Volume 29 - Issue 4

Volwne 29, Nwnber 4

The magarine about Yale and Ntv.¡ Haven

February J4, l9'J7

TheNewJoumal PUBLISH ER

Audrey Leibovich EDITOR- I N-CHI EF

Hillary Margolis MANAGING EDITORS

Karen jacobson Gabriel Snyder BuSINESS MANAGER

Dan Murphy D ESIGNER

Alec Bemis PRODUCTION MANAGER

john Bullock PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Marisa Galvez A s sociATE PuBLISHER

Min Chen AssociATE EDITOR

joel Burges AssoCIATE PRODUCTION MANAGER

Lainie Rutkow

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RESEARCH DIRECTOR

Dana Goodyear CIRCULATION AND SuBSCRIPTION MANAGER

Sara Harkavy

Hurry in. It's Bonus Time at the Clinique counter

Carolin~ Adams • Lortn Brody• • jay Dixit David Hoffman • Christina Lung • Yuki Noguthi Cath~rin~ Okndtr"' • Daphna Rman • Gtnny Taft*

*&cud to staff F~bruary 7, 1997 M~bm and Dir~ctors: Constance Clement Joshua Civin • Peter B. Cooper • Brooks Kelley Suzanne Kim • Patricia Pierce • Kathy Reich Elizabeth Sledge • Fred Suebeigh Thomas Strong

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Fritnds: Steve Ballou • Anson M. Be.ard, Jr. Edward B. Bennett, Jr. • Edward B. Bennett III Blaire Bennett • PaulS. Bennett • Gerald Bruck Jay Carney • Jonathan M. Clark • Constance Clement • Peter B. Cooper • Andy Court • Jerry & Rae Court • Mesi Denison • Mrs. Howard Fox David Freeman • Geoffrey Fried • Sherwin Goldman • David Greenberg • Stephen Hellman Brooks Kelley • Roger Kirwood • Andrew J. Ku~neski, J r. • Lewis E. Lehrman • Jim Lowe • E. Nobles Lowe • Hank Mansbach • Martha E. Neil Peter Neill • Sean O'Brien • Julie Peters • Lewis & Joan Platt • Julia Preston • Lauren Rabin Fairfax C. Randal • Rollin Riggs • Nicholas X. Riwpoulos • Arleen & Arthur Sager • Dick & Debbie Sears • Richard Shields • W. Hampton Sides • Lisa Silverman • Eliubeth & William Sledge • Thomas Strong • Eliubeth Tate • Alex & Betsy Torello • Allen & Sarah Wardell Daniel Yergin & Angela Stene Yergin

TheNew;[~UJlla.l_VoL-UME-29,

FEBRUARY N-UMB-ER414, 1997

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

7

A Festival for Art's Sake New Havens International Festival ofArts and Ideas begs the question: does the fringe benefit when culture comes to town?

BY HILLARY MARGOLIS

12

How the Talk-Show Half Lives As more Yalies make the pilgrimage to New York studios, they misunderstand their own place in daytime television.

BY JOEL B URGES

16

When the City Was a Silver Screen In the Elm City's cinematic heyday, New Haven and Hollywood converged on downtown's bygone movie houses.

BY RICHARD KIM

22

The Two-Party System A reporter ventures into the college social scene in search ofwhere the ((normal" Yalie parties.

BY GABRIEL SNYDER

www.nazi.com An undergraduate infiltrates the web sites where white supremacists propagate their hatred.

BY ] AY D IXIT

32

Roll Reversal The Pequot Tribal Nations Foxwoods Casino brings both dollars and destitution to Southern Connecticut.

BY D ANA GOODYEAR

TANDARD S_ From Our Perspective Points of Departure Between the Vines: House of (No) Sryle BY SARA HARKAVY Endnote: The Call Number of the Wild BY ALEX F UNK Cover design by Seth Zucker.

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THE NEW jOl;R"'AL is published five rimes during tb< acad.mic y<a~ by The New Journ.tl ar ~ale, l.nc.• ~.0. Box HP Yale S!ation, N~ Haven, o6s1o. Offi~ addr<:SS: •p P~rk S~r«r. Pho~<: 1103) 43.>·t9S?AII co~e<nrs copyright l99S by The New Journalar Yal<, l!'c. All.Righrs Res<rved. R<pr~ucroon <Hh<r on whole or on ~an wothour.wnnen p<rm~oon of th< publosh<r and eduor on cho<f 1$ probobored. ~1ule ~h,. magaztn< is published by Yal< Coll<g< srudenrs, Yal< Unov<rmy os nor rtsponsoble for tts conr<nu. Ten rhowaf!d ~pots of <acb usue are do~rnbured fr« ro memb<rs of th< Yal< ;tnd Now Hav<n com~unuy.

Subscriptions are available ro thas< outsid< the ar<a. Rar<S: One y<ar, s t8. Two y<ars, SJO. THE NEW JOl;IL'IAL 1$ pnnted by Turlq Publocauons, Palmer, l\.iA; bookk«pmg and bolting S<IVlC<S ae< provoded by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. THE NEW jOURNAL <ncourag« lttt<rs ~o th< ediror and co~m~nts on Yal< and New Haven issu<S. Wrir< 10 Edi10rials, }431 Yale Sration, Haven. CT o6s>o. Alllm<rs for publicarion musr includ< addr<SS and signarur<. W< r«<rve th< nghr to edot all l<tt<rs for publocanon.

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Culture in the Streets the

Popular culture is messy and residual.

reminiscences of Party of Fivr. These

Popular culture is constantly on the

television tidbits comprise predictable

move.

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X-Filrs,

Popular culture resists definition.

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Cultural critic Stuart

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fraternities,

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era, posrmodernism

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cultural epoch,

The articles in chis issue can no more

at Tht Ntw journal believe that

call 772-4666

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Alovely Queen Anne Style mansion has been transformed and refurnished into a 10 room bed and breakfast inn.

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popular culture is, co use Hall 's

series of pithy com-mentaries on prime-

metaphor, culture in the streets. It is the

time television. Publishing a special

traffic of our daily lives and it is the road

issue, there is always the temptation, on

on which this traffic runs. We maneuver,

the one hand, to be exhaustive in our

take detours, stall, hotwire, fall asleep at

coverage of the chosen topic. On the

the wheel, wake up with a jolt. The

ocher hand, there is also the worry char

traffic is swift; popular culture blurs

the issue will simply become an

before our eyes.

encyclopedic taxonomy. Instead, we have

The articles in this issue attempt to

located ourselves within the scenes of our

map the cultural streets that lie beyond

everyday lives, and, consequently, we

the classrooms and offices of Yale and

have found a place for ourselves in

New Haven. Popular culture surges

popular culture. These articles record our

forward at breakneck speeds, accelerating

experiences with the stop-and-go narure

for the turn onto the highway of the

of culture in the streets-the traffic jams,

twenty-first century. Despite this fin-tk-

the collisions, the men at work. They

sieck rush, the essence of popular culture

expose, finally, a dilemma for the writer:

can still be glimpsed in the rearview

poised between viewing and partici-

muror.

pating, between policies and pleasure, he

We at

Tht Ntw journal were

compelled to take to the roads of popular

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culture: out of our living rooms, beyond the sophisticated crudity of Tht

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or she must be willing to embrace ambivalence.

- Thr Editors

Cult Classics Backstage, Jason Weinberger (CC '96, MUS '97) walked past me nervously as he hurried to warm up for his clarinet performance. I knew him as the charismatic conductor of the Jonathan Edwards Chamber Orchestra. Now an assisrant conductor for the Yale Symphony Orchestra (YSO), Weinberger took the stage of Sprague Memorial Hall for his recital, a requirement for his master's degree . in music. His body swayed to Max Reger's Sonata in f minor, Op. 49, No.2.

I had never heard of Max Reger.

Weinberger was also going to perform a piece by the relatively unknown Alban Berg.

Weinberger relished the chance to introduce more obscure classical pieces to people who probably would not otherwise have heard them.

He had realized an odd duality about classical music at Yale. He stood atop a stage at times graced by the Tokyo String Quartet, in a city rich with a classical music tradition. Yet even in such an environment, most graduate and faculty concerts are poorly attended by undergraduates. Weinberger had exerted great effort to yield the 60-plus turnout. H e and other classical musicians must find creative ways to attract tindergraduates willing to listen to more than Beethoven's Fifth.

Yale both is and is not part of a downward trend in classical music. Faculty concerts are attended primarily by older New Haven residents. On the other hand, Yale Music Professor Craig Wright (Hon. MA '81) said Yale is probably the only university in the United States where an undergraduate symphony will have higher attendance than a basketball game. Yet Wright still fears that classical music is becoming less popular, especially among younger people. "The audience," Wright said, "keeps getting older and older." His music appreciation course is an attempt to revive interest in classical music among college students.

The YSO concert most heavily attended by undergraduates is the Halloween concert, which often features a homemade movie, live acting, and popular music. Lisa Shufro (BK

fEBRUARY 14,

1997

'95) recalled, "The bulk of the audience at other Yale Symphony concerts are not Yale students." In contrast, she described the orchestra's treatment when they played in Portugal for their 1995 spring trip. "Those people treated us like we were movie stars," she said. "Just-Please! autograph my program," university students there would beg her. This year, the orchestra has put forth an extra effort to attract undergraduates and has successfully drawn more students, YSO Manager Laurie Ongley said.

The Yale-New Haven area follows a national trend in which rock music leads the popularity charts and classical music lags behind.

One solution may be for classical musicians to perform repertoires that mix more popular pieces with

I e s s

yo un ger audiences. For one of Weinberger's .:h amber orchestra performances, psychology pro-fessor Peter Salovey narrated Sergei Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf." Weinberger then seized the chance to play one of Prokofiev's less popular works to the same audience.

The classical music world at Yale is fighting a battle to stay within the bounds of mainstream culture. This struggle has meaning for Wright because of music's special place among the arts. "People have a universally more visceral, pro or con, response to music than to any of the other arts," he said.

So what is at stake in the battle to save classical music other than the spiritual and aesthetic? "What else could there be?" Wright asked in return. "That's the very essence of

life."

- Lorm Brody

Kick Starting Krank20 You wander into Store 24 searching for something to help you face the coming dawn.

Their coffee is lukewarm at best, and pillpopping has never been your thing. You plod along, bleary-eyed, to the beverage cases, anticipating the syrupy comfort of a Coke.

Then you spy the bottle. You're drawn towards its busy green and red label boasting "maximum caffeine" in yellow letters.

Welcome to the Interstellar Beverage Company's fantasy of your initial encounter with Krank2 0, the world's first caffeinated water.

Marketed as "the world's coolest caffeine delivery system," Krank20 offers more than a snazzy label to attract exhausted Gen-Xers.

Promotional items abound, including stickers, posters, T-shirts, and the coveted "kranksta" rubber band gun. For the truly devoted, there is even a web site, complete with mascot Grinny and the "Krankee of the Week."

Publicity continues through radio spots and fliers that declare, " Inside: Krank 2 0 is manufactured using a proprietary process called '332ZIR,' which assures superior consistency, highest caffeine levels and great taste! Outside: Exciting graphics on the bottle and support materials set Krank20 apart from the crowd!"

According to its distributors, Krank20 has met with sweeping success. Sold in 30 states, it can be found nearly everywhere, from military bases to universities. The Interstellar Beverage Company receives ten to 15 calls per night praising the product, and its website boasts 10,000 hits a week. The company confidently claims that "after nearly two years in development, Krank20 Highly Caffeinated Water has emerged as the most exciting and intriguing functional food in today's beverage market."

Included in its marketing literature is the following success story: "Yale University coffee shop sells three cases during the first night after delivery of a six-case order."

An employee at Durfee's Sweet Shop confirms this story, saying, "Yes, it's true. But it was probably because our cooler was barely

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stocked with anything else. It was hot back in September, but now it's died off." The Durfee's cooler attests to this, as rows of Krank20 sit idly waiting while bottles of Snapple, Tropicana, and Poland Spring water are replaced almost hourly.

Apparently, this is not unique to Durfee's.

When presented with a bottle ofKrank20, the clerk at Krauszer's replied, "We don't sell much of that at all. See for yourself." He gestured toward a full cooler ofK.rank20 that remained virtually untouched the entire week. An employee at Quality Liquors echoed this sentiment, saying, "We used to sell it. We don't anymore. We ordered a couple of cases and sold about three bottles."

Only the Store 24 clerk reported continuous sales of Krank 20, and these were mostly to students who were repeat buyers. It appears that these purchasers have reason to be satisfied; the product does taste like water and manages to deliver the effects of 100 milligrams of caffeine per 500 milliliters of water. But, these devotees comprise only the smallest minority ofYale students.

For the vast majority of people in Krank20's 15- to 24-year-old target group, the product may as well not exist. As evidenced by its stagnant pre$ence on campus, "exciting graphics" and a website are not enough to convince consumers· that caffeinated water is anything more than a passing fad.

-Lainie Rutkuw

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A young man behind the counter at Pepe's Pizzeria sidesteps a pile of coal , adroitly whirling an enormous wooden oar.

He flips open a narrow ~etal flap in the brick wall, pulls out a bubbling, thin crust pizza from the 12-squar'!-foot oven, and lands it on an aluminum tray.

"Specialty pizzas? Oh, we have so many... " says Sal Montagna. Sal is a 57-year veteran pizza-maker for Pepe's. In a smock as white as his hair, he leans thoughtfully over the wooden counter. "White clam pizza-that's a big seller. Then we have the veggie special, special with anchovies , sausage and mushroom, pepperoni and mushroom ... " For most college towns, pizza places are as essential as bookstores, and more numerous. New Haven is no exception. Yale enjoys the rare privilege of being located in

the home of the pizza, or at least the home of the nation's best.

The aroma from Sally's and Pepe's ovens has wafted over the nation's collective nose, attracting a parade of famous fans. The Clintons (both as lowly students and as the lofty First Couple), Presidents Reagan and Kennedy, Danny DeVito, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, and Paula Abdul are among the stars who have stamped a tomato-stained seal of approval on Wooster Square's pies.

The walls of Sally's restaurant display gifts left by big-name clientele. One can dine on seasonal veggie pizza beside candid blackand-whites of Kennedy and Sinatra or take a gander at the Doonesbury rendition of a Sally's chef. Sally's most recent acquisition is the tennis racket with which Richard Krajikec won Wimbledon last year. "He comes here every night of his stay during the Pilot Pen tournament," says Flora Consiglio, the wife of the late founder of Sally's.

Krajkec joins an army of devotees who pay regular homage · to Wooster Square's pizza parlors-an army willing to weather hours of anticipation and salivation for their tasty reward. At 4 p.m., opening time for Pepe's, the tables are full. By 6 p.m., the line of customers extends out the door. Pepe's keeps its annex, site of the original Pepe's, as · a reserve to handle the overflow.

When Frank Pepe opened his pizzeria in 1925, pizza was still considered ethnic food.

Consiglio says Pepe and his nephew Sal, who established Sally's in 1938, were among the first to make pizzas commercially.

When Modern Pizza set up shop in 1934 and Sally's branched off from its father store, people speculated that the cause was a familial or culinary dispute. But Consiglio, who has never tasted pizza other than Sally's, refutes such rumors. "That's all just hearsay.

We're all the best of friends." Evidently, pizza has been the focus of an impassioned urban myth. .

Any way you slice it, Sally's and Pepe's needn't be concerned about losing clientele to competition. Even if most collegiate connoisseurs choose Broadway, Yorkside, Town and Bar pizzas because of proximity, there are plenty of customers to go around.

So long as presidents, tennis champs, pop stars and other die-hards-like the ones who fly into New Haven just for a pie-keep coming, Wooster Square will remain pizza's famed culinary home.

-Yuki Noguchi

TH£ NEw JouRNAL

nternational Festival of Arts and Ideas coordinators Anne Calabresi, Roslyn Meyer (ES '71, MS '73, PhD '77), and Elinor Biggs are in the business of breaking boundaries.

They battle against the social, economic, and geographic segmentation that prevents New Haven from capitalizing on its resources-namely, the city's location on the Eastern Seaboard, its lively arts community, and its layout around the central New Haven Green. They believe in breaking boundaries creatively, using the arts as a means of melding these resources into a city that will be attractive to residents and visitors alike. "We want to create an air of vibrancy in New Haven and make it a place people want to be year-round," Meyer says. The festival's creators-Calabresi, Meyer, and businesswoman Jean Handley-believe that to foster this environment, they must eliminate divisions among New Haven's neighborhoods. They see the festival as the ideal way to achieve this lofty goal. After all, believes Calabresi, people are at their best when they are playing and creating in the ways that the festival encourages them to do.

At the inaugural festival last June, oversized papier-mache figures from the Bread and Puppet Theatre towered over toddlers who stared upwards in awe, actor-activist Ruben Blades showcased his reputation as a world-class salsa musician, and Native American singer Buffy Sainte-Marie performed folk

I

music on the New Haven Green's specially-constructed "World ~ Stage." Other artists set up shop on patches of sidewalk nearby, g showing off their talents with magic tricks, juggling, or mime. ~

Pictures and videotapes of the festival lend support to the idea of building bridges between New Haven's diverse neighborhoods; each recorded event shows people of all ages and ethnicities, swathed in brightly-colored shorts and T-shirts, swinging their bodies to the music and clapping their hands in excitement.

Despite New Haven's current reputation as a city stricken by poverty, violence, and economic decline, Meyer, Calabresi, and festival executive director Biggs remain unruffled. In fact, they are defiant. "New Haven is so underrated and overcriticized, it's pathetic," Meyer says. "I came here in 1969, and I never left."

Yet festival organizers are aware that pessimistic media coverage may dissuade potential attendees from New Haven's subu rbs and beyond. Jean Handley, the third festival cofounder, woke up sweating the night before its opening, suffering nightmares that no one would appear for the Yale-New Haven tours planned for the kickoff. Before the first tour, however, a large crowd had already amassed. "There were people waiting in line-moms with strollers!" Handley says excitedly, her tone betraying her surprise. "On the tour, they saw wonderful architecture and buildings that we pass blindly every

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day. We have gotten so we do not see what's good about the city, we look at the things that need improving." Handley h as a more optimistic view of New H aven's offerings. "I see it as a city with great potent ial and, increasingly, others see it that way, too. The governor already refers to New Haven as the cultural capital of the state." Part of the festival's objective is to capitalize on the idea of New Haven as a cultural center for the East Coast. This will be aided by the planned construction of a high-speed train between New Haven and Ma n hattan that will only encourage visitors from the New York metropolitan area, Calabresi says.

Biggs defends New Haven's ability to become a renowned arts cent'Cr and popular tourist destination. She sits in the festival office, which opens onto a view of the New Haven Green and Yale's gothic Old Campus. Biggs waves her arm in front of the windows, as if to pull back a curtain an d reveal a scene from last su mmer's festival. "If I had looked out this wind ow during the festival, I would have seen li terally .thousands of people walking around down there," she says.

Her tone is incredulous as she speaks of paren ts and children walking hand in hand on the Green after sunset. "Maybe there were. only 20,000 people there, but we changed their attitudes."

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he road to Calabresi's farmhouse runs down Whalley Avenue into the town of Woodbridge, where the street metamorphoses from a car dealership mecca inco a wooded country road. T he farmhouse tops a steep, winding driveway that lets the driver forget he or she is only moments from a road leading direcdy back to New Haven.

Inside the house's blue and white country kitchen, frantic energy abounds.

This room has probably seen the birth of many of the ideas behind the festival's creat ion . Calabresi plugs in an electric teapot an d seats herself at the large wooden table that dominates the floor space. D ressed in a green suit and white blouse, w ith a scarf draped across her neck like a dishtowel and her blonde hair in a loose French twist, she looks like a

1990s career woman in the home of an 1890s farmer's wife.

Calabresi, a founder of both L.E.A.P. (Leadership, Education, Athletics in Partnership) and the festival, has long been recognized as a community leader and advocate. She sees her work on the festival's board of directors as one more way of improving the quality of life in New Haven. "I think of this as an extension of working with inner-city kids," she says, "because New Haven is threadbare in terms of financial resources. " Certain community members level criticism at the festival for becoming an event organized by the white elite for the white elite, but Calabresi, Meyer, and Biggs dismiss this claim as ridiculous.

Nevertheless, in raising funds for what they hope will become an internationaJiy renowned festival, the organizers' connections have proven advantageous.

"I knew I could go to Paul Newman to ask for money for the arts," Calabresi says. She readily admits that if someone from Newhallville showed up at Newman's door, he or she would not have the same luck. ¡

H

eading in the opposite direction out of New Haven's center, Elm Street becomes Grand Avenue and leads to Centro San Jose. It curls across railroad cracks and past storefronts that display equal parts Spanish and English. Centro San Jose itself, a social services and youth center that primarily serves New Haven's Hispanic population, looks abandoned from the outside. Its graffiti-covered, red-paneled walls and the small sign propped in the window do not distinguish it from the rest of the block. Inside, a cramped room holds a desk and two buckets to catch runoff from the leaky ceiling. Despite the buckets, a pool has formed on the desktop and caused the vinyl to buckle.

A larger, rectangular room serves as the main recreational area. The room has a linoleum floor and no windows. A handful of children scamper around, bouncing between a makeshift stage and a ping-pong table. They chatter in a mixture of Spanish and English and lick

THÂŁ NEW jOURNAL

their fingers as they eat twists of fried dough that fill the room with a greasy odor.

Peter Noble, executive director of Centro San Jose, emerges from a meager office and sits down at a child~size table.

He is young, but his face looks tired and overworked. The children at Centro San Jose's after-school programs are Noble's first priority; h e co ntinually glances around the room and interrupts himself to interject Spanish phrases into the children's conversations as he talks.

In January, Noble met with Meyer to discuss increasing community involvement in 1997's festival. "We are in a position to allow the festival to get more participation from people in the neighborhood," Noble says. His suggestions range from the simplicity of hanging festival banners over Grand Avenue to the comp lex ity of busing community members to events. However small these gestures may seem, to Noble

FEBRUARY 14¡ 1997

they are meaningful. "We are in the business to break social and economic barriers that prevent people from gaining access to good things, like the arts," he says. "Poor people often do not have access to the arts." utting an arts festival in the middle of New Haven does not guarantee "access to the arts" for every city resident. Those living in the neighborhood surrounding Centro San Jose have to walk 25 or 30 minutes to reach the New Haven Green, which served as the focal point of festival events.

Planners must conside r what will convince residents of neighborhoods such as the Hill, Fairhaven, and Wooster Square to make the necessary trek into downtown. Calabresi herself has been stomping out into the neighborhoods, as she says, talking to religiou~ and community-based organizations to drum up interest. "People who came to the festival from surrounding neighborhoods

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had a wonderful time last year, but they won't respond to a general invitation, especially to something they didn't think up themselves," she says. Meyer concurs.

"Peo ple have to feel like it's their festival." Accomplishing this task once may permanently open doors between neighborhoods. "You expect that once people come in and have a good time, they will feel more comfortable coming back, Meyer says.

Perhaps the most important step in forging a bond between New Haven residents has been the move to bring the arts to them rather than forcing them to come to the arcs. In conjunction with the International Festival and supported by its funding, the Ans Council of Greater New Haven organized and ran Art on the Edge, a fringe festival held on Audubon Street.

In its first year, Art on the Edge acted as an extension of the larger International Festival by bringing the

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event to areas beyond the Green.

Organizer Bitsie Clark sees Audubon Street as ideal for this. Despite what some might term high-class architecture and storefronts and the area's placement on the outskirts of downtown, Clark does not perceive Audubon Street as an exclusive area of the city. "The viewpoint of people is that it's a place where arts take place," she says, noting that ArtSpace, Educational Center for the Arts, Foundry Music, and the Arts Council all make their homes on the single city block.

Centro San Jose did make it to Audubon Street for the International Festival offshoot. The center participated in Art on the Edge through its afterschool drumming group. Long rehearsals with a professional drummer ensured a successful performance, Noble says, though he does not feel the group needed to prove itself to others. "We were looking to make sure that people know what's going on in other neighborhoods.

We're not going to come back to this neighborhood and be judged," he says.

"But people were curious to see what we were about, and I guess in that way there was some pressure."

Jennifer Rivas, a 13-year-old sixth grader in the drumming group, wears baggy jeans and a mustard yellow T-shirt and keeps her long brown hair in a ponytail. She talks about "touching," a colloquialism for drumming. "We touched, we danced. It was fun," she says smiling a wide-mouthed grin. Before Art on the Edge, Jennifer had never been to Audubon Street. Now, she shrugs and says, "Yeah, it's nice there." ventually, International Festival organizers hope to expand Art on the Edge to other neighborhoods in New Haven. Noble would welcome an Art on the Edge festival in his area.

Attendance at such a festival, however, depends on the community's accessibility.

For Noble, accessibility relies more on logistical dilemmas than on overcoming racial or socio-economic obstacles. "If people feel the arts or other activities are important, they will come here. But we need to resolve the transportation issue

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THE NEw JouRNAL

first," he says in his characteristically subdued tone.

The idea of fringe festivals in New Haven's various neighborhoods is not a new one, according to Art on the Edge organizer Clark. "It has been done in the past and it could easily be revived," she says, adding chat Art on the Edge would benefit from incorporating the echnicity of neighborhoods such as Fairhaven and Wooster Square into its programs. She hesitates to do chis immediately after the Festival's birth, however. "We have to be careful chat we don't bite off more than we can chew at first," Clark says pragmatically. Expansion of Art on the Edge is not a one-way street. Noble says the issue of attracting audiences to neighborhoods such as the Hill works in reverse as well; the residents of the neighborhoods must be attracted to the idea of celebrating the arts. The people who frequent Centro San Jose, for instance, sometimes need convincing that such an event benefits themselves and their families. "Our approach is to try to explain co people chat these activities are different, but worthwhile," says Noble.

For now, festival organizers concentrate on establishing the International Festival and Art on the Edge as successful annual events in New

Haven. They also focus on crossing the boundaries that prevent everyone in New Haven from participating. Calabresi's welcoming speech at the festival made clear the double goal of spearheading a regeneration of New Haven's arts tradition and using that tradition to form a city-wide community. "Let us welcome to our extraordinary city our visitors," she urged Festival attendants last June.

"Let us shake a stranger's hand and say, 'Thank you and welcome to our future."'

Her words belonged co the scene: the Green , in the midst of summer, with toddlers screeching in delight, and snowcones dripping onto a patchwork of picnic blankets. In mid-February, the words sound canned, as though a speechwriter jotted them down half-an-hour before showtime. Walking the streets of New Haven, no one remarks on boundaries that have been broken or bridges that have been crossed since last June. Yet the Festival continues its effort to form a cohesive New Haven through the arts, even as the neighborhoods themselves remain on the edge of the effort to eliminate boundaries within the city's borders.

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1997

II

If Lives¡ Joel Burges Talk shows are definitely a curiosity. One ofthe criticisms oftalk shows is that they make the lowest, most extreme instances of lift seem commonplace. In a sense, that's what makes it interesting. I mean, most people are intrigued by a woman sleeping with 100 men in a year. I mean, it's kind ofsick.

-Lynn Kessler (SY '98) n New York City one day last winter, playing hooky from school, I found myself encircled by enormous photographs of Ricki Lake. She was everywhere, colonizing three of the four :t walls in the waiting room of the Ricki Lake Show. Her larger~ than-life smile flashed at me, her teeth dazzled an airbrushed white, :§ her pastel clothes complemented her Slim-Fasted figure. Her iconic G:i image soothed my t r uant's heart: my decision to skip "Edith ~ Wharton and the Problem of America" had been the right one. ~ About to enter the sound stage, I thought about the obstacles I ~ had overcome to be within arm's reach of Riclci. My two friends and :;5 I maneuvered through a series of checkpoints before gaining ~entrance to the waiting room. On the street, we proved we were at 5 least 18, and presented our fluorescent lime-green tickets for that 8 day's episode. In the lobby, our names were checked against a master

I 12

list of those who misbehaved on the show before: either by calking back to Riclci, using the strictly forbidden audio or video recording devices on the sound stage, or chewing gum while cameras were rolling. Riclci establishes her authority with the tender severity of a Victorian governess.

My friends and I boarded the elevator and ascended to the final checkpoint. Stepping out of the elevator, I joined a line where guards checked my bags for weaponry, and my body was scanned by a metal detector. I hoped the knitting needles I was carrying would not alarm the guards. I wouldn't dream of harming Riclci in any way.

Riclci's "Rules of Order" dictate that her authority not be questioned.

So there I was, in the waiting room dominated by Ricki's image.

I was disturbed. I had been thoroughly disarmed. While succumbing to Riclci's codes, I began to realize that being on a talk show, like participating in any cultural event, has an etiquette both formulaic and freaky in its idiom, an idiom both policing and populist in its ideology.

Adoption of the etiquette, idiom, and ideology of talk-show culture is growing more common among Yale undergraduates.

Leaving behind the study of mass media, students find themselves participating in the cultural practices they usually only talk about in

THE NEW jOURNAL

classrooms. Undergraduates are conducting surveillance on how the talk-show half lives, spying on the members of the working class, peoples of color, closeted gays, and other marginalized compatriots of the television nation.

I went to Ricki because, one, I knew Ricki was a step above Gordon Elliot. Two--now this wiLl sound paternalistic-! foe/ it can never hurt to have a sane, level-headed individual in the audience.

-Maria, an anonymous undergraduate

L

ynn Kessler, who organized Saybrook College's October 25, 1996, trip to the Ricki Lake Show, lied to her contacts at the show. When they asked if the group of Saybrugians were "ethnically diverse," she passed us off as such.

Curious to see what it would be like to accompany a large group to a talk show, after my experience with only two friends last year, I found myself standing on Elm Street. I was waiting for the bus that would take me back to Ease 37th Streer-and Ricki. On the bus, we theorized about what the day's topic would be; Ricki keeps ir top secret until cameras are rolling and taping has begun. Bur Ricki is known for her tongue-twisting, tabloid-like titles, so we knew our

FEBRUARY 14,

1997

efforts co our-think her were in vain. ~ Maria, an undergraduate who wished to have her name changed ~ for this article, only hoped the episode wouldn't be a tearjerker. On iJi= her first talk-show trip with Saybrook College in the spring of 1996, ~ she went to the Gordon Elliot Show. The sexy title, "MY LITTLE. PRINCESS IS NO ANGEL," did not prepare her for the seriousness of the ~ topic at hand. Gordon's attitude towards his diabolic princesses ~ horrified her, along with many of the other Saybrugians present. -;}.

Gordon accused a teenage girl of being responsible for her own rape because of the way she dressed. ~ Looking back, Maria was disgusted by Gordon's paternalistic ยง reprimand of an adolescent rape victim: "I really realized that half~ the time the people on the show are being exploited. When it's ยง children being exploited, it's unbearable to watch." Maria explained, ~ "Children don't have the ability to stand up for themselves. When 2_ there is a room full of adultS screaming at them that their rape was ~ their fault, what are they going to think? It's nor a healthy siruation." ~ She further commented, "I thought about going on a crusade to go ~ to as many talk shows as possible, to give some some sort of support i to the guests." Like a nineteenth-century Protestant reformer, a~ woman fighting against child labor in factories and advocating ~

i

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like an old hand at this-we waited patiently until we were called to line up for seating. At the door leading to the sound stage, each guest was handed a trinket, a key chain bearing Ricki's name, to remind us of our trip to the Ricki Lake Show. I still carry mine with me, as do any number of other Saybrugians.

Once inside the sound stage, we were entertained by a comedian, who kept us pacified and amused until the episode's topic was announced and Ricki showed herself. I felt a little bit like I was at a child's birthday party, waiting for a mother to arrive with a cake covered by flickering candles. Soon, the long-awaited topic was revealed, a kind of "best of the Ricki Lake

Show':

"WE FOUGHT ON RICKJ BEFORE... BUT

NOW WE'RE BACK T O SETTLE THE SCORE!"

legislated temperance, Maria wished to teach the audience a lesson about compassion.

But it wasn't Maria's reformist zeal that led her to step aboard the bus. carrying the Saybrugians to the Ricki Lake Show last October. Instead, it was that ~icki was Maria's kindred spirit, striving towards a common goal. She felt a bond of sisterhood with Ricki, for the host had the good manners to empathize with her guests. After all, Ricki is a talk-show success story herself She went from everyone's favorite fat girl in

Hairspray and on China Beach, to the slimmer, trimmer Queen of Talk Shows, to displaying herself as the expectant mother of daytime television this past fall. For Maria, this talk show host is not guilty of Gordon's sexist condescension, but of a gender paternalism. Forcefully, Maria suggested to me, "Why don't we call it maternalism?"

Maria's suggestion foreshadowed what Saybrook witnessed when we arrived at Ricki's .studio in New York City. After we satisfied Ricki's demand for docility at her various checkpoints- by now I was feeling

The audience loved what the title promised.

When Ricki stepped onto the sound stage, we became frenzied. As I clapped passionately in the name of Ricki's arrival, I thought that Maria must be pleased by the topic. It suggested controlled chaos, not Gordon's judgmental aggression.

During the opening moments of the episode, Ricki read a letter. It was from a woman who had ap.peared on an earlier Ricki Lake Show to resolve her differences with her negligent mother. Her mother, refusing to communicate with her even afrer the show, left her daughter orphaned in the wide, wide world. Saddened by the plight of this wayward girl, Ricki informed the audience that though her biological mother had failed her, Ricki had not. Like a surrogate mother, Ricki kept in touch with the girl-fulfllling Maria's reformist vision of talk-show maternalism.

I find them amusing. Sometimes they bring on freaks-weLl, not freaks. People that will amuse you, for shock value.

-Lynn Kessler ' ' F reaks, Lynn! They're freaks! " Martha Surridge (SY '98) exclaimed, pointing at the "selfproclaimed .freaks" strutting through the studio audience, handing out carnations to audience members, making their way onto the stage for the final segment of the October 25, 1996, Ricki Lake Show. All four of the freaks-couples Eric and Judy, Nile

14

THE NEw JouRNAL

and Bridget-had appeared on an earlier episode of the talk show, entitled, "yo BRO! YOU THI NK I LOOK LIKE A CIRCUS FREAK, BUT YOU ' RE A MAJOR GEEK!" The two couples were back to update Ricki about their lives, which seemed to have little to do with the topic at hand. Instead, they were there to display their outrageous appearances, a spectacle of self-fashioned freakiness to be paraded before a gawking, gleeful audience. ¡¡ Bridget, who lives with Nile in the house of her major geek of a brother, looked like a trendy, urban mermaid. Shimmering like a piece of light blue tinfoil, Bridget's dress matched her blue-green hair and eyebrows; her aquamarine lipstick was laid on thick and magnificent. She wore a pair of sleek and shiny, knee-high patent leather boots; they resonated with the black spots on the leopard collar of her pale blue dress.

Nile, her companion, had dyed his hair a flaming orange, shaping his coiffure into spikes the shape of ice cream cones.

Wearing a leopard-print jacket reminiscent of Bridget's collar, Nile was dressed all in black, in sharp contrast to his deathly pale ski n, which looked like it had been powdered with the layers of white cosmetics used by nobility in seventeenth-century French courts.

Eric and Judy were similarly outlandish.

Eric's hair glowed ferocious magenta and Auoresent green, his clothes screamed plaid, and piercings covered his face. There was a metal spike through his nose, and his earlobes had been stretched around large wooden earrings. His girlfriend, Judy, wore platform sneakers and a floor-length dress covered with blue sequins. During his earlier appearance on the Ricki Lake Show, Eric talked about the problems his father had with his failure to conform. After that, Eric explained, "My Dad realized I wasn't joking about how I looked." This brief tale of filial reunion was all we heard before Ricki wrapped up the show, telling her four "self-proclaimed freaks " how they had served their purpose: "You've cheered up my day."

Ricki wasn't the only one amused by her guests. The Saybrugians found the talk show just as entertaining. Ricki and her show also filled a void. Lynn reflected, "Coming from Yale, you're like-you're

FEBRUARY

14, 1997

different from the talk show audience. lc's kind of fun being in the talk show environment because it's so different. It's a lot more emotional." She continued, "On talk shows, people don't have discussions, they scream at each other. It's frenzied."

Lynn saw the Ricki Lake Show as an opportunity for Yale undergraduates, otherwise controlled and contained, to go a Little bit crazy, to be children under Ricki's watchful eyes.

Presiding over this cultural space, Ricki draws in not only "freaks" but also those

who want to view them. For Lynn, viewing is about learning emotion; for Maria, it's about teaching compassion. They both went to the talk show expecting t o experience a real-world classroom. But they failed to recognize themselves as the outsiders-becoming the freaks themselves.

In the talk show's idiom of freakiness, it is Lynn, Maria, and myself who finally don't IBIJ belong.

joel Burges, a senior in Saybrook College, is associate editor ojTNJ.

15

In the Elm City's cinematic heyday, New Haven and Hollywood converged on downtown's bygone movie houses .

When _the City Was a Silver Screen Richard Kim ig A1 sit; behind the night· manager's desk in the lobby of the Hotel Duncan. Dorothea Moore stands behind the bar at the Anchor Bar and Restaurant. They .begi~ their parallel tales with, "Once upon a time there were six great picture palaces in New H aven. And they were splendid ... " With that auspicious opening these long-time New Haven citizens and film-lovers recount everything they know about cinema and this city. They talk for hours, sometimes pulling out • photographs or backtracking to correct a date, to tell you that it was Katherine Hepburn and not Bette Davis who starred in 1942's Women ofthe Year.

Dorothea and Big A1 didn't just go catch a flick at the Bijou Dream Theater. They ingested movies. They lived through them, and through them they built their identities. H ere is Big Al, not as a hotel desk clerk, but as a debonair Johnny from the Rita Hayworth noir classic, Gilda. Here, too, is Dorothea, not as a cocktail waitress, but as Gilda herself-sudden, vicious, and tragic.

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orothea runs the Anchor, where suburbanites and Yalies stop for a drink after a show at the Shubert, itself a onerime movie theater. Throughout her day, she cites dialogue from All About Eve as if it were a sacred text When All About Eve opened at the Paramount on Temple Street in 1950, Dorothea convinced her boyfriend, "a blondehaired fellow, not too good-looking, but nice," to take her to the very first screening. He picked her up at her parents' home off 16

Prospect Street and escorted her to the nearest trolley station. · True to the fashion of the time, Dorothea wore white gloves and a hat. Her boyfriend took her arm and walked between her and the street, protecting her from traffic and other urban menaces.

As patrons filed into the theater, a large organ and an aspiring young pianist were lifted up on a platform in front of the screen.

Dorothea admits that this was often her favorite part of the evening. She relished the glamour of having a uniformed usher escort her to a seat, and then listening to the organ spin out classical and popular music while watching everyone else take their seats.

All About Eve had a special importance to its New Haven viewers. A portion of the film was staged and shot in the Elm City. Over a static shot of the corner of Chapel and College streets, the narrator, an uppity English theater critic, remarks, "New Haven. Con-nec-ti-cut. To the theater world a small strip of sidewalk between the Shubert Theater and the Taft Hotel."

Like most residents of New Haven, Dorothea delighted in this reference to her hometown, regardless of its derisive tone.

"Usually, we were very polite at the theater. Everyone back then was nicer and had a sense of decency, but when New Haven came up, everyone let out a cheer."

When the show concluded, Dorothea and her date walked over to Liggett's Drug Store on the corner of Church and Chapel streets. T hey had sodas, ch atted with friends, and listened to some hit records. Then the blonde-haired, not too good-looking young . man escorted Dorothea home and kissed her once before ~m~

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Ye~rs later, when workmen were converting the Taft Hotel into an apartment building, they mentioned to Dorothea that they were gutting the famous room where scenes from All About Eve were filmed. To the bewilderment of her husband and co-workers, Dorothea rushed out of the Anchor, crossed the tightly cordoned construction lines, and climbed in high heels to the top of a dumpster where she begged the foreman to give her the mantle piece from Eve ¡ Harrington's room. He knew exactly what she was talking about and wrapped a piece of it in his jacket for her to take home. "I chink it's somewhere in my garage," she says now.

Dorothea breaks off her story to hand two customers their checks. She turns back around to give this final invective, "Then that Mayor Richard Lee came along with all those modern ideas we call improvem ents ... But things were more elegant then. Simpler. Quieter. Before all the noise." Dorothea tells of trying to find the corner where the old l.'aramount stood, but none of the office buildings now there mesh with her idealized. past.

"They all look alike, you know."

A

mong newspapers clippings and yellowing photographs, Big AI points to a picture of a quintet of serious looking businessmen. The only one smiling is a short and slightly oilylooking man with a handlebar mustache standing in the center. Meet one of the forgotten founding fathers of American cinema, New Haven's own S. Z. Poli.

Although he's been dead for over half a century, Mr. Poli is always addressed in the formal.

Poli purchased the American Theater (formerly St. Mary's Church) in 1893 and converted it into one of the largest theaters in New England. An intuitive and brash entrepreneur, Poli may have been the first American to show a film for entertainment purposes. In early 1896, between acts of Vaudeville theater, Poli experimented with French cinematograph reels. By the summer of 1897, at Poli's Bijou Dream Theater, New Haven residents paid less than a nickel to watch the debut of Gr~at American Biograph:

18

The Ride Through Haverstraw TunneL. Advertisements from a turn-of-thecentury New Haven Evening Register tout the theater's "fairyland waterfall encased in a crystal staircase and luxurious marble foyer." An enormous success, profits from the Bijou Dream Theater, "the house of cinema hits," allowed Poli to acquire a space across the street which he named after himself, the Poli Theater.

Already a millionaire, Poli purchased one theater after another, some as far away as Washington, D.C. and Worcester, Massachusetts. When Poli retired in 1928, he had assembled a chain of 28 theaters which stretched across the Eastern Seaboard and were rivaled in opulence only by New York's and Los Angeles's picture palaces. In that same year, he remodeled the Hyperion Theater on Chapel Street, renaming it the College Theater. Of Poli's three New Haven theaters, only the College stands today, a gutted and vacant shell.

He eventually sold most of his theaters to the Fox Corporation and the Loews Corporation for a reported $30 million. With those funds, he built a series of mansions in Milford for himself and his daughters: Then Mr. Poli, a man whose theaters were artfully integrated with lower level cafes and shops, a man who intimately understood the importance of crowds and pedestrian traffic, accomplished the most prophetic feat of his life-he built a private movie theater for his family.

F

rom a leather-bound scrapbook Big AI produces a photograph of the exterior of Loew's Poli Theater. An over-sized light-bulb letterboard dominates the scene. "Disney's Fantasia," it shines. As if the lights weren't enough to draw a passerby's attention, two men dressed in fedoras and trench coats point up to rhe sign. When Fantasia opened in 1942, Big AI was just a child. It was one of his first experiences at the movies. He's been a dedicated connoisseur ever since.

Big AI does not follow worldly events or speak foreign languages. He's content to occupy the world along the few blocks from his house to his work. He's happiest when he's squirreling through his

scrapbooks, crying to locate a certain photograph and getting lost in a forgotten newspaper clipping along the way. A natural but untrained historian, Big AI's instinct told him to start saving these scraps of paper: advertisements, ticket stubs, flyers, posters, photographs, and newspaper clippings, anything which might preserve his experiences at the movies. "I just couldn't throw these things away. " He points to a photograph. "Do you wane me to show you the old Paramount cheater? Nobody appreciates these things anymore," Big AI says.

By the mid-1970s the Roger Sherman RKO and the College Theater were the last of New Haven's downtown picture palaces. Both of them began to cater to audiences that were younger, mostly black, and usually male. Blaxploitation films, reggae documentaries , violent science fiction works, and pornographythese movies were common fare for the College in particular. Big AI remembers when the College played its last film, Evil Knievel, in 1977. Big AI could not bear to attend.

Big AI picks up a newspaper clipping, an article about the 'College Theater's demise. He shakes his head. And then with sudden vigor, he clutches one of his scrapbooks and says, "What's a guy to do?

What's a guy to do these days with all of this?" Surrounded by sheaves of yellowing paper, he's unable to maintain a single thread of conversation. As he uncovers an interesting photograph, he jumps from past to present and chen retreats backwards in time. t was a week before the Christmas of 1952: a young Big AI walked into his 'll favorite theater, the Poli, right across g the street from the Bijou. Despite their~ proximity, the Poli and the Bijou did not~ compete for audiences. If the Bijou was ~ an elegant beauty, then the Poli was a ~ handsome bachelor. It tended to show~ serious dramas, continuing to play~ newsreels even after television had made ~ rhem obsolete. Big AI was there to see ~ Gr~at Whitt Hunter starring Gregory Peck ~ as Ernest Hemingway. He came alone for ~ the afternoon matinee because none of!.

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his friends had time for movies during the holiday season. Afterwards he walked to Malley's department store to shop for presents. What he wanted most for Christmas that year was a television set.

Big AI sensed that everyone was getting them in those days. And he was right.

Within eight years, almost 90 percent of New Haven households would have a working set. ollowing Big Al's directions to the old College Theater, my friend Andrew and I bolt down Chapel Street, pausing once in my room to get a flashlight, a tape recorder, and some rope.

Excited by the spirit of adventure, we take some steadying shots of whiskey to help us get past the imposing "No Trespassing" signs. Embarking on what promises to be an intrepid historical excavation, we force our way into the old theater. It is no easy task; at moments the danger and fright are enough to warrant our hushed tones.

Since th e building receives little sunlight during the day, the temperature inside the College hovers several degrees below freezing at night. A thin sheet of ice covers all exposed surfaces, making climbing over piles of rusted metal, fallen bricks, and chunks of plaster molding genuinely treacherous. When we finally reach the center of the crumbling shell, Andrew and I are covered in dirt , cobwebs, and strands of red curtain. The flashlight's thin, watery beam only permits glimpses of twisted metal shapes hanging ominously from the ceiling and overturned seats impeding our path, their cushions rotting with mold and moisture.

Even in the dark, the great silver screen, now faded off-white with a fine dusting of din and soot, dominates our view. It's center has been cut away in jagged strips.

Andrew says, "I have nightmares about spaces like this. " Silence. Beat , beat.

Silence. The flutter of wings in the rafters sets us on our toes, and a lone pigeon's coo is enough to eject u s from th e building, running and screaming and laughing.

When I return the next day, I am both surprised and disappointed. There is light, and I am alone. Instead of catching only patch es of decay, the entire

F

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enormous space opens to me. The theater is far larger than I expected, far more impressive in scope and mass. But after my initial awe passes, I only notice the empty beer cans, candy bar wrappers, flattened Kodak film boxes, and plastic grocery bags that litter the floor. After a casual inspection, I note that both the seat cushions and the curtains are made of maroon polyester cloth, not red velvet.

One wall is papered with a pattern that resembles a Wonder Bread bag, all candycolored circles on a white plane. Surely, this could not be the theater of Big Al's memories? That, that's some other theater, I think.

T

he history of movie theaters in New Haven is as fleeting as a series of images projected on a screen; there's no substance to it, no depth. It can't be found in the tangible artifacts. It's not in the architecture, the photographs, or the history books. Big AI and Dorothea tint their recollections with nostalgia and bitterness. If you want facts, you can't trust their tales. The films themselves are all available on videotape, but what good are they without the crowds, trolley cars, and soda fountains?

What's worse is that the city's busy streets conspire to keep the College hidden, to conceal from view what should be its looming presence over the downtown landscape. A_ person might attend Yale for four years and everyday walk down Chapel Street to buy a paper at NewsHaven and a cup of coffee at Willoughby's. Everyday this person could pass both the College Theater hidden behind the Union League Cafe and the deserted lot behind Laura Ashley where the Roger Sherman RKO stands, and he would never know either place existed.

A culture that is primarily visual leaves no trace of its passage. It is unrecordable. Knowing this, it's still possible to get fragments of narratives, to imagine a grander architecture from the imprints of a crumbling building, and to reconstruct a small look at the pastalbeit inevitably colored by the present, by nostalgia and television and regret. li31

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FEBRUARY 14, 1997

21

A reporter ventures into the college social scene in search of where the "normal" Yalie parties.

The Two-Party System Gabriel Snyder en I walked into the Beach Club, Silliman roo~ 805, the first thing I noticed was the shot table. t was slicked with tequila, reflecting the pale, _ lectric-blue light of a neon beer sign. One of the hosts of the party, identifiable by his yellow construction hat, was filling disposable plastic shot glasses to the brim with noxious, cheap liquor. I arrived early and didn't know anyone in the room. I hadn't planned to get drunk on a school night, but, feeling a little awkward, I went up to one of the two kegs set in the middle of the room to pour myself a drink.

I asked the host about the occasion for his party. _ "It's Tequila Monday," he told me. "It's a tradition, but it ~ hasn't been respected in the past because old Beach Clubs have ~sucked." The current residents of this suite are determined to ~ restore the Club to its former glory as a non-exclusive tequila free-for-all, a club whose only membership requirement is the ~ willingness to get plastered on a Monday night. ¡~ This Monday, the first of the semester, there were plenty of ~ partygoers willing to revive the tradition. As successive waves of ~ people arrived, the only thing they seemed to have in common ~was their lack of school work. The stereo in the corner pumped ~ out an eclectic assortment of dance music. When the Chemical if Brothers came on, the composition of the dance floor changed

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FEBRUARY 14,

1997

dramatically. Those who had been dancing to A Tribe Called Quest froze awkwardly and got out of the way.

By 11 p.m., the place was packed. The room, which looked enormous when I first arrived, was suddenly claustrophobicaJly small. There was a long line at the keg, and a steady rhythm had developed at the tequila table: salt-shot-lemon-grimace, salt-shotlemon-grimace, salt-shot-lemon-grimace. I tried to navigate the crowd, keeping a lookout for a familiar face. I had hoped to find someone I knew who could introduce me to the current members of the Club. Occasionally I saw someone from a lecture or section and exchanged a few words, but no one seemed to belong there. I watched people make eye contact, experience a brief flicker of recognition, and move on. They seemed more engaged with the tequila than with their conversations.

I bumped into a guy from a sem inar whom I knew marginally at best. He looked as lost as I did. I leaned forward and yelled into his ear, "Are you having a good time here?"

"Yeah, I guess so." After looking around the room, he added, "Where have I been for the last three years?"

"What?" I asked.

"I mean, I don't know any of these people," he confessed.

"Why are you here then?"

He sounded ready for the question. "There are three reasons

23

to come to parties like this," and he began to list them: "First, there's the dancingbut I really don't feel like dancing because I feel a little stupid dancing in front of people I don't know. The second is the _ drinking, but I don't feel like drinking ~ tonight. And third is to meet women-" ~ " -to hook up, right?" I prodded. ~ "Yeah, these parties are great if you ~ want to meet someone rrast. " ~ I realized that he was not going to be ¡~ my connection. At this party there was ~ nothing to connect to. I sought out the ~ host and tried to pin him down. "How ~many of these people do you actually ~ know?" I demanded. ~ He looked up to survey the room and Q)

then bent down to shout in my ear, "Maybe 15 percent." He looked around the room again and leaned down.

"Maybe." y trip to the Beach Club was a self-conscious attempt to locate the mainstream at Yale. Instead, I found that I had become disconnected from any central Yale social scene. For the past semester, the parties I had been going to were usually small gatherings of people who all knew each other. But what seemed co connect them was the sense that there was a larger, more homogenous group of "normal" Yalies that these parties were most defiantly not.

M

A few nights after the Beach Club's Tequila Monday, I went to the release party for the Yale Literary Magazine, held at its designer's Park Street apartment.

Everyone was reading the freshly printed magazines. I spotted the box of issues on the floor next to a table crowded with martini fixings and a ju g of red wine.

Wandering partygoers moved through the kitchen. People stayed only as long as they wanted, until they finished making their drinks or tired of the company. In the living room, the groupings were more permanent. Ashes grew long on the Dunhills of the people seated on the couches, chairs, and floors. Conversations drew on as one topic was exhausted and another began. It was poetic.

Few introductions were necessary; invitations had been taped to the Yale Station mailboxes of people associated with the magazine. Most of the people had come to see their published work or that of their friends. There was no social tension because the crowd was selfselected. The only challenge of coming to an event like this was to set myself apart in a room full of people so much like myself. Even so, the only way to be sure of my own individuality was to ground it in the common understanding of the people around me. Being with people that were like me was comfortable, but it struck me that this scene was a bit ridiculous. This is not what¡ mainstream Yale does for fun. The rest of Yale was out there, I thought, but if I was going to find it, I would have to go beyond these apartment walls. ass media images of college life tell me that the mainstream flows down frat row. On television and in movies, the most often depicted and recognized image of a college student is a kid in a sweatshirt bear ing Greek letters. I haven't encountered that kid at Yale, yet. But I thought maybe there was truth to the stereotype, and I should venture out to Lake Place.

The Sigma Nu Black Light Party was not my first opportunity, but it was the first time I mustered the nerve to accept a public invitation to a party thrown by a

M

THE NEW jouRNAL

bunch of fraternity brothers I didn't know. I felt I could go only after I had convinced two friends, Steve and Aaron, to come along. Although they do not frequent frat ¡ parties, they had a history with Yale fraternities. They once infi ltrated a rush event at Dakota J's by d ressi n g i n baseba ll caps and flannel shirts. I nside they ate free wings and d rank free p i tchers until they were suspected as impostors, at which point they q uickly left the restaurant. Even in this fearless company, I had to drink a couple of shots of gin to bolster my courage before I left my room.

Steve, Aaron, and I paid our $3 at the door and a younger frat brother drew a circle and a dot on the backs of each of our hands with a yellow highlighter marker. The marks bewildered us. We joked that the symbols might be secret code for the rest of the brothers: "Outsiders-kill on sight."

Another brother pointed us down the stairs towards the basement. "You don't

FEBRUARY 14,

1997

know what's down there," he said. I took the comment as a warning.

To match the black light theme of the party, Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" and other late-1960s psychedelic hi ts were piped into the basement. At first I could only make out the silhouettes of people in the unnatural light . Su ddenl y, h uge, glowing block letters jumped o ut of the darkness: "FOOTBALL." As my eyes adjusted, I saw the equally large guy who wore these letters o n the b ack of h is jacket.

The black lights obscured the faces I passed in the crowd. Ski n was dark purple; the whites of the eyes and teet h shone a pearly yellow. If I di d know someone there, I would not have been able to recognize him or her. I saw a white baseball cap on nearly every male head, usually turned backwards. Along with cheap beer, the bar served live goldfish to be gulped from shot glasses.

The bartender boasted that he had already swallowed eight.

Steve, Aaron, and I formed a little ~ cluster in the m iddle of t he crowd. I~ scanned faces fo r someone I knew, but~ this time people were al ready too~ engrossed in each other even to notice us. ~ We had no idea what was going o n .~¡ Mostly, we talked amongst ourselves and ~ admired our plastic cups that glowed a ~ bright orange. ~ The stereotypes I exp ected were confirmed. These markers-the hats, the ~ jackets, the goldfish-were a language I didn't understand, cues to one another as to whether the individuals at the party actually belonged. And, in our inability to communicate, it was obvious that we did not.

Ignored by the rest of the party for 45 minutes, the three of us decided it was time to leave. On the way out, I asked one of the brothers if this party was smaller than normal. He told me no. I asked him if he thought most undergrads came to these parties. He told me no. I then asked him where he thought the rest

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of Yale was. "What? I don't know. I just know they're not here. " The fraternities were my last hope to find the rest of Yale, but I was out of luck. Sigma Nu was just as closed as the Limary Magazine party. Yet, these groups are insular without any positive definition. For the writers and artists as well as the frat brothers, it is easier to know who they are not than who they are.

Both groups need to beli eve in a mysterious "other" for them to exist at all.

To them, that "other" is the rest of Yale, but I found the rest ofYale isn't out there.

There are only fragmented subcultures, each with a social language of its own chat defines its members against ocher groups.

Nowhere else is this segmentation more pronounced than at each group's part!es.

T

wo of my roommates, Max and Alec, have birthdays that fall two days apart. Each of the two years my suite has lived together, we have celebrated by throwing a joint birthday party for them. While our suite has always had a good rapport, tryi n g to throw a party together reveals a social schis m. Alec and I enjoy parties where our friends come to sit, drink, and talk.

Max and Andy respond that their friends want loud mu sic and open space for dancing.

This year we compromised. Our suite has two large rooms, the common room and my bedroom, connected by a hallway.

U nder the compromise, Max and Andy would set up the common room the way they wanted it, while Alec and I would set up my room. Max and Andy decided to move everything out of the common room and bring in a stereo. Alec and I removed the easily breakable items in my room, but kept a couch and chairs. The b ar would go in the hallway running between the two rooms. Logistically, the arrangement was a nightmare; soon after the party started, the narrow hallway dogged with people trying to get to the bar as well as from room to room.

Socially, though, the two-party system was a bizarre experiment.

For me, throwing a party has always included a bit of agony. It's not cleaning up the morning after t hat I hate, but

those minutes right before people arrive when I worry that no one will show up.

During those early fragile moments, when the first people arrived, I was uncertain how the party would rake shape. Max's friends from the crew ream were the first to a rrive. They came straight f rom Mory's, still dressed in jackets and ties and singing Yale songs. When some of the people Alec and I had invited arrived, they were entirely confused. "I thought I was at the wrong party when I came in," one of my friends told me, adding in total disbelief, "There were guys singing Yale songs." For the rest of the party, people seemed to arrive in groups-the ultimate team, F.O.O.T. leaders, staffs of publications. No one came alone.

From early on there was a definite distinction between the crowd in the commo n room and the crowd in my bedroom. At one poim during the party, A ndy saw two women peering into the common room. "You could just tell they were your friends ," he told me. "So, I said to them, 'Alec and Gabe are back there."'

Andy and Max's friends who came in through the door to my bedroom were just as confused. As they walked in, they smiled and then quickly found their way to the common room where people they would know were congregated.

Most of my memories of the night were from behind the bar in the hallway where I could see the traffic between the two rooms. Groups kept to themselves, but the boundaries were not completely impermeable. As the party progressed, the people who would not have normally been togethe r did not seem to feel awkward interacting. I danced in the co mm o n room. Andy hung out with people in my bedroom.

I had fu n at our party. The proxjmity of the disparate groups made the night more enjoyable. Even groups cannot exjst in isolation. A group needs to define itself against a non-group, just as much as individuals need to know the barrier between the self and other. And if the non-group does not exist, the group must conjure one up.

Ia)

Gabriel Snyda, a junior in Bakelq College, is a managing editor ojTNJ. THE NEw JouRNAL

T

he Internet may be the best thing that has happened to help spread the word of white power. In the past few years, white supremacists have emerged in force on the Internet, establishing a nerwork of hundreds of World Wide Web pages; they know the net provides a cheap and effective means to promote their messages. In the past, such groups existed on the margins of society, recruiting new members by pamphleting car windshields in mall parking lots. Today, they can design slick, hi-tech home pages at low cost and broadcast rheir message to a potential audience of 30 million Internet users.

Human rights organizations that protest neo-Nazi hate and violence clash with civil libertarians over issues of censorship and the First Amendment. Responding to the on-going debate, many neo-Nazi web sires now feature disclaimers that users must read before they can reach rhe conrenr of the sires. Before entering the New Jersey Skinheads page, users are cautioned: Warning! This page may be offensive to haters of free speech and the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

FEBRUARY 14,

1997

It's your choice: STAY EXIT

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en I came across rhar disclaimer, I hesitated. Bur I was~ urious. I felt drawn in. I clicked on STAY. I found ~¡ myself plunged into a neon multimedia landscape lir ~ up by splashy graphics and sophisticated color animation. This ~ was the main web sire of the New Jersey Skinheads. "There are ~ ANTI-WHITE FORCES working against us!" the page declared. The 'i sire was filled with "hot buttons," clickable pictures or words that ~ instantly transport users to another site on the Internet. One ~ hyperlink zipped me to a sire called The 14-Word Press, a place~ devoted entirely to the glorification of 14 words credited to a !!?. man named David Lane. The 14 words were: " wE MUST SECURE

W

THE EXISTENCE OF OUR PEOPLE AND A FUTURE FOR WHITE CHILDREN. " I clicked my way back to the Skinheads page and foUowed a different link, this one whisking me away to a web page called Heroes of the White Race. "The time is now to learn and pay respect to our great ancestry!" it read. There were photos

27

<ii and biographies of Henry Ford, Rudolf

~ Hess, and Heinrich Himmler. Another ~ link took me to a place called the Nigger ~ ~

~ ~

<; -~

: ~ ~ a..

Joke Center.

Back at the main page, I found a list of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) groups organized by skinheads, discussion centers where people meet to talk in real time.

"There are several great channels established that you should enjoy visiting," it said. "The best channels are #skinheads, #nazi, #aryan, #whitepower, #kkk, and #racial_identity. T he most popular being #nazi and #skinheads." I logged on to the IRC server, joined #nazi and waited as my screen went dark.

Compared to the bright city-lights feel of the World Wide Web, the IRC is like sitting in an unlit room and conjuring disembodied spirits, hearing only voices in the dark but seeing nothing. The topic of conversation that evening was "Adolf Hitler was RJGHT!" I waited a few seconds.

Then a flurry of white pixels appeared on my screen.

<Skinhead> So, Jay, a Yale man eh?

I was surprised he could tell where I was logging from. I typed a message back. <JOY> Yes. What about yourself, Skinhead?

Mentioning Yale caught someone else's attention.

<Bruderhof> Who goes to Yale? <Jay> I do. <Skinhead> Jay is dixit@morpheus.cis .yale.edu â&#x20AC;˘ Jay Dixit <Skinhead> are you wp Jay? <Jay> am I what?

<Pillage> shheeeeesh <Skinhead> wp <Pillage> white power? <Skinhead> yeah <Jay> No. I'm just curious. <Bruderhof> Yale had no White Power when I was there. <Jay> B: you were at Yale? ~ <Bruderhof> Jay: I went there for 1/2 semester ... <Skinhead> is Yale a pretty liberal school? <Bruderhof> At New Haven Hospital.

Yale SUCKS! Its even worse than harvard! <Skinhead> true <Jay> In some ways, yeah, it's very liberal. <Lyncher> Harvard~ Jewland <Bruderhof> harvard has more jews though. I went right to Harvard from High school for 2 years <Jay> Bruderhof: what wp groups do you belong to now? <Bruderhof> Jay: no comment there, none <Skinhead> are you proud of your european heritage? <Jay> Skinhead : why do you assume my heritage is European? <Skinhead> natural assumption i guess. can't see non-Whites getting into yale without affirmative action. and I would imagine they are still a minority there <JOY> I don't know . . . there are a lot of non-Whites at Yale.

Something like 35%. <Skinhead> damn <Bruderhof> Nigger at yale=aa! <Bruderhof> niggers can get in med school wi.th C's <Jay> Yale does have affirmative action admissions.

<Skinhead> but Whites can't? <Bruderhof> Lots of gooks at Yale <Skinhead> educating the enemy ... real smart <Lyncher> Ed-U-Kated Nigger <Skinhead> so they can only use it to advance "their communities". at the expense of ours. when will it end?

T

he next day, I went on the chat group again. The discussion topic was "If A Nigger Hangs From A Tree And Nobody's There To Hear It Does It Make A Sound?" Many of the same people were there, including Skinhead.

<Jay> So Skinhead, do, you think the white race is in danger? <Skinhead> yes don't you? <Delia> The white is never in danger.

They just get complacent at times.

We are still the pure breed. <Jay> Well, there is more intermarriage going on now than ever before. <Skinhead> this is not true Delia: we are facing extinction <Delia> The race traitors must witer. <Delia> wither <Delia> Sorry Skin. <JOY> Do you think the threat of extinction comes from the government or from other races? <Skinhead> government mostly <JOY> So you mean like government programs to aid minorities? <Skinhead> the u.s. government is our biggest enemy <Delio> They shroud the Block and the mongrels in protection. <Skinhead> not only that Jay, but to militarily deny White nations, White schools, White neighboroods, THE NEw JouRNAL

etc. <Jay> You mean prevent us from arming ourselves? <Skinhead> no <Delio> The whitemon needs more guns. <Skinhead> how about militarily AND econimicolly? ie S. Africa <Jay> So the government should be giving more money to white countries and less to third world countries? <Skinhead> well I say no foreign aid at all, period <Delio> We give billions to the Jew. Israel. <Jay> Do you think interrqciol marriage is a threat too? <Delio> Interracial marriage is a detriment, however it may also purge our kind of bod genetics. <Skinhead> in a way, but even though a minority mix, their friends, and associates usually toke the side of the minority and thus eventual racial suicide <Jay> How do you think we should go about fighting? <Skinhead> any means necessary <Jay> would you ever consider using violence? <Skinhead> yes. I feel violence is being commited on my race doily, it's self defence <Joy> You mean like drive-by shootings, and so on? <Delia> The block kills its own. <Skinhead> no, like block on white crime, and forced integration <Delio> Remember Whitey! The Block and the Jew ore using you! (Not neccessarily in that order!) <Jay> Do you think if we segregate, things would be better, or do you wont to eliminate other races

fEBRUARY 14,

I997

entirely? <Skinhead> and all the while, the endless vilification of the White race Jay. segregation won't work, we must SEPARATE by continents <Jay> So N. America would be for whites, and African-Americans would go bock to Africa? <Skinhead> africa for black, asia for yellow, s. america for brown europe for White, America. I would like America for White but it almost seems unreal at this point. <Jay> Because it's already so diverse? <Skinhead> yeah <Delio> I blame the Jew for influencing our entertainment industry. <Jay> Do you think that will ever happen? Separation by continents? <Skinhead> that's the way it started, why not? I mean, not many whites in asia or africa, but lots of them in our countries <Delia> The block insists on not using birth control. Its like rats breeding. <Jay> Well, for one thing, the worldwide racial diversity we're seeing now is the result of centuries of immigration. <Skinhead> I can't believe that we ore around 10% of the world's population and we let them in our countries! that's suicide! <Joy> Hove you ever read any Hitler? <Skinhead> Meim Kampf was a lightouse in a storm to me. was looking at the scene of an execution. In front of me were four men. Three were soldiers, jackbooted storm troopers with iron helmets. The regalia on their shoulders marked them as

I

Third Reich Nazis, soldiers in Hitler's army. The brims of their helmets cast stark shadows in the bright sunlight, obscuring their faces. The fourth man was an elderly civilian with white whiskers and clad in plain clothes. The soldier on the left was smirking smugly and had a pistol pressed hard into the old man's throat.

The old man was in pain. He might have been sobbing. Perhaps he was begging for his life. His muscles were tense. His whole body cringed. He was waiting to die. At the next moment, the Nazi officer was going to shoot him.

Click. I scrolled down. The graphic of the Nazi soldiers carried a caption in white block letters: "coo SENT us." Below was the German phrase "Jude n und Schwarze raus"-Jews and blacks get out.

Further down was a statement: "It is simply fact that the White race faces certain extinction in the near future."

This site was called Northern Thunder, a neo-Nazi page I found while looking for the International White Racialists page, the site Skinhead maintained. Something about the way he had talked made him sound more serious than the others.

Skinhead's page was another technological marvel-text and graphics on a grey background decorated with engravings of Nazi flags and rows of soldiers, all embossed on grey to look as if they had been carved in a stone memorial.

I felt like I had walked into a World War II museum in an altered world where the Nazis had won the war. An animation box flashed the words "WHITE REVOLUTION IS THE ONLY SOLUTION." I scrolled down tO a list of "POWs," men in prison for violent hate crimes. "Bruce Pierce-252 years, David Lane-190 years." I read on. Bruce Pierce and David Lane, I would later learn, were the two white supremacist

29

defendants convicted in the 1984 Denver shooting death of Jewish radio host Alan Berg. The same David Lane who coined the 14 words.

After more wanderings, I came across a Time magazine on-line feature called "Free Speech on the Internet," based on a TV segment from che NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. I clicked to download the ten-minute clip. A few seconds later, the crisp sound of a TV announcer's voice was streaming out of my computer. It alternated with the deeper tones of interview clips. "Daren Brittell is a selfdescribed racist. Which means I love my race and I'm willing to do whatever it takes to secure the Existence of my race. He has swastikas on his wall, Hider's Mein Kampfon his bookshelf, a shotgun by his

30

beef, and a message on his mind. My main message is to wake white people up to the genocide that is being taken place against our race right now. Through his computer, he also has a connection to the Internet. It's helping me get my message across, which is what I am on a mission to do. It's to spread the word of white survival as far as possible."

The rhetoric in the news clip sounded uncomfortably familiar. The phrases Brittell used reminded me of my talk with Skinhead. Puzzled, I opened the transcript I had kept of the previous night's IRC chat. At times, people addressed Skinhead as "Daren." I noticed Skinhead's network address was ~db@207.104.138.182. So Skinhead was Daren Brittell, an outspoken neo-Nazi,

willing to publicly advocate violence, and an admirer of convicted murderer David Lane. I went back to the newsgroup, wondering whether I was in any danger. I resolved that it would be my last time. <Riley14> Jay do you know the 14 words <Skinhead> 14 words: we must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children. <Jay> Yes. I've been surfing the web. <Eric> the beloved 14 words <Eric> R U national socialist, Jay? <Jay> No, I'm not. Are you, Eric? <Eric> yes, i believe in the wisdom of the great leader <Jay> Eric: By great leader, do you mean Hitler?

THE NEW JouRNAL

<Skinhead> Heil Hitler! <Pillage> <Pillage> 1\_\ <Pillage> I I I_ <Pillage> I 1_1\ \ <Pillage> _\ \1 \ \ 1\ \ 1\ \_\ <Pillage> <Pillage> \ \1 \ \/_/ <Pillage> \ I\\_\ <Pillage> \/_! I I <Pillage> I I I \/_I <Pillage> <Pillage> Adolf Hitler was RIGHT!!! <Pillage> Sieg Hei l!! <Eric> Heil! Hitler! the great leader of our people <Eric> Joy ping reply 43 sec. <Joy> Reply? What did you ask me? <Eric> oh, ..... nothing <HOW> Who hates blacks? <Eric> MEMEMEME!!!!! <SSPRIDE> hong um <Piranha> beat um <Piranha> i hate niggers and queers the most <SSPRIDE> kill all the shitdick fags <HOW> I belong to a group of black bashing bikers. <Thihigal> What do red laces on Doc Martens mean? <EricT88> I'm with you SSPRIDE <Eric> ore you interested in notional socialism Jay? <Joy> Am I interested in it? No, not in the way you mean. I don't agree with national socialism and I'm not interested in joining any national socialist organizations. I am interested in understanding what motivates national socialists. <Dona88> my children are all the motivation in the world i need Jay <Eric> ore you a jew Joy? <JOY> No, I'm not Jewish, Eric. My father is from India, though. <Eric> well, we hove a VERY special day for your type, coming real soon <JOY> What do you mean by that, Eric? <Eric> hail the white children, that is what we must fight for our youth's future <Eric> he is a Nigger! <Eric> WP! <majere> history!!!! <anti-hero> sand nigger!

fEBRUARY

14, 1997

<majere> hahahahaoa sand nigger <How> Death the Jews and Blacks. They are the some> HILTER did not finish whothe started <Skinhead> Joy, are you interested because you find some things you agree with? <Jay> No, I'm interested because I disagree, and I wont to understand why you guys think what you think. <Eric> i think you hsould be relieved of your suffering from all the wondering Joy * Skinhead doesn't understand how anyone could disagree *** Mode change "+b *!*@morpheus.cis.yale.edu" on channel #nazi by Skrew *** You have been kicked off channel #nazi by HamAWAY (.x(Rp0)x.

(Banned: *!*@morpheus.cis.yale.edu) .x(Rp0)x.)

IRC log ended Thu Oct 17 23:58 With that, the movement on my screen abruptly stopped. I had been kicked off the chat group and banned from returning. I suddenly became aware that it was midnight and I was sitting alone in a dark computer lab.

T

hree nights of chatting with reallife neo-Nazis left me feeling sick. But surfing the web the next day, I understood why hate groups of all kinds have seized on the Internet as a primary method of adver ti sing.

Skinheads, white supremacists, neoNazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and those who deny the Holocaust all find a home on the Internet. Some pages, like the Nigger Joke Center, are merely sickening and offensive. Ochers are more serious, intended to persuade and recruit. It is impossible to know whether Eric would follow through on his violent threats, but we know that at least some of the denizens of these groups are for real.

The White Aryan Resistance Hate Page, for instance, is maintained by Tom Metzger, a former Klansman who quit the KKK to found his own more extreme group, the White Aryan Resistance.

Metzger was later found guilty of inciting murder, after three members of

his group beat an Ethiopian student to death in Portland, Oregon.

Many of the pages are infected with a bizarre paranoia about the impending "extinction" of white people. The Aryan Nation's page warns that at only 8 percent of the world's population, the white "race," is in danger of genocide at the hands of "the Jew" - a curious reversal. Other pages explicitly denounce this culture of fear. Some try to conceal their racism, proclaiming chat they do not hate at all, but merely love their race and are willing to fight for it.

The Adelaide Institute, for instance, runs a page that denies the Holocaust.

"Why would anyone find this offensive?" the page demands. "We are celebrating the living who were thought dead." Another recurring theme is the metaphor of a great war, and a certain nostalgia for the days of the Third Reich. One page is named "Blur und Ehr," meaning "Blood and Honor"-che motto of the Nazi SS. Hate groups on the net have proliferated to the point where it is now possible to stumble across these sites without even looking for them. A search for the word "holocaust" on the search engine at Lycos yields a link to alt.revisionism-a discussion group devoted to denying the Holocaust.

There is nothing to prevent schoolchildren from unwittingly coming across these sites.

Many users agree that to fight Internet hate, we must meet it on its own terms, using its same technology to combat it by exposing its lies and rhetoric for what they are. It is in this spirit that a librarian at the Harvard Law Library created a site called Hatewatch (http : //www.hatewatch.org).

Hatewatch's mission is to monitor hate groups, keeping live links to their Web pages. We can no more wipe out hate on the Internet than we can wipe out the human impulse to hate. But , with vigilance, we can show the users of the Internet why these hate groups are wrong.

Ill]

jay Dixit, a junior in Ezra on th~ staffojTNJ.

Stil~s Co/leg~.

is

31

Foxwoods Casino brings both dollars and destitution to Southern Connecticut.

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i, it's Merritt. · We're at Aladdin. I swear to God if you don't show up in one second-I'm sitting here rallying the troops, I'm working on 'em, but they're fading fast and I swea-l'm holding down the fort. You've got to come. It's been like forty minutes.

You've got to arrive, you've got to arrive. We need the car we need the people we need to get in we need the energy. We need you to arrive. We're at Aladdin. We're waiting we're waiting it's freezing we're waiting. I'll see you soon. I know you won't abandon us."

Merritt hands the cellular phone back to the man who lent it to her. It is 2:30 a.m., early Saturday morning, Crown Street, New Haven. The line for last-minute orders stretches the length of Aladdin's single, fluorescendy-lit room. Cold and constant rain interrupts our view through the restaurant's sheetglass display window. Merritt stomps her patent-leather-booted heel impatiently, checking first her watch and then the street outside.

She tightens the wrap of her coat and walks into the street to wait for the car with Gadi, Tyler, Nick, and me. Five minutes elapse before it arrives. By the time everybody crams in-there are six of us in a car that seats five at best-it is nearly 3 a.m. We will not get to Foxwoods until 4 a.m. But there is no turning back. We have been crowing about our imminent trip all night, receiving gambling advice, and hearing Foxwoods tales from people who have been once, or who regularly make this pilgrimage.

We press on, shedding exit after exit, insistent rain flying from the windshield. Conversation in the car establishes that Foxwoods is indeed the largest casino in the world, employer of 10,000 and home of 3, 100 slot machines and 234 tables. The Mashantucket

32

Dana Goodyear Pequots have been raking in vast sums of money since they built the casino in 1992: estimates range fro·m $400 rrullion to $1 billion annually. The Pequots give up $ 100 million a year to keep the state coffers full, and maintain the reservation's monopoly on gambling. We pass New London, Groton, Mystic, and turn off the interstate.

I remember the last time I took this road to Ledyard. I was on a bus on my way to Providence. It was March, late at night, a blizzard. Every seat on the Greyhound was claimed. Plastic bags full of food and liters of Coke cluttered the aisle. I dosed my eyes and listened to the two sweatsuited, middle-aged women across from me complaining about their husbands and their bad luck at tb.e slots. I tried for a while to follow the loudly-voiced free associations of a deranged man a few rows behind me. I fell asleep.

When I woke, it was to bright light and a woman's voice coming through a megaphone. "You are now at portal six. A bus will be here to meet you at 7:00 a.m. Please pick up a map as you exit the bus. Welcome to Foxwoods. Good luck." The bus drained of all but two or three passengers. As we pulled away, out of the parking lot and back towards the highway, I began to grasp the sheer size of the place. Snow accumulating on the ground reflected the pinks and purples of the light murals on the building's flank.

Massive sculptures were stained a ·garish, otherworldly hue. proaching Foxwoods, this time aware that it is my destination, I still can't quite believe my eyes. "It goes on or miles," says a voice from the backseat. Even from this distance-stili on the road, the complex far away-1 can't discern

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the casino's perimeters.

The first thing we do when we pass through the glass door and ascend the wide flight of stairs is stop at the cash machine. It spits out $100 bills. A man with a walkie-talkie and a green suit checks our IDs and gives us each a map. The six of us in all-black regalia move past him into the casino. There does not seem to be a norm here; no one even looks twice at our boots and boas and leather jackets. I have nothing with which co compare the space.

All my metaphors fail me: a carnival factory? a petri dish of turquoise and chrome? Liberace's ear wax?

A guard accompanies me across the carpeted floor to the coatcheck because the umbrella I carry is considered a weapon.

She notices the dismay that settles on my face as we move deeper into the atrium, a stand of shivering, bleeping slot machines on our right, a field of blackjack and roulette tables on the left. We walk by a stretch of teller windows, where chips convert to money and cups filled with quarters are exchanged for bills.

"This is slow for this time on a Friday night," she says.

"There are usually more people here than this?" I ask. It's not what I'd call overcrowded. There are some unused slots, but most of the tables in this first room are occupied, and it's now 4:30 a.m.

"Oh, yeah. This is nothing." The guard makes a gesture, as if to conjure under her forearm's sweep a room teeming with gamblers.

"How many people do you think can fir in here?"

She looks at me wide-eyed, like I have asked how many atoms can fir on the head of a pin, or if she thinks the earth could just

FEBRUARY !4¡

1997

be a speck of dust under a giant's fingernail.

"I have no idea... there's no way to tell." adi walks away from the roulette table. I walk with Nick and him into the slot parlor. I feel like I have entered a Super Mario hell: the nonsensical inflection of beeping and the lights that flare without a stimulus. Gadi and Nick comment on the scene before them.

"It's the irony of all the ringing bells and all the really sad people."

"The worrying machinery... " I recognize a couple sitting in here, side by side at the slots.

The man wears grey camouflage pants and a purple sweatshirt, his belly a visible band of flesh. The woman's hair is tangled, long, unkempt. I saw her earlier, trailing behind him through the lobby. He looked angry. "You'll win it back, honey," she whined.

They look meaner than before. We leave the slot parlor and walk down a wide empty hallway.

"You could write a whole story about the Native American tragedy that's taking place right here," Gadi says.

"Any Native Americans in sight?" Nick asks. "Not a one."

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t Foxwoods' heart is a space that is vaulted, cool, forested with rootless plastic trees. Steam rises from the chlorinated water that collects beneath a waterfall. From between fake rocks grow flowers. The hour is perpetual twilight. An Indian crouches there, aiming his bow ceiling-ward. His skin gleams, opalescent. He is glass or plastic, his thigh the diameter of my

33

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waist. On the benches circling his glade, old men sleep and women read; one mother rocks a stroller absently. The I ndians at Foxwoods are massive, unidentified, prelinguistic, prehistoric.

There are no statues of the white man; instead there are animatronic robots. They emerge from casement windows above the storefront facades that line the casino's maze of hallways.

Captain John and the tavern mistress Abby show off their plastic musculature as they tell anecdotes to passersby. They talk about their histo ries, romances, families, morals, jobs. If you listen long enough, their tapes repeat. g Not one of us wins money that ¡c;; ~ night. We leave at 7 a.m. Outside it is {l dawn, and the rain has thinned to a cold ~ gray nag. Misery.

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V

anessa Gezari (SY '97) grew up in the idyllic town of Stonington, about ten miles from Ledyard. It 1s a quiet place , a small

34

fishing village turned Defense Department factory outlet, turned depressed victim of military budget cuts.

Its charm did not disappear with the U.S. Navy, however, and the affluent residents of Stonington Village and the city folk who summer there still find it a pleasant place. Stonington considers itself just a little more sophisticated than its rural neighbor Ledyard, where the houses are spaced at three-mile intervals, and the only site worth seeing is the new casino on the Pequot reservation.

The people of Stonington feel the presence of Foxwoods, looming on Ledyard's thin, rocky soil. They have witnessed demographic change; the lure of employment brings families from as far as Las Vegas. Its jobs also pull locals up from destitution. Foxwoods has proved to be a stopper in the economic leak that threatens the area. It employs the laid-off workers from the closing factories, the struggling carpenters, the odd-jobs men who can't find work.

Demographic change breeds tension.

The introduction of unknown elements causes hairs to bristle on the backs of local necks. A mounting flurry of small crimes has brought discomfort. Last summer, Stonington witnessed its first murder in eight years. Change comes from all directions: the flotsam of the casino circuit, the out-of-state and outof-town gamblers, an Indian population whose affluence and influence rises exponentially.

Vanessa sees the casino as both the cause of and the solution to the tension.

"The kind of frictions that are going to develop are the kind that are going to develop anywhere when you have a poor or lower-middle-class, working, bluecollar community that is not able to raise itself above a certain level, and then you have people who are fabulously wealthy. On the other hand, Foxwoods has a weird way of gelling all of that friction because of the thrill of the casino. It has to do with winning

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money."

"The possibility of instant mobility," I offer.

"Even when you lose, you feel like you had a chance at least. It seems to smooth over the very frictions that would occur in this kind of a community. I mean there is racism, but there is racism everywhere."

The Indians, she says, are a familiar presence. Their names mark the land. It is the local reaction to the presence of other racial groups, those using Foxwoods, that emphasizes how provincial this part of the state is. The Indians, for the time being, are treated with a grudging respect. I ask if Indians are the butt of wisecracks.

"Right now there is a sort of awe, and almost a kind of 'good ol' boys' feeling about them. The area is predominantly white, and even the people who are white and middle to lower class feel like this is the Indians making good, and they sort of feel like they're just slapping them on the back.

It's the kind of thing where it's like, 'Yeah, those guys don't have anything to worry about,' which could turn very easily into, 'They don't have anything to worry about, let's go give them something to worry about.'"

The casino benefits its employees: the pay is decent and the working conditions¡ are good. The members of the Pequot tribe who take a cut of Foxwoods' as tronomical proceeds are getting a taste of the good life. It is the gamblers who are losing money by the busload. Vanessa tells a story that has the ring of everyday truth, a dreary fact of life in a casino town.

"A friend of a friend was waiting in line for the movies in Niantic behind this couple. Niantic has a good theater, it plays artsy movies. The movies are $3.50. The man turned to the woman and said, 'You know what, I don't think we can afford this. I think I lost too much money at Foxwoods this weekend.' And the couple just left.

That's $7.00."

Such exchanges promise to become quotidian. Ir already sounds almost like an eerie admonition, a dull fairy tale

FEBRUARY 14, 1997

whose moral is implicit in its brief plot.

Foxwoods' new rival, the Mohegan Sun, opened this October in Uncasville, Connecticut, just a stone's throw from Ledyard. Foxwoods itself already has an expansion project underway, to be completed by the end of 1997, that will add 900 hotel rooms to the existing 500, as well as more gaming space. The Mashantucket Pequots also plan to open a summer theme park. Seasonal tourists and a migrant labor force will glut and purge the area annually, injecting money and depleting resources. Vanessa thinks the theme park will upset the balance between the quiet seaside community and the giddy entertainment megalopolis in its midst .

"Foxwoods is still this thing that is really hidden away in the woods in Ledyard. It's very self-sustained right now. It's doing a good job-and I don't know if it will keep doing a good jobbut it's both employing a really large number of people and not doing a lot of damage ... it seems. Until we get some sort of seepage, which may happen with this increase i n crime, if it is really connected. And what about theft? Not the bloody crime, but what about people getting their fix? I mean, are we going to start having Addicts Anonymous , Gamblers Anonymous .. ?"

As Vanessa talks, thoughts of Foxwoods shift and rearrange in my head. Fragments of the overheard and the surreptitiously seen collect. I picture myself standing by the casino doors, watching two very overweight men in gold and hightops creating banter for the sake of the thin woman who accompanies them. She looks on, amused, as one man says to the other, "You're a junkie, man. You're addicted.

Take a slot machine and stick it in your arm." He jabs his forefinger into his own arm like a syringe. The accused shakes his head and protests that he didn' t come at all last week. The first man points to a dispenser of flyers advertising the gambling addiction hodine. "You need that number, man?"

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Dana Goodyear, a junior in Davenport College, is research director ofTNJ.

35

'' I

remember when Yale students actually wore the clothes sold in J. Press," says my grandmother when we walk through New Haven, her old hometown.

"Goodness, how times have changed." ¡ As my grandmother has noticed, J. Press is usually empty. The high-priced stores lining Chapel Street are _equally devoid of customers. I have yet to see one of J. Press's $50 Yale scarves on an actual student. And I, for one, am afraid to even touch one of Ann Taylor's suits, much less purchase one.

It seems I am not alone; most of the outfits I see on campus are obvious attempts to satisfy the need for casual comfort. The only trend that seems to have been a hit with Yale students is the grunge look. Women without make-up and men in sweats seem to be less the exception than the rule. But I'm hesitant to describe what Yalies consider campus chic since ours seems to be a singularly Yale style. What makes such a geographically diverse group as Yale's student body come to dress in the same form of non-style?

New Haven's frigid winters are one explanation. It's not that my Yale friends and I don't care about looking good, it's just that we care more about being warm. Wearing an above-the-knee skirt in below-freezing temperatures is not comfortable. While both my homecoming and prom dresses saw the light of day last year, for this year's winter ball I donned a pair of faded blue corduroys and my duck boots. If walking up the ice slicks we call sidewalks

doesn't inspire Yale women to put away their high heels in favor of ungainly, but remarkably steady, winter boots, I don't know what will.

But weather alone can't explain why personal grooming seems so different here from the rest of the world. People at similarly frigid schools have very different experiences with the world of college fashion. According to a friend at Boston University, Yalies are mere fashion amateurs. In Boston, nothing gets in the way of style, which, incidentally, is a concept very different from the utilitarian parkas and boots of Yale. Leather jackets are de rigueur for men-no down coats there-and women wear bodyconscious styles even in the dead of winter. My friend attributes this to the international students who come to Boston, bringing European high fashion and the money to back it up. Her description was verified by a friend at Columbia, where even the grime of a New York winter can't keep the fashion mavens down.

So if weather isn't affecting our neighbors to the North and South, it can't be the only reason Yalies seem to have lost their fashion know-how. Our sense of style, it would appear, relates to our sense of self.

The importance (or non-importance) of appearance in the 18 years that precede matriculation at college makes an imprint. It seems the study habits students bring to Yale offer reason for our fashion anemia. Eighteen straight hours of studying somehow make fashion less of a priority. The sweatpants and matted hair

THÂŁ NEW JouRNAL

look that takes over during exam period is just an extension of Yale's normal fashion sense. Students who choose Yale tend to take responsibility, regarding school and everything else, seriously.

If my shopping habits are any indication, there's a link between being a conscientious student and being a conscientious spender.

I can't imagine dropping hundreds of dollars to replace serviceable clothes any better than I can think of blowing off a final exam.

But following that logic, a Yalie should look no different from any student at Harvard or Princeton. As any red-blooded Yalie knows, nothing could be further from the truth. People at Harvard seem to dress according to what they do: lit majors dress wear black and econ majors look like they're ready to take over the corner office at J. P. Morgan. The emphasis on appearance seems to be similar to the feeling we get that Cantabs care more about US. News and World Report rankings than we do. Similarly, a stroll around the Princeton campus feels like an adventure into a J. Crew catalog. But for YaJies, clothing seems to be less a uniform and more a way to look presentable while we're doing what we think is really important. We are passionate about what we are doing not because we think there's some type we need to fit, but because we are genuinely interested.

And while for most Yalies this passion for their activities becomes a reason to neglect fashion, for a few among our student body, clothing is their passion. When fashion takes over it really

fEBRUARY

14, 1997

takes over, as it does for Hai-Ting Chinn (MUS '97) . You've probably seen her walking around in her top hat, decked out in an outfit resembling that of an eighteenth-century boy. As she says, "The way I dress reflects my lifestyle. I want to live a life that's not part of this century." Her sister in spirit is Francesca Mymen (TO '98), who wears hand-sewn medievel garb.

"Whenever we see each other, we have this feeling of complicity," Chinn says.

Another woman who's often noticed for her unique sartorial tastes is Michelle Benitez (SY '00). She adheres to the AfroCarribbean religion Santeria, which requires initiates to dress in all-white for one year. For Benitez., attire reflects her most closely held beliefs. In their own way, these exceptions fit Yale's unique Ia] fashion rules: here, there are no rules.

Sara Harkavy, a sophomore in Calhoun College, is circulation and subscription manager ofTNJ.

37

Call Number of the Wild On file: copulating cartoon characters, Eurosmut, porno flick plot synopses.

by Alex Funk

I

t will probably be February 14. The pastel candies will be ceasing you mercilessly. "BE MINE," they'll beg sarcastically. "''M YOURS," they'll lie.

You'll bitterly mash the tiny hearts in your mouth, ironically underscoring their message.

You'll be tasting broken heart.

You'll swallow these candies, considering various Yale methods of beating the Valentine blues, only slightly aware of the self-destruction implicit in the act.

And t hen it will come to you, a call from another world. Like Costner in a cornfield, you will hear the call.

"Zeta... " It may be a while before you follow the voice, but eventually you will. Your blues will disappear iri.to the grey New Haven air. The healing power of Zeta lies on the shelves of Yale's library system; and you don't have to read well to enjoy it.

You'll find your way to Seeley Mudd Library, home of Yale's Zeta Collection of non-circulating material. When you enter an Orbis keyword search for "Zeta and Mudd," you'll retrieve 2,289 entries.

T he entries will at first seem arbitrary, ran ging from Bocaccio's Decameron to a book of The New l'Orker cartoons, but before long you will sort through such chaff to get to the wheat. And wheat you will find ...

You'll secure an informative copy of The X-Rated Videotape Guide IV by Robert Rimmer and Patrick Riley. You'll assume the first aut hor to be working under a pseudonym, the second ro be moonlighting as coach of the Miami Heat. Call number: ZETA PN 1995.9 S45 R563X. You'll brush up your Spanish by reading Solo Para Adultos: Historia del Cine X, an informative tome by Casto Escopico replete with "plot" synopses of your favorite porno flicks, as well as memorable stills from hits like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door. On page 262 you will find a photograph of John Holmes' legendary 15-inch penis. Call number: ZETA PN1995.9 S45 E73.

You'll recoil in fascinated terror as you glance at juliette De Sade, a French cartoon book that features hand-drawn portrayals of apocalyptically violent sex. Call number: ZETA PQ 2663 A889 + J9.

Q uickly, you will move on to a different book of French erotic pop art, Les Chefi-D'Oeuvre de Ia Bantle Dessinle Erotique, the fifth volume of which contains Spiderman with female genitalia, Goofy getting laid, "Lit tle Orgasm Annie," and Mickey Mouse doing

something truly unmentionable to a rather younglooking pink elephant. Call number: ZETA PN 6714 + C46.

Soon, you will regret the fact that these works are non-circulating. You'll ask librarians about the Zeta Collection, and their answers will strike you as disturbingly vague. "It has a quirky character," one tell you, and that the collection's purpose is "to control material likely to be stolen or damaged." hough not entirely satisfied, you'll reluctantly acknowledge chat you'd be more inclined to steal Exquisite Creatures than Paradise Lost.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Zeta Collection contained birch control literature t hat the state of Connecticut prohibited from being openly displayed. Back then, the collection was housed in a two-story locked cage on the seventh floor of Sterling Memorial Library. T he librarian says he "knows the Zeta Collection very personally," which you will interpret as some kind of joke. Strangely, none of the employees of the Yale Library System will be able to tell you when or by whom the Zeta Collection was started, or how it got its ominous name.

Your appetite for smu t whetted, you w ill explore other collections of Yale pornography, only to find them pale in comparison to the mystical Zeta. You won't deign to investigate Sterling's collection of Playbqy magazines, as they're chiefly stored on microform, t he ultimate anti-erotic medium. You' ll consider researching Beinecke's collection of Playboys until you notice the Orbis caveat "many issues mutilated and/or stained." You will look at Mother Yale looming majestically over the circulation desk, and you will wonder what she looks like nude.

So you'll follow the voice back to Mudd and the welcoming embrace of Zeta. Soon, the librarians won't need to ask which books you're requesting. Soon, you'll hear the images on the pages cooing "BE MINE," "KISS ME," and other things not found on Valentine candy. You'll have overcome your loneliness, become a Romantic scholar; with a straigh t face, you'll tell your parents that your love life is great and you've been spending a lot of time in the library. The months will float by like a breeze. ¡ And some bleak day, probably in a future February, you'll see a downtrodden student walking up Science Hill, angrily chomping on some kind of candy. And you'll know what to do: drift up behind him, lips by his ear, and pass on the voice: "Zeta..." you'll whisper. The call number of the wild.

Alex Funk is o senior in Calhoun College.

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