perhaps obvious that the way through emotions like shame and guilt is obsessive repentance which, if you don’t wear holes in your fingers moving rosaries through them, eventually leads to absolutions by the higher power. This might not be effective if you don’t believe in higher powers and forgiveness isn’t exactly what you want either. If you just want to be a better human being who fucks up less, or to be a person who feels the weight of human emotion less, you’re on your own. Confession has also had a traditional role to play in the appeasement of guilt. But this is in no way an option for me. I have read Foucault's History of Sexuality Volume 1 too many times to flirt with notions of confession without rolling my eyeballs right off of my face. With parents who were apostates from Catholicism, I grew up with a sense that shame was something often imbued in people by the church, and that I should be less susceptible to its creep, because I need not be concerned with god’s judgements or wrath. And yet here we are in a political moment when it feels like there is not nearly enough shame going around. That nothing could make the men in power feel embarrassment, regret or inadequacy and so there is some part of me that is drawn to sit in it when it comes, not to try to cut corners by flushing it from my system like a form of spiritual food poisoning. In this moment shame feels like it might be an important corrective, a gateway drug to accountability, decency and growth. So shower me in it until my skin is raw. Let bugs crawl out of the shower head and taunt me, I am not getting out of the bathtub.

Possibly this is a very deranged, binary and misguided kind of thinking. And also the logic feels reasonable in the USA right now. How often do we all (shower) cry for help these days, and how do we get out of this reality? I do not actually want to hang out with bugs in a bathtub of shame.

A year or so there was an excerpt in Harpers from a book by Adam Philips about second chances that begins by asking the reader to attempt to engage with a thought experiment imagining a world without redemption:

“The idea of the second chance is one of our more familiar self-cures for a certain kind of despair: the despair that comes from seeing ourselves as saboteurs of opportunity, as fundamentally self-destructive, distracted creatures whose hate is far stronger and stranger and more pleasurable than our love. In thinking about second chances, at least to begin with, it may be worth wondering what a life would be like in which there were no such thing, a life in which every act was irredeemable (in which apology would be nonsensical), every transgression unforgiven and unforgivable (in which mercy would be unrealistic), every mistake uncorrectable (in which revision would be impossible), every act and apparent choice determined by forces beyond us. A life in which losses could not be recovered and conflicts could not be resolved. A life without cure or hope or useful repetition. So how, then, would our lives be different—or even better—if we lived as if there were no such thing as a second chance? It is an almost impossible question to answer, but it is something many people have had to do. It would be a life spent adapting to an absolute defeatedness, a life of intractable guilt and irredeemable shame. It could feel like a life of radical self-betrayal”

The 2nd Chances book is a book about stories, specifically stories inside of Shakespear and Freud and in this, the classic comedy/tradgedy dynamic is framed accordingly:

It is not, of course, incidental that much of the literature we have come to value is, one way or another, about second chances, about what can and cannot be repaired, and about what that repair might be (comedies are always comedies of recovery)...... Tragedies are always tragedies about the violence of self-justification, the defending of an intractable position. What we see in tragedy is the worst-case scenario of the need to be right: life as a protracted tantrum.

Artists, it turns out, have much to offer in terms of lived examples of not mustering the grace of extending or accepting second chances. Sometimes legends of specific artists’ contributions are overshadowed by legends of their ability to hold onto slights, feuds and bad tastes in their mouths FOREVER. Sometimes these schisms are framed as endurance performance art pieces, and other times just falling outs that go past the point of no return. I had long known that being an artist came with some obvious occupational hazards: financial instability, living outside of basic social circadian rhythms, not owning a garment without paint on it, a proclivity towards hoarding etc. But one thing that it took a bit longer to see was the oversized risk of going to the grave embittered with an irrational chip on the proverbial shoulder. Which in the terms suggested by Philips is, in short, to have lived a tragic life, eaten from the inside out by the worms of a stubborn refusal to find repair. Once I noticed this pattern it became both a life goal to not succumb to it, and also something that I began to find the gallows humor of irresistible. (While on the topic there are a couple of substacks turning their attention to such matters: shout out to Mark Iosiffescu’s Failures of the Avant-Garde and Eugene S. Robinson’s Look What You Made Me Do, which includes a recurring sub-column called Punk Grudges.)

The first time that the nightmare of the lifelong grudge held came into focus was in watching the movie “Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis” by Mary Jordan. I had felt stirrings of it when looking across the distance at the life path of Kathy Acker, but it was not acute like it was watching The Destruction of Atlantis movie. Pretty early on in my path as an artist, teachers, peers and critics would mention Jack Smith in relation to the body of work that I was frantically summoning into existence. I think that this was because like Jack Smith I was organizing weird performances in living rooms and warehouses that rarely started anywhere close to on time, but also because beauty and silliness existed in equal balance in his work, and this was clearly what I was aspiring to, occasionally successfully. And then there was the thing about the penguin, which was why I secretly felt drawn to him as a patron saint. Smith had a kind of alter-ego stuffed penguin with a beaded bullet bra that he frequently performed with in the 70’s and early 80’s - I think that her name was maybe Yolanda? The first art piece that I got real obsessive about at age 7 in 1982 was a giant paper-mache penguin that I worked on pretty much every day after school for like 2 months. When you are 7, a two month long project is pretty much a magnum opus, and as can be discerned by the photograph of me and my masterpiece, we were not fucking around.

Atlantis in the Jack Smith cosmology was some kind of utopia. It was an island of diamonds and palm trees, or maybe just his apartment as evolving theater set, because in utopia all performance is glamorous and rectangles are the enemy. It was the opposite of the rented world and a lobster played the landlord. Or the idea of landlordism, which is funny because lobsters are kind of giant cockroaches of the sea and once thought of similarly to rats. Andy Warhol once said that Jack Smith was the only person who he would ever copy. I have of course drawn influence from his work, and the film regarding The Columbus that I hope that you have watched, because really it is the only part of this essay that is actually about The Columbus Theater, was heavily inspired by the film Chumlum. Chumlum is not actually a Jack Smith movie, but rather a Ron Rice movie that was made of the actors from Smith’s production of Normal Love hanging out off hours at Ron Rice’s loft where they would watch uncut production dailies. It is stunning and dizzying in the movement of double and triple exposures orchestrated inside of the camera and I as soon as I saw it I wanted to pile up layers like this. When you do an in-camera multiple exposure you have to drop a stop for each extra exposure, and then pull out the film spool and in darkness rewind it by spinning it backwards with your hands. I did this in a bathroom with the lights out and with towels stuffed into the crack at the bottom of the door. If you live with a filmmaker without a darkroom, don’t expect to use the bathroom whenever you want.

In 1997 the Museum of the Moving Image mounted a retrospective of Smith's work and a fully refurbished 16mm version of his most famous piece, Flaming Creatures was being screened at the museum. It so happened that this historic screening would be taking place when I would be visiting family on Long Island, and I fully intended to catch the train to Queens to see it first hand with my own eyes. At some point my mom suggested that since my dad had the day off that we could go together. I’m sure that her intentions were good. I could not figure out how to explain that going together might be weird as part of the lore of the film was that it precipitated national conversations about obscenity laws, and that a number of people had been arrested for screening it. Befuddled members of the Senate Judiciary committee were forced to watch it, in all of its limp genitalia glory and wrestle with the perennial American question of whether freedom of speech applies to gay things that seem like they should give you a boner, but are possibly too confusing. So my Dad and I went together to the screening, which was awkward, but then to my horror, he happened to know more people there than I did. One of his colleague’s kids had worked on the restoration of the film. It also came out that my father, as a young investigative reporter, had actually covered some kind of sting operation involving the moving of pornographic films across state lines, which at the time in the 1960s was illegal. So all of the legal battles around obscenity laws were part of his encyclopedic knowledge of the more tawdry sides of recent American History.

The next time that I saw a sixteen millimeter projection of Flaming Creatures it was December 2019. A time that gets jumbled with all of the emotional turmoil and rawness of the early days of the pandemic. It was at the Columbus Theater as part of a program called Wet Gate and also featured video interviews with Ken and Flo Jacobs and Brian Frye who was billed as the world’s leading (only?) expert in avant garde film as it relates to American law. But still the thing that I couldn’t get out of my head was Jack Smith’s inability to let go, or repair all of the fallings out. In Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis John Watters puts it most succinctly in saying “He bit every hand that could ever, ever feed him, and the problem is nobody knows his movies because of that, he never finished them and if he had maybe been a little less difficult maybe we would have seen his movies more”.

Other quotes from interviews from the film that shed some light on his grudges and how they impacted his isolation and material existence:

Ronald Tavel “He ate a cracker and piece of cheese everyday, he wouldn’t buy a refrigerator that would be conceding to capitalism”

Tommy Lanigan Schmidt “Jack was very poor and people took from him”

Tony Conrad: “Jack was curious this way, he would have a falling out with different people, he fell out with this one and that one, I knew a lot, after I fell out with Jack I began to meet other people who had fallings out”

John Matturri “Phone calls at 7 in the morning saying the only reason that you hang out with me is because you want to suck my brain”

Sylvére Lotringer “I heard rumors that he was going around with an axe and trying to look for me to do me in”

The film turns to Jack's last role before he dies in which he plays a character and the character is death. The artist Uzi Parnes says “Before he was diagnosed with AIDS he would often talk about visiting the Variety Arts Theater on 3rd Avenue, which at the time was a porno theater, and trying to get infected because he thought that AIDS was a glamorous way to die”. And here we are full circle to back in the days when one could walk into an adult theater and get close enough to a stranger for many things to happen. For the seeds of death to be planted. Smith was 56 when he died, and it is hard to not wonder if he had a chance to get older, if age might have softened him. He loved being in the hospital for how well fed he was. He talks about vegetables and having 3 meals a day. And maybe I think, that it was after all the poverty and scarcity that fed the bitterness and fallings out. Or the purity in the anti-capitalist project that his peers dropped out of as careers developed alongside of Manhattan real estate. Into the 1980’s. Into the blown out overexposure of Atlantis.

DEEP HOLE, Matunuck RI

One time I ate an oyster. I am and was vegan at the time, but was trying to let go of rigidity. My world had fallen apart and I was trying to pick myself up with experimentation and a broadening of horizons. I was not taken with the experience of oyster eating and thought that it tasted and felt like a wad of snot with like a splash of lemon. That night I was also a bit drunk and had somehow lost my clothes at the party (it was a hot tub party) and so I had to ride my bike home across town in my bathing suit at 2am, which I do not advise. But I was proud that I was not too proud to bend to eat the oyster. Another time I ate a mozzarella stick. It was Lent and I was dating someone who did this thing for Lent of giving up things that he had given up, which felt almost like an uptight New England Carnival type of inversion. And who am I to deny the spirits of liminality in a season of resurrection. And also who am I to deny fried things. So he (straight edge) drank a sixer of High-Life and I (vegan) ate a sixer of mozzarella sticks and neither of us got sick.

Not getting sick feels like the best to hope for in these times of abject American mind poison. Spirit poison. To not get sick you might be tempted to try to stay well, but then in said pursuit realize that wellness culture can be another awful strain of mind poison. But some of the wellness things are nice and purity will knock you down faster than poison so use whatever you need these days. I have been mainlining the ocean, maybe because in mid-life I know how to commune with god. Or I at least know how to space out and float. I have been reading about Jainism in the morning while I eat breakfast. On most days I could tell you when it will be high tide in Matunuck, which is a side effect of the tide widget that stares out at me from my phone. I also mainline the phone, though this is not entirely consensual and when given the opportunity I let it die.

Every time that I go to write about anything, politics hovers over it like an oversized hammer. Every time that I start an essay, it takes way longer than it should because politics have become knots in my brain and stones in my guts. Lately, I think a lot about Simone Weil’s On the Abolition of Political Parties. At times, I have wanted to be like Simone; philosophically rigorous, mystical and frail. But I am built out of 2x4’s. Rough cut and oddly sturdy. Last week a lid fell off of a coffee cup while I was drinking it and I accidentally poured scalding hot coffee onto my tits. A horror? Yes, but the silver lining was how astonishingly fast I healed. Most of my days are spent beavering about; lugging things here and there and I sometimes wonder if I would be smarter if I stayed still more. At night when I rest, I unconsciously pick scabs off of my breasts. Yesterday I burst into tears listening to Sarah McBride being interviewed by Ezra Klein. But it was like the good kind of crying, when you realize that you can let down your guard. Or maybe I just cried because it was the first time that I had ever heard a politician talk about beauty.

On the drive to Matunuck there is a small highway sign pointing in the direction to the oyster bar. Fifteen years or so ago my friend Arley had done a bunch of design work for an oyster farmer who was opening a restaurant and now all these years later I am reminded of Arley as I see his hand in the spelling out of the letters M-A-T-U-N-U-C-K.

I was working at AS220 and Arley had been the communications director at AS220, but had a scheme to keep working there, but move from doing full time communications for the org, to doing AS220 design work plus some graphic design client work. The idea being that it would help the org to be able to continue to have Arley’s hand made approach to branding in the mix and that affiliation with the org could help to stir up some clients. AS220 could be a wild place like that in the aughts where if you had an idea to change your job, you could run with it, so long as you hustled to bring in money that would cover your salary. Usually eventually people realized that for the effort it might just be worth it to go into business for themselves, but going into business by oneself can be kind of a deranged prospect, particularly for artists. Pretending that capitalism is marginally worth participating in can be too much when your heart wants to build utopias, nurture beauty and justice or at minimum tweak out on graphic design. In the AS220 office engaging with capitalism could at best feel like a weird form of avant garde performance art where artists proved that they could deliver lines about community development finance while wearing outfits vaguely mocking power suits that were often held together by safety pins. At worst it could feel like a nervous breakdown when cash flow just wasn’t there to make payroll and there were 50 people whose livelihoods depended on the organization’s paychecks not bouncing.

Sergi Diaghilev was a type of patron saint whose legacy lurked in our midst. His Ballet Russes were wildly popular, critically acclaimed, yet often lost massive amounts of money and so he’d shuffle around debts until a patron or money launderer would take interest. Or he’d flee town for a few, while trying to convince an heiress to support his vision. In short his hustle was hard. There is much to be said about trying to make ends meet in the arts. Where the shaking of trees becomes an art form unto itself. And the getting of ducks in a row, a craft above all others. None of us came into the game to practice these art forms and, but once you know how to throw yourself into learning a craft, that learning is transferable, so if tree shaking it must be, then so be it. And now the ducks have fled into the trees and the federal government is talking about clear-cutting. The business donors have put their pocketbooks behind digital portals. Chainsaws rev. But we had long been warned about the quantity of eggs to put into government baskets. Or the quantity of government to have in amongst the chickens. But the chickens have also been chainsawed, so here we are with the ducks in the trees, trying to catch their eggs before they smash to the ground.

Smash an egg on your head and the yolk is dripping down. The yolk is dripping down.

The dismantling of the National Endowment for the Arts has been lurking in the shadows. Always lunking, but especially lurking for the past few months. There are few places where I like to spend time less than the grants.gov portal used to apply to NEA grants, and yet I felt queasy reading the article about the NEA rescinding already awarded grants and many of the lead program officers quitting. A nausea that leads into a burning in the back of the throat. And then that righteous anger gurgling that can be one of my best and worst qualities. It is a pittance you know, the amount of money that the US government allocates to the arts. And yet still it is the single largest source of Arts Funding in the US with an annual budget of 207 million. RI Senator Jack Reed was quoted in the NY Times as saying that he’d fight tooth and nail for the NEA. He tweeted this quote with a link to the NY Times article and so far a month in it has three whop-de-do likes. I don’t know if this is a reflection of how over twitter people are, how little attention RI constituents pay to Elected Officials once in office, or if its part of the retribution algorithm.

I drive to Matunuck because I started to surf a year or so ago. I got surf-curious a bit before that, like got a wetsuit and all. Mostly at the urging of the painter Sue McNally. It might have even been the first time or second time that I met Sue. We were eating burritos in the Dirt Palace kitchen because Dan Wood was hanging out and I was bemoaning the dwindling days of being able to get into the ocean and she was like, you need to get a winter wetsuit. And I was like I’m not trying to be a surfer, and she was like, I’m not a surfer but I love my winter wetsuit. And then I found one on sale for 100 bucks and I was like I am doing this, even if I just jump in the ocean in January a couple of times, this is worth it. Simultaneously my friend Erik who grew up surfing in Florida had been talking up surfing to me. I went out with him once and it was super obvious that I could fall for it hard. Anything to be by the water. As a kid I would wake up early and walk to the town dock with a fishing pole over my shoulder and a bucket in hand. Jeans rolled up. A bandana out of my back pocket like the cool teenagers with feathered hair wore when they rollerskated. Except for my bandanna was mostly for wiping off fishy scaly hands. I have never in my life wanted to eat animals, fish included, but I have always been drawn to the things that one does as a pretense for staring out at the sea. For being with the sea. My poor father would mostly be tasked with eating the strange creatures that I would slosh home with in my bucket. Unsurprisingly I also did not like the killing or gutting of fish. Small bluefish called snapper were the regular catch. Followed in frequency by flounder and eel. But then sometimes you’d get something freaky and prehistoric like a sea robin or tautog with its oddly human teeth and there had better be an old timer hanging out on the dock to tell you what you were dealing with, because in 1982 there was certainly no internet to look this shit up on. A couple of times I caught sand sharks, but it was pretty well known that you gotta throw those back. In 1984 my fishing career came to an abrupt end thanks to Satan, or rather thanks to the fallout from a satanic murder in the small suburban seaside town where I lived. Turned out that the playground near the dock that I fished off of was covered with 666 hail Ozzy type graffitti and suddenly I was no longer allowed to walk down there by myself early on weekend mornings. In retrospect I should have protested though, on grounds that everybody knows that Satanists are not morning people.

Sometimes it can be hard to discern when you are running towards something from when you are running away. Luckily when you are in the ocean you are not running anywhere, so this type of orientation is not relevant unless you are becoming addicted to surfing, which is pretty much what happens if you are the kind of person who is incessantly drawn towards the sea. Addiction is a complicated subject, filled with heartbreak on top of heartbreak. But some of the most hopeful moments that I have felt in the past five brutal years have been sitting in the backyard reading some article about new frameworks for understanding addiction and new approaches for working through it. Last week or maybe the week before I read the book The Drop: How the Most Addictive Sport Can Help Us Understand Addiction and Recovery, by Thad Ziolkowski. The title, long and straightforward, might seem like it is telling us what we are in for, except for what is not made obvious from the title is that Ziolkowski is formally trained as a poet. So even though it is a book hovering on the edges of social science, self-help, recovery memoir and maybe even sports lit, at least once a chapter there are a cluster of words that forcibly pull you out of the logic of prose and sit you down in a wide expanse of loosely affiliated ideas and just makes you hang out in this place of beauty and uncertainty. It is also full of lurid descriptions of excessive partying which I realize has started to wear me down inside of literature. The idea of consecutive nights of bad sleep sandwiched with large quantities of social encounters and the roller coaster of shit decisions, body aches, head aches, and more bad sleep, is such a monumental bummer to me that I get a little queasy and itchy, just reading about others in the flow of a partying life.

Publicly announcing my enchantment with surfing is a bit nerve-wracking. Its hard to not simultaneously anticipate that I’ll be seen as a poseur or kook, and also it feels like coming out into a subculture that I have some major issues with. Surfing has some sociological aspects that overlap with the world of art. Sub-culturally it can be a place where people who don’t fit into mainstream society can find acceptance. It is an activity like art where while you’re doing it, it can be quick to enter a flow state where the shallow sounds of work-a-day consciousness fall silent under the spell of absorption and focus. It is a place where one can sit with pure feeling and glimpse it from the edges while tripping out on rainbows made by droplets of water beating up against offshore winds. And also, as I was also a little miffed to learn after I had been hooked, that surfing, it turns out is a sport! And so it comes with some of the derangements common in sports subcultures, namely misogyny and homophobia. I know that it sounds naive or stupid that it hadn’t occurred to me that it was a sport, but I think that I was thinking of it more like ballet, or hiking, sex or skateboarding: i.e. something physical and embodied, but also creative, expressive, a journey rather than a competition.*

The other thing that first lured me towards surfing were the psychedelic surf films of the 60’s and 70’s, which hold their own in dialogue with experimental films of the era. In 2017 Harvard Film Archive curated a mini festival around some of the master works of this genre. It was called The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun: Psychedelic Surf Films 1966-1979, and I went up to Boston to catch a projection of Morning of the Earth being shown on 16mm. As far as experimental film goes, I’ve been a pretty heavy user over the years - not a scholar, but a practitioner and someone who worked for a while in a technical capacity in the field (at a motion picture lab). The vast majority of experimental films are not feature length, largely for reasons having to do with finance and distribution. So I was fairly blown away to learn that the sub-culture of surfing had built a robust feature film touring/distribution circuit from around 1965 to 1975 that supported a number of really long, totally plotless, mostly abstract, slow, and mind boggling beautiful films with equally killer soundtracks. Morning of the Earth has elements of anthropological filmmaking, a strand that runs deep in experimental film and is broadly problematic in all of the ways that anthropology is. That said, much of the contemporary surf literature that I’ve encountered has fairly thoughtful takes on what it means to be a visitor from places that have wielded colonial power in places that only recently have decolonized. It can be a bit uncanny, I’ll like be watching Pinch my Salt, which is a contemporary you-tube podcast type show, that I think of as sort of like the CarTalk of surfing, i.e. two family members crack themselves up with surf shop talk, and they will articulate an argument about localism that almost borders on decolonial theory a la Franz Fanon, and then in the next breath say the most abjectly stupid thing about women as a category. Anyway, this is all a digression because I was talking about 1970’s psychedelic surf cinema. Even in just the cursory overview presented at the Harvard Film Archive, it becomes pretty clear that George Greenaugh sits at the center of this world. His work exudes a coolness that surpasses almost everything. An aloof visionary with a Ramones haircut in platinum blonde. Shoeless and shirtless, usually wearing pants covered with fiberglass resin from a prototype of something meant to float that he is working on. The 1973 masterpiece Crystal Voyager was his story (though directed by David Elfick). When it came time to create the soundtrack Pink Floyd came to them to offer their services in exchange for permission to use some of the footage shot by Greenaugh “inside of the barrel” for their live shows. The modern surfboard fin is based on Greenaugh’s design. He hand crafted all of the waterproof housings for the camera gear that he used to shoot inside of a barreling wave for the very first time in Crystal Voyager. It weighed 28 pounds, and despite having a smaller frame, he figured out how to operate it while riding on a kneeboard. It seemed fairly obvious to me on first encounter with his films and the legends around him that if you are an artist/surfer, this is your guy, though I can imagine that engineers and tinkers of all kinds might feel the same.

Its been a number of weeks since I started writing this piece, actually maybe a couple of months. The spring got supercharged and the to-do lists at the day-job mounted, and all there was, was to throw labor at problems and I stopped having quiet mornings to type into the void. In that time there was a devastating fire at the Matunuck Oyster Bar. And for a while the timing felt weird in the way that coincidence and tragedy can each dust the surface of life with a patina of unreality. I had written more about when Perry, the proprietor of The Matunuck Oyster Bar would pop into the AS220 office to talk about the design work, but I had cut it out. For every sentence I write I cut one out. But we liked it, we always liked it when someone outside of our realm seemed down with art in all of the ways. I’ve been reading articles and it sounds like hundreds of people, maybe three hundred worked there full time. Which is pretty astounding given that to be on the list of the top 100 largest employers in RI you only need to employ 375 people. As a vegan, who only once ate an oyster, it wasn’t really my thing, but I’d been there with friends on a honeymoon road trip trying to find the best lobster roll in New England. It was a nice time.

I sometimes imagine the words Deep Hole as a reclaimed slur describing old women. Menopausal women. Surfing is potentially a mid-life crisis enthusiasm for me, but its certainly not my first rodeo with doing off the beaten path type things in middle age. Somewhere in my mid-forties I went on an instagram selfie bender. But the selfies that I posted were weird, often not at all sexy selfies, or profoundly trying too hard to be sexy selfies that they became so grotesque that all that was left was a puddle of embarrassment that should not be looked at, maybe sarcastic selfies, but also sincere selfies. I posted one every day or so for a month and it was pretty excruciating. A forced visibility while in the crosshairs of the moment of life of suddenly vanishing visibility. I really didn’t know what was going on, or where this inquiry was coming from. But most of my adult life had been about figuring things out in real time through weird experiments, often shrouded with some aesthetic elements so that they could be passed off as art projects. My genius friend Mary-Kim recognized it immediately and sent me a link to the seminal poem Pause, by Mary Ruefle as well as some of the selfie poems that she had written a couple of years earlier. The poem Pause, is so good that it almost makes it so that there is nothing else that needs to be said on the topic of menopause. But, of course lately there is a lot to be said on the topic as the 6 trillion dollar wellness industry has realized that this particular Gen X cohort of middle aged women are quite a high spending power tranche that might be tempted to spill some disposable income on serums and the like. Some are calling it the Menopause Gold Rush, as it is very rare for it to be discovered that an entire category of health care that has been underserved by “the market”, involves a demographic that now has massive purchasing power that demands lots and lots of corporate attention. Anyway, here I am six years further into what I have been told is at least a decade long wild ride and I’m over photographing myself. Over overthinking in/visibility. I’m still punk enough to be highly skeptical about being part of anyone’s gold rush, skeptical about for-profit pseudoscience hocking potions at women with the same old subtexts: it is your duty to be better…to look younger, to have less hair on your arms, to have more hair on your head, to be thinner, except for don’t diet, that will stress other people out, you mustn't stress other people out, our potion that we are selling you can be taken without weird side effects that will stress other people out. Don’t get me wrong I’ll fuck around with hormones, because that seems actually interesting in this moment in American gender conversations. But personally I don’t wanna get into it with attempting to have inner glow or whatever the current incarnation of unrealistic beauty standards are these days. My current concept of self care is looking as tired on the outside as I feel on the inside. Anyway, the thing that I have found in this phase of life, is that middle aged people, at least of my generation, don’t really have crises - we have generally not been afforded the luxury of drastic irresponsible change in mid-life. Most middle aged people who I know are on call all of the time to deal with everyone else’s crisis from toddler freak outs, to early adult mental health breakdowns, to elder’s health emergencies, that the last thing that they would precipitate or willingly engage with on actual purpose is a crisis. We just expect so much of mid-life people that when they pick up a new hobby to cope or whatever, or attempt to change in a mostly positive, but maybe quirky way, it's derided as a crisis. Which is ok, who has the energy to bicker over semantics? I am 100% fine with outmoded stereotypes about middle age persisting in the zeitgeist if I don’t have to argue about it and can put my head down into work, hang out at Deep Hole and attempt to get more sleep.

Over the past year as I’ve gotten increasingly more obsessed with surfing, I’ve done what I usually do when taken with something, I read anything that I can get my hands on about it. I’ve probably read about fifteen surf adjacent books over the last year or so, most of them memoir with some fiction and history thrown in. My plan is to take this essay full circle and wrap up by telling you about the book that takes place at Deep Hole in Matuncuk, and is titled (you guessed it), Deep Hole. But first, a small digression telling you about the books of this topic of inquiry that have meant the most to me.

If you express even the slightest interest in surf literature, you will hear Barbarian Days this and Barbarian Days that. And the book by William Finnegan IS pretty much worth the Pulitzer prize-hype and all of that. But I will say that as this administration moves to diminish all permutations of identity categories and vilify diversity efforts, it is profound, in reading a library shelf’s worth of books on a given topic, how powerful the small handful of books written by women has felt to me. I had originally written mini book reports on each of them, but this essay was getting too long so I’m just going to do shout outs to: Rockaway by Diane Cardwell and Surf like a Woman by Pauline Menczer. Both are very suitable summer beach reading, easy page turners. Surf like a Woman has some laugh out loud moments when a childhood Pauline is running around the beach calling every dude who crosses her a dickhead. Puberty Blues by Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette is as deranged as it comes…which tracks as it comes straight from the hearts and minds of two Australian teenage girls in 1979. I would not call this one a fun read, it's too full of 13 year old girls facing punishing social pressures, but it's short, feels important, and the ending is incredible.

All of the above books are memoir in some way, which is a baffling genre to me, even though maybe there’s a lot of it in what I write. There is a danger to narrativizing a life, to collapsing various perspectives into a solitary voice and getting comfortable with ideas of truth offered in this form. And yet the intimacy can be undeniable; can feel more true than anything. Fiction is just real weird, especially when there is something known to be true, but in a different form lurking underneath. Like a cat dressed up for Halloween as a different kind of cat.

The Don Winslow short story, Deep Hole, is set in Matunuck RI in 1975 and centered around a surfer named Eddie who likes to gamble. He gets into the hole, deep. Get it? The story is a straight to audiobook “Audible Original” that is about an hour long. Winslow writes crime novels that some might call pulpy. At their best his books vibe a little Raymond Chandler-esque. Some of his characters surf. Some of the dialogue is hard boiled. I can be both totally into AND ALSO a total snob about genre fiction. At this point in my life I am both bored by and slightly resentful of plots that tie together neatly. In fact, as you may have caught wind of from these wandering, not really going anywhere essays, I don’t even really like plot as a concept, like at all. But I don’t want to be too hard on Winslow, largely because of the extraordinary efforts he has gone through to take on Trump. He basically retired from his writing career to fight MAGA in a way that is no joke. We all channel our resistance through a variety of means, actions and daily decisions. Most of us can’t drop everything to create anti-Trump propaganda for crime fiction fans. Most of us don’t have access to millions of followers whose politics are middle of the road enough that they might have voted on either side of the party divide at different times. But when somebody has this platform, a mainstream fan base and uses it unhesitatingly and relentlessly, I’m going to be grateful and get off of my soapbox about things like finding conventional plot devices a little bit annoying.

So anyway, in Deep Hole Eddie has bet on the URI Rams, and this bet has not paid off. And he has nothing to pay his debts with. His “friend” Chris, whose uncle is the mobster running the books has already taken his surfboard and wetsuit and gotten him fired from his job at a seafood joint that is a thinly veiled Aunt Carrie’s. He’s like barely paid off the vig.

Vigorish is a word that I have a very distinct & fond memory of learning. I was working at AS220 and going over some bookkeeping with Dr. Chazen, who for many years was the foremost patron of the arts in Rhode Island. He wanted to commission an artist to paint a mural on the side of a dialysis center in South Providence, but he also wanted a tax write off. Dr. Chazen was like what’s the vig? And I was like do you mean the fee for fiscal sponsorship? And he was like ok, you picked up correctly on context cues, I guess you pass, but also do you know nothing of Yiddish or sports betting? So then he explained that Vigorish meant the cut that the book-maker took and started to explain various approaches to calculating a vig that involved probabilities and proportions. This all basically went over my head, so I was like, uhhh…we were just going to factor in the standard 5% fee that we charge everyone, but if you want something more complicated, I’m sure we could figure something out. He rolled his eyes. I usually couldn’t parse exactly where I stood with this larger than life figure who had been so important to the career trajectory of so many local artists, but in that moment I knew that he had at least moderately enjoyed explaining underworld financing mechanisms to me. And I felt like some important occult knowledge had been gifted to me by just the right person.

Anyway back to the story of Deep Hole where Eddie’s friend Chris is getting more and more shit from his mobbed up uncle about how poor of a job he’s doing collecting the money that’s owed from Edie. So Chris cooks up a scheme for Eddie to rob the high roller card night that he works for his uncle. Eddie has no business wielding a gun, is terrified, but sees no other way out of the hole. Eddie pulls it off, narrowly escaping getting blown apart by mobsters at the card game by pissing himself. For a minute it seems like all might be right in the world but then the mob-uncle visits Chris and is like “how stupid do you think I am”. Chris and Edie are kidnapped and put onto a boat that motors to (you guessed it) Deep Hole. It seems like they’re going to go in with the classic cinderblocks attached to their feet, but then the mob uncle is like Psyche! Its ok, I’m just gonna keep the money that you stole from the game. So it becomes a story of a mob guy making money by essentially stealing from the mob. And this is where a fictional story set in Matunuck becomes a cat dressed like some other cat. Also set in 1975, there’s a famous (true) story of the mob in Providence sealing from the mob. It's often referred to as the Bonded Vault Heist. I’m not going to go into the details, because the story is pretty widely known. Known enough that it was hard for me to not project some outlines of it onto Winslow's Deep Hole plot. I’m not going to try to convince anybody that this novella is fantastic literature and I’ve probably spoiled a little of the ending, so if endings are your thing…apologies. But if you love finding reflections of this strange little state in odd nooks and crannies of culture, pop or otherwise, read it, I mean listen to it, maybe at 1.5 speed or something. And then go to Deep Hole wearing some kind of aquatic footwear and be dazzled by orange sugar kelp clinging to cobblestones deposited by glaciers. By red floating sea pom poms and the sweet rot of wrack as the tide goes out under the hot sun.

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*And there are certainly surfers who lean that way and eschew competition. Within the field they are called “free-surfers”.

“So when you come to the new mall, cut your face, paint your eyes, shake your face, run amok, show me how you cut your face” Mr. Pipes

The Mall that I grew up going to was named after the poet Walt Whitman. A little bit further away was a mall where the food court was named Calder Court after sculptor Alexander Calder. One of Calder’s last commissioned pieces sat in the parking lot for a number of years, and was eventually brought inside to hang out with the Sbarros and Orange Julius and then once people realized what it might be worth, it was sold for 1.7 million dollars. The story of how the Calder and a bunch of other 1960’s high art ended up in this particular not super high end mall is actually pretty interesting and has an Andy Warhol Factory sub-plot. The point being that art and malls have a long history of entanglements. Malls are after all real estate and its time that we talk more openly and clearly about how artists and real estate markets spent a generation squabbling and hate fucking and never being transparent about which line on the balance sheet pertained to sales of art and which pertained to the sales of square footage of hardwood floors that could not be sold until churned through the gentrification machine that we have all seen so many times from so many vantage points that the horizon can only be an optical illusion. When the Mall Apartment that is the star of the recent film Secret Mall Apartment was being built, the churn and the horizon seemed situated enough in the rear view mirror, that we thought that we all knew better about everything, but still the setting sun was close enough to be burned by, especially in Providence.

As suburban malls have died and their corpses left to rot, their mythos have risen in our collective consciousness. A word started floating around to embody a longing felt for department store displays of the not so distant past: mallstalgia. On a certain level I think that everybody can feel in their bones the sundry ways that malls and the suburbias that they sprung from are a depressing cultural dead end. The arguments against them suddenly being proven irrelevant by their abject economic failures.

I moved to Providence in 1993, about a year after the very beginning of the planning for the Providence Place Mall. By 1995 I was enraptured in cultural theory and addicted to reading about modernity, post modernity, and all of the signs and symbols that were replacing lived experience as commerce and public life collided. But before that, as an alienated teenager in the suburbs, on an intuitive level I knew that the mall was a bummer. But still when god gave us a snow day, my friends and I would take the bus to Walt Whitman, play Tetris at some store that sold televisions, eat onion rings at Burger King and scope the fashions of other alienated teenagers doing the same. At this point in time there were not the Hot Topic style mall stores that catered to suburban alienation that would come in the late ‘90s. Maybe you could get like a new wave or metal tape at Sam Goody, but basically the only way that it was a place that had anything for us was that it was indoors on a snowy day and accessible without a car.

This is to say that the mall’s value to us was as public space on a transit line. But then as weirdos it didn’t take us long to realize that malls weren’t actually public space at all. All it took was handing out one flyer to another teenager about some event to be asked to leave (no leafleting) or carrying around a skateboard (because the parking lot also is private property it is illegal to skate anywhere near the mall). To me the issue of the Providence Place Mall was always about public financial subsidization through tax deals and the like, of space that has the appearance of being public, yet where basic rights are not guaranteed. I’m still sorting out my feelings about how political analysis did and/or didn’t enter directly into Secret Mall Apartment, but we’ll get there. These issues are as relevant as ever as the Providence Place Mall has just recently banned groups of more than four teenagers and enacted a curfew on teens at the mall.

A thing that people used to talk about more often was how the first ever enclosed shopping mall in America was the Arcade in Providence on Westminster Street built in 1828. Now its mostly apartments and like one pretty ok falafel place. In the aughts, before it became condos or whatever it was a weird assortment of half failing stores on two levels including one that sold work by local artisans that also hosted an artist residency in whichever storefront was currently vacant. I think that it was in the summer of 2002 when I got to do a residency in one of these store fronts. It was my first ever artist residency, which is funny because now my job and to an extent, my life sort of revolves around artists residencies.

It was a weird experience. I had the space for a month and I wanted to set up a fake store and talk about commerce and sell things or talk about selling things to people hyped on buying things at the mall, but also I sort of just wanted to hide and sit in an oddly carpeted empty room with fluorescent lights and meditate. Sometimes I think of that residency as a massive failure where all I did was put clippings from Italian trade shoe magazines into three dimensional paper frames while listening to a boom box playing the news all day. Maybe that was when I got sick of the radio news. But then I remember that I made a movie that has likely screened more than all of my other movies combined. Its sort of a one line joke of a movie of the Italian shoe models rolling their eyes. You never know why or when you will make the thing that resonates. And sometimes the “popular” work that you make will feel vacant. I was also obsessed with neon colors and each afternoon I got a diet coke big gulp from the nearby downtown 7-11. The mall was slow, but still sometimes I would feel like a zoo animal and so I gradually started hanging things up on the big glass windows so that people would really have to try to peep between the stuff to see in. But then I put up this drawing that was like a trick of perception where if you look at it one way you see a woman looking in the mirror, and if you look at it another way it looks like a two legs with a hand between them doing what hands between legs do, and i guess word got around and people started coming by to look at this drawing, which was not what I wanted. Now along with existential feelings of doubt, I also had to contend with intrusive thoughts about how I might be getting in trouble for hanging up a masturbation drawing at the oldest mall in America. Eventually the mall manager did come by and peek in and I preemptively was sure that I was going to jail for indecency or something. Sorry mom.

When I think about artists who compulsively flirt with trouble, but also have an impeccable track record of getting out of it, Mike Townsend (one of the masterminds of the Mall Apartment) is the first artist who comes to mind. Probably the most meaningful conversation I’ve ever had with Mike was when I was trying to get him to contribute to a compilation of stories by local artists that I was putting together on the topic of trouble. He talked fluidly and matter of factly, with neither guilt nor apology about the relationship between trespassing and privilege, boundary pushing and safety nets. I never got him to write or make anything for that book but its still a pretty epic compilation.

At the Arcade, it turned out that the mall manager thought the drawing was funny and the trouble was in my head. But as the residency rolled on, I wasn’t happy with what I had gotten done. There was going to be an opening and I thought that I should stay there one night to work all night, because at the time another deranged idea that I’d gotten into my head was that if I didn’t stay up all night working on an exhibition, was I even working at all? If I wasn’t visited by the spirits of 3 am insights and the lonely quiet of the sleeping city, could I know anything worth sharing? If I wasn’t loopy and sleep deprived at an opening, gnarly with ketosis induced bad breath, would I even know how to socialize with the middle aged people who worked downtown who I imagined would be the audience for openings at the Arcade? So eventually I decided that I would stay overnight in my makeshift mall studio before the opening. I was pretty sure that if I left to use the bathrooms in the basement after hours that I’d set off some alarms, so as I hatched this plan I started to save the big gulp cups to pee in. There were folding tables that I worked at and when it was the time when the security guards were closing up I put a big piece of fabric on the tables and hid underneath them, my stomach teetering between feelings of thrill and nausea. One of the hardest things about being an artist is that no one tells you what you’re supposed to be doing. And value, both conceptually and materially are massively subjective.

Inside of this community becomes everything, and this is one of the most beautiful and rewarding things about being an artist. I think that I will carry with me to my death the belief that the community of Providence feral twenty something artists who I came up with was one of the most magical and rigorous cohorts of young artists that this country has ever seen. Although I also hope that every cohort of young artists everywhere feels this way. But the thing is, when something is so special and rooted in all kinds of wild ideas, and also when a good half of the things that are being done are not totally legal and are happening in places where no one is supposed to be, then things need to be secret. They need to be underground.

Just like in art there are no written rules in the underground. No one tells you what you’re supposed to do or not do. But there are some things that are pretty obvious. Like don’t talk to cops or journalists. One time in the early days of the Dirt Palace, back when the Providence Journal actually had writers who covered art events, a reporter named Bill came to a puppet show. He stood out like a sore thumb in his button down and Pippi and I were tag teaming trying to explain to him why it was really important that he didn’t write about the event in the ProJo and that like if he actually cared about art he would not jeopardize the shutting down of a space like ours by telling likely indifferent Projo readers the sundry details of the ballad of some styrofoam ball heads mounted on chopsticks. If you write about this we argued, you are going to be fucking things up for a lot of people by tipping off the Fire Department. He said that he would write what he felt moved to write. On that cue, Dan, Pippi’s boyfriend at the time moved forward and said something to the effect of, it seems like you’re threatening my girlfriend and you have now unleashed the gorilla. Dan, who had a gorilla face tattoo that covered his chest, pulled off his shirt and stood there with crazy eyes. Bill the arts writer got the fuck out of there and apparently was no longer moved to write about a puppet show being performed in a hallway that smelled like garbage in a building in Olneyville that still had boarded up windows.

That’s a long winded way of saying that when in January of 2022 when Documentary Filmmaker Jeremy Workman’s email with the subject line “interview request about Secret Mall Apartment” landed in my inbox my abreaction was to think to myself, who the fuck does this guy think he is and does he really think that I’m going to narc this shit out. Honestly I don’t even open most emails that are requests that have something to do with talking about the old days of Providence. Most of it is related to memories of someone who lived here for a year or two in the late 90’s and I have lived here for 30 odd years and while those late 90’s years were magical and special, so have been most of the other years.

What I’m getting at is that nostalgia feels like a betrayal of the present. And also a betrayal of a whole bunch of other pasts, and so I try not to go there, to that place of idealizing other times. But anyway, I finally like, actually read the body of the email from Workman and kind of had to eat shit. It was long and not generic, and I could feel it anticipating my skepticism in every sentence, but it never struck a defensive tone. The author of this email understood what he was up against and was graceful and generous at every turn. So rather than throwing it directly in the trash I let it hang out for a week or so. Then like any normal person, I googled the shit out of the sender and figured out what mutual friends we had. My friend Peter had worked with him on some freelance gigs in NY, but more importantly a friend of his had been the subject of one of Workman’s previous documentaries and Peter thought that the whole thing was really positive and cool. I tell you this to give some insight as to what kind of scrutiny and community back channel vetting this dude went through by assholes like me who are only marginally connected, but protective, probably to a fault of beloved secret histories of Providence.

The telling of stories connected to underground scenes can’t be told by just anyone. When we were younger I think that a lot of us focused on notions of “selling out”. But I hardly think about that anymore, and I’m not sure if that’s a product of aging, or if the whole economy around art has gotten so much of the air sucked out of it that you’re just cheering for anyone who can make a go of anything in a reasonably half financially sustainable way. Now my concern mostly has to do with stories getting the basics wrong and making people who choose to live in ways that don’t fit into traditional molds out to be eccentric freaks.

I’m telling you about my initial skepticism when Workman’s email arrived, not to reinforce ideas that are likely floating around that I’m a judgement asshole gatekeeper, but rather because I think that its a good segue into the core idea and approach that I ultimately think makes this film successful. And that is that it is centered around public art. By 2003 when the mall apartment is underway, Mike is already a pretty seasoned public artist and the crew of younger artists building the apartment with him are also working with him on public art projects. All art is dependent on complex ever shifting relationships between makers, viewers, meaning, context and a bunch of other interconnected nodes that I often visualize in my head as string figures or loose knit lace. Public art is unique in that if just one or two little nodes are off, people literally start toppling statues, or mobilizing for their removal before they’re even installed. Public art failures can be intense and painful. Tilted Arc, the South Bronx Bronzes. Every day Mike and the Tape Art crew are negotiating with living humans about ways of altering the lived environment of these various living humans. Often the environments are shared. The negotiation is the art. The listening. The artist showing that they understand the perspective of the viewer. The dance of navigating multiple perspectives is a daily exercise routine where the muscle mass of trust is built slowly but surely over time. The word stakeholder vibes a little corporate to me, but it's such an essential part of a public art project: assessing who might be stakeholders, and figuring out how to intersect and approach them. When public art goes well, it affects how people feel about the places where they spend time, places where civic identity is generated and shared. When it goes wrong, there are bummer lawsuits.

A legend is maybe the oldest and purest form of public art. The beliefs and values of a group of people become embedded in a shared text. To know a legend is a form of belonging, to know a special element of the story in a deeper way is the stuff that communities, cultures, cities and even countries are built on. To be a legend a work of art has to not just stir feelings in an audience, but those feelings must be civic in some way. The story of the Mall Apartment was a Providence legend for a long time. The question for Workman was: could he, using the tools and distribution mechanisms of cinema widen the circle of who felt moved by this story.

In weaving together stories of Tape Art and Mike Townsend’s work in public spaces with the story of the Secret Mall Apartment, a set of underlying ethics and corresponding aesthetics are made apparent. Workman’s approach from the jump, of paying a lot of attention to stakeholders, is something that I now interpret as an attuned alignment with Mike’s ethics and approach to public art-making. I’m not sure of how much the two of them discussed these things in plain terms, or if it was more of an intuitive sense that Workman’s sensitivity, craftsmanship and experience telling the stories of people with persistent visions was the right avenue for bringing increased visibility to the story of the mall apartment.

The story, of course, has been told in other forms. But none of the other forms possessed the potential of bringing the project full circle to durationally occupy major real estate in a mall the way that of a feature film with a theatrical release could.

The most widely circulated media about the mall apartment pre-movie was an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible called The Accidental Room. It's good, but its focus is on the weirdness of the building design that led to the existence of the mall apartment space and it speaks the language of architecture and urban planning, which is a relevant framework for this project, but not, I’d argue the most important one. It always felt like there was a place for the Mall Apartment amongst the canon of art historical works that take on relationships between real estate, architecture and capitol like the work of Gordon Mata Clark or Theaster Gates. But the film operates more in the realm of heist movie than in the art world, which is, of course, a political choice.

My favorite pre-movie secret mall appearance is in the novel Exes by Max Winter, a book that between the plot lines reads like an almanac of Rhode Island legends: the founding father’s corpse as apple tree root, clingstone, scrimshaw he’s-at-homes, Despair Island, the fountain on Benefit street, directions involving long gone businesses and of course, the mall apartment. Because Exes is a work of “fiction”, the details are mangled and skewed, and the character, Cliff Hinson, who is the lead mall dweller through who’s voice we hear the story of living at the mall, is certainly not (all) Mike Townsend. Most of the characters in this book are bizarre mash ups. I think it is a bad idea to attempt to reverse engineer the complicated character medelies that Winter has drawn up, that said a little bit of detail detangling is hard to resist. For example Cliff mentions drawing on the mall apartment’s walls the rooster that he used to own that cock-a-doodled-do’d every half hour. I can assure you that it was in fact John Dwyer who owned this mill dwelling rooster. It lived across the hall from me at 556 Atwells (the other side of Eagle Square) where the walls were 12’ 4” and the landlord had cheaped out when divvying up the former factory floors by only actually installing 3 pieces of drywall on top of each other, meaning that the top 4 inches of wall did not exist. There was so much space in the mill that most of the time this didn’t matter, but when that fucking rooster was announcing dawn over and over all day long, you could feel that 4” gap. At times Cliff’s account of the space is more intimate than what we get in the movie Secret Mall Apartment, even though it is, as far as I know, totally made up.

We moved in the secret room piecemeal, stuffing what little we needed into duffel bags and making trips a couple-two-three times a day under cover of the busiest business hours. We brought some pots and pans, a hot plate, milk crates, clothes, a stereo. There was also what was left of our old space. The building’s new owners figured it was garbage, so they hadn’t thrown it out. It took a whole lot of trips to get the caftan maze down there, and the wall’s worth of action figure torsos. My hips started to hurt from all the up and down, but that’s because we’re meant to live in trees.

When I had the residency at the Arcade I realized that bringing a bunch of stuff downtown in a car that you had to park was a pain in the ass and so a couple of times I pushed a granny cart full of materials from where I lived in Olneyville to the Arcade. The walk itself, a summer spectacle. What I remember of the night that I stayed there was that when I was awake and in the zone I felt exuberant, but then when my energy started fading and I hit exhaustion and doubt, it was painful and not very fun. When at dawn, I finally did attempt to lay down under the table to avoid the part of the day when the lights got turned on, I could only sleep in like 15 minute chunks and then my hip rebelled against pushing against the floor with no padding and I’d have to keep shifting sides like a rotisserie chicken.

While I don’t actually know what it was like to crash at the mall apartment, the movie backs up my speculation, that it fell on a spectrum ranging from exuberance to awful sleep. The material aspects of spending time in a fucked up place that’s not built for living and where you’re not supposed to be sleeping aren’t that mysterious to me. We were all doing this a lot in the 90’s. A few nights in a studio here, a night in an abandoned building there, someone had the keys to the old Woolworths. Everyone had hacks for eating food with filthy hands when there was no running water and kept a piss bucket under their desk. The curiosities that I came to the film with were about the spiritual aspects of what it was like to live like this, but nestled, not amongst the ruins of industry, but rather inside of an engine of hyper-powered consumerism. Sometimes I felt like I could glimpse answers, but most of the time the primary source documents were emotionally blurry.

The Providence Place Mall opened in 1999, the same year as the WTO protests in Seattle which are often seen as a critical moment in the anti-globalization movement. Protesters included anarchists, major unions, and far right idealogues like Pat Buchannan. Everyone knew that America’s economy was changing. As young people in the 90’s the course of our lives were marked in unique ways by extremely cheap rent in the leftover warehouses and worker housing abandoned by the steady stream of factories that had moved overseas. Politicians and economists would tell us that it was good that we were shifting from a manufacturing to a service economy, but the 90’s economy vibed more bloated and sinister than “good”. Cities were precarious with all of this empty space and the jobs that seemed to be replacing manufacturing were bullshit dead-end retail jobs at the mall. Professionally someone working in the service economy could range from a doctor to a housekeeper - which is to say that there wasn't much coherence or solidarity in this so-called sector. It didn’t add up and the news was all about Enron and other stories of corporate America screwing over workers.

In this dramatic shift of economies, I think that one thing that leaders neglected to take into consideration was that manufacturing in the United States was kind of a legend. As a nation, it was how we grew our wealth, how we had jobs to welcome immigrants into the country, how we won the good war, and how we took steps towards gender equality (with Rosie and all that). There is inherently a satisfaction in making things, and this satisfaction coupled with propaganda about the freedoms won through the things made by American Industry and the reality of hard-won union living wages in the manufacturing sector created an imagination of manufacturing labor that meant more to American’s civic sense of self and its place in the world than the sum of mere data points. NAFTA went into effect in 1994 and dealt the death blows to much of the lingering manufacturing in the US. This brought together what in hindsight was a very weird coalition in 1999 in Seattle.

Providence was far from Seattle, but the loss of industry was living with us day in and day out. It was a huge part of our lived reality. While we young people were attempting to construct utopias in the ruins with walls literally built out of garbage and other excesses of capital, leaders were throwing garbage like shopping areas and strip malls at the walls and seeing what stuck. We were in our 20’s and maybe some of the things that we were building were too dangerous or beautiful to last for long like Fort Thunder, but all of the shit that they were suggesting was rotten with greed, exploitation, environmental harm and/or just simply idiotic. The proof is in the pudding of the failure of the first anchor tenant at Eagle Square and the defaults on payments of the Providence Place Mall. There is an irony that there are certain alignments between today’s MAGA economic policy and the anti-globalization ideas anarchists were getting in the streets of Seattle for in 1999. The main difference being that anarchists then were talking about impacts on labor and environmental standards and also that in ‘99 the infrastructure of American Industry was dusty, but not entirely dismantled as it is today. But still it ought be kept in mind that politics and economic policy today are not out of the grasp of the myths and legends of American manufacturing.

The Providence Place Mall was a weird bad idea, but as Leonard Cohen has told us, there are cracks in everything. The crew building the Mall Apartment found the crack and held strong in it for four years, but maybe even more importantly held onto the story for twenty years, and now it emerges as a legend that answers some questions about cities and industry at a time when we could use new legends and ideas more than ever.

With the mall in receivership, new thoughts about paths forward for it are surfacing including ones that have (drumroll) apartments in the mix.

It is warming up now, but for weeks it has been days on end of ice and cold. Often what I consider to be the worst sub-season of the season of winter. But this year everything is thrown off by the cruelty of executive orders, and so the treachery of a landscape of ice seems like a relatively nice shared reality to live in compared to the political landscape that we are experiencing together as it unfolds in real time. Last week, on top of the cold there were also wild winds. My dog hears the shake of the windows being rattled by gusts and looses her mind. There is a dull bruise on the back of my head where in a fever of wind induced fear she forcefully tried to burrow under my head at 4am. I had a dream that night about finding a new flower that blooms in February. Oh come on hellebore, wake up winter aconite, can you not feel my need through the frozen soil?

Some mornings I leave sleep and greet the day with fight in my blood and go off to the pull up bar. I get small satisfactions from hardening the muscles in my biceps and back that veer my body just slightly off the beaten path of the now state mandated fiction of two neatly defined genders based on biological sex. But often I lay in bed, awake before dawn trying to problem solve this political moment in the dark taking cues from the hypnopompic. When talking about “solving” I don’t mean on a geopolitical level. I mean on a personal spiritual level. But also on a practical level as someone who runs a small business in the quote “third sector” in the arts in the state of Rhode Island. I believe in all three of these things probably more than I should: RI, art and small business. Even though my lifetime of practical experience informs my opinion that each of them can be totally deranged, dysfunctional and disappointing, I feel some hope, as it is after all, the motto of the state of RI, and so here we are.

Sometimes when I’m laying down and my brain is stretching I find myself getting caught up in the trap of prophecy, attempting to extrapolate where each day's awfulness in the news will take us in various future increments of time: a day, a season, a year from now when the nation will want to congratulate itself for a milestone birthday, but nobody bakes a cake because everything is broken and plus nobody can afford basic ingredients like eggs. I have never thought so much about America as I have now as it is being dismantled, and still mostly I think about Rhode Island. Or New England. Vermont’s ski slope resistance to JD Vance. Hand drawn signs along the road telling him to fuck right off and go ski in Russia. In family photo albums there are pictures of my cousin Nathan & I as kids in Southern Vermont’s late or extended bi-centenial celebrations, maybe its ‘77 or ‘78. We are holding the flag of the Green Mountain Boys, the militia group that fought in the Revolutionary war, but also fended off New York’s attempt to control the territory. People forget that for 14 years Vermont was an independent Republic (1777-1791). These types of memories are hard to hold because to remember is to indulge a potential longing for a time when a state could be a country outside of America. Longing for a time before America. Longing for a story that goes differently. America is not actually that old. The land is old. I am lucky to have friends who are Artists and Scientists who think in geologic time, rather than in the time of Nation-states. And yet time is partially what is at stake, and this is what feels so dire. Time on planet earth. Both in terms of the practical reality that policy decisions will have real life effects on the lifespans of living humans all over the globe, but also in terms of the lifespan of planet earth itself.

The main framework that is on my mind when I wake up is survival, which frankly, I resent. Having gone through the existential turmoil, mass deaths and economic uncertainty of covid just 5 years ago, a decade of moderate quiet and stability doesn’t seem like a lot to ask for. I don’t ruminate about survival so much on a material level, which is a privilege, but more on the level of will the things that I’ve built my life around make it through this time: the business that we run as a sort of family business as people who don’t really believe in normative family structures, the free thinking, free wheeling very queer arts community of Providence, the state itself. But also artists, small businesses, and Rhode Islanders are freaks of nature when it comes to survival, and there is an optimism in my heart that I am having a hard time squelching even with the harshest of indulgences in “realism”.

Last week, or maybe it was the week before, I tuned in on a zoom call with all of the other administrators of arts organizations who receive general operating support from the state’s arts council. There were 2 screens worth of little boxes with little heads in them, maybe 50 heads total. Little hands scratching the little heads in a collective expression of what the fucking fuck. Everyone is trying to play it cool out of respect for each other. An unspoken solidarity expressed by not having a freak out at the absurdity of a discussion of what these Newspeak executive actions mean in practical terms. We are shown slides with quotes from a call on Tuesday Feb 18th where the National Endowment for the Arts laid out its new policies regarding DEI as it has been required by executive order.

In the best of times running an arts organization is a brutal game of making ends meet by stapling small ribbons or pieces of shoelace from the recycling center together. But now suddenly beyond the stress of precarity, organizations face the existential question of what kind of acquiescence is tolerable to attempt short term survival on the daily. No one wants to compromise on DEI initiatives, for all of the obvious reasons relating to fairness and justice, but also because a core joy of art, and specifically American art, is to learn from and be dazzled by different perspectives and grow as individuals but also as a culture from expressions that come out of various lived experiences, and in so doing to finding our way back to commonality and understanding despite, or perhaps because of difference. The mash up is the medium.

Zoom calls like this of arts administrators are surreal and I both love and hate the vibe. There is always one person rocking a black turtleneck and beret, someone with outlandishly unkempt hair, someone, probably representing classical musicians wearing a suit jacket, but no tie. To say that the characters are out of central casting would be an understatement. And also diligence, earnestness and good faith overfloweth. Although I like to imagine that my approach to the sector is unique and comes out of doing a lot of time in various underground subcultures, still the reality is that these are my people and the things that drive me crazy about them are probably the things that drive me (and others) crazy about myself. The doggedness, the over the top idealism, the office systems hyper-efficiency, the flagrant uses and abuses of personal style.

To a degree it's all business. We talk about timelines, payment delays. The basic math of the budget for grants. Only one third of the state’s arts grants budget comes from federal sources BUT the grants require a one to one match, and the matching funds are subject to the same regulations as the federal funds. Everything is subject to budgets being passed on both federal and state levels. Lawyers are being talked to. Everybody and nobody understands what no DEI means, but we’re told that culturally specific organizations can be funded (for now). I do not ask questions about if LGBTQ+ or feminist focused projects or organizations are fucked because of course they are inherently involved with “Gender Ideology”, the new improved original sin that women need to be protected from, despite, of course it being women who invented “Gender Ideology”. I do not ask this question because I know that the state administrator, and probably everyone on the call gets it 100% and that outting ourselves as practitioners of “Gender Ideology” on a recorded zoom call, does nothing but potentially put ourselves and the agency at risk.

In the same email that the NEA sent out on February 6th canceling DEI, Arts organizations were told that the NEA was prioritizing project grants that celebrate and honor the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

I will not write an NEA grant this cycle, because time is what is at stake, and I know that it will be akin to spitting my time into the wind. Also an extreme eye-roll with a fuck you on top for the attempted sleight of hand of replacing DEI with DOI (Declaration of Independence). But despite the fact that I can not waste my time with NEA grants right now, I do want to think about artists in Rhode Island engaging with this history, because I worry that without diverse artist voices reflecting on what the heck was going on 250 years ago in Rhode Island, the stories will be all patriotic pomp, penny-whistles and singing of the glory of the profits of privateers.

In the 2019 book Time is the Thing A Body Moves Through, T Fleischmann writes about Jemima Wilkensen who in 1776 in Cumberland, Rhode Island became The Public Universal Friend. I had known a bit about this Revolutionary Era preacher because Daphne, who I dated for a couple of years around 2020 (give or take a year in each direction) liked to call herself the Publick Universal Girlfriend. Which was, of course, both brilliant and terrifying to me.

Though I recall being so engaged with Time is the Thing A Body Moves Through that I read it in a day, I remember more about it somatically than in terms of content. I remember parts about dead baby possum, ice in the moment that it breaks, the meditations on the Felix Gonzolez-Torres piece Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA), the mythology of cupid and psyche, and a chunk in the middle about The Publick Universal Friend.

At one point in the book the narrator, Clutch, discusses an essay that they are working on. The opening line is “It is Spring and the season of ice has passed” I think about going back to the first line of this essay and swapping it out with this one, but neither I nor the ground outside are quite fully over the ice. It is not yet spring.

The Publick Friend is sometimes credited with being the first American born woman to found a religion in America, but contemporary accounts challenge this on grounds that by their own description of becoming The Public Universal Friend, they clearly went through a gender transformation. In today’s language and understanding, The Friend would most likely be considered non-binary or agender.

On October 4, 1776, when she was twenty-four years old, Wilkinson fell extremely ill with typhoid fever. On the fifth day of the fever, she became unconscious and appeared to be close to death. When she awoke, Wilkinson declared that she had actually passed through the gates of heaven and had been raised from the dead. She announced that she had a new spirit within her, the “Publick Universal Friend,” and from that day on she used that name and would not answer to her birth name. Ezra Stiles, the former minister of a Congregational church in Newport and then the President of Yale University, succinctly described her transformation: “she died and is no more Jemima Wilkinson. But upon her restoration, which was sudden, the person of Jesus Christ came forth and now appears in her body with all the miraculous powers of the Messiah.” (Christian McBurney, Small State Big History)

The Friend quickly took to sermonizing, spreading the word divinely given to them. Announcing their miraculous rebirth and extolling the virtues of celibacy, restraint, and humility. They started to wear masculine clothing and a hat made out of a beaver pelt (T Fleischman, Time is The Thing A Body Moves Through p.74)

In this time of stark division, even the name “The Publick Universal Friend” seems outrageous and impossible. How could anything public be universal and a friend to all? And discourse on the right would also tell you that the notion that there can be anything more than two sexes is contemporary mind poison, unique to this moment of hyper-contagious thought viruses. And this is why I want to lurk in the past and dust the cobwebs off this moment of settler history. Hello from two and a half centuries ago, non-binary people are alive and well and leading movements in the colony of Rhode Island! The Friend sermonized to crowds big and small. The largest, likely in Connecticut, was delivered to upwards of 3,000 people. This might not sound that big today, but considering that at that time the population of Providence was just a bit over 4,000, and the whole state of Rhode Island had a population of less than 60,000, the reality was that in context, a lot of people were paying attention to The Public Universal Friend.

The Friend’s teachings were similar in many ways to those of the Quakers and included a philosophy based on loving-kindness to all. They preached pacifism, peaceful relationships with Native Americans, pushed their followers who owned slaves towards manumission and championed equality of the sexes at a time when women had very few legal rights.

Their faith diverged from Quakerism in that The Friend practiced Faith Healing and Dream interpretation. This all sounds pretty up and up even by today’s standards, and yet particularly when they left RI and attempted to start a commune in central NY, their group’s relations with Native Americans in practice was not as ideal as what they preached of.

In probably delusional moments I fantasize about the whole city of Providence sitting out a firework laden propagandist 1776 celebration, and instead meditating together on pacifism, tuning into visions and dreams, and riffing on lessons to be learned (or left behind) from this beaver hat wearing agender character from our Revolutionary Era past.

The Friend had numerous followers including the well-off Judge William Potter who lived in what was then called Little Rest (now Kingston). At the time the Judge was one of the most influential men in southern RI. “Judge Potter built a large addition of fourteen rooms to his house, which was called by locals “the Abbey.” This served as Wilkinson’s headquarters of operation for several years. The 1790 Rhode Island census indicates that fourteen white persons and thirteen free black persons resided on Potter’s estate.” (Christian McBurney, Small State Big History)

On the land where the Judge and The Friend lived there was a large rock in the middle of a field where supposedly The Friend would preach from time to time. For the sake of embodied research, I drove there one day and I stood on the rock, full of daydreams and anxiety about the present and tried to let the rock and frozen ground surrounding it talk to me in geologic time.

This installment of Wild Goose Chase is a little bit different. Its jumping off point is a location in Rhode Island, but not as in a town or street as I’ve written about in the past, but rather as in a collection of specific houses on the East Side of Providence. These houses have been the sites of endless stories, wild parties, the butt of jokes, an impossible dream of cooperation and collective ownership, they have provoked neighbors to keep code enforcement on speed dial, single handedly brought down property values on an uptight and hyper-gentrified street and now they are ostensibly gone in their current incarnation? Without fanfare, or much information - no official posts about their demise on the internet. Their death seems to be a first rate mystery deserving of an actual investigative journalist, of which I am not.

But I have some stories and some questions and I daydream that maybe the combination of these things could stir the interest of someone with more skills and/or resources than I have for getting to the bottom of something that smells, if not rotten, then at least like overripe co-op compost. If you are not familiar with co-op compost, let me tell you that it is powerful stuff. While living at Milhous (75 Charlesfield St) in the mid 90’s hungry rats lurking in the un-enclosed compost dug deep enough to have hit buried power lines and doing as rats do, ate them. Thus causing a power outage affecting most of Charsfield Street, including the police substation. The police had no patience for this type of antics and were furious. But who’s fault is it when the rats don’t check in with dig-safe? The police said wrong question, rats don’t make phone calls. This is why it's not worth trying to talk reason with cops. No imagination. Anyway, I say that we are talking about houses plural, but the star of this particular show is Watermyn Co-Op. Because I am a sucker for history, timelines and dot-connection please bear with the Jimmy Carter sub-plot. I’ll admit that the subplot is here to also raise the red-flag of historical relevance. Does it mean nothing that the child of the one time President famously lived in this house while failing out of school because she was protesting apartheid too fervently to focus on things like actually going to classes? Is this not a piece of Providence history worth preserving?

Without complicating lines of inquiry too much, I want to add that part of my interest in digging into this story now has to do with the efforts to organize at Atlantic Mills. The student co-ops were born out of organizing during a time of upheaval and then had a run of over 50 years, which is pretty impressive. And yet they managed to disappear without so much as a public whimper. How does this happen? What cautionary tales are to be drawn from this turn of events? How do we sustain things that our movements have struggled for in the past, and not take for granted the fruits of the radical labor of our elders that may be politically imperfect through the lenses of the present. In short, how do we maintain collective leftist projects on both material and spiritual planes? How to discern what’s worth keeping and not accidentally let the baby get thrown out with the passive solar heated bathwater?

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As a kid living in the DC suburbs in the late 70’s, we grew peanuts in the backyard in homage to the then president. I would dig in the dirt and pull up the peanuts, put them into my red wagon and walk around trying to offer them to people going to the movies. The problem was that there wasn’t anyone going to the movies in my backyard, except for me and when I talked about going to the movies, what was really going on was that I was sitting on a cinderblock under a darkish pine tree. I would sit under there for hours just spacing out and staring off into the distance, pretending to be watching movies, but really just enjoying the quiet and sometimes elaborate visions projecting from my five year old mind's eye. If you have ever wondered what the warning signs are that a child might have experimental film-maker tendencies, I offer this anecdote as cautionary tale.

At this current moment in political history it is hard to imagine thinking about American Presidents and being anything other than exhausted, fearful, and freaked out but I hold that if there was an administration to come into consciousness during, the Carter Presidency wasn’t too bad. How far we seem from a time when a peanut farmer could hold such an office, when the child of the President would go to public High School, when a politician would tell the country going through an energy crisis to turn down the thermostat and wear an extra sweater.

In reading over all of the stories about Carter’s legacy over the last month, I was reminded that his daughter went to Brown for a few years and lived in Providence. I had known this because it was part of the lore of the Brown Association for Cooperative Housing (BACH), a student run housing initiative started in 1970.

When I was a freshman at Brown in the spring of 1994, my friend Eliot & I threw our names into the hat for the housing lottery of these said Co-operatives and through luck of the draw managed to get into a room in Milhous. This was a big win for me at the time as I wasn’t doing great that freshman year. I mean grade wise I was doing fine, but I felt alienated from my classmates who seemed to have all gone to prep schools where they had become experts on the Carolingian Empire, catapults and numerous plagues.

Eliot and I were similar in various ways and were fast friends. Both of us were visible characters on campus whose idea of dressing down for breakfast at the cafeteria likely still involved eyeliner and a fur coat. But despite our flair for fashion, we were both pretty low drama and goofy. Our friendship was not at all romantic, and it had never occurred to us that there might be anything scandalous about attempting to live together as people of different genders. The Co-Ops were cheap: $800 a semester & $400 for the summer rounding it to about $170/month, which even in the mid-90’s was pretty good for Providence. Living there required being part of the vegetarian food co-op too, which was another $400/semester, but this meant that all of your food was paid for. Residents and other non-resident “food-co-opers” cooked dinner for 25 in a team of 3 about once a week, usually from a recipe from one of the many Moosewood cookbooks, which were the gold standard for vegetarian cooking at the time. At risk of sounding extremist, I have probably endured every recipe from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest at least once. I honestly don’t remember any co-op meals being inedible, but we got fresh bread delivered 3 times a week from The Daily Bread, which had a bakery on Wickenden St before the main operations were moved to Broadway in the building that now houses the spa with a logo that looks like a butt-plug. Point being, it was pretty easy to make yourself a sandwich if what was being served was god-awful.

Anyway the co-ops were cheap by design. The students who founded them were critical of the expanding reach of Brown University into the Fox Point neighborhood and the tendency of the growing student body to price out Portuguese and Cape Verdean families who had started settling in this neighborhood in the 1870s. The idea was that if there were more affordable housing options closer to Brown’s campus, this would curb the tide of displacement. In my research I found instances of BACH’s messaging that asserted that BACH was the first not-for-profit organization with an explicitly anti-gentrification mission. And while displacement concerns are clearly articulated in the original by-laws and articles of incorporation, I have no idea of how to fact check this claim. However, given that the term “gentrification” was not coined until 1964, it doesn’t seem impossible that the organization was the first to use the term in its application for not-for-profit status with the IRS in 1970.

My parents did not like the Co-Ops and thought them to be filthy drug dens, but they loved Eliot and I think were just glad that I had a friend who seemed both fun and down to earth. It probably didn’t hurt that he was a computer science major. As previously mentioned, Eliot and I both had impeccable taste, fantastic wardrobes and so it seemed obvious that the decor of our room would also be top notch.

Another perk of the co-ops was that you could do whatever you wanted with your room. We planned to paint the walls plum with avocado trim. I returned to Providence early for the fall semester to do the painting, which I was told would be fine by someone who answered the phone when I called Milhous the week before, only to find that when I got there no one knew who was in charge or where any keys were. Moving me into this scenario might have been part of what freaked my parents out. I assured them that everything would be fine. They drove me to the paint store, returned me to the big porch and bid me adieu. Then for the rest of the week, too shy to ask again about the keys, I climbed up the fire escape to get into my room. I kind of liked climbing, the only hitch was that this particular Co-Op was right next to the police substation, and could I essentially break into the building for a full week without rustling the ire of any cops? Yes, the answer was yes.

Pretty early into the semester, we got a call on our answering machine from a journalist doing a piece for the alumni magazine about students who lived in places with interesting decor. She said that she had gotten tips from multiple sources that our room was very cool, would we be willing to talk to her? Sure we said. I think that we chatted a little, but it turned out that it was mostly a photo shoot. I wore platform Chuck Taylors and a favorite thrift store dress. The article ran. My parents loved it and were starting to change their tune on the whole co-op situation, and then the response letters started to flood in. People who had graduated in the 1940’s who were scandalized that a boy and girl were living together wrote scathing hate-mail. One called us “Moral degenerates and fornacators”. A friend astutely observed, “neither of you have gotten laid all semester and now you're the poster children for sex on campus, you have to admit that it's pretty good prank”. At dinner one of the upperclassmen from the co-ops who was on the board said something to the effect of, “I don’t think that the co-ops have been in the middle of such a media controversy since the former President’s daughter was photographed sitting on buckets of tofu at Watermyn Co-Op.” And that was how I learned that Amy Carter had lived at Watermyn a little less than a decade earlier. According to my math it was likely the Fall of 1986 when Amy was a co-op member.

When I moved in, in 1994 the co-op network consisted of 3 houses: Milhous & Carberry that were rented from the University through a deal that had been brokered after the university had acquired them and 24 other buildings on a total of ten acres from Bryant College in 1969, and Watermyn, which had been bought by the student-run organization in 1971 (Watermyn, along with Milhous & Carberry had also been part of Bryant but it is unclear if the parcel was bought from Brown, or directly from Bryant College).

The late 1960’s/early 1970’s were tumultuous times on campuses everywhere and at Brown the curriculum was being radically redesigned by students for students. This approach, which for many years was called “The New Curriculum” is now simply referred to as the “The Open Curriculum”. The New Curriculum was based on a report co-authored by Ira Magaziner, whose son Seth currently represents RI in the US House of Representatives. The Co-Op experiment was part of the movement for students to have more agency and ownership over the design of their educational experience.

The sophomore year that I had spent as part of the Co-ops had been a pretty big turn-around for me. I felt like I had found my people and was ready to dig in deeper. I became the housing coordinator and thus a part of the Co-op board. Board members did administrative work, rather than say toilet cleaning or stair sweeping, though truth be told, cleaning type chores were probably blown off more often than they were actually done. The year that I joined the board was when things were getting hot and heavy with the purchase of a 4th house that at first was called Gnu-House, both because it was “new” and as a nod to the free operating system Gnu/Linux (the house was across from the Computer Science Department and at first attracted mostly CS majors.) The basic run down from 1995 was Milhous = punks, Carberry = hippies, Watermyn = lesbians, Gnuhouse = CS majors. This changed slightly year by year as the lineups in the houses shifted. At some point a bunch of residents at Gnuhaus drank too much vodka, received an out of body visitation from cosmic reindeer and were instructed by them to rename the house Finlandia. Shortly after Finlandia came on-line the University sent notice that it was terminating the leases on Milhous and Carberry. This was a huge crisis moment for a solely student run organization that was suddenly going up against a behemoth university that to a degree banked on the fact that every 4 years there would be full turnover within the student body and thus institutional memory of student-led organizations could be very short.

Of the things that I learned from in college that are relevant to my life and career today, all of them pale in comparison to the learning that came from being part of the student co-ops. I witnessed the closing of a real-estate deal being totally managed by nerdy 21 year olds, lived with kids who had grown up in Providence and gained perspective on local arts, politics, and came to know the cast of characters running the vibrant arts underground at the time. As housing coordinator I administered the housing lottery, assigned rooms (and sometimes roommates), shook people down for rent when they got behind on paying, practiced consensus decision making, was part of conflict resolution being learned in real time, had my first encounters with the Providence Department of Inspections and Standards (at the time under the leadership of a guy name Ramzi Loqa), figured out how to fix things that broke, learned about big picture concepts around cooperation, housing, not-for-profit ownership of property and with a team of about a dozen other students, organized and organized and organized our fucking brains out until we were all burnt out or dropped out or in Butler (the psych hospital) or looking longingly to live somewhere that didn’t involve daily battle with a billion dollar powerhouse institution who was always going to win from the start.

Ok that’s just the boring list. I also negotiated with residents at Finlandia who had 49 pot plants growing in a closet lined with aluminum foil, who refused to move them before a walk through with city building inspectors who they considered to be “the man”. This couple, a girl who went to Brown and her hippie boyfriend, refused to talk with us clothed. To be clear, we could wear clothing, but they insisted on being naked for the occasion of meeting with us. They also claimed to have guns and really wanted to pull them on the building inspector, rather than say, my idea, which was to move the plants to the grow closet at Milhous for the night. Ramzi Loqa was hard to deal with, but not deserving of having guns pulled on him by hippies. The Milhous closet, which was one block away, had fans and lights and their plants would be fine there for one night only. It took almost two hours of stupid conversation and being awkward about where to put my eyes before they finally agreed to box the plants up and move them in the back of my truck. What else, we put on shows in our living room that included the likes of Elliot Smith, Jason Molina, Palace and sundry local bands. I baked a lot of bread while reading a lot of Foucault. When Guy Debord died my housemate wheatpasted flyers up all over the city with the quote “Where there was fire, we carried gasoline” it was like that. Lust for life, the white hot heat of community as imagined by 1970’s vegetarian college students, interspersed with 90’s youth cultures, radicalism, a city moving through a uniquely strange time of corruption and lies and sometimes we had fucked up plumbing.

At some point as the eviction crisis loomed we started to look for help from a national organization called NASCO which stood for North American Students of Cooperation. I wasn’t on the front lines of the NASCO mission, as I was pigeonholed as someone who should be on the propaganda committee. This group had decided that we should stage a puppet show to rally our proverbial troops. I made marionettes that were way too big that puppeteers manipulated while standing on top of tables. The person doing the majority of the script writing was a serious student of experimental literature, heavily influenced by Oulipo, and so the bulk of the lines were both rhyming, and contained no instances of the letter “a” (it is also possible that his keyboard was just broken). I think the puppet show was successful on the level that outsiders came and understood better what we were up against, and we all became more invested as we brought creativity to our bullshit situation. It was decided that we should go as a group to the NASCO AGM, or Annual General Meeting. We drove there in a van reading aloud to each other from canonical texts about utopias and intentional communities. The conference was eye-opening. Many of the University Student Cooperatives had non-student paid staff, NASCO had non-student paid staff. No wonder we were so rag-tag and burnt out, but also many of these organizations were WAY bigger than we were. BACH became an official NASCO organization and got some guidance from the organization through the rough transition from running 4 co-op houses to only two.

After 2 years of living in the co-ops (one of which I was on the board) I agreed to do another semester, but I knew that I was winding down. I was burnt out on every level and also really wanted to take a semester off of school to just live and work in Providence. I had slowly been falling in love with the city, but knew that I had to be in Providence in a non-institutional way to be able to see the city from its best angles. So I got a job working on Thayer Street, settled into a new rhythm and counted how many classes I still needed to take to be done with this institution that I was growing increasingly disillusioned with as it flexed its muscle power to put the squeeze on the student co-ops. I figured that the best use of my remaining time would be to recruit new energy for the board, support rising leadership, and be clear about my timeline for stepping out. The folks who took up leadership in this time were truly geniuses. Add to the list of things that I learned from the co-ops: recruit people who are smarter than you to work with and it will make your work life better, and you might actually be able to leave out the back door when the time to transition comes.

The University took back the Milhous and Carberry buildings and then proceeded to mothball them for at least 10 years (1998-2008). My blood would boil every time I went to Louis diner (across the street from Milhous) and would see the houses just sitting there vacant. I was angry because A) the two houses could have supplied affordable housing for 500 students during that time span and B) the reason Brown University could afford to just hold property like that was because they weren’t paying property taxes on it (in 2008 Brown was making Pilot payments of only about 1.5M a year). It was bad enough that Brown was buying up real-estate left and right and not paying any taxes, but to hold onto real-estate and just sit on it, fuck that. In much of Europe this kind of housing hoarding/wasting wasn’t just looked down upon, but was actually grounds for losing your real estate (it was legal to squat in the Netherlands until 2010, and the UK until 2012).

According to the City of Providence recorder of deeds, in 2017 ownership of 166 Waterman (Watermyn Co-op) and 116 Waterman (Finlandia Co-op) changed from being owned by The Brown Association for Cooperative Housing to being NASCO owned. I’ve been trying to learn more about this transition and why it happened. This also seems to be when the organization name changes from BACH to PEACH (Providence East-Side Association of Cooperative Housing). I went to visit the BACH/PEACH archives that are now housed in Special Collections at Providence Public Library last week and couldn’t find much in the way of answers as to what happened in 2017 that prompted this change in ownership.

I did find some incredible old photos though.

And this is probably as good a time as any to mention some artists of note who lived in the cooperative houses. Barnaby Evans, the founder of Waterfire and Nina Katchadourian, who’s “Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style” charmed the art-world and internet in equal measure both lived in Carberry (though not at the same time). I found cute photos of visual artist Edie Fake and writer Joanna Ruocco in the Watermyn archives, though I am not sure that either of them lived there, but songwriter Erin McKeown for sure did. There are likely many others as well, I’m not going deep on this part of the research/storytelling.

Fast forward to the beginning of the end. A couple of years ago (mid-pandemic) it was rumored that Finlandia was being traded with landlord Walter Bronhard. For Finlandia, this local real estate titan would give the co-ops two beautiful houses that would become co-ops in the future, because Bronhard wanted to build a new multi-story building where Finlandia had been. If the name Walter Bronhard sounds familiar it could be because you rented from him at some point, as he was a pretty big Providence landlord (I say was, because during the pandemic so much Providence real estate got bought up by big national investment companies, that I don’t think we really have a grasp on what the size of a “big” landlord in Providence even is anymore). But also if the name Walter Bronhard sounds familiar it could be because you went to noise shows in Olneyville in the early 2000’s. One of the best moments in Providence noise aesthetics was naming projects or spaces after dumb local stuff that might cause confusion, such as naming a band after a shitty landlord or a DIY space The Providence Civic Center, after the actual Civic Center had gotten a name change to the Dunkin Donuts Center. The name “Civic Center” was, after all, now up for grabs. At around this time a member of the precocious high-school break-out band called Japanese Karaoke Afterlife Experiment started performing as Walter Bronhard. I could not find any digitized recording of just Walter Bronhard, but some great collaborations with Dylan Going and Dave Public as Bronhard/Going/Public are here.

In mid August 2023 my friend Jenn (who was the BACH coordinator a couple of years after I left) and I texted each other photos of Finlandia as it was being demolished, and then shared rumors that we had heard about the future new co-op houses. But by August 2024 I started to hear rumblings that the new co-ops were being liquidated, that actually Watermyn was being evicted and everything was going to be sold.

I got in touch with Jenn again and my friend Shayna, another powerhouse BACH leader of the late 90’s and in August wrote the following letter to NASCO:

Dear Staff and Board of NASCO & NASCO Properties,

We are writing to you as alumni of the entity formerly known as the Brown Association for Co-operative Housing that currently operates as PEACH. We were involved in the late 90’s when Finlandia was first purchased and placed into operations and when the university was evicting 2 leased houses (Milhouse and Carberry). The eviction crisis led us to look for support and technical assistance from NASCO. We have fond memories of attending the AGM in Ann Arbor in 1996. We have been following the sale of Finlandia and acquisition of two additional properties. With this history in mind, we were confused by news that NASCO was now evicting Watermyn coop and has plans to sell off assets in Providence. We are looking for clear information about this situation, as currently nothing public exists on your website or social media. We would also like information regarding what NASCO is doing to help relocate current PEACH residents into alternative suitable housing.

If NASCO does not have the capacity to support PEACH, we believe that the assets should be transferred to a Providence based affordable housing organization that has the capacity to keep resources for affordable housing in Rhode Island. We have been told that financial issues are part of what is motivating this decision. This is both unfortunate, and not apparent from a review of both NASCO and NASCO Properties 990’s that are publicly available. The asset to debt ratio of NASCO properties for the fiscal year ending in 2023 looks healthy.

Regardless of your organization’s financial health, we believe that a resolution of the current situation that dissolves the PEACH houses, sells the assets and takes the capital out of the local ecosystem is extractive. It is also a breach of trust invested in your organization by previous generations who invested their resources into the development of these facilities intended to be long term local affordable housing for students and residents in Providence interested in cooperative housing.

It is our understanding that residents are expected to be out of the houses soon. We hope that your organization can respond to this query before residents are expected to relocate.

Xander Marro, Jenn Steinfeld, Shayna Cohen

*************

We received no response to this correspondence, and so I did the very gen-x thing of picking up the phone and cold calling a number on the NASCO website. The person who I spoke to was aware of the email that we had sent, though seemed surprised that we had not been responded to, but quickly told me that it wasn’t actually her work hours and that she couldn’t really talk now (though I called during hours that were designated as her “office hours” on the NASCO website). There is still no information on the NASCO website or on any of their social media. The Wikipedia entry on NASCO still claims that PEACH is a member, though through the City’s deed portal I found that the 166 Waterman (Watermyn co-op) property had been sold in December 2024 for $800,000. As a not-for-profit administrator, it boggles my mind that NASCO did not have at very minimum some bland stock communication to quickly respond to our letter with - like are you so low-key that you don’t even think to get out ahead on damage control when doing something potentially controversial like liquidating the assets of a member co-op?

My estimate is that the combined value of the assets that NASCO is selling off in Providence is in the range of 4 million dollars (166 Waterman: 800k, 169 Waterman:1.6M, 400 Angel St: 1.4M) From looking at 990’s (publicly accessible not-for-profit tax filings) it seems like the value of their whole portfolio is only about 6 million dollars. This raises A LOT of questions, both practical and ethical. The main practical question is, how much capital had NASCO properties actually sunk into Providence? The ethical question is, if a mission based national financial organization puts x amount of dollars into an organization in Providence, those assets appreciate, and they then sell them for 100 times what they initially invested is this usury? Is it ok if they’re planning on using the funds to do “mission” work in other places? It is entirely likely that there are ways in which PEACH was not holding up various parts of basic deals. But did the punishment (complete divestment & the taking away of all resources) fit the crimes?

While I obviously have a fondness for these co-ops, don’t like seeing affordable housing in Providence sold out and am not an entirely neutral party, I’m not wound up in the heat of the situation. Through various day-jobs and community work in housing, I’ve seen a lot over the years. Including dynamics where the froth of the big money of real-estate and the values based idealism of mission based leftist organizations collide in volatile ways. From this vantage point there are a couple of obvious issues that come forth in the NASCO/PEACH situation. The most glaringly problematic thing going on is that NASCO as a not-for-profit organization is in the business of educating, providing technical assistance and helping their member organizations to succeed. While its related business entity NASCO Properties, as a real estate development entity has a lot to gain if an equity rich affiliate fails. This conflict of interest is shitty, but it's probably not actually illegal.

My sense is that PEACH had zero in the way of legal standing once the deeds went into the NASCO name. But why would PEACH have given over so much equity? Tax records indicate (and an informal conversation with a former member backs up) that in 2016 (then BACH) got behind on property taxes and Watermyn was going to go up for tax auction if the tax bill wasn’t paid. NASCO came to the rescue with the money needed to pay the taxes - the buildings at this time were worth at least a million dollars together, but NASCO ended up with both deeds in its name for 50k. So there was a crisis, but also absolute trust that aligning with this national organization would help with expertise and the management issues that had gotten the co-ops into this place.

Interview with the chickens living in the Watermyn backyard (the co-op coop)

Wild Goose Chase (WGC): Hi, its nice to be talking with you bird to bird, can you introduce yourselves and tell our readers what kind of ducks you are?

Hennifer: Thanks so much for talking with us. First of all we’re actually chickens, Rhode Island Reds to be specific. Next,everyone is pretty much dead except for me, but they’ve agreed to join this interview as ghosts, so this is really a very special conversation. Coming to us from the other side are Dots and Valerie who were taken out by hawks, Biscuit who got kicked like a soccer ball by a random sociopath walking by our coop, Doorknob was was bullied by Esther who pecked at her butt and then it got necrotized, and then there is Esther who got hers from a cat.

WGC: wow, that’s a lot of history right there, you’ve taken us through the story of the downfall of the coop so directly, I wonder if you might be able to take us through the story of the downfall of the co-op with the same kind of candor?

Dots: Yeah, chickens get a bad rep for fucking around, endlessly crossing the road or what have you, but I can assure you, we can give it strait like the best of them.

WGC: When would you say that the beginning of the end was? Was COVID really hard? Was there fowl play?

Biscuit: I’m going to mostly ignore your fowl play question, we’re always playing, and always dead serious. Anyway things started to decline well before COVID, maybe starting around 2016, there was a crew who lived at the house who just didn’t pay rent. 3-5 people coming and going over 3-5 years each who just didn’t pay at all. We were here doing our part popping out eggs every fucking day, but you know humans can really get weird when it comes to distributing labor and resources and the like. Everyone liked the people not paying rent. I don’t know what was really going on

WGC: huh, that’s interesting so even though their actions had the potential to tank the whole co-op project no one got mad at them or asked them to leave?

Valerie: Exactly. I don’t know what the humans were thinking, but Brown University is a weird place where some young people’s families have so much money, and the people not paying rent didn’t have money, and it probably just made sense that someone with more money would figure it out or take care of it eventually.

Biscuit: it is not confusing to me how the other people cohabitating with people not paying rent who they liked, a student housing coordinator per-se, might not willingly jump into the role of enforcer and take action to evict people who were otherwise in good standing, who were otherwise friends. Once NASCO was in the loop it was assumed that they would help manage these kinds of issues. No one wanted to be the man, no one was getting paid to be the man, nothing made it worth it to be the man, and when you are taking housing away from someone who needs it, it is hard to not be seen, or to see oneself as the man.

Doorknob: Yeah, just like no one in the coop wanted to be the enforcer when Ester was pecking at my butt

Esther: I see now that I should have taken more lessons from the people living in the co-op about hierarchy, but I felt deeply embedded ancestral urges to establish myself in the pecking order. I’m so sorry for how my actions hurt you, Doorknob.

Doorknob: Apology accepted Esther even though you basically killed me.

Hennifer: The Co-ops were an interesting and practical learning experiment in non-hierarchy and collaboration, but they were born of an era before the nuances of “equitable” and “equal” were hashed out in hundreds of memes on the internet. My guess is that cultural growth on some of these fronts outpaced structural growth inside of the organization which left interpersonal relationships in a limbo leading to residents who didn’t fully respect or buy into the project. Its a lot of work to keep up with the times. And people need transparency not just about finances, but also about how the finances tie into core values to put work into a project like this.

WGC: That’s a really astute comment Hennifer. Rifts between the idealism/openness of intentional communities and problems with individuals who put their needs front and center without worry for the impact on the group are as old as intentional communities themselves.

Doorknob: Yeah, It can at times feel like intentional communities who are forced out of existence by an external force are lucky in comparison to ones pushed over the brink by the heartbreak of falling apart to forces on the inside. In the end it seems hard to say exactly which camp BACH/PEACH fell into. There was a ton of “grey” in the situation with the group who didn’t pay rent, and in general they were beloved and considered positive co-op participants outside of the rent situation. But a couple of years later there was a ÷person who was straight up embezzling, which, even in Rhode Island, is not so much a moral/legal grey area.

WGC: Wow, ok Doorknob, you just kind of dropped a bomb, embezzling eh?

Doorknob: Well you told us to be direct.

WGC: I appreciate you, Doorknob. Wrap up question, how are you all feeling about 2025?

Hennifer: Both totally fucked and powerful. Bird Flu is raging and we’re all going to die, but we’ve got the economy by the balls or huevos as they say in Mexico.

WGC: Aren’t most of you already dead?

Dots: Well we’re going to double die. Eggs are going to cost $8 a dozen and everyone who processes poultry is going to be deported, so there’s a good chance that chickens are going to be talked about a lot this year, which is fine. The more time people are talking about chickens, the less they can be eating chicken just based on a basic can’t talk and chew at the same time logic.

******************

I’ve been struggling to write a conclusion that neatly ties together the threads of this story. If you’ve been able to get to the end of this piece I feel that I owe you something useful for your patience and willingness to roll with wildly different components and approaches to telling this tale. Mostly what I’m feeling however is that there’s suddenly a lot of work to do right now. Every few hours for the past few days a text message has rolled in from a different friend who has had a realization about a way that their life is already being fucked with and being made harder by this administration: a passport issue, a green card issue, medicaid insecurity. I’m sad to see the Providence Co-op’s go, particularly Watermyn with all of its history. I wish that NASCO had handled the situation differently, but in the big picture, it's undeniable that what NASCO does, is decent, vital, probably often thankless work. I hope that NASCO takes very seriously all of the love, labor, wildness and care that went into building up the assets that they cashed out of Providence, and uses them in a thoughtful strategic manner that benefits a lot of people digging into cooperative experiments in other places, and that maybe they still consider investing some of it back into Providence.

I knew what I didn’t want, which was hot takes. The news would be full of them, social media would also overfloweth, fingers would point, data points would sing. But I have grieved enough to know that when your heart is broken, explanations sound like excuses and reason offers little in the way of balm. Others might want the hot takes, and I would be happy for people to take all of the takes that they needed. But I needed to leave them be. 

The thing that I could feel in my stomach was that the majority of this country was mean and hateful, or at best had talked themselves into believing that letting pass all of the specific manifestations of this meanness (i.e. the blatant racism and misogyny and lets not even speak of the cruel mockery of the disabled) by the president elect was in their best interest.  The belly of the news-media would digest it all around the clock and belch out theories into the dark of night. Pundits, posters, public officials and political analysts would be typing away speculating that it was male anger or Palestine or the Dem swerve to the right or not playing to the base on the left enough, or the fault of xyz demographic, or the cursed alignment of stars in the cosmos. I am not generally anti-analysis, but this was all sports radio in the background to me, describing the mechanistic details of a game that I could only appreciate as broad movements of bodies. 

The day after the election was also unfathomably beautiful in Rhode Island, if it was possible to believe that afternoons in America could still be beautiful. I had a lot of Fall planted bulbs to get into the ground at the place where I work: alliums, astilbe, anemone and asiatic lilies. And so I let the sun hit the back of my neck as I pushed away thoughts about all of the opinions that I didn’t want to hear. A friend and the college class that she was teaching would be coming in a couple of hours and we would need to give a tour to students - the same tour that we have given hundreds of times, so it shouldn’t be hard, but in the meantime, I could dig in the dirt, and this I speculated would be grounding. And then time got away from me and suddenly I realized that a gaggle of college students were behind me as I was stabbing the earth obsessively with a trowel in the guise of planting bulbs. From afar my activities might have passed as gardening, but up close, there was no denying that I was absolutely foaming and rabid and holding the trowel as one might a dagger. I stood up and tried to brush it off. “Just working through some feelings” I said jokingly.  And that is fine. I am fine with goofing about talking about emotions, but also I think that it's a politically ok place to spend time these days -- in emotion. After months of strategy and news cycle roller coasters and endless robot text messages from every politician telling you about some matching fund scheme, experiencing defeat of this magnitude on a visceral level is a reasonable way of moving through time. Like a mole underground learning its new environment through the dampness hitting its whiskers, I want to let myself feel my way through this new reality rather than make a mad rush to understand it. 

 I know that I am not going to be the first to be hit by the repercussions of where we’re headed as a nation, but I have little doubt in my heart that a wide variety of people, including those who I love will suffer. The years of the first Trump administration were not easy years in my world. I was working at a burnout clip on an overwhelmingly large project renovating the Wedding Cake House, which meant endless days of being filthy and for half of the year very cold. Between 2016 and 2020 a record number of people in my world died and it felt like I was stumbling around in a haze of grief. Some of these deaths were just passings that happened to occur during those years, but at least half were deaths of despair. Deaths that might not have happened if making ends meet with dignity didn’t seem so hard, if less homophobia/transphobia was spewed on the airwaves, if there were more safety nets, if policies didn’t make poor people feel like there were no options for them in this world, if being marginal in anyway was not an endless uphill battle both psychically and materially with few glimmers of hope.  

Before the election I had started writing about corn cakes, specifically RI Jonnycakes and had visited Kenyon’s mill in Usquepaug. Jonnycakes have been the subject of fierce debates in Rhode Island’s past, and I have been meditating on the value of low stakes fierce debates in civic life as a way of safely practicing at the conflict and disagreement that are an inherent part of community life. Are low stakes debates still possible in 2024, or have all stakes become inescapably too high in all ways for people to debate formerly banal things like if goose fat is the best thing to fry jonnycakes in, or if goose fat, is in fact too disgusting, bougie, alienating to vegetarians and where do you even get it*,to be the subject of a conversation that does not go off the rails? 

It is likely not the most important thing to think about right now, but I have written about my experiences with corn cakes as an offering to this moment in time, or maybe as a distraction from this moment in time. And also because I think that they are superbly delicious. 

On October 4th I went to Usquepaug RI, land of cornmeal and the following is my report, bracketed, as is my way, with a good deal of meandering through semi-related stories. My aim in this Substack is not to get into the classic myths and legends of Rhode Island, but about a year ago I started to feel the pull of the Johnny Cake (you may note that my spelling is inconsistent - “Johnny Cake” is the most common spelling “jonnycake” is the uniquely RI arrangement of letters). As most of you know, my day job is in arts administration, but given the world that we live in, this also means having an organizational side-hustle to make ends meet, and ours is running a Bed and Breakfast when our 2nd facility, The Wedding Cake House, is not used for hosting Artists Residencies. People hear B&B these days and their mind goes to the Air variety, however we are actually a regular old quaint B&B and by right of this legally required to serve breakfast to all of our guests who would like it. This might sound like fun, but let me tell you, keeping up with banana inventory is a fucked up ride. 

When I first imagined making breakfast for guests at the Wedding Cake House, I thought that we’d do something buffet style in the dining room and serve dreamy fluffy wedding-type layer cakes for breakfast. Not a normal breakfast food, but cake would be thematically relevant and perfectly decadent for a vacation and we could balance it by serving all you can eat steamed greens. In some ways this might characterize my delusions to a tee: believing that there is a general population that would be charmed by the dazzle of artistically frosted breakfast cake, and want to eat it alongside a heaping pile of kale topped with lemon and seeds. My nature relishes in finding balance in extremes particularly as it relates to the aesthetics of  corrupt and over the top sugar infested nightmare confection of cake and the simple yet magical healthiness of a giant bowl of steamed greens. However, it did not take much time to realize that most people just want toast and eggs and, like maybe a piece of fruit. Also we opened during covid, so there was no “buffeting”. We put together a breakfast menu as a form that people could fill out and have breakfast delivered to their room. It was pretty basic: hot beverages, muesli, fruit, yogurt, vegan yogurt, hard boiled eggs. 

It worked pretty well for a while, but then our reviews started popping off, and there was more demand, and suddenly we were selling rooms at a higher price point, and our reviews were mostly still pretty good, but occasionally people would complain about how we didn’t have T.V.s or toast. The T.V. complainers could go fuck themselves, we made clear that we didn’t have T.V.s - read the description and go somewhere else if you need a room with a big screen, but it did seem reasonable that we should be serving some other breakfast items. 

As Rhode Island has a few regional delicacies that are virtually unknown in other part of the world, we had the idea of serving “basic continental breakfast” items, alongside of a “Rhode Island Menu” this would obviously include coffee milk, pizza strips and cider donuts, and it seemed like it should also include jonnycakes, so I began researching the humble RI corncake. And then whoop, down the rabbit hole, I fell! I started to back away from believing that we should serve jonnycakes however, because one loose 5 year old and a jar of syrup can spell disaster like few other things in a Victorian mansion. I have a real aversion to the sticky. So we ended up going with Portuguese sweet bread toast, but still my brain was infected with the worm of knowledge about corn cake controversies, and so dear friends, I am here to unpack all of it with you and to tell you about going to the grindstone itself in Usquepaug, an unassuming hamlet supposedly split between Richmond and South Kingston. 

How big is Usquepaug? Unknown -  a couple of streets maybe? It has been difficult to find any map based delineation, however it was pretty easy to find the Kenyon’s mill. Supposedly at the height of the hamlet’s boom times, in 1865 the population hit 165. Then in 1866 the village’s largest mill burned down and was never rebuilt and the village has been declining in population ever since. A 1986 LA Times article placed the population at 35. However, in the same article it also quoted a supposed mail carrier working in Quonochontaug RI as a man named Ronald McDonald, so I’m taking all of the information in this piece with a grain of salt. In said article Paul Drumm Jr, the then owner/operator of Kenyon’s Grist Mill explains that: 

Usquepaug is an Indian word borrowed from the Scottish-Gaelic word for whiskey. He reached into a cabinet and brought out a bottle of Tullamore Dew Irish whiskey. On the back were the words Uisge Baugh, meaning water of life or whiskey. “The Indian version of Uisge Baugh was Wowoskepog, which became Usquepaug. So, however you figure it, Usquepaug, Rhode Island means Whiskey, Rhode Island,” he said.

I’m honestly a bit confused by this explanation. It should be noted that there is also a native group that calls itself the Usquepaug Nahantick Nahaganset Tribe, that was seeking state recognition in 2018. They have a very nice flag, but information beyond this is hard to gleen. A basic google search of the name predominately turns up a statement from Narragansett Tribal leader Sachem Anthony Dean Stanton addressing the issue of “splinter groups and social clubs”

I have a distinct memory of the first time that I read the Kenyon’s Corn Meal box. It was the late 90’s and my friend Beatrice and I were goofing off, laughing, squabbling and making corn cakes in her apartment, or maybe it was my apartment. It was always hard to tell, because her apartment was right next to my apartment and joined by a back hallway. It was in the Summer Street Compound that artists had been living in since the 1970’s. 

I had been living in 556 Atwells, another artist compound, but in the spring of ‘98 I knew that it was time to move out and so I rode my bicycle around endlessly looking for a place. I include this part in the story, because most of how I’ve found places to live has involved obsessive wandering, which is a pleasure in its own right. I would ride my bike down every street and take notes on all of the various former factory buildings. After a few weeks of this, I had some leads and knew the city far better, but I still hadn’t found a place. But then magically I was riding down a street at the edge of where South Providence meets Downtown and I saw some older artist/contractor types that I knew moving in and asked them if they had the landlord's number. I wrote it down, called the guy and the next day met him in the parking lot. He was very kind, but also about 90 years old. He knew that he had some open units, but we spent about an hour going through his box of keys and none of them seemed to work on the unit that he knew was empty. What to do when the landlord is too disorganized  to find the keys to the apartment? I had no idea, but I decided to sit down across the street and draw for a while. Eventually someone leaving the building noticed me and asked what I was doing. I told him the story. He laughed and said, “yeah, John (the landlord), is a great old guy, very fit and active for his age, but some pieces are starting to not add up”. Then he said, “I’ve got way more space than I need, I’ve got the whole 4th floor, I’ve been thinking of breaking it up and subletting, want to check it out?” “Sure”, I said. We rode the freight elevator up to the 4th floor. It was truly an awe inspiring amount of space with giant windows on both sides and about 30 motorcycles in various states of repair glimmering in the afternoon light that spilled in through the west facing windows. It was true that there was a whole section to the South that was totally empty. He offered that he was a contractor and could throw some drywall up pretty fast to section it out, and there was another staircase on the South side so I could come and go without needing to go through his space, it just might take a little while though to get a bathroom and kitchen figured out, but I could use his in the meantime. He also mentioned that he was shooting a pin-up calendar called “Real Women, Real Bikes”. It was like a classic nudie motorcycle calendar but the concept being that the bikes and women included were “real” i.e. all ages, body shapes and walks of life - the motorcycles not just those fresh off of the factory floor, and the black and white photography would be artful. “Sounds cool” I said. 

The next day I got a call from the landlord. He had heard that Richard (the motorcycle guy) and I had talked, and he wanted to let me know that he didn’t approve of me living with Richard. He’s twice your age and takes nude photographs he told me point blank. I told him that I knew both of these things, that the plan was not to live together, but rather to break up the 4th floor, and that I could handle myself thank you very much, but I also mentioned that perhaps we could try again to get into the apartment that he couldn’t find the key to through the back door? 

Then later that day Richard called and asked if I’d be in his calendar for $100. I told him that my parents would kill me if I was in a nude calendar, but that my best friend was very beautiful and might be into it; I gave him her number. 

Eventually the 90 year old landlord & I broke into the apartment's back door with a crowbar. The rear door was a cheap hollow core interior door and after prying it open, it never worked quite right, but so long as the exterior door stayed locked it was fine. The landlord asked how much I wanted to pay for the apartment. I told him $300 dollars. He said that the last tenants had paid $400. I said, well they were a couple and I’m just one person and Richard said that he’d sublet for $200. So he said $300 would be ok, but I had to figure out putting in new locks and keys. My best-friend did the calendar, as did a friend of mine’s mom. It was all class and supposedly Jay Leno bought a ton of them to give out as holiday gifts that year. I painted the walls of the apartment silver with gloss black trim, and then I built a narrow loft that was 16’ long and 4’ wide, which I’ve heard was how the apartment stayed for the next 25 years until the building was evicted en masse in the middle of the pandemic. 

After living there for about a year one night I was hanging out with Bea and the crew from the apartment in the back who were mostly all from South County and fresh out of URI. We were musing on how there were three interior doors in my back hall, but we only knew where two of them went. I had a crush on a kid who was part of that crew who wore thick glasses and probably in a plot to impress him, in an act of sheer bravado I attempted to kick in the door karate style. To my own shock and amazement, it actually worked and voila there was a whole secret empty apartment that Bea could live in. She called the landlord and said that she wanted the apartment, but that he didn’t have to worry about finding the keys. It was small and only had one window, but it had a bathtub, which I did not have, so between the two of us, we had a pretty ideal little compound. 

And so it was there that we were getting into it with a griddle and corn meal and I had this bread book open to a recipe that had said to boil the water first, but Bea wanted the jonnycakes to be thin and with apples. And so the aforementioned giggling and squabbling persisted.

 The book that I had was The Garden Way Bread Book, published in 1979 by Garden Way Publishing which was a back-to-the-land how-to enterprise. I note this because there’s still a lot that I want to unpack about this movement. It feels intimately connected to some DIY threads and values that are important to me, but there’s an aspect to it all that feels escapist, white-flighty, and maybe a little like cos-playing in search of a simpler time, which feels all too relevant in this current political moment - we don’t talk often of commonalities between Hippies and Maga-hats, as the times defining them are so vastly different, and yet some common threads, such as a looking backwards with longing, are there in plain sight. I had (and still have) this cookbook, which is set up like an almanac, offering different bread recipes for each month. I have held onto it, both because who does not want a hippie bread cookbook from the 70’s, but also because it features a photograph of my parents holding up loaves of home-made french bread in celebration of Bastille day. My parents, who had grown up in Vermont and gone to a lot of trouble to figure out how to get out of the state and transcend some of the economic limitations of small town life, had a complicated relationship with people moving from cities often with resources to Vermont in pursuit of old fashioned living. There is a long history of discomfort with settlers of various forms in New England: a tension between how someone with resources from afar might change ways of life for better or worse. The question seems to be if the risk is worth the bestowing of trust: if I treat this person as a complex human, will they in turn show me the same respect and consideration, or does their positionality in relation to resources always already make them predestined to betray my humanity. The economic possibilities for someone living in rural areas are so vastly different from urban, small city vs. big city, and so on. When I’ve been close to these dynamics, its hard to not see them as colonial in nature, but perhaps that is just because power differentials across land are so marked by colonization that it is ever present. I imagine an economic meteorologic map of America would read like hundreds of colonial micro-climates full of corresponding resentments and curiosities. Has the original sin of the betrayal of Native peoples contaminated all of the soil and the rocky terrain of our hearts and broken our potential to meet each other across varying relationships to power where geography intermingles with wealth gaps? Could the election results read as tea leaves mimicking a discombobulated class war? I push this questioning out of my train of thought. I’m still not ready for it. 

And so I think about corn. Or to be more specific corn cakes. Or to be even more specific Johnny cakes. Or to be Rhode Island specific spelled as one word with no “h”:  jonnycakes also possibly Journey cakes, or Shawnee cakes. Made by the Narragansetts probably going back into the 1400s or before, but who really knows. Could early settlers in Rhode Island have gotten through the winter without them, probably not but who really knows? 

I don’t remember what had gotten Beatrice and I deciding to make jonnycakes that day, but we could be like that. One of us having a weird idea and the other getting really excited about it, propping each other up and egging each other on. Her boyfriend Mike was hanging out with us that day and it seemed a bit unusual that he wasn’t joining in on the discussion of how to cook these things. One of Mike's core charms was that he had opinions. Even if he didn’t really have opinions, he’d quickly form them on pretty much anything as almost an ethic of social engagement. But he just sat quietly to the side being vaguely amused by our antics. Finally I think I directly asked him, “What to you think, add boiling water?” He said, “we should probably look at the box and see what it has to say”. This was an interesting and logical suggestion, but also slightly suspicious as Mike was not the kind of person to bow to the authority of like, packaging.  

And then, there it was, in blue type on white chipboard it read “As all Rhode Islander’s will agree, there is only one correct recipe -- and that is their own!”. I stood flabbergasted for a moment. Were Beatrice and I the butts of a practical joke hundreds of years in the making? Are Rhode Islanders really so wild-willed that no singular recipe could unite them all?  Could anything be more decent than a live and let live neighborly approach to the crafting of corn cakes? Could more meaningful disagreement be diffused by low-stakes controversy over fried mush? Mike stood with a grin on his face like a 6 year old kid who has successfully not spilled the beans about a surprise party. 

So we agreed to disagree and made multiple batches, one thin with apples, and another batch of thick ones made with boiling water. They’re totally different beasts, one a dessert vibe, the other I like to describe as if Keebler elves made a soft batch cookie version of Fritos.  

So what is at the heart of the Jonny Cake controversy? Well, some might say that it is the oil. And some might say that it is the approach (thin and large or small and puffy) but the most persistent controversy has to do with the recipe, and since it is basically a one ingredient concoction, we’re clearly getting real specific, and we’re talking about the kind of corn used. There is a faction that believes that unless a jonnycake is made out of heirloom Narragansett white cap flint corn, then it is not a proper RI Jonnycake. Purity can often be a trap. White cap flint corn has less rows per ear and less ears per stalk than almost all of the corn that is commercially grown today. Many strains of corn that were grown in North America before colonization have not made it into this era, but the insistence on using this corn for Jonnycakes has meant that a variation of the original is still out there today. Its worth noting that seeds are always slightly morphing and changing - they are not reproduced by mechanical means, so the relationship between the copy and the original has the potential for some chaos each year and multiply that by hundreds of years, and of course it can not be said that the white cap flint corn is the same as that of 400 years ago. Just as the oak trees that grow on this land today are not the same as the oak trees that grew 400 years ago. Ecosystems change and flora and fauna adapt and change with it. At the grist mill the man showing us the grind stones told us that there was an initiative at URI to try to breed the corn to be more like how it was pre-colonization.  I am charmed by this but also struck by the irony of yet another variation on looking for authenticity by trying to recreate a relic of a past time in this land. 

The grindstones themselves were a thing to see, but really the magic of a “tour” like this of a site that is both functional and totally historic,  is to hear the stories of people who have devoted their lives to maintaining the businesses and places that preserve some sense of our imagined collective past. The man, who I am guessing was maybe a grandson of Paul Drumm Jr (quoted above) was a bit like I had imagined, capable of shifting gears from selling things at the gift shop to being the handyman and running the mill, to packing boxes, dealing with the kayak rental side business that they run on the river that once powered the mill, and then back to being a story-teller. He brought more Native history than I had expected into his spiel and explained that, people always think that it took settlers to come to mechanize the grinding of corn and to use technology to take labor out of agricultural processing, but that the native people had their own technology, they weren’t just smashing corn up entirely by hand in a mortar and pestle day and night. They often tied the pestle up to a branch of a tree so that human labor was used to bring the pestle down, but the branch and its endless springy-ness growing towards light, provided the labor of lifting the pestle up. 

For a long time Kenyon’s mill hosted a Jonnycake festival, but it got put on hold when Paul Drumm Jr. passed away, and the hold carried over for a number of years and now its been almost a decade. I asked about it and somehow we got to talking about RI Commerce Corp and the man told us that Kenyon’s does not do business with Commerce Corp. And this felt almost full circle. If you talk to anyone with a small business in Rhode Island, eventually, likely they will tell you if they love or hate RI Commerce Corp. It is unlikely that this is as low-stakes as liking your Jonnycakes thick or thin, but as something that Rhode Islanders have opinions about it might be as ubiquitous. I said that I hoped that the festival would make a comeback, and left with both the classic Kenyon’s Johnny Cake mix, and a bag of heirloom Narragansett white cap flint corn. I feel a little like I’m make-believe living in another era when I cook them up (which I see as a semi-dangerous gate-way drug to nostalgia, which in turn is an ingredient in the bat-shit delusional thinking involved with making things great again) but these corn cakes are too delicious to overthink. I make them thick with boiling water, my recipe is a slight deviation from the classic so I’m writing it out below. I mostly like them savory with a big pile of greens, but occasionally I’ll have them with a little syrup or maybe some strawberry jam. 

**************************************

Recipe: 

Put water on to boil

If you want to be an ultra purist heat up a cast iron pot that nobody has ever cleaned with soap (kidding not kidding) - if you are less interested in historical reenactment feel free to use whatever non-stick skillet you like best

Measure a cup of Jonnycake cornmeal

Add 1tsp salt & 1tsp baking soda - some people add 1tsp sugar, but I am not one of these people - that’s it - mix the powders together 

Add 1 and a quarter cups boiling water, 1tsp of lemon juice, stir, and let it sit for a minute

I usually use olive oil, but freak what you feel when it comes to the fat - if you love bacon grease, well, its your arteries friend

Use a big soup spoon to scoop out the dough/batter onto your pan. Some people swear by a let them sit for 6 minutes before you touch them and/or flip them over approach, I think that if you’re using a more modern pan, this doesn’t matter as much. I’d say that I probably do about 5 minutes on each side

* It is not suggested that you acquire goose fat by wildly chasing geese, however it can not be fully discarded as an option.

Further Reading:

ECO RI Oct 10 2024: https://ecori.org/the-deep-indigenous-roots-of-rhode-island-corn/

Yankee Jan 2022: https://newengland.com/yankee/history/rhode-island-jonnycakes/

NY Times July 1981

NY Times June 1999

I can imagine that one or two people who know me really well, will be like Xander, you’re starting this Wild Goose Chase thing with Point Judith because of the Jandek song about Point Judith, and those people would not be wrong. It's too fitting to resist really, an artist who for decades went far out of his way to be unfindable, unknown, anti-famous, a wild goose chase in his own right. A code written in meticulously untuned guitars and it is low tide and there are diamonds in the ocean. (Italics are the lyrics of his song Point Judith) The word ocean as he sings it, both a crashing wave and a whisper.  Sometimes referred to as the most enigmatic musician of the college radio era, for a long time Jandek’s identity was shrouded and hiding in plain sight. The stuff of pre-internet legend. This man who put photos of himself on his album covers, but still managed to be unfindable. Perhaps because the only people who were really interested in looking were also invested in obscurity and privacy and the unrealized potential of being a prolific artist and mostly unknown. Little waves spill over little rocks. You can peel off mica from the rocks as it shines like smooth silver.  There’s a lighthouse in the distance, but it's all so quiet, that why disturb the silence.  

The song Point Judith shows up on the second Jandek album Six and Six, which came out in 1981. And Point Judith Gets mentioned again in the song Ghost Town by the Sea, which is on Graven Images which came out in 1994. All of Jandek’s musical output and mailings originate in Houston, Texas. Yet, it's clear that he is talking about Point Judith, Rhode Island, so this begs the question, what was Jandek doing in Rhode Island in the late 70’s or early 80’s and maybe again in the 90’s? Most Jandek songs are clearly one guy alone in a room with a 4 track or something. But then there’s the song “Nancy Sings” featuring a beautiful woman’s voice. For a while in Rhode Island there’s been a rumor going around that Nancy taught at Classical High School in Providence. I don’t know how it started, but it feels like a good myth to hang in the air. But also if you have any intel on this matter, please slide it right into my DMs. 

Point Judith for political and demographic purposes is part of the town of Narragansett. The town of Narragansett obviously gets its name from the Narragansett people who lived in the area before colonization. There are five members of the Narragansett town council. The year round population of Narragansett is about 15,000, but in the summer it balloons to about 34,000. Of the around 15,000 year round residents 72 are Native, 190 are Asian, 82 Black….in short, according to the 2020 census, it's about 92% white, whereas RI as a whole is 72% white. I tell you this not just because as an arts administrator I’m trained to incorporate data and organizational structure into the storytelling that I engage with most often (grant reports and applications), but for other reasons as well. For example the part about the town council, that’s foreshadowing, and the part about non-urban areas in Rhode Island being much whiter than the urban, that might be foreshadowing too, but it's also something that I think will come up over and over as I goose chase into various parts of the state. 

Go away in the moonlight and

Bring back a starfish

Settle back easy and

Make up your mind to stay

I've earned a fortune and

There's not much more to say

I'm livin' easy

As smooth as silk these days

I see that you're fearful

Haven't changed your ways

Settle back easy and

Make up your mind to stay

The country's cleaner and

I've earned a fortune and

You don't have to pay

Just settle back easy and

Make up your mind to stay

The day that I came down with COVID I had spent the early morning surfing off of Conent Ave in Point Judith. For most of the morning it was just me and an older guy on a longboard. He was chatty and philosophical and happy to impart tips for evading rocks. “Its a church, surfing is”, he told me. I knew what he meant. To the extent that words have meaning at all when meditating on glistening waves. Perhaps it’s overly obvious to say that the ocean is vast and many different things: habitat for wild and strange creatures, the origin of life on the planet, the majority of what covers the earth. But from the places that I’ve experienced the ocean the most: near to shore and in small boats and dinghies, I’ve always carried a sense it is also a graveyard.  

There is much to affirm this feeling in Point Judith. Many ships have come to grief in the waters just beyond the lighthouse. If you’re intrigued and want to go deep, you can access a complete list of marine disasters in Rhode Island at the website/database hosted by the Beavertail Lighthouse Museum Association. But if you just want a glimpse at the ships that have sunk or otherwise around Point Judith, I’ve put something together below. Name of vessel, vessel type, homeport, event date, event cause, event type, owner, status, master, cargo. It is just the C’s because Confidence and Centipede and Chickenpox are poetry without any help. Total loss in the fog. Got off. Snowstorm, sunk, stranding.

This list does not include the sunken ship off of the coast of Point Judith that has captured my imagination the most, which is the German U-boat simply named U-853. Its story is strange and has a number of plot twists, including some classic Rhode Island grift. The fact that I find myself interested in this story, popularly referred to as the Battle of Point Judith has surprised me. As a child of history interested parents I was dragged around to a lot of so-called historical sites. One year rather than visit family for Christmas we camped out at colonial Williamsburg. I occasionally was captivated by these places if the outfits people wore were interesting enough, but few things disappointed me as much as outings involving the phrase “The battle of”.  Please let me sleep in the car. I can not take another fucking rusty cannon. 

The Battle of Point Judith, however, as far as I know, has only a plaque at the Point Judith Light House and no major relics that children get dragged around to. And part of what is so interesting to me about it is that it happened after Hitler had suicided and after the president of the German Reich had ordered all U-boats to cease attacks. In essence after Germany had officially come off of the offensive. So it was quite surprising when a 5,000 pound cargo ship off of Point Judith had it’s stern blown off by a lurking U-boat emerging from the depths on May 5th 1945 and sank in 15 minutes - had the captain of the German submarine not gotten the message, or had he gone rogue? 11 crewmen and 1 Navy guard died on the attacked cargo ship, 34 others were rescued by nearby vessels. US warships that happened to be on route from NY to Boston got the news and were put on a search and destroy mission. It was a 17 hour manhunt involving 264 hedgehog bombs and 95 depth charges. 54 members of the submarine’s crew died including the ship's captain who was only 24 years old and 6 foot 4 inches, which seems entirely too tall for someone living in a submarine. These 54 men, sometimes referred to as Nazi’s, other times referred to as sailors in the service of the German Reich are still inside of the submarine which is located on the seafloor about 8 miles east of Block Island. Or more precisely their remains are still inside of the submarine. 1 man escaped, but died shortly after and is buried in Newport.  

There are videos online of scuba dives to the sunken submarine, many of which have debates in the comment sections regarding the ethics of entering what is essentially a war grave. But the most bizarre ethical component to this story is detailed by Varoujan Karentz in his article on the Small State Big History blog.  

Karentz writes about coming across some propellers in the brush on some land owned by the Castle Hill Inn in Newport. He writes nonchalantly about walking through some overgrowth and nearly stumbling across the objects. He then photographs them, has a friend who works at Raytheon identify them as indeed coming off of U-853, and gets his lawyer son on the task of figuring out who has rights to these pieces of history. The backstory that he uncovers is basically that in 1953 a deep sea scrapper type from Florida had a plan to recover tanks filled with mercury from the sunken submarine supposedly worth a million dollars even back in the day. He hired a fishing boat out of Newport to help with the haul, but couldn’t get the tanks out. Perhaps to cut his losses he struck a deal and through some sketchy back channel a guy who owned this Newport Inn ended up in possession of them. He stashed them in the woods behind the Inn for over 50 years. Karentz wanted the propellers to be loaned to the Beavertail Lighthouse Museum, an organization that he was on the board of. He writes letters that reference international law, stolen goods etc. but at the same time the German government is catching wind of all of this and there is a growing sense in Germany that “thrill seeking divers are grave plundering as leisure entertainment” . A deal is struck by a relative of the guy who stashed the propellers in the woods and the German government and the relics are given to the Naval War College in Newport. Karentz eventually writes about all of this and does some additional research about all of the other stuff looted off of the sunken boat. As I perhaps alluded to, military history is not at all my thing, but brazen criminality on the ocean floor crosses over into something else. Everyone in this story knows a guy, and no one questions if the goods are hot, which feels so perfectly Rhode Island. 

In related news, the man who owns buildings on both sides of the Dirt Palace, was charged last week with buying a lot of stolen gold rings at a pawn shop that he runs. The man owns like half of Olneyville Square: the church, the old jewlery factory next to the church, the rooming house, the weird eatery where Hot Fashion Corner used to be, and yet he needed to buy $378,000 worth of gold rings for $12,384. Even by Olneyville standards this business deal comes off as maybe too good to be true. 

But this is a digression. It is so easy for everything to fall back to being about Olneyville. And there are some through lines, and commonalities. For instance Olneyville is run by seagulls and Point Judith, particularly Galilee, is solidly under the dictatorship of the down and dirty dumpster duck. Their cries are everywhere along the streets lined with lobster traps and fields of Block Island parking lots. 

Full disclosure, I am on the side of the seagull. Although they lean cannibalistic and I eat only vegetables, they embody a grace combined with a street fighter sensibility that twangs at my heartstrings. I know that they are assholes and make it nearly impossible to eat a sandwich in peace at any given beach in Rhode Island, and yet I can not help to feel that when in their presence, I am amongst my people. They are resourceful and proud, downy and absurd and cry all the fucking time. For years I used to sit on the roof in Olneyville and film them swooping around in slow motion, stomping through puddles, gnawing on chicken bones. 

It would be impossible to write about seagulls and Point Judith without talking about the late great Rhode Island artist Jon Campbell who’s expansive body of work was often connected to Point Judith and included many revisionist paintings with classical protagonists replaced by the petulant birds. This grouping of paintings and other pieces of his visual art were exhibited in a retrospective titled, obviously, “Gulls Gone Wild”. 

The first time I met Jon it was because we (The Dirt Palace) were being stalked by the Providence Fire Marshal and we needed help. Bad. It was probably late 2003 or early 2004. The fire at the Station nightclub had left the state grieving and heavy hearted. Everyone knew someone who had died in what was such an unimaginably horrible tragedy. And also fire codes were being rewritten to become the strictest in the nation and hundreds of young artists living in RI’s cities were inhabiting emptied out factories, in not entirely fire marshal approved spaces, including us. Through a series of events a New York Times article mentioned that there was going to be a first in the nation gathering of transgendered artists at a feminist art space in Providence called the Dirt Palace.  This was not something that we were organizing. A friend of a friend was putting it together and it seemed like an awesome and chill thing to host. We had a whole spiel that we gave to folks when we collaborated in this way with people organizing events. Rather than say “no mainstream media” we tried to be specific and said “no mention or listing in the Providence Journal or Providence Phoenix”, because who would ever imagine a New York publication covering something in Providence, and who imagined that in 2003 the Providence fire marshal was reading the New York Times?  But as it turned out, both of these things happened, and so the fire marshal, showed up and parked his car facing our door, headlights about 5 feet from the door handle.  For like three days. The thing that I don’t think that he realized was that we in fact, had another door. But after about two days of this, we basically knew that we were fucked and could not live lives that endlessly avoided the parking lot. So we did what generally was done when 20-something year old artists living in warehouses in Providence found themselves in over their heads. We called AS220 and left a message on the answering machine. I have a distinct memory of Bert and Shawn, the Artistic and Managing directors respectively, calling me back at the place where I worked in Fall River and them two passing the phone back and forth asking questions and hatching a plan, while my boss puzzled over who the hell I could be talking to. Their plan was Jon Campbell.  Jon, they told me, was in with fire marshals. And I was like, what are you talking about, we are trying to hide from the fire marshal, not bring in more fire marshal people. But they were like, he’s not a Providence Fire Marshal, actually he does pyrotechnics now, but he has been a fire marshal or something like it and he knows how they think and you’re going to have to bring Providence Fire Marshals through the space and so what you have to do is buy some time, clear the place out, do a walk through first with Jon to tell you what you’re doing wrong, because the Providence Fire Marshal comes in now they’ll just shut you right down. 

So finally we convinced Laura, a disarmingly positive character with pink hair who lived there at the time, to step out into the parking lot, pretended not to know anything, take the fire marshal’s card and tell them that someone would give them a call soon. The next day I called the Fire Marshal, also playing dumb. Walk through tomorrow? No can’t do tomorrow, sorry. How about next Wednesday?  So then we rented a U-haul and moved out everything in the middle of the night. The beds. The stove. We left a fridge, but cleared out all of the vegetables. We left a microwave and some strategically placed Chinese take out. It was the Monday before our showdown and Shawn from AS220 brought over Jon Campbell. The dress rehearsal was intense. We hadn't thought about lighting in halls or clutter in halls or bikes in halls. Things that now seem shockingly obvious about basic egress hygiene.  It turned out that Jon was way scarier than the actual fire marshals, who once given access to the building seemed not to actually care what was happening, so long as they could inform us that we had six months to install a fire alarm system. They just walked around and were like cool Johnny Cash poster, why didn’t you answer the door all of those times that we knocked on it? Jon was no bullshit about how we just had to get our shit together and make the place safe and legal, which was generally not what was happening in underground Olneyville in 2003. Anyway, my sense was that he hated us and thought that we were irresponsible degenerates. But then a couple of months later he left a message on our answering machine saying that he had a friend who was cleaning out a studio and did we want some screen printing inks that would otherwise be headed for the trash? 

I understood this gesture well. An older artist helping connect you to resources. I mean resources that were probably going to end up in the landfill, but still remembering that you existed and what art you made and what supplies might be needed, this was an act of kindness. An offering. An affirmation that what you were trying to do might be in alignment with the world that they were also trying to live in.  Jon came by a few weeks later with a garbage bag filled with things from a studio clean out. We made small talk about how things had gone with the Providence Fire Marshal. He was casual about it, and I didn’t feel the same shame and embarrassment I had felt when he was imparting painfully obvious wisdom about, like not parking bikes in front of doors.  

About five years later when I started working at AS220 I’d see him around more often and came to know his songwriting a bit better. Then later we figured out that we had a mutual friend in Moe Bowstern, a legendary zine writer and fisher out of the Pacific Northwest. Moe also does a Substack that I highly recommend. (If I was like proficient at Substack I think that there’s a way to “officially” reccommend it - but until I figure it out, I’m going to do it the old fashioned way, by actually telling you how cool Moe & this writing project is.) Anyway here’s the thing. Like so many artists who are just making stuff all of the time, Jon was not great at documenting or archiving his work. If you google his name and for example, a song that you want to find, you will likely come to a reddit thread about how hard it is to find his recordings. Aside from song writing and painting seagulls, Jon also made jewelry. My favorite of his songs is about the Garbage Barge of the 1980’s. But his song that’s most connected to Point Judith, that I also love “Fredrick’s of Gallilee” can not be found on the internet, except as a cover song performed by someone else.  The premise of this song is that there’s a store that’s like part lingerie (based on the old Fredricks of Hollywood catalog) and part commercial fishing gear for women. I could be off, but I find it oddly feminist, and also strangely aligned with an energy that I feel in the air walking down the pier of charter fishing boats for hire in Galilee. Hear me out, but think that this long strip of boats tied up to various docks has vaguely red-light district vibes. I’m not thinking about the ropes or knots either, though there’s also that. Its more the line up of potential “fun” experiences mostly marketed to men, doing a social men’s outing thing, whereby there are also visual hints about what you might get before you pay for your experience. Signs are posted along the doc that detail amenities on the boats that can be hired on hourly basises, but sometimes also rules.  It's a little lawless out on the ocean, but also it’s a regulated industry, and men who are being marketed to, are expected to feel proud of their performance as they ritually reel in their catch. Its transactional, but there’s an expectation of camaraderie. The men are often shirtless and drunk. I’m not at all saying here that women don’t fish, or that fishing isn’t wholesome, but rather that there aren’t too many geographies that feature rows of glimpses into transactional mostly gendered experiences that can be “window shopped” before choosing who to do business with. 

The seagulls squawk and circle and at the end of the pier there's a shift to boats selling live lobsters out of coolers. There are other docks around the corner that are just straight up for commercial fishing boats, where there’s really nothing for hobbyists, tourists, or people looking for deals on live lobster to seek out. Then if you keep walking beyond the rows of dock, you find yourself in a different kind of ocean. A vast sea of parking lots for the ferry to Block Island. It’s astounding in contrast, the fishing boats and parking lots. And yet it’s clear that these are the two cornerstones to the village’s economy. I couldn’t help but to wonder about how these things compared. It turned out to be quite easy to find information and data about the fishing sector. RI DEM publishes an annual fisheries report. According to the 2023 report, Point Judith brought in 44,728,785 pounds of fish and shellfish valued at $56,364,828. Also from this report: “The Port of Galilee is one of the largest ports on the East Coast and is known for high volumes of squid landings. Galilee, also known as Point Judith, is the 18th highest value US port as of most recent NOAA Fisheries of the United States assessment; it was also the 4th highest value fishing port on the East Coast (NOAA 2022)”.  In my reading, one of the core reasons pointed to for the success of Point Judith as a thriving port is the Fisherman’s Cooperative, which was organized in 1948 by the fishermen of Galilee to obtain better prices for their catch. Hurray for a cooperative! 

My search for information about the parking lot sector yielded no such transparency or easy access to data. In its place was intrigue, scandal and a video about the situation with the Lighthouse Inn that was written and narrated by a member of the Narragansett town council, that frankly felt like watching a horror movie? Maybe it was the soundtrack. Honestly I thought that it was genius. Perhaps some of this was accidental. But the minutiae of compliance with state lease agreements in order for a private company to weasel its way out responsibilities by neglecting a property that it manages and then turning it into an opportunity to use said real estate as a highly profitable surface parking lot is so monumentally horrific yet boring that pairing it with dystopian drone footage featuring massive amounts of bird shit and haunting stock synthesizer soundtracks IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO. The RI DEM who manages the lease ended up extending it’s agreement with the villainous Real Estate company after rejecting three development proposals for the site as unfeasible. It seems like said Real Estate company, Pri X, is some kind of a collabo between Procaccianti Copanies and Paolino, so like the same dudes who own most of Downtown Providence. 

While we’re on the topic of PARKING, during the height of Covid there was an interesting parking-related win for RI Coastal Access related to the “Avenues” in Point Judith. Its hard to parse exactly when RI Coastal Access activism started to get serious momentum, but from a quick survey of its IG & FB pages it seems like this campaign might have been a pivotal injection of energy. There’s a great overview of the whole situation on the RI Costal Access Website. But the basic premise is: 

Public access points at “The Avenues” in Point Judith were utilized frequently, particularly by the surf community starting in the 1970s.  Parking at the Right Of Ways accommodate just a few cars, while others park along the roadsides when waves bring multiple visitors to the neighborhood.  This relationship between surfers and neighborhood residents goes on relatively harmoniously and without incident for decades.

Things start to go sour though, when in 2019, at the urging of some new residents who have different feelings about visitors to their neighborhood, no parking signs go up and tickets start landing on cars. Things get heated between neighbors, some of whom are on the side of coastal access, some of whom don’t want people parking on their streets. There are a number of Narragansett town council meetings that are packed when the issue is being debated. The critical argument that coastal access advocates make that seems to finally capture the public imagination, is that public Right of Way to the ocean (which is protected in the RI Constitution) is effectively meaningless without reasonable parking allowances. 

During a town council meeting Narragansett resident Brian Wagner offered this take on how access to parking is essential to beach access, and by taking that away, that very access is being limited.

“Access is meaningless unless it’s meaningful,” Wagner said. “And in our current car-based culture, that means parking. I have surfed these areas literally for decades, and I have never had an issue parking on Pilgrim Avenue. It’s always beyond me when people buy property in the immediate vicinity of a protected public resource like the coastline and then complain when the public comes to use it.”

There was a deadlock until 2020 when there were elections for Narragansett town councilors. Half of the council flipped and now ALL 5 of the councilors were sympathetic to coastal access on the Avenues. In a 5-0 vote of the town council parking restrictions in Point Judith were amended. A couple of homeowners particularly mad about the riff-raff parking on “their” streets file a lawsuit against the town council. In a win for Coastal Access this lawsuit was lost.

So if you want to go on an wild goose chase, drive yourself to Point Judith and park on a side street off of Ocean Road because not so long ago people fought for your right to be able to do this. And wander your way to a Right of Way. There are a couple that actually are noted on google maps (Conant Ave, and Pilgrim Ave). But there are a lot more. Some well marked, others where it just looks like you’re wandering into a mysterious netherworld of goldenrod and Joe-Pye weed, and glistening red poison ivy. My favorite secret spot, because the sign is so specific that there is clearly a back-story is on Pocono Road, which is a one-way loop around. At the end of the loop on the right there’s a spot where there’s no house that seems easy to pull over and park alongside of. Right now it smells of wild grapes. Walk back towards the ocean and you will come across a tangled mess of overgrowth with Virginia creeper morphing into eye popping orange and red hues and private property signs scattered in amongst the vines. But just to the left of this (if facing the ocean) is a Right of Way sign. Behind it is a sign that lets you know that this Right of Way is exactly 6.59’ wide. If you walk to the end of this strip there may be a folding chair waiting for you. Little waves spill over little rocks. You can peel off mica from the rocks as it shines like smooth silver. Settle back easy and Make up your mind to stay.

Last week and the week before I had COVID for a long time, for the first time. I slept my face off and plotted a lot with my business partner Pippi about how to take care of work stuff without actually being at work. The part of this story that is missing is that I gave Pippi COVID before I knew that I had covid (I also gave it to Bonnie and Kevin - I’m sorry guys & owe you forever). The day that I had come down with it, it was so hot out that it was near impossible for me to feel the difference between a personal fever and an everyone-at-an end-of-the-world 98 degree meltdown day. 

At work we were about to be hosting a family residency and so the house would be filled with the children of Artist Moms who would be working towards an art show. From afar I wrote a scavenger hunt to introduce the children to the nooks and crannies of the Victorian mansion that they would be living at for the next week. One of the more precocious children who was perhaps sick of doing art projects with some younger kids was overheard saying that the best use of her time would be TO DO MORE SCAVENGER HUNTS, like all day. I might have taken this offhanded-through-the grapevine compliment from a 10 year old too seriously, because it really got me thinking about making scavenger hunts. 

In the early 90’s as a teenager on the cusp of being allowed to drive around the wastelands of Long Island, one thing that my friends and I would do to entertain ourselves was to make up scavenger hunts for each other. Part finding things, part dare, part incitement to vaguely criminal activity, part wholesome rhyming riddles, part advanced placement curatorial  studies. Did other teenage friend groups build elaborate instruction-sets for each other’s fancy? If I were to be really pretentious about these lists of instructions I would talk about them as performance art scores, but it is possible that we were just kids trying to make the best of living in the sprawling suburbs. A landscape with a sick underbelly that fueled countless episodes of true crime or scandal tabloid television shows like Geraldo or Hard Copy. Anyway, I think that in a number of ways these friends might have been unique and special, but maybe everyone thinks that about their teenage friends. 

This story is about to come full circle, as it was on an adventure visiting this town where I grew up on Long Island that I contracted COVID. I went back for a reunion show of a hardcore band that my friends had been in. It was at the town’s dive bar, which was also the joint where Jack Kerouac drank at when he and his mom famously lived in said town, which at that point was mostly a fishing town on the northshore of Long Island. It was out further than most people who were commuters wanted to take a train from on a daily basis. After 9/11 that all changed and real estate prices skyrocketed. My folks figured that it was a good time to cash it all in and sell their house and they got out of dodge and I never really went back.

Suddenly like 20 years passed. But there I was on the night when Trump had gotten shot, hanging out in a dive bar with giant screens playing Fox news hovering about the crowd on mute, while teenage angst anthems were being reenacted by 50 year olds. I felt like I had been dropped on my head into a wormhole. Which to be honest, was not an entirely unpleasant feeling. The band was really good. There was a new singer (the younger sister of the guitarist). At one point she publicly announced that her enlistment for this reunion show hinged on them being cool with a rewrite of the lyrics of one song twinged with a dose of skate-bro-bravado-misogyny. And this was the moment when I cried - the world maybe actually has changed for the better?

I drank some shitty non-alcoholic beer and remembered people’s names who I hadn’t seen in three decades. I hugged too many people and when it became overwhelming I sat alone in a corner looking out at the crowd pulsing with dramas and histories, feeling glad for my life choices starting with having gotten myself the hell out of that town. But also I was starry-eyed with wild admiration for these weirdos siloed in a hell hole who I had come up with who went on to do all sorts of things.

Anyway, that got long-winded, and what I was trying to say is that I feel like I have a couple of credentials when it comes to the crafting of places to hunt for, which is really what this is all about. Why subject oneself to finding things? Well it is certainly optional! Why look for buried treasure? Why travel? Why attempt to see things in a new way? I don’t know, don’t you sometimes just feel your legs going wild with a desire to walk somewhere new? 

So the other day while waiting for children to smash a Piñata that Exyl made, Zoe was joking about learning about things in Rhode Island and said “you should make a Scavenger Hunt for us - like for adults”. 

“Ok” I quickly agreed, knowing on an intuitive level that is actually a thing that I want to do. But not because I know about so many mysterious places that I want to tell others about, but more because I want to keep learning and digging into Rhode Island and all of its strange nooks and cranies. Sometimes it's hard to remember to travel, when you might only be going a few miles away. But travel can be anywhere, its an agreement between your eyes and heart to be open. So here’s the deal. This newsletter will contain a lot that’s just me riffing and blah blah blahing, but within each newsletter will be a section that’s about a RI locality and will include a clue that will take you to an actual physical location in Rhode Island or nearby environs that I think is kind of special. Find it if you want to. No rush. God and climate change willing, it will be there in the future. 

FAQ

Q: Before I subscribe to this newsletter - I gotta know, how often will it come into my already overloaded inbox?

A: Around once every 6 weeks - maybe a little more, maybe a little less

Q: I’m a big fan of geese, will there be actual goose content? 

A: YES! PROBABLY! 

Q: I’m a Canadian Goose, will there be content for actual geese?

A: You Canadians have to stop pooping so much in all of our urban green space. But probably yes, there will be information that will be entertaining or relevant to geese of all nationalities. 

Q: What if I know about some incredible secret places in Rhode Island that I think should be part of a gooser? 

A: Sounds great, tell me all of your secrets! 

Q: What is the difference between a duck and a goose? 

A: Geese have more neck bones and are kind of assholes. In case you are wondering a duck and goose can not lay eggs together. Or like they can lay eggs, but the eggs won’t hatch. Or the eggs of the eggs won’t hatch. Something like that. 

Q: It seems like you might be writing about places that you’ve gone to in RI a dozen or so times, but I’ve lived in quahog-ville for my whole life, will I be annoyed at your writing? 

A: You are more than welcome to be annoyed at my writing on any number of fronts, but the genre of travel writing has existed for a long time, people just usually write about places a little bit further away and not like 7 miles from where they live, but we are blessed in RI to have 400 little villages inside of 31 towns and 8 cities inside of a breadbox. 

Q: I am a Rhode Island Red chicken, i.e. the actual state bird, and I’d like to know why you are ignoring me and getting involved with all of these other flighty friends like ducks and geese? Who do I talk to about this egg-regious error in your ways? Where is THE COMPLAINT DEPARTMENT?!?! 

A: Great question. See photo below.

Q: Will this newsletter be funny, like will it quack me up?

A: Possibly if you have a fowl sense of humor. (oh my god I’m so sorry - but also I can’t promise that goose/duck puns won’t happen)

Q: I heard there might be buried treasure - do I need a shovel?

A: This is currently not true - no buried treasure, but also what kind of New Englander are you that doesn’t have a shovel in your car? 

Q: It seems like you might just be writing about a bunch of unrelated things that don’t really go anywhere?

A: True, but see the title of this newsletter.

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