Volume 28 - Issue 1

Volwne 28, Nwnber I

The magazine about Yale and New Haven

Recording the Holocaust: Steven Spielberg follows Vale's lead to preserve an oral history

September 8, 1995

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60 years of Penguin Books

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Kati~ Brandi • ]o~/ Burg~s

• jay Dixit* Rosnnary Hutzkr • Hiihlry Margolis* Dani~/ Murphy • Ann Skdg~· ·~kct~d to staff, s~ptnnb"

4, 1995

Mm~btn and Dir~cton: Edward B. Bennett III Constance Clement • Peter B. Cooper • Andy Court • Brooks Kelly • Patricia Pierce • Jay Porter • Kathy Reich • Fred Sttebeigh Thomas Strong

Frimd.s: Anson M. Beard, Jr. • Edward B. Bennett, Jr. • Edward B. Bennett III • Biaire Bennett • Paul S. Bennett • Gerald Bruck Jonathan M. Clark • Louise F. Cooper • Peter B. Cooper • Jerry and Rae Court • David Freeman • Geoffry Fried • Sherwin Goldman Brooks Kelly • Roger Kirwood • Andrew J. Kuzneski, Jr. • Lewis E. Lehrman • E. Nobles Lowe • Peter Neill • Julie Peters • Fairfax C. Randal • Nicholas X. Rizopoulos • Arleen and Arthur Sager • Dick and Debbie $ears Richard Shields • W. Hampton Sides Thomas Strong • Elizabeth Tate • Alex and Bersy Torello • Allen and Sarah Wardell Daniel Yergin

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F E A T U R E S _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __

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Keeping Time Weathering changes in tastts and venues, Ntw Havens jazz scene continues to showcase world class musicians.

BY B EN L UMPKIN

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Rolling Through the Special Olympics While the world watches, one woman manages to keep Ingalls Rink on trac :

BY ANN SLEDGE

Bearing Witness Rushing against time, Yale's Fortunof!Video Archive and Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation attempt to record survivors' accounts ofthe Holocaust.

BY I<AREN j ACOBSON

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Adding Sex-Ed to Street Smarts Every day, students in Ntw Havens schools hear that their age group has the fastest growing rate ofHIV-inftction. But to make a dent in the statistic, health educators must reach drop-outs beyond school walls.

BY H ILLARY .MARGOLIS

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T A N D A R D

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About this Issue

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Point of Departure

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Between the Vines: Elm Street Fighter

BY

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M URPHY.

Cover by Gabrid Snyder and Horling Wong.

Cover phoros counesy ofYad VaShem phoro archives and by Brendan Koerner/ Tht Ntw Jou17llll THE NEw }OVaNAL is published five times during the academic: year by The New Jounul at Yak, Inc., P.O. Box ).4J1 Yale S~tion, New Haven, CT o6s1o. Off~« address: 1S1 Park Str«t. Phone: t10J1 4J1·t957· All contents copyright t99S by The New Journal at Yale, Inc:. All Rights Rcsetv.d. Reproduaion e11b.r in whole or in pan without wri11m permission of cb. publisher and editor in chkf IS prohibited. Whik this .......,. is published by Yale Coll<g< nudencs, Yak Univusicy is noc mporuible fw iu contents Ten thousand copies of each wue are distributed fr<e to m..mb<n of cb. Yale and New Haven a>mmunicy.

Subocripcions are arubbk to tl>oK ouui<k cb. area. lUres: One ya<. 111. Two )'Ql1. SJO. THE Nrw jOti~!W. is printed by Turley PubiiClrions, Palma, MA; boolchq>ing and billin& KrYic<S an: provided by Colaaan 8ooltlteq>ing of New Havca. THE Ntw JOVaNAL mc:ounca kttas to cb. editor and a>mmmu on Yak and New Hartn imK>. W rire ro Editonals, HJ~ Yak ~tion, New Hama, CT 116110. Alllcrrers lor publication must induck addras and SJS~U<ute. We~ rh• nght to edit all ktters for pubiiCluon.

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It always seems that TNJ publication times roughly coincide with the changes in the seasons. Considering we publish five times each school year, I guess that makes sense. In the "About This Issue" in the last issue of Volume 27, I began with my rather Shakespearean ruminations on the end of winter and beginning of spring. It was appropriate in light of the recent annual staff turnover. But not all metaphors work for all stories.

True, we find ourselves now at a new beginning, the start of a new school year. The summer is drawing to a close, and soon the leaves will begin to turn ... But doubtless, our intelligent T NJ readers already knew this. This issue marks the beginning of Volume 28 of a magazine that has continuously strived to live up to the description that falls under our ever-familiar flag: "The magazine about Yale and New Haven." Although we are a magazine run by Yale student~, we dedicate ourselves to looking at this town as more than just a place where we go to school.

As I write, my sister is experiencing her first few days as a frosh at Yale. Part and parcel of the glory that is "Camp Yale" are the constant reminders to walk in pairs and take safety precautions while in New Haven. And while this vigilance is quite necessary in dealing with any city, It disappoints me that from Day One, we build a fortress around Yale to protect us from the very city that we should view as ·our home. Yale's commitment to the value of liberal education teaches us to draw connections-in the world of ideas and ideally in daily life. That includes connecting with the place in which we live.

In this issue, Ben Lumpkin writes about the jazz scene in New Haven that's seen better days but continues to play tenaciously onward. But it's not just a story about jazz.

It's a story about the rise and fall of a city that one person interviewed said was the "only city with as much personality as New York." It's a story about the survival of an artistic medium and the survival of a city.

Ann Sledge's piece on this past summer's Special Olympics directly explores Yale's relationship with New Haven in the implementation of this strategically complex event.

Ann chooses to convey the energy, frustration, and rewards of putting on such an event through the small and grand experiences of one commissioner in particular, Barbara Chesler.

But drawing connections means more than traeing relationships between Yale and New Haven. It also consists of looking at this institution within the larger framework of the world. Sound grand? Perhaps. But it's not beyond Yale's scope. And neither is it beyond the writer of our cover story, Karen Jacobson. Karen documents the modest beginnings of the Yale project that began videotaping Holocaust survivor testimonies 16 years also; Yale's project continues to fuel and sometimes fight with such daughter projects as that of film director Steven Spielberg. Although separated by 3,000 miles, Hollywood and the Ivory Tower meet to record the oral history of thousands of survivors with the courage to speak.

This issue does not purport to be the comprehensive record of Yale's doings and New Haven's goings-no magazine could honestly do that-instead it presents itself as an occasion to explore some of them and their relations to each other. Each story tells one beyond itself, constantly reminding us to realize the import of all that surrounds us.

-SAK

260 York St. • New Haven

789-8994 4

THE NEW jOURNAL

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Beinecke's Best Kept Secret If Carl Van Vechten were alive today, he would have loved M & M's well-known slogan, "Melts in your mouth but not in your hand." Coming across the jingle in a magazine or on TY, he would have reveled in its myriad sexual meanings. He would have then cut it out in order to create a new page in one of his scrapbooks. After pasting the slogan onto a page of one of these albums, he would have continued Sipping the pages of his GQ or Esquirt, browsing until he found the perfect Versace or Calvin Klein advertisement to illustrate the particular

Jorgensen, a man who became a woman. Max Lerner, the article's author, suggested that Jorgensen "changes rus sex-and the planets stop whirling in their course to discuss his (her) case." He wanted us to see, first, that transgressing the sometimes rigid social constraints of gender and sexuality was possible in spite of whai: our bodies look like.

He also revealed how popular and public culture contributed to what we are as sexual beings in private-and especially what it meant to be homosexual.

For example, Van Vechten placed in one

Wed 11 Years, Tells Wife "HE" is a WOMAN, But the Mrs. Still Loves 11HIM" and Wants "HIM" as "HE" Is. gayness between the lines of the M & M's slogan. On his death bed, he would have bequeathed the scrapbook containing this home-grown erotica to the rare books division of a distinguished, private university's library system.

In fact, the real Carl Van Vechten made just such a donation when he died in 1964.

Van Vechten's scrapbooks, pieced together in the 1950s, now reside in the Yale Collection of American Literature, housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Famous for his photographic portraits of Harlem Renaissance writers, his subjects included the likes of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. But in his scrapbooks he abandoned his more formal portraits to create collages grounded in his campy sense of humor. Van Vechten wanted to reveal something gay in popular culture, so he uprooted the sexualized imagery found in his scrapbooks from an- extensive variety of sources: his own collection of pornography; pictures he took of nude men who modeled for him; photos of athletes and soldiers clipped from various periodicals; and, finally, sexually suggestive headlines like: "Steaks that melt in your mouth."

Journalism that focused on gender confusion fascinated Van Vechten. He cur out one article, for instance, about Christine

SEPTEMBER 8, 1995

album a 1955 newspaper story that reponed how a British panel concluded that the "real safeguard against homosexual activity... is public opinion." Van Vechten's inclusion of this anicle in one of his scrapbooks revealed an apparent paradox: Public opinion can be homophobic and oppressive, but it also helps to mark out a gay identity because it acknowledges that homosexuals exist. In other words, public opinion, while sometimes oppressive, may work as a safeguard for, rather than against, homosexual activity.

Moreover, for Van Vechten to piece together his campy collages from so many different and frequently public sources, was to assert not only rus own identity as a gay man, but to suggest that there were others like him--even if many of them concealed their fantasies about men.

Although today we might consider the community he was documenting as almost too private, a culture too closeted to enjoy its desires, Van Vechten's inclusion of an article about military cadets at West Point playing the female roles in Tht Mary Wivts of Windsor suggests that we might be wrong.

While it would be extravagant to claim that being a gay man in the military has ever been easy, the soldiers depicted in the articles chosen by Van Vechten didn't seem bothered by dressing up as women and parading

around in skirts and curls. Quite the opposite: they appear to be having a gay old time.

Another poignant example of Van Vechten's assertion that gay males existed in institutions that seemed to be safeguarded from homosexual activity was his bequest of the scrapbooks to Yale upon his death.

Strikingly, he even created a collage that commented on the university, then a bastion of (mostly white, mostly rich) testosterone: "Yale May Not Think So, But It'll Be Just Jolly." The words were coupled with a picture of a nude man whose genitals are covered only by a leaf-cut, possibly, from an ivy vine. Van Vechten's bequest to Yale was, however, not only his way of insinuating that there were gay men in the Ivy League, but also an occasion for him co make a statement about higher education. He provided Yale with a provisional map of his own sense of what it meant to be a gay man. At the same time, he bequeathed a complex atlas of both gay culture's and the mainstream public's perspective of homosexual activity during the first half of the twentieth century.

While the study of these scrapbooks engenders some tension because of their pornographic edge, the books represent a body of work that has the potential to guide Yale into the foundation of gay and lesbian studies. He gave them to a major research institution like this university for a reason, implying that knowledge about sexuality should emerge not only in the privacy of our bedrooms, but also in the public space of our classrooms. As Van Vechten might say if he were alive today, Yale may not think so, but studying gay and lesbian forms of culture will be just jolly.

-]otl Burges

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Keep_ ing Time Ben Lumpkin

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he forecast is for rain. Before I left the house, the weatherman loomed over the earth with his pointer, radiating that weird weatherman glow that comes from standing in front of electronic pictures. "There is a chance of a thunderstorm Friday or Saturday," he into.ned, "as that steam really gets built in." There can be no doubt that the steam is really built in, but there's still no rain. I have turned to music for release, sitting inside a small brick bar on the corner of State and Crown where you can hear live music eight times a week. The bar is called Cafe Nine.

On stage, New Haven resident Wayne Johnson (often visible playing his flute near the entrance to the British Art Center) displays a formidable talent in the Joao Gilberto classic, "Girl From Ipanema... Cafe Nine's weekJy Saturday Afternoon Jazz Jam is in full swing, with life-time New Haven musician Eddie Buster presiding on the keyboard. I am practically the only person under 30 years of age in the entire bar. Most look to be in the stage of life that goes by the vastly unspecific designation "middle aged." The crowd is very nearly half black and half white. I try to recall if I have ever seen that mix before.

Crimson T-shirts with "cafe nine" written on the front and "Ego Free Zone" inscribed across the back are for sale behind the bar. At least three people are wearing them. Amateur sax player and _ professional dentist Dr. Tony Dioguardi, a participant in the E Saturday Jams at Cafe Nine since the bar opened five years ago, has ~ learned that I am a reporter. He swings by my table while making ! his rounds about the room, where everyone seems to know ~ everyone else. The jazz audience in New Haven is like a microcosm ~ of the city, he says, "small but tenaciously viable." Cafe Nine, he ~ adds, is one of the few places in New Haven where one is likely to ~ find "anyone from¡ltate senators to guys with no place to go home ~ at night." ,: Jazz in New Haven ha.s lost some of its former grandeur. New ~ Haven residents Sam Cannady and Alfonso Vaughn, sitting on j high stools close to the stage, squeeze their eyes shut in the effort

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to remember the past. They list the names of the supper clubs and live music halls that once flourished in New. Haven: Sound Track, Democratic Club, Golden Gate, Yellow Lantern, the Zebra Room, the Quarter Club, among others. They tell of the renowned Foundry Jazz Club, which once occupied the space where the Koffee? cafe stands today. They describe the morose beatniks who used to frequent McTriff's Jazz Club on Chapel Street, today a Vietnamese restaurant known as Saigon City. They recount appearances made by such jazz greats as Dizzy Gillespie and Connecticut native Horace Silver. jazz and other live music in New Haven reached their height in the fifties and early sixties, before the dual pestilence of disco and Dragnet (the 1V series) swept the city.

In the woeful words of Cafe Nine regular Brian Kolterman, "disco happened." In the mid-seventies, bar and dub owners across the country discovered they could draw larger crowds by hiring DJs to spin records, which ¡cost far less than hiring a live band to perform several sets in the course of an evening.

The advent of television also contributed to the gradual decline of live music in the city, Yale School of Music professor Willie Ruff (MUSB '53, MUS '54) told me over the phone from his home in Alabama. "All the things that brought TV in took live performances out," Ruff lamented. He recalled that during his freshman year at Yale, in 1949, "the real activity on campus was live jazz." Be-bop-playing Yale students like himself "made more money than the Dean." Ruff described private parties where Dizzy Gillespie entertained a room full of Yalies and girls bussed in from Smith College, wrapping up his tale with the unusual admonishment: "Your exceedingly square generation has to have a committee to entertain [itself]." lV, and particularly the hit series Dragnet, said Ruff, kept people at home in the evenings, even to the point that one movie house remains of the eight that once stood within two blocks of campus. In the world of television, rock bands replaced jazz bands.

Rating-crazed television programmers had no room for jazz in even

THE NEW JouRNAL

Weathering changes in tastes and venues, New Hoven's jazz scene continues to showcase world-class mus1c1ans.

the remotest of time slots. In his whole life, Ruff pointed out, Duke Ellington only made one television appearance. "The jazz audience, as such, no longer exists," he said.

There is plenty of evidence to back up this view. The New Haven Jazz Festival on the G reen has been reduced in scale from nearly a dozen concerts per summer to three or four. Yale Band Director Tom Duffy tells tragic stories of failed University jazz concerts. The Annual Yale Jazz Fest, launched in the mid-eighties, didn't survive past its second year, when musicians played to those few undaunted by snowstorms. A 1985 Miles Davis concert only half-filled Woolsey Hall, and members of the audience began trickling out by the middle of.the show. "You couldn't give the tickets away," Duffy recalled. Branford Marsalis fared no better some years later. And even today, Duffy reports, if he dares to play anything more progressive than big band jazz (for which there still exists a loyal audience among sixty-something suburbanites), he is faced with an audience of 50 to 100 people in the 800-seat Sprague Hall. On such nights, said Duffy, "you can hear every single stroke of the clapping."

For bar and club proprietors like Cafe Nine owner Mike Reichban, the reality is not only that jazz lures smaller crowds, but that those who come do not drink and spend as much as the young crowds lured with rock bands and DJs. "Uazz fans] are the kind of people who like to savor that single malt scotch," Reichbart said.

"For them, a drink is just a small embellishment to the scene."

Nevertheless, the fact remains that on any given night in this city there is a place where one can hear the soulful wail of saxophones, the piercing blasts of a trumpet, the maniac rumbling of drums, or the curious twangs and hums of a bass. In the summer, when the heat seems to impair bodjly functions in a permanent way, when breathing becomes less a mechanism for the support of life than a process of sucking heat here and spitting it there, when people feel that heat may overwhelm perso nal expression- become the only expression-at those annihilating hours, there is jazz to awaken the mind.

SEPTEMBER 8, 1995

mtyne Escoffrey jams at Rudy's where New Haven's up and coming jazz musicians prepare for b~gger and better gigs.

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afe Nine is like nothing so much as a buzzing spirit in the midst of a body laid waste by inactivity. You can walk there any night of the week, down either Chapel or Crown Street, without seeing a soul between the back of the Taft Apartments and the crowded stoop of Cafe Nine itself. You'll pass the Chapel Square Mall where it sleeps-filled, one supposes, with a great swirling vortex of city planning nightmares. From here, on the Crown Street side, you'll walk along a row of some of the oldest buildings left downtown, every single one of them empty.

On the Chapel Street side you'll pass the American Discount Store with its permanent "Giant Clearance Sale" sign hanging in the window. A little further down, beyond Nu Haven Books, the Las Vegas Jewelers storefront stands criss-crossed with strings of colored Christmas lights, blinking stale holiday cheer into the empty lot across the street. Signs in the window invite passersby to browse an intoxicating selection of gold teeth, beepers, and silver name plates.

One cannot walk to Cafe Nine repeatedly at night without learning one thing: downtown New Haven is not particularly dangerous after dark, just deserted and a little bit eerie. But if you ask anyone inside Cafe Nine why it is the only bar of its kind they will tell you, almost every time: "People in New Haven are afraid to come out." No one is particularly interested in the question. ,, Conversation on the topic was exhausted long ago. William Sherr, the owner of a recording studio rwo doors down from Cafe Nine,

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Fred (left) on saxophone and Laco Deczi on trumpet at Cafe Nine. Deczi says his bandplays all originals. "Why do something that's already been done?" he asks. takes the explanation one plodding step further for my benefit. "When people leave cities," he says, "cities die."

As chairman of the Ninth Square Development Association, Sherr has dealt with the frustration of trying to support nightlife and othet commercial ventures without a flourishing residential area. It's tough, he says, to keep a bar filled when the nearest vibrant neighborhood is further than most people want to walk. (With more stringent drinking-and-driving laws, driving to bars is increasingly uncommon.)

The newly refurbished apartments within the Ninth Square, roughly the space between Cafe Nine and the Chapel Square Mall, are still relatively lifeless; the ground floor space reserved fOJ< merchants has yet to be filled. In large measure, the resurrection of downtown New Haven, if it is to be, will come about by repopulating this area. "The Ninth Square may be one of the last legitimate opportunities for people to belong to a diverse community," says Cafe Nine's Reichbart.

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n a later visit to the bar, Riechbart has given me his treasured copy of an out-of-print book with the tide, The New Haven Sound: 1946-1976 In the opening pages, author Paul Lepri brags that in the 1940s, New Haven

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turned out more big band leaders than any other city in the U.S. He names such stars . as Artie Shaw, Les Elgart, and¡ Buddy Morrow, who all got their start in Elm City. I turn the pages eagerly, but after this promising start the book degenerares into a dry genealogy of obscure bands, cataloguing their formations and mutations with sentences that tease the imagination to distraction, such as the cryptic line: "The Corvettes changed their name to the Cadavers and added Nick Bagwasco on rhythm guitar."

Reichbart, a small, peripatetic man who flutters around his bar like someone looking for his car keys, alights on the booth opposite me. The building which today is Cafe Nine has a long history of supporting various bars and taverns, he says, his words coming in torrents.

In the 1870s, patrons of the bar then in this building used to get in fights with patrons of a temperance bar across the street. Reichbart first went into business here in the seventies, when he opened a "hippie, biker bar" called "Blue Bartz."

Back then, when Budweiser cost $.50 a bottle, Reichbart's clientele generally called for an ounce of Schaefer's alongside an ounce of bar whiskey. Today, with three or four jazz performances a week, Cafe Nine is the city's premier jazz venue.

"Life without music is a mistake," Reichbart suddenly blurts out, after a brief meditative silence. "Who said that?

Nietzche? No. Yes." "Jazz is a safe music," he continues. "[You listen to jazz] if you are someone who doesn't think that the next neighborhood is some disgusting breed of people."

The truth of this statement can be upheld with more powerful evidence than simple bar-brawling statistics. At the Ebony Lounge, a jazz and disco bar that sits on the town line between New Haven and Hamden, there is a sign in the window forbidding the entrance of people under the age of 25. Why? People who patronize the bar come mostly from a neighborhood in which lies a disproportionate number of older African-Americans who have retired and settled down to a quiet life. Ray Bright, one of the current owners of the bar, which has been in business 35 years under various managements, said what he doesn't need is "any of that hip-hop shit," music which draws young men with "their pants hanging down over their asses," men whom Bright fears may carry weapons.

"Kids come in here and drive the older people away," he said.

The Saturday afternoon jazz audience at the bar is anything but scary. As Martin Luther King gazes serenely from a portrait behind the stage and a galaxy of Christmas lights throws shadows on the old tin ceiling, the room fills with what seems to be one large family turning out for a picnic. Pinstripe oxfords and pressed white blouses abound. New Haven legend Wayne Boyd leads his jazz trio through a chilling rendition of "Round Midnight" at three in the afternoon. Boyd formed his first band in the city in 1966, at age ¡16, and

THE NEW JouRNAL

It is difficult to say whether iazz is on the rise in New Haven or more or less running in place.

eventually worked his way up to a position in the Jimmy McGriffith Quartet, a band that plays gigs throughout the world. At the Ebony Lounge, Boyd hefts his wireless guitar from one room to the next as he plays, greeting old acquaintances between riffs. 've come down to Cafe Nine on a Monday night to hear Collectively Speaking, voted New Haven's favorite jazz band in Th~ Advocau's annual readers' music poll, but most of its members are on vacation. In its place I find an impromptu trio made up of New Haven Symphony bassist Jim Andrews, Collectively Speaking drummer Ken Aldrich, and a guitar player who regularly appears at Foxwoods Casino, Dave Dana. Dana is very fast. As a player, he seems almost obsessed with speed. One man at the bar is thrilled. He leans over to tell his wife in a voice just a little too loud, "that's as fast as they get." Aldrich is a drumming phenomenon. To watch him pull his wild array of sounds from four drums and four symbols is no less ¡ bewildering and fantastic than to watch a magician pull rabbits from a hat.

Between sets, Dana finds his way to my table. He is wearing a shirt like a Jackson Pollack painting (unbuttoned to show an abundance of deep black chest hair), a strange brand of blue jeans, and white high top sneakers with bright red laces. One is not surprised to learn his former place of residence, before returning to his hometown New Haven in 1982, was Las Vegas.

In the seventies, Dana left New Haven for Florida with nothing but his suitcase, his guitar, and 50 bucks. In Florida he lived on the streets for a time before he found a regular gig on an island off the coast. One thi~g led to another until

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SEPTEMBER 8, 1995

Dana's band landed a gig at the Stardust Casino in Las Vegas. Dana drove across the country and spent several years in Vegas, playing various casinos and ultimately landing a job .as the house guitar player at the Las Vegas Hilton, where he had the opportunity to play with big name entertainers such as jazz singer Joe Williams, and pop singers Tina Turner, Diana Ross, and Stevie Wonder. When Dana left Vegas, it was to join Stevie Wonder's band. Dana has played under his own name for three years. "I've developed the ability to hold the stage," he says coolly. "I don't have to be behind a skirt any more."

Aldrich squirms like a turtle on its back when separated from his drum sticks. He sits uncomfortably in the chair opposite me as he narrates his rise from a wedding gig drummer, who banged away in his basement at all hours for practice, to the drummer for the Tommy Dorsey Quartet as it toured the country. When pressed, Aldrich admits that he has been coached by drumming legend Louis Bellson, but for the most part he seems content to sum things up with the observation, ''I'm kind of childish, Dave is kind of Las Vegas, but oh well." He wants to return to his drums. t is difficult to say whether jazz is on the rise in New Haven or more or less running in place. The ever popular Rudy's on Elm Street began staging live jazz on Tuesday nights about a year ago and has seen that generally slow bar night transformed into one almost as busy as any other, particularly when Yale is in session.

Still, saxophone player Wayne Escoffery, who runs the jazz sessions with as many of his musician friends who show up on a given night, isn't sure that people come for

love of the music so much as to drink and hang out. A sampling of the crowd backs him up, revealing that few either listen to jazz at home or go in search of it on their nights out. Rudy's proprietor Thomas Henniger characterized Tuesday nights as "our regular crowd. The only difference is the ten guys carrying instruments."

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he loyal jazz fans-those who grew up with the music-can be found at Charlie B's .Steak House, where world class bass player Jeff Fuller (ES '67, MUS '69) and piano player local Bill Brown play on alternate weekends. On one Saturday night, Fuller leads his band through swing classics, like the song that invites you to "Get your kicks on Route 66." The lights of the big brass chandeliers are dimmed way down, leaving the wine racks in shadow and rendering barely visible a row of pastoral portraits of cows

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Caft Nin~ owner Mike Reichbart chats with customeN from behinJ the bar. He anJ Bill Sherr at the faclt Straw SounJ Recording Snulio are cutting an allnnn of live p erformances at the bar.

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in pasture. The singer invites his audience to throw back a few quick drinks and sink into a dream of the past. But between sets, Fuller himself bemoans the fact that he has been unable to attract young people to hear him play. "Yale students would be my ideal audience," he says. "Here are people thinking, learning, and exploring. That's what jazz is all about."

Internationally renowned jazz pianist Harold Danko is optimistic that jazz can thrive in New Haven. Danko, who was drawn to New Haven a year and a half ago to raise children in "the fi rst city outside of New York that has it's own identity," delights in the ease with which he has been able to organize well attended neighborhood concerts in New Haven. It is a refreshing change for him, after years of living in New York City where "there is so much heavy artillery you have to use just to mount a block event." Danko is committed to teaching and performing for his students as a way to maintain a core audience for jazz. Will Bartlett, who teaches jazz with Danko at the Neighborhood Music School in New Haven's Audobon Court, said that faculty jam sessions at the school are one of the few opportunities for youths under the age of 21 to hear live jazz, and are thus a key element in "passing on the tradition."

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hank God for Cafe Nine fo r what it is doing for the jazz and blues scene," says New Haven resident Chris Cass as we sit at the bar and watch Czech trumpet legend Laco Deczi pace back and forth while his sax and organ players tangle up in a fast fusion sound. It seems like a feeble understatement with D eczi on the stage.

Deczi fled communism in 1984 when his THE NEW JouRNAL

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notoriety as a jazz star started to earn him unwanted attention from the repressive government. He has returned to the Czech Republic four times since the fall of communism and has packed entire soccer stadiums with his concerts. As you enter the Reduta Jazz club, the Czech Republic's equivalent of the Blue Note, you are greeted by two giant photographs: one of Miles Davis, and one of Laco Deczi.

A group of young Czechs are wandering around the bar with video cameras, grinning like mad. Reichbart told me a week before how he got into a conversation with them and, upon learning they were from the Czech Republic, spending six months in the U.S. at Yale, asked them if they had ever heard of Laco Deczi. "Of course!" they exclaimed, their eyes widening at the mention of their country's number one cult hero. "You should come by next week," said Reich bart casually. "He'll be playing here." There ensued a long and eventually successful effort by Reichbart to convince his customers that he was neither crazy nor joking.

Tonight, I shake one of the young Czechs from his reverie long enough to ask some questions. Jira Janada attempts, with the passionate earnestness of one who has witnessed a miracle, to explain his feelings, but his English is not up to the task.

SEPTEMBER

8, 1995

Finally his eyes light up as he digs up a favorite English cliche. "Man to man!" he blubbers. "Man to man!" Cafe Nine, as it happens, is the only place in the world where Jira Janada could clasp hands with Laco Deczi.

As I leave the bar that night I glance over my shoulder one last time at Deczi, straining against his horn like a ship against a gale, straining towards something unprecedented. On the street, just as the notes are becoming inaudible, I hear an outrageous sequence burst defiantly from the trumpet. It's difficult to say, but he may have made it right there; he may have burst free from the long history of jazz with some sparkling new creation. I stand dumbstruck in the empty lot behind the bar. On the wall in front of me a brilliant graffiti artist has painted three dark figures gyrating with arms flung heavenward.

Following their reach I see a billboard with the words, "Stop Graffiti. It's Choking Our Cities. Reward up to $500."

Talk about a misappropriation of funds.

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Rolling Through the Special Olympics 0

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at stood out as Barbara Chesler sped across Ingalls Rink was the cellular phone tucked into her back pocket and the large beeper attached to her belt.

Without these electronic gadgets, Barbara's outfit-crisp, white polo shirt and khaki shorts-would have looked more like that of a head camp counselor than a commissioner of the biggest international sporting event of the year. New Haven welcomed the Special Olympics 1995 World Games with its 7,200 athletes, not to mention 16,800 coaches and family members, according to the Special Olympics International Headquarters. Somehow these people had to be housed, fed, and transported for over a week. Fulfilling these and other functions required 45,000 recruited, organized and trained volunteers. Free lunches from McDonald's had to find their way to each and every volunteer and athlete. An additional 28,000 cars required parking in a city that can barely provide enough spaces for l ,500 Yale freshmen to move in each year. A fleet of 750 buses mobilized to transport spectators, athletes, coaches, family members, and dignitaries to and from the Opening Ceremonies and various venues.

If Barbara Chesler had paused to ponder the potential logistical nightmares conjured up by these numbers alone, she might have been overwhelmed. But in the vast organizational web that formed the Special Olympics hierarchy, she had her own niche that carried the title Commissioner of Rollerskating. For five days, everything that went on in and around Yale University's Ingalls Rink was her domain. Supervising even this small portion of the Special Olympics proved quite a daunting load.

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B

arbara had never witnessed a Special Olympics event, or even a rollerskating competition, prior to the New Haven World Games. But on the second day of competition she could proudly announce that the first day had gone extremely smoothly. Small dark circles under her eyes norwithsranding, Barbara exuded a certain sharpness and alertness as she prepared for a new day of competition. She walked swiftly and circumspectly, not missing a single derail. And the details bombarded her. There did not seem to be enough clipboards for all the volunteers, officials, and announcers required to pull off the day's events. Barbara raced towards the Volunteer Services rent across Sachem Street to resolve rhe clipboard dilemma personally. As she speed-walked across the rink, she noticed an imperfection in the rink floor. The rink staff had drained the ice, leaving a hard, asphalt floor suitable for rollerskacing. A committee member explained that the rink had been repaired in that spot, and that the small patch should not affect the athletes' performances.

Although Barbara was a new initiate to the Special Olympics phenomenon , she is not a stranger to Yale athletic facilities.

While she busied herself procuring clipboards and investigating nicks in the Ingalls Rink floor, piles of unread mail lay on her desk over at Payne Whitney gym. As an Associate Athletic Director of Yale University, she oversees the administration of Yale intercollegiate sports programs. Her tasks include helping teams raise money for various events and working with the admissions office to recruit athletes. Barbara was not alone among Yale faculty, staff, and students who were either drafted or who volunteered for the Special Olympics conglomerate. Yale

THE NEW JouRNAL

Wh ile the w orld watches, one w o ma n manages to keep Ingall s Rink on track.

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International employees answered phones at the volunteer headquarters, hosted family members of foreign athletes, and set up the Special O lympics home page on the World-Wide Web. Crowds of athletes and coaches swarmed into Commons every day for lunch.

Graciously, the universiry footed the bjll for these activities and provided countless resources in the form of staff time. Not that Yale did not reap benefits for ¡its generosity: when the Special Olympi"cs Opening Ceremonies, held at the Yale Bowl, aired on prime-time television, cameras captured an oversized Yale banner every time they panned the box of guests of honor, President Bill and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Each time a delegation of athletes marched onto the decorated field, a sportscaster droned, "Now entering the Yale Bowl, the team from .... " But for Barbara, the significance of the Opening Ceremonies as a media coup for her employer concerned her less than the transportation debacle that threatened her dedicated team of volunteers at the rollerskating venue. So well-attended were the Opening Ceremonies that the traffic congestion prevented bus drivers from shuttling the last batch of athletes back t0 their dorms until almost 3 a.m. The rumor spreading around the officials' room at Ingalls Rink was that buses were going to run an hour late, so that bus drivers could rest. Late buses meant late athletes and a late start to the day's already packed schedule of competition. Even by 12:15 p.m., 15 minutes before competition had been scheduled to start, the only athletes that had arrived to start warming up were those staying in nearby Yale residential colleges. They had walked the short distance up Prospect Street to Ingalls Rink.

In the officials' room, members of the rollerskacing planning

SEPTEMBER 8, 1995

committee, clad in various Special Olympics T-shirts, listened intently to Anne Wahlig, head of rollerskating for Special Olympics International. Anne spoke clearly and energetically, telling her team what to do. Remnants of doughnuts and glasses of orange juice lay on tables next to official Special Olympics documents. The relaxed attitude in the officials' room had been shattered-no more small talk about the celebrities who had starred in the opening ceremonies the night before.

Formally and authoritatively, the head official informed the others that they would have to delay competition at least one hour so that athletes would have time to arrive and warm up.

Meanwhile, Commissioner Chesler had pulled the cellular phone out of her pocket and was punching the buttons in frustration, trying to reach someone who could either confirm the rumors about the reasons for the transportation delay or exert his or her authority to make the buses run on time. She tried the transportation headquarters of the Special Olympics World Games and then the movement control headquarters, repeatedly, but co no avail. She had to admit, though, that part of the problem stemmed from her uncertainty about which of these departments was responsible for the transportation of athletes.

While officials and members of Barbara's rollerskating committee hurriedly took notes, the head official discussed details about how figures, the first scheduled event, could be judged without all the figure rollerskaters present. Suddenly, a volunteer burst into the officials' room to announce that the first bus of athletes had just arrived. People cheered, then immediately fell silent again and listened to the head official, fully aware of time pressing forward.

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Even though several more buses of athletes and coaches arrived soon afterward, Barbara continued trying to contact the transportation headquarters so that they could send over a supervisor. She stayed in the officials' room, using a wall phone. Meanwhile, her cellular phone protruded from her pocket, and her beeper made strange noises at her side.

While movement patrol put Barbara on hold, she fiddled with her beeper, trying to shut it off. A committee member approached her with a document that required her signature. Barbara balanced the paper on her lap and signed it with her right hand, while her left continued to fumble for the beeper.

While she was still on the phone, a committee member informed her that the

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&zrbara Chesler, Commissionn- of Roliersltating, attempts to solve a transportation crisis.

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womens' locker room had flooded the night before due to an air conditioner overflow, but that the staff had been able to vacuum up the standing water. Barbara smiled and said, "Gotta keep your sense of humor about these sorts of things." Earlier that morning she had attempted to rectify the transportation mess by talking to Doug Vaugn, a rollerskating committee member. Barbara had asked him whether he could redesign the signs so that the bus drivers could read them without having to step outside the bus. She had spent much of her time directing buses, since the drivers were unable to see the signs indicating where they should wait to transport people to various other Special Olympics venues.

B

ack at the rink, Barbara paused for a moment. Realizing there was nothing that required .immediate attention, she struck up a conversation with an athlete who was preparing to warm up. "Are you having fun?" Barbara asked. The woman looked up and shrugged her shoulders, motioning towards her ear. Barbara saw a large hearing aid and realized that the woman could not hear the question. She asked again, speaking a little louder, but the woman still could not hear. Instead of giving up, Barbara turned around and asked a surprised coach if anyone nearby knew sign language. One woman stepped forward, and Barbara asked her to sign to the athlete that Barbara was looking forward to watching her skate. The confusion on the athlete's face disappeared-she looked relieved that she had finally understood.

Meanwhile, speed skaters tore around Ingalls Rink, their faces aggressively

SEPTEMBER 8,

199S

focused on the competition ahead. They concentrated on performing the correct streamlined motions in order to increase their speed. Several rollerskaters competing in the artistic half of the program marked out their routines. Chris Gaimari, who had competed in several previous Special Olympics World Games and was favored to win the gold medal for the freestyle artistic event, practiced a difficult formation called "shoot the duck." One of his teammate's roller skates traced figure eight lines similar to the ice skating figures that were formerly part of the Winter Olympics. A woman in a pink sequined leotard sat tensely lacing her skates, her eyes darting between the¡ asphalt floor of the rink and the eleven flags hung impressively above. Warming up for the dance event, a couple skated around the the rink in sync.

Michael, an 11-year-old speed skater, looked up when his parents and neighbors arrived greeting him with loud cheers and congratulatory remarks. In fact, almost every athlete had several people in the bleachers rooting specifically for him or her. Almost every spectator knew one of the competitors personally; very few people had come just to see Special Olympics rollerskating. Although Michael

clearly enjoyed the attention, he looked slightly annoyed when his mother started straightening his shirt. He listened, uninterested, as she told him how many more Special Olympics flags and pins she had bought for him that day. His father nudged him and said, "Hey Michael, maybe you'll get to see Arnold Schwartzenneger tonight during the opening ceremonies!" Michael wasn't ¡ listening, though. His focus was far from celebrity watching; instead, he was contemplating how he could perform up to his maximum potentiaL He had seen his coach and was waving him over. In an urgent tone, Michael asked his coach whether he should change the wheels on his skates to smoother "outdoor wheels."

In the final moments before the ' competition began, Ingalls Rink had become the still point at the center of Barbara's elaborate organizational storm of buses, volunteers, and clipboards. All Michael noticed was the asphalt, the other competitors, and his own dream of rollerskating to a gold medal.

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Bearing Witness Karen Jacobson oanne Rudof tells a story about a l 0-year-old Hungarian boy who survived Nazi labor camps. "He went to a Yeshiva. And every lunch time he would tell these stories of what he did and what he experienced during the war. And one day when he went out he heard one child say to another child, 'Let's get Marry to tell us more of his bullshit stories, and that's when Marty stopped telling his 'bullshit' stories."

Rudof, the organizer of Yale's Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, oversees the recording of survivor accounts. Only recently have people begun talking about their experiences during the Holocaust. "They wanted to talk after the war, [but) when they talked, people shut them off," Rudof said. "I think one reason that survivors didn't talk is that they perceived people didn't want to hear what they had said."

Today, as some of the youngest survivors of the concentration camps reach retirement age, there is more time in their lives to remember. Memories they attempted to forget are coming back.

Suddenly, they want to speak out.

Two projects are helping them do this by conducting interviews in a format that allows the survivors to speak of what they witnessed. The process is both painful and relieving. For survivors telling their stories, there are sleepless nights both preceding and following the interviews. There is also the hope that once they have spoken, they will no longer live alone with their horrors.

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16

Tht only ont what's /ivtd it through knows rtally what happmtd.

Bteaust tht fulings [that] art involvtd with this story, thry art not tht samt. But you cannot ttl/ how I ftlt whm I found tht ckuhts of my brothtr, for txampk [whik sorting tht garmmts ofthost who had just bun gaJud]. Now ifyou aJk mt what I was thinking about, I wasn't thinking at all. I was horrifitd. But I can ttl/ tht story, and it sounds-wt/1, anothtr story. "

Wt/1, how shall I rkscribt to you how Auschwitz was?" n the third floor of Sterling Memorial Library in the Fortunoff Video Archive, thousands of individuals address this problem. VHS videotapes, each marked and coded, line the walls from floor to ceiling in the small, cramped room.

Books of Holocaust memoirs are squeezed behind a crowded row of desks. Artifacts, books, and tapes have priority over people in this room where Holocaust survivors' testimonies are archived by a small staff. After 16 years of work, 3,500 testimonies have been recorded.

On the opposite side of the country, in the same trailer where production work for jurassic Park was done, the Survivors of the Shoah (Hebrew for Holocaust) Visual History Foundation has its headquarters at Universal Studios. The modest trailer contains crowded desks near a clock-covered wall telling times from around the world-Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami/New York/Toronto,

0

THE NEW JouRNAL

.A Holocaust memoriAl erected in D~~eh.u, Germany.

Buenos Aires, London , Amsterdam/Frankfurt/Johannesburg, Paris/Prague, Jerusalem, St. Petersburg, Sydney. These are the cities where Steven Spielberg, the acclaimed movie director, has set up projects to tape the stories of Holocaust survivors.

In another trailer, volunteers answer che project's hotline and enter facts about survivors into a database. Sixty-four computers catalogue the 64 taped interviews expected to come in each day.

Inside a Universal Studios building, high-tech computers digitize the tapes to CD-ROM. In its first year, Spielberg's project has taped 3,000 testimonies. The goal is to reach 50,000 in the next few years.

Spielberg's Shoah Foundation has raised $19 million in the past year from corporate sponsors such as MCA, Warner Bros., UPS, and Silicon Graphics, Inc. The largest grants for Yale's Fortunoff project, from the Charles H. Revson Foundation and from Alan M. Fortunoff, on the other hand, total less than one million. This money will run out by the end of 1996, forcing Yale to discontinue taping.

P

rior to the late seventies, no real forum existed for survivors to relate accounts of the Holocaust. A handful of individuals, like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, wrote memoirs.

The majority, however, did not discuss what had happened. Many feared, often unconsciously, that no one would listen, and the mistakes of the Holocaust would be echoed.

SEPTEMBER

8, 1995

"The fear that fate will strike again is crucial to the memory of trauma. The act of telling itself becomes severely traumatizing if the price of speaking is reliving, not relief," writes Dr. Dori Laub in ustimony: Crises of Witnming in Litaatur~. Psychoanalysis, and History, a holocaust survivor himself and co-founder of the Fortunoff pr.)ject. "If one talks about the trauma without being truly heard or truly listened to, the telling might itself be lived as a return to the trauma-a re-experiencing of the event."

The Yale project confronts this reticence, typical of survivors.

Fortunoff program advisor Dr. Geoffrey Hartman {GRD '53), professor of comparative literature at Yale, became involved in the project after his wife gave her test imony. He said that, initially, survivors did not know whether they could trust the program.

They knew nothing about Yale, except that it was not a Jewish institution, and were unsure what the program hoped to accomplish. Much of the work of Hartman and his associates has consisted of overcoming the survivors' suspicion of being interviewed. The survivor must initiate the taping at Yale and most of those who have been taped learned about the project by word of mouth or through the newspaper. "When they finally came in they gave us their trust and we worked from hand to mouth. We weren't high-tech in any way," Hartman sai~.

For Spielberg, gaining the trust of survivors was less difficult.

Because of his Jewish background, and particularly because of his reputation as the maker of the 1993 film Schindla's List,

17

As survivors reach retirement age there is more time to remember.

Memories they attempted to forget are coming back. They want to speak.

Holocaust survivors living in the United States were less suspicious of him.

Spielberg drew inspiration for the project during the fi lming of Schindltr's List. He was quoted in Tht Ntw York Timts as saying, "At least a dozen Holocaust survivors journeyed [to Poland] using the film as a cushion to find closure with their nightmare. They showed up, and often through tears began telling us their stories. I kept saying to them, 'Thank you for telling me, but I wish you could say this to a camera because this is important testimony.' I asked them if they'd be willing to do this, and they all said yes."

In a press release dated August 31, 1994, Spielberg announced his plan to create the largest videotape library of

Holocaust survivor testimonies ever recorded. "We have assembled a bright and dedicated team of historians, documentary film makers, Holocaust survivors, educators, archivists, and communication technology experts devoted to preserving the memory of the Holocaust," the release stated.

The film maker has since set up two institutions: the Righteous Person's Foundation, which receives all the profits from Schindkr's List, and the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, which carries out the work of recording survivors' testimonies. Spielberg recruited the producers of Schindler's List and a Universal Studios executive as the executive producers for the project.

Independent producers June Beallor and James Moll run the day-to-day operations. n contrast to the grand fund raisers and the blitz of press releases that ushered in Spielberg's project last year, the Yale project began modestly in 1979. Laurel Vlock, an independent television producer from New Haven, contacted Laub about taping survivor testimon ies after the success of her Emmy award-winning documentary on the dedication of the Holocaust Memorial on Whalley Avenue.

NBC had recently produced a series entitled Ho/Qcaust, piquing interest in the subject. In many ways the television series inspired the video project, explained Laub, because it exposed the need for an account of life during the Holocaust that was not steeped in fiction. "[The series) didn't seem to comprehend what the Holocaust was all about," he said. Vlock and Laub joined forces, making use of their respective resources and areas of expertise.

Vlock had access to a camera crew, and

I

The Fortunoff Video Archive on the third floor ofSterling Memorial Library.

18

Laub contacted a Jewish center to find survivors willing to talk about their experience;. They taped the first testimonies in Laub's office.

"On that first night we expected the taping to last two hours," said Laub. "It lasted until three in the morning. We realized this was something we had to do.

It was nothing we had heard before, the power, the detail, the reflection without preparation. We didn't know they had it in them; they didn't know they had it."

The process begins when an interviewer calls a survivor for a pre-taping session to construct a rough outline of his or her story. Survivors are encouraged to bring any memorabilia they would like recorded. Drawing on the information given, the interviewer completes further research to prepare for the taping.

"We do a pre-interview work-up so the interviewers have a broad outline of what they'll hear," says Rudof. "From that preinterview outline, [interviewers] hit the books and make sure they are familiar with all the routes these people travelled. " Roughly, the process involves a detailed study of maps to make sure interviewers have a feel for where events took place, and a review of the history of each location, so experiences can be placed into context.

The camera focuses on the survivor from the waist up during an interview, zooming in and out to capture each gesture and expression. The interviewer asks the survivor to begin telling his or her story from as far back as possible, usually beginning with details about his or her birthplace.

"We don't like to use the word 'interviewer' because it brings to mind a television personality," said Rudof. "And

THE NEW JouRNAL

when Barbara Walters does an interview, or Dan Rather does an interview, they own that interview. They know what they are looking for, and they go into [it] as the dominant partner in the interview." The project's interviewers, Rudof explained, go into the room as avid listeners, encouraging each survivor to tell his or her story in his or her own way. They must listen closely so as to keep the story in the correct place and time.

Hartman stressed the importance of preventing the survivors' words from being influenced by the interviewer. "We say, 'Don't impose your ideas on the survivor,'" he said. "This is a rich archive full of anecdotes, stories, history of everyday life under grim circumstances."

Interviewers for the Fortunoff project go through an eight-week training course, then return each year for three or four sessions of refresher courses. "What we do or what we recommend to our affiliates is that they train the interviewer over a range of weeks so that things sink in and the interviewers [have time to] do a lot ot: reading," said Hartman.

There are 12 interviewers at Yale for the 50 to 70 interviews done each year. No new interviewers have been trained since 1984. "The more people do this, the better they become at doing it, so we would prefer to stay with the ones we have," Rudof explained.

T

he scope of the Spielberg project demands the ability to train large numbers of interviewers in a short period of time. Prospective interviewers only train for two days, or about 20 hours.

"In the beginning we knew it was necessary to have some sort of training for the interviewers but we didn't realize [to

SEPTEMBER 8, 1995

The Fortunofl" Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies

Vol< Univmicy

The Fortunoffana Shoah foundations' pamphlets are distributed to synagogues and jewish centers in the hope of~aching survivors. what] extent," said producer Moll.

"In L.A. recently, over a 1,000 interviewers applied. Two hundred may attend the [training) session, and 100 will be accepted to do interviews for the foundation," said Moll. About 700 interviewers work for the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation across the U.S. and abroad. Their newsletter boasts of a woman whose team recorded 52 testimonies in one week.

Yale, as the first institution to tape survivor testimony, has learned a great deal in the past 16 years. It helped initiate a number of similar projects around the world, including Spielberg's. Yet Spielberg's promotional pamphlets merely cite Yale as a depository of their tapes, not as the creator of this model for oral testimony. Although Hartman was originally wary of the Spielberg project, he is more optimistic today. "They have persuaded me during the past yea.r of their seriousness, of their capacity to learn," he said.

There are some differences in the methods of taping used by Yale and Spielberg. Both sides argue that their format is most conducive to gathering testimony. While the Yale project places no

time limits on interviews, the Spielberg project, in its effort to record as many testimonies as possible, limits each session to two hours. "We needed to prepare a budget so we decided to go with that average length knowing that we would expand it if necessary, and we have ...we don't cut them off," said Moll. "They are trained to spend a solid half-hour on prewar experiences ... , an hour on war experiences, and then a half-hour on postwar life, but its not limited."

The setting of the taping sessions also differ. The Yale project has always taped outside of the home, beginning in Laub's office and then moving to Yale's audiovisual center in the basement of Street Hall. "We have never really done taping in people's homes," said Rudof.

"You have to worry about soundproofing, the lighting is difficult, the phone is ringing, the refrigerator motor is disturbing... it's really hard to control."

In the studio, the survivor is allowed to decide whether somebody who has accompanied her or him to the site remains in the control room during the interview. Many prefer to go through the interview alone, even when it means asking a spouse, or son, or daughter to

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Auschwitz

wait outside. Giving the survivor these options helps them to feel they are in control, said Rudof. "I think part of the ability to talk about this is to talk about it to a stranger in a vety neutral setting," she added. "A person's home is loaded, and you don't want to pollute [the] house."

Spielberg prefers to use a fuHy mobile camera crew in his interviews, taping in the survivors home whenever possible.

"LogisticaHy, it [is] convenient to film in the home," said one of the project's producers, June Beallor. "We [find) that the survivors [are] more comfortable in their own surroundi n gs and that i t [imparts) their own character, because we [are] in their home w ith their own material, their own photographs. It gives an insight to who they are as individuals."

With many of the interviewees being in their 70s and 80s, filming at home can be much easier, Beallor added.

Still, one disadvantage of filming in people's homes is the tendency for survivors to avoid painful or grotesque material, either because they do not want to make family members uncomfortable, or because they are afraid to let loose horrible images in the p lace where they spend their time.

Hartman said that while the Spielberg method may ultimately be less effective,

the simple fact that the project will have done 50,000 interviews, as compared to Yale's predicted 4,000 interviews, assures that it will unearth important material.

"The statistics are working fo r them," he said.

Hartman's main focus for the Yale project is continued expansion to include more survivors across the U.S. and around the world. "In 1980 we were saying exactly the same thing [as the Spielberg people)," said Hartman. "We don't have all that much time. We've got to do it." n a small archive room in Sterling Memorial Library, a tape slips into the VCR. A viewer puts on a headset and is alone with the videotaped person. It is not the image of a skeletal Holocaust victim or the innocent eyes of Anne Frank. This individual is someone you might pass on the street, a middle-aged to elderly man or woman, dressed smartly, with a German, Polish, or other European accent. Behind them there is only a plain off-white wall, or a simple wall-hanging. The only place for the viewer's eye to rest is on the witness' face. The tapes are unedited; the camera never stops or cuts to a different angle. The viewer cannot fall back on the idea that this is merely fiction.

Throughout the testimonies, the

I

THE NEW jOURNAL

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The tapes a re unedited; the camera never stops or cuts to a different angle.

The viewer cannot fall back on the idea that this is merely fiction.

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495-7400 perplexity of the survivor today at the moral distance from the events they lived is painfully clear. They pause, their eyes or face wrench, and the silence is heavy. The struggle to narrate the immorality of the time is excruciatingly vivid.

Myra L. stays composed through the wo rst of the narrative. Her big eyes captivate the viewer, but her posture is relaxed, her hands folded on her lap. It is as if her stories happened to someone else-until she recounts the death of her nephew.

The little boy came to her in the Warsaw Ghetto before one of the large round-ups. She was a nurse sharing an apartment with her two brothers. Her nephew, the son of her sister who had died at the beginning of the Ger~an occupation, lived in an orphanage. At one point it was announced that all children under the age of ten were to be taken to camps. The child was only nine-and-ahalf, and small for his size, due to lack of nutrition from growing up during the war years. He pleaded with his aunt to let him stay with her. She describes how she can still see his eyes. At the time, in the ghetto, she thought he had a better chance in the orphanage than with her, so she told him no. When the day for round-ups came, Myra was told that she and her family would be allowed to stay because she was a nurse. Looking back she thinks she could have saved her nephew easily. She begins to cry as the anguish comes through, that she really did say no. "The survival will was so big that no one was sacrificing oneself for someone else," she says. In 1984, the year Myra gave her testimony, this decision of 40 years earlier is unbearable.

SEPTEMBER 8, 1995

( ( wen I looked at some of the video testimonies I saw what a powerful way to record and transmit information [it was]," said Hartman. "There are qualities that the printed record of the historians cannot reach adequately. In addition to history writing and audio testimony, [video] adds something experiential."

"The story is the point of view of the victims," said Rudof. "There are tens of thousands of sheets of German documents, and if that's the only documents the scholar studies, then they will have a very biased point of view. So we are trying to balance chat. Many of these people will never write a memoir, so this provides them an opportunity to tell their story."

There has already been debate about the historical importance of this testimony.

The earliest audiovisual records were completed at Yale 40 years after the event.

Laub, who specializes in trauma studies, has noted how the mind tends to encode the memories of trauma more deeply than other recollections. Memories, though, are never as factual as the accounts in the military records kept by the Nazis.

An interview that Laub conducted himsel f exe mplifies chis debate. The woman he was interviewing described an uprising chat occurred while she was in Auschwitz. Describing her testimony, he wrote, "A sudden intense, passion and color were infused into the narrative. She was fully there. J\11 of a sudden,' she said, 'we saw four chimneys going up in flames, exploding. The flames shot into the sky, people were running. It was unbelievable.'

There was a silence in the room, a fixed silence against which the woman's words reverberated loudly, as though carrying along an echo of the jubilant sounds

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exploding from behind barbed wires, a stampede of p eop le breaking loose, screams, shots" battle cries, explosions. It was no longer the deadly timelessness of Auschwin ...The woman fell silent and the tumults of the moment faded. She became subdued again and her voice resumed the uneventful, almost m onotonous and lamenting tone."

Laub showed the testimony a few months later at a conference with historians. The historians argued that it was factually known that not four but only one chimney had exploded . Th ey emphasized the importance of accuracy so that revisionists could not use such testimony to discredit proof of the Holocaust.

Laub disagreed, and the structure of the testimonies support his argument. Oral history should not be used like the written documentation by the Nazis themselves,

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which accurately catalogues the events.

"The woman was testifying not to the chimneys blown up, but to something else more radical, more crucial: the reality of an unimaginable occurrence. One chimney blown up in Auschwitz was as incredible as four...The woman testified to an event that broke the all-compelling frame of Auschwitz, where Jewish armed revolts just did not happen, and had no place. She testified to the breakage of a framework.

That was historical truth."

"The university is important," said Hartman. "We cannot expect oral history to be as precise as research since this is memory of 50 years now. This gathers information on daily hiding and activities. , The archives of videotapes reveal humanity in detail. Instead of directing the tapings with preset agendas, 'interviewers allow survivors to guide the convc.rsation.

At Yale, interviewers make exceptions occasionally to help illuminate less documented areas of Holocaust history.

The academic setting of Yale's project encourages feedback from researchers who will eventually use these tapes.

During the past 16 years, Yale has refined its model for interviewing. Now it hopes to pass on this knowledge to the young Spielberg group. Spielberg has donated $500,000 to the Fortunoff project, but has earmarked it for cataloguing purposes only, not taping. And while Spielberg reaps the benefits of Yale's years of experience, Fortunoff faces financial doom . Unless another major grant appears in the next year, Yale must discontinue taping testimonies. Yale's ground-breaking work has allowed Sp ielberg to jump in quickly without difficulty. These interviews are not filled

SEPTEMBER

8, 1995

with heroic acts and happy endings; the interviewers and the interviewing process must allow both the testifier and the viewer the forum to hear the stories.

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The viewer leans toward the screen, her body tense, responding to every word the witness utters. She looks to others sitting around her for similar responses, but they do not hear the testimony she hears in her earphones. She squirms, yet cannot turn off the tape, cannot stop the story midway through. She wonders, 'What would I have done, how would I have acted? ' As Hartman wrote in " Learning from Survivors: the Yale Testimony Project, " "Face to face with that world, it is our search for meaning which is disclosed, as if we had to be comforted for what they suffered." The viewer walks away from that interview. Yet, just as the testifier, she feels she must speak and must talk about the trauma she has just witnessed. These projects aim to compel her to speak, to fulfill the promise inscribed on the Dachau memorial, "Never Again.'"

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Every day, students i.n New Hoven's schools hear that their oge group has the fastest growing rate of HfV-infection. But now, health educators must reach drop-outs beyond school walls.

Adding Sex¡Ed to Street Smarts Halary Margolis

L

eaving a New Haven dance club one night, Deborah Bey spots teenagers huddled together on the street corner.

Unlike most New Haven residents, she approaches them and begins asking questions. As director of education for AIDS Project-New Haven, she urges them to participate in a youth group sponsored by her agency. The teens' immediate response is a refusal to attend. Bey then asks if they are practicing safe sex. Their reply is a resounding "no" that echoes in Bey's ears and triggers the first step in her effort to turn their response around.

Such responses are prompting the creation of outreach programs for kids no longer enrolled in New Haven schools. If the teenagers with whom Bey spoke were enrolled in school, they would have a School-Based Health Center (SBHC) to provide information and support in matters of mental and physical health.

In particular, condoms would be available to them as part of a project adopted two years ago. High school drop-outs such as those Bey confronted have no SBHC to inform them about AIDS, tell them the benefits of abstinence, or hand them a condom. While the SBHCs are themselves a success story, the fact that their services reach only those students enrolled in public school illustrates their failure to address the needs of all of New Haven's youth.

Supported by a combination of public and private funding and staffed by a wide range of health professionals, Connecticut's SBHCs (including seven clinics in New Haven} aim to provide comprehensive primary health care for public school students.

According to Connecticut's Department of Health and Addiction Services, 13 percent of students using SBHCs in 1993-94 had no form of consistent medical care, and 8 percent used the SBHCs as their only regular form of health care. A 1993 New Haven Social and Health Assessment Survey found that 65 to 70 percent of tenth graders were sexually active. Studies done by Yale-New H aven Hospital reported that one in 38 pregnant women in New Haven deliver HIV-positive infants in New Haven, the highest ratio in the United States. In reaction to these statisti cs, administrators and SBHC workers have become intent on taking

measures to prevent teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Their first step was establishing more complete services regarding sex education and STD/AIDS prevention through the SBHCs. During the 1993-94 school year, condoms were made avaihlble at clinics at Jackie Robinson Middle School, Fair Haven Middle School, Wilbur Cross High School, and Hillhouse High School. Jane Stern, nurse practitioner at the Fair Haven Middle School Hea,lth Clinic, said that the clinic staff follows strict guidelines .regarding the program's intentions. "The goal is AIDS prevention, not birth control. The number one issue we discuss is abstinence. It's all about AIDS prevention," she says.

AIDS is not a foreign concept to many students in New Haven. Patricia McCann-Vissepo, chair of the Board of Education for New Haven Public Schools, believes that one reason parents have remained relatively calm about condom distribution in the schools is because of the impact AIDS has had on their lives and those of their children. "This is not abstract, this is very real to people. Four out of 25 kids in ¡my son's fourth-grade class lost a family member to AIDS," McCann-Vissepo reveals. She believes that many parents felt a heavy weight being lifted from their shoulders with the beginning of condom availability in the schools. "I think they heaved a sight of relief. They said, 'Someone's doing something, and maybe now I don't have to."'

a

ile it is too early to know whether SBHCs' new focus has decreased the number of HIV-positive students in New Haven schools, the program's supporters believe that it is proving successful. "I'm sure that in the group of children who have been counseled, we have saved someone," says McCann-Vissepo. Bey points to the fact that most students see f rom four to 20 AIDS presentations during high school.

"Something is going to seep in, even if you're not always paying attention." Bethany, a junior at Hillhouse High School, believes that merely having a clinic on school grounds dramatically increases the amount of information students receive. "We spend most of the day at school. Now that the clinic is here, we have no

THE NEW jOURNAL

Tl

0 3

DON'T BE SHAME BE GA espite a positive attitude towards the SBHCs, the program's supporters acknowledge its failures along with its successes. "We still need to demonstrate to children that they have other options in life than to become sexually active," McCann-Vissepo says. Spinner believes the SBHCs and outreach programs are far from the best format for delivering information. But she also sees the undisputed facts. "We need to makes condoms available. I would prefer that parents do it and have the discussion with their children. The clinics are the second or third best option," she says. For now, however, they may be the best option for New Haven teenagers who are not receiving information in their homes. Spinner tells a joke about the lack of communication between parents and kids regarding sex. "What ~re the two kinds of people who never have sex?" she asks wryly, answering her own question with more than a hint of irony. "Our parents and our kids." Spinner is so familiar with the untruth in this statement that she barely sees the humor anymore. If the parents and schools are not doing enough to educate kids on the streets and change their behavior, Spinner knows that she has to try. "I'd rather they abstain, but if they have gonorrhea twice, I want to save their lives," she says. "I think their lives are worth . " Jt. Spinner recalls a time when condoms were nowhere to be found in clinics and sex education did not exist in schools. She has diagnosed countless HIV-positive teens and seen many pregnancies. In the face of this, Spinner created the Task Force to encourage the incorporation of more comprehensive SBHC's and condom distribution into all New Haven schools.

While condom distribution draws the most attention, administrators and health professionals believe the SBHCs more important role is to provide support for kids who can't find it outside of school. "The program is really the clinic, and the red herring is the condoms," says Spinner. Her voice takes on a tone of urgency and a hint of sadness as she discusses the plight of many New Haven teenagers. "[Sexually active] kids need someone to say, 'Hi, are you in there? I love you. I care about you.' And you'll knock on the kid's door 112 times before they let you in.

D

choice but to walk past it fi~e times a day. You see a sign in the clinic window and you read it. Seeing information makes students curious, makes them ask questions, and then they learn the facts," ¡ she says.

The students also emphasize the importance of services rendered at the clinics that they may not find elsewhere. For Bethany, condom distribution is the most important function of her SBHC. "Lots of girls I've talked to are embarrassed to buy condoms at the store. What if they need a price check on them while you're at the register? That's embarrassing," Bethany says.

"Condoms are expensive. If they don't have the money, some kids will do what they have to do, if you know what I mean." To anyone who does not catch Bethany's meaning, the statistics prove her point: with or without condoms, kids are having sex. In addition to providing condoms and health education, the clinics appear to fulfill the role of a support network envisioned by Janet Spinner, chair of the Adolescent Committee of the Mayor's AIDS/HIV Task Force. Bethany attests to this; she learned the value of the SBHC's support system when she lost her own father to AIDS. "To come to school and have them say they're available to you is a big help," Bethany says. "Drop-outs are missing out on a good opportunity."

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And if they let you in, maybe you can help them." In truth, it is the professionals working to break down these doors rather than the condoms themselves that make the crucial difference in teens' lives.

During the past year, the program has evolved into something closer to Spinner's ideal of a comprehensive support network.

Today, services offered by the SBHCs have been expanded to include reproductive health care, as well as a laundry list of other physical and mental health aids like crisis counseling, stress management, substance abuse and family counseling.

Carlos Ceballo, coordinator of SchoolBased Health Clinics for the New Haven Public Schools, wants students to feel comfortable seeking both physical and emotional support from the clinics. To reach this goal, he has coordinated a social development program of good decisionmaking and risk prevention for at-risk teenagets. Carla Jones, a health educator and HIV counselor at the Hillhouse High School SBH C, has spent the past year creating an environment in the school to foster support and encouragement for troubled teens. Though her polished appearance seems almost out of place among the worn walls of Hillhouse, Jones' warm and inviting demeanor has established her reputation as a friend and confidante. "At the clinic, you can talk to someone you trust," Bethany explains.

"You can talk to Carla. You know her and you like her."

However, no enhancement can overcome the program's biggest failing: the fact that SBHCs only reach students attending school. Health education programs must be extended to school drop-outs and kids on the street: "The

THE NEW JouRNAL

UBSCRIBE. Even if you live outside the Yale area, the best magazine about Yale and fact that kids come back multiple times for counseling [in the SBHCs] says that we have achieved one of our goals, but the dropout rate says that we aren't 100 percent successful," Spinner says with an edge of frustration. She emphasizes the need to help teenagers perceive themselves as valuable. "O ut~ of~school kids are a harder group to reach and what are we doing to help them? They are just as important."

Bey, of AIDS Pr9ject~New Haven, recounts a time when one teenager called her at home. "I asked her how her day was and she said, 'Wow, no one's ever asked me that before.' No one has ever loved these kids or cared about how they are doing." Even Bey, who has worked with countless teens, sounds pained at the mention of a situation she witnesses on a day~to~day basis.

The main problem that outreach coordinators encounter in helping high school drop~outs is precisely the fact that they are hard to reach. Finding these teenagers is the first step in helping them, and it is not always an easy step to take.

According to Bey, the role of outreach programs begins with identifying how kids slip through the cracks in the school system. Bey claims that the school system bas failed to take responsibility for ensuring that students reach the next level of education. "Some kids miss the boat on the jump from junior high to high school.

They just never get on anyone's roll sheet." Once kids have disappeared from school grounds, it is likely that no one will urge them to return. "If they're not here, they're not here, and we don't tap them," says Stern. "It's discouraging once they're gone because they're out of contact and who knows what they're doing?

SEPTEMBER 8, 1995¡

Hopefully they've picked up some information along the way and are taking care of themselves, but obviously some statistics say differently."

Bey contrasts the school and its bright posters, readily available health services, and psychological counseling with a life removed from this network of information. "In the streets, no one's talking to you; no one's telling you how to use condoms correctly; no one's telling you how to clean needles," she says. "In the school system you have someone watching over you at least a little bit. On the street, you don't get the message that teens between the ages of 14 and 25 are the fastest growing population with AIDS." Dondi Burroughs, a health educator at AIDS Interfaith in New Haven, feels it is essential to help drop~outs find a new direction. "These kids can't do a three~ sixty because they'll end up in the same place. They have to do a three~eighty."

Bey uses similar pragmatic language to outline her attack. "The first step is to keep these kids from wandering. The second step is pulling them into an agency in a group setting and then modifying the curriculum to fit them." All of this is easier said than done when dealing with kids who have already shunned the system.

Bey and Spinner realize that programs must be tailored to the specific needs of drop~outs and troubled kids. "Going into the neighborhoods, you see that you can't do a regular group," Bey asserts. "You have to be working with kids twenty~ four/seven. You need to work with them where they are." Bringing services to teens rather than expecting them to come to the agencies is a large part of the philosophy

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behind outreach programs for high school drop-outs.

Bey, for example, continues to chat with teenagers since she first approached young adults outside of the dance club.

She has created a personal crusade, using condoms and literature from AIDS Project-New Haven. She speaks to them on her own time, without the formal support of her agency, and she exudes passion for her cause.

Bey is not satisfied with the solo approach, however. As a member of the Adolescent Committee on the Mayor's HIV/AIDS Task Force, she wants to turn her work into a formal program through her employer agency, AIDS Project-New Haven. As chair of the same committee, Spinner hopes to fill in the gaps in outreach programming for out-of-school youth. "Lots of groups supposedly provide services, but they are underutilized and are only a small part of the overall agencies," Spinner says with dissatisfaction. Plans for new projects throughout the city include vans to distribute condoms and material on HIV/AIDS prevention, as well as coordinating services with grass-roots organizations. In addition, the committee meets with parents and families of school drop-outs and with GED/Adult Education students, whose graduation rate mirrors that of public schools.

Bey's philosophy is driven by the idea that empowerment must precede effective AIDS educadon. Burroughs and Spinner agree th at kid s on the street have dangerously low self-esteem. "Wh en you have the attitude that black men don't live beyond the age of 25, why should you care about AIDS?" Bey asks with a hint of despair. H er question reflects what Spinner terms the spirit of "fatalism," the "it doesn't matte r, I'll do it anyway" attitude common on the streets. "A child ·or young adult putting him- or herself at risk knows how not to risk losing his or her life. W h at lacks is the ability to negotiate protecting him- or herself and the belief in wanting to survive," she says.

In Bey's mind, state and national government reinforce this attitude. She cites the tightening of AIDS funding across the country. "This country is going t hrough a conservative tide. People still see AIDS as a gay disease. T hey think, so what if a poor Latino dies? H e wasn't contributing to society, he wasn't working, he was using drugs."

Bey, Spinner, and Burroughs are all interested in employing techniques of peer counseling and training to empower outof-school youth. Peer education programs have already proven effective in the public schools. Jones provides an 11-week peer education training course on AIDS and STD prevention through her SBHC at Hillhouse High Schoo l. Jones has no delusions about where teenagers get their information. "Peers listen to peers. They listen to each other more than me. " Burroughs already uses this method in the AIDS Interfaith outreach program called Haven's Youth Peer Education (HYPE), which provides outreach services. in the form of seminars, a teen hotline, job

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placement, and distribution of condoms and AIDS information on the streets. Bey wants to provide simultaneous education and employment by creating a peer counseling program with monetary compensation. She echoes Jones' confidence in the effectiveness of training teenagers to teach each other. "Youth listen to youth most, and you have to deal with the fact that a lot of these kids are poor and can't give up their time for free," she says. Bethany agrees that kids listen to their friends even though the information is too often laced with error. "All kids know is what they hear," Bethany says.

"They don't know the truth." Bey hopes to mold teenagers not only into peer counselors, but also into their own best supporters within the community at large.

"I want to trajn them to be informed advocates so they can turn around, go to the Board of Education, and advocate AIDS education."

To fill the place of the schools and SBHCs for kids on the street, Spinner proposes the creation of a drop-in center.

"We need a way of addressing the basic human needs for homeless kids. We need to establish trust," she says. Spinner's words outline an environment where outof-school teens could receive attention, mental and physical health care, and nurturing from trustworthy individuals.

Although the first step in the HYPE program is attempting to persuade kids to return to school, Burroughs believes that those who refuse must be offered other options. "The kids have to know that there are places to go," he says.

Bey agrees that one answer to the problem is making activities both available and appealing to teens. She points to the success of such programs as Midnight

SEPTEMBER 8, 1995

Basketball and Youth Nights at various community centers in New Haven.

Though Bey represents AIDS Project-New Haven, she realizes the stigma attached to her organization's tide. "These kids don't want to show up anywhere involved with AIDS. They don't want their friends thinking they're infected." According to Bey, teenage drop-outs aren't searching for a teen group meeting at an agency such as hers. Like Burroughs, she thinks they are looking for a place where it is clear that someone cares.

Jones, Bey, Burroughs, and Spinner are all looking to provide this place. The difference is that Jones has the luxury of working with a clinic for dispensing information and a captive audience surrounding her clinic. For Jones, the SBHC provides a stepping off point by forming an immediate connection between herself and the students. Before even reaching the point at which Jones' work begins, Bey, Burroughs, and Spinner must overcome the challenge of reaching their target group. Not only must they find a drop-out, they must be able to grab his or her attention and hold it long enough to make a difference. Once they do this, the process of changing that teenager's attitude and behavior can begin.

These modern-day street fighters are looking for more than permission to distribute condoms. They are struggling to establish ways in which kids will allow them to care.

1111

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jonathan Weinberg

.,

Elm Street -Fighter Dan Murphy 'm facing my roommate Steven on a city street in Beijing. As the locals pass on bicycles, we're engaged in a fight to the death. I grab Steven in a headlock .and punch him until he flips over, a tangled mess of arms and legs. I pump my fist in the air as my friends whoop and shout in celebration. Suddenly, a vicious kick to the head sends me crashing to the floor.

Miraculously restored, Steven stands over me, laughing a twisted sort of cackle. Exulting over this latest blow, he declares, "Oh man, that was sick!"

It's not that we don't like each other. And neither one of us is particularly violent. We're only like this when we're playing Str~~t Fighur. Sega has transformed our otherwise peaceful common room into something out of Lord ofth~ Fli~s.

Nearly everyone on our floor enjoys some level of addiction; at least it's comforting to know that we're not alone in our mania.

Especially among males, Sega has become one of Yale's most popular pastimes, a video-game subculture complete with its own language. For the uninitiated, the above scene might seem a mystery. But Sega players are familiar with the violence of Strut Fight~r, Sega's most popular game.

Strut Fight~rs premise is simple: two characters, chosen from the game's twelve stock personalities, beat on each other until one knocks the other out. Each character has a signature move which only he or she can perform. For instance, Chun-Li, a slight Asian woman (and, incidentally, the only female character) specializes in the Chinny-Chi Ching, a devastating maneuver in which she turns upside down, and scissors her legs like helicopter rotor blades to elevate herself, repeatedly kicking her opponent's head. Aaron, the senior down the hall who's on his way to Yale Law School, claims to be the world's leading authority on Chun-Li, having spent months mastering the nuances of the Chinny-Chi Ching. At any hour of the day or night, A.aron can be found too close to the glowing screen with his dirty, size-13 sneakers twisted Indian style.

At these moments, his unshaven face and gaping mouth take on a violent look ~f competitive intensity that stands in stark contrast to

I

Chun-Li's balanced, delicate features. It always seems impossible to me that the herky-jerky motions of A.aron's hairy knuckles on the controller somehow correspond to the graceful poised flips and leaps of his counterpart. I don't think Aaron ever fully appreciates this irony, being too enraptured by the two-inch character existing somewhere between Cindy Crawford and Bruce Lee. When I play Strut Fighkr, I usually choose Edmund Honda, a 400-pound Japanese sumo wrestler. This choice is considered something of a cop-out among my friends, due to the fact that Honda has an extremely powerful punch, and in order to win all I have to do is tense up all my muscles, contort my face, and press the punch button as fast as I can to unleash Honda's patented "Fists o' Fury." True Honda players win by defying gravity and flying headflfst at opponents like a human torpedo. I still have a long way to go before I reach that level of expertise.

Just as in sports, stories grow up around Sega, myths about feats and accomplishments. Tom, the junior living down the hall, read that if you reach the end of Strut Fight" II without a single loss, all the defeated characters appear in hospital beds. The elusive "hospital beds" quickly became the Holy Grail of my floor, sending Tom on a crusade which remains, to this day, unfulfilled.

I was reminded of our Sega exploits on a recent humid August night at Shea Stadium where the Mets were facing the Los Angeles Dodgers. Most of the evening's 13,000 fans were unapologetically apathetic. Next to me, an overweight, balding man was dozing off with a plate of nachos in his lap, another victim of what the media calls "baseball's soporific pace." Sitting there in the sun, I realized that his dreams could be far more exciting than the lulling action on the field. I pictured him climbing over the barricades and sprinting at lightning speed to the mound to deliver the ChinnyChi Ching to Dodger pitcher Hideo Nomo. I could see him taking it upon himself to get back at the players for being too skilled, too rich, too blessed with talent.

Perhaps the popularity of Sega's realistic games can blur the line between what's real and what's a video game. Who's to say what is

30

THE NEW JouRNAL

"real hockey," when there may be more kids learning and playing the sport with joysticks than with hockey sticks? Most Yalies will never live anything as violent as Strut Fighter, and they may be led to believe that in real life most street fights involve beautiful Asian women and Sumo wrestlers.

If an everyday fan should enjoy a moment of glory dreaming of athletic feats, it lasts only until he awakes to his real life, where not every day is an adventure, and he isn't a professional athlete. When daily life isn't a sport, a fight, or a crusade, the vicarious life within the glowing box can sometimes be more enjoyable. Observing his snooze, you can only see an inactive couch potato, and you never meet the athlete dwelling within. Sega brings out everyone's competitive fire.

On my hallway, we all fell into this Sega world to different degrees. Aaron seemed at times to have difficulty distinguishing his own identity from Chun-li's as evidenced by statements such as, "Did you see how I kicked Bal-rog!" or "Honda killed me." For my part, I've never managed to throw my entire spirit into the game. I always enjoy playing, but every now and then I'm struck by the absurdity of our video game obsession. Having always played sports, I never got over my guilt at playing a game of Sega on a sunny afternoon.

On the first night of finals week last semester there were nine people in my common room booing and cheering at the raging battle onscreen. Sitting at my desk two rooms away, I grasped the tattered baseball I had borrowed that afternoon. Two hundred years ago, before the birth of "the National Pastime," this ball would have been considered a meaningless lump of twine, cork, and leather. The game gave the baJ.lsignif«:ance.

How could something as simple as a ball ever hope to compete

SEPTEMBER

8, 1995 ·

Sega has become one of Yale's most popular pastimes, a video-game subculture, transforming otherwise peaceful common rooms into something out of Lord of the Flies. with the electronic complexities of Sega? The video game offers a new kind of sport, one with vicarious glory neatly confine·d to a television screen. Sports become sterile and clean, indoors and yearround, requiring no uniforms, equipment, or stretching. And all the issues of real life become clear-cut, with the computer acting as an electronic arbiter deciding who deserves a penalty and who wins the fight.

Staring at the raised red stitches of the baseball, my thoughts were drowned out by yells concerning the fate of Chun-Li. No matter how high the Chinny Chi-Ching takes Chun-Li, I don't think she'll ever replace the sports of real life. Video games will always be fun, but there will never be anything quite like the act of throwing a baseball.

IIIJ Dan Murphy, a sophomort in Timothy Dwight Colkgt, is on tht staff

ojTNJ.

I don't want to work for The New Journal! I have better things to do with my time than work for a magazine that has received every major

writing prize at Yale as well as the Rolling Stone College Journalism Award.

Besides, you and I¡both know that The New Journal is just a training ground for media types like TNJ founder, and

Pulitzer Prize winner, Daniel Yergin or P?~St TNJ staffer, and editor

of th~ Chicago Tribune, Jack Fuller.

And you think just because The New Journal is the oldest magazine at Yale and also has the largest circulation, 1'm supposed to be impressed? Give me some credit. So, I beg of you, go ask someone who cares .

Well, while we won't be seeing him at any TNJ meetings, we would love to see you! The New Journal is looking for innovative writers , DTP demigods, cutting-edge designers, dynamic photographers, artistes extraordinaires, business tycoons, and interested, interesting Yalies in general. If one of the above applies to you, come to one of our two snappy organizational meetings or call us.

TNJ Organizational Meetings

Tuesday, September 12 7:00 p.m.

Wednesday, September 13 8:00 p.m.

WLH 113 Or call 'The New Journal office at 2-1957 or Suzanne at 776-4 752.

~

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