Volume 30 - Issue 2

Women's Sports 25 Years after Title IX • Demystifying the Art of Tattooing at The Edge

Volume 30, Number 2

The magazine about Yale and New Haven

Welfare Reform

The~wJoumal P UBLISH ER

Dan Murphy EDITOR- I N-CHI EF

Gabriel Snyder MANAGI NG EDITORS

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jl.Q__UJil(Ll_Vo-LUM E-30,N-UMB-ER . ,~"l VVJ.!__ OcTOBER lheNe 17, 1997

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

II

Photo essay: Night Visions

BY LILA SUBRAMANIAN

Serving Up Misinformation

I4

With neither telephone numbers not street addresses, the food vendors near the Medical School try to sort out the city's plans for their future.

BY J ESSICA WINTER

r6

The Uves Behind Welfare Reform A look at the day-to-day struggle ofbeing poor in New Haven in an era when government assistance is disappearing and jobs are scarce.

BY ELI Kl:NTISCH

22 p. 22

On the Cutting Edge The Chamber of Commerce feared a grimy sailor's den; what lower Chapel got was a clean, up-scale, and very now body art studio.

BY VANESSA A GARD-JONES AND L AINIE R UTKOW

25

Women's Sports Are Here to Stay But at What Cost?

Progress in women's athletics in the 25 years since Title IX has brought equality and opportunity but also commercialization and exploitation.

BY GENNY TAFT

S T A N D A R D S _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ 4 5 28

From Our Perspective Points of Departure The Critical Angle: Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra

BY ALEC HANLEY B EMIS

30

Endnote: So, You Want to Be an Academic Superstar?

BY GABRIEL SNYDER

Cover phom by Au Piyaka.

THE NEW jOURNAL is published five rimes during the academic year by The N.w Jourruol at Yale. Inc., P.O. Box .HJ~ Yale Station, New Ha.·en. Cf o6s>o. Office address: >!1 Patk Street. Phone: 1>0J14J>-19S7· All concenu copyright t 997 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduc<ion either in whole or in part without wrinen ·permission of the publisher and editor-in-chief is prohibited. Whtle this lllapz.ine is published by Yale College srudenu, Yale University is nOt responsible for its contents. Ten thousand copies of each iuue are distribured free to members of the Yale and N.w Haven community.

Subscriprions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year. so8. Two yean, $ JO. THE NEW jOURNAL is printed by Turley Public:arions. Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by ~man Bookkeeping of New Haven. TH£ NEW jOURNAL encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Wrire to Editorials, PO Box 10.1-4)1. New Haven, CT o6po, or email tnj(ityak.edu. Allleuers for publication must include address and signature. We reserv~ the right to edit alllctren for publication.

We are pleased to note that 30 years ago, almost to the day, Volume 1, Issue 1 of The New Journal rolled off the presses. But we recognize that this important anniversary is bittersweet.

The end of one's twenties is sometimes a period of panicked changes. As the 30-year-old man notices his thinning hair, his expanding gut, and his growing distaste for popular radio, he's bound to recall his faster days of youth. Adulthood sets in and often manifests itself in a desire to own a lawn mower and get good gas mileage.

Here at The New Journal, however, we approach our fourth decade with untempered enthusiasm. Sure we remember our younger days, proud of all that we've accomplished.

Our unrivaled 30-year stability as an undergraduate publication and the 600-plus staff members who have moved through the masthead are particular points of pride. But rather than trying to re-live the individual achievements of our glorious youth, we're keeping ourselves committed to the principles that were behind all of those accomplishments: sound writing, innovative thinking, and hard work. With these elements we can confidently speed forward while remaining happily married to our past and cheerfully plodding towards middle age.

4

die fight for its very foundational principles. & Office of Public Affairs spinrnaster Thomas OR THOSE WHOSE ONLY CONTACf WITH Conroy said on the media ponrayals of Yale in Yale is through the national media, the uniconnection to the Onhodox Jews issue, "I versity must seem to be constantly locking don't think a story like that is negative as long horns with one opponent or another in an as Yale is seen standing up for its principles." effon to defend a fundamental principle. Tra- , & immovable as it wishes its gothic buildditionally, Yale's adversaries in these epic batings were, the Yale administration tles have had all has positioned itself in these hum~ faces. Three brouhahas so that any comyears ago it was Texas promise is tantamount to gazillionaire Lee Bass, toppling the institution.

Then it was the cudHowever, this brinkdly union members. manship has, for the More recently it's been most part, been unnec. gay activist and playwright essary. When faced Larry Kramer, followed with individual conimmediately by a group of cerns such as the Onhodox Jews. complaint of the five Those of us who are at ground students who are Onhodox Jews, zero know that life at Yale is relatively prosaYale responds by appealing to the absolute ic and unheroic. Denizens ofYal~no matter values embedded in the residential college syshow much the admissions office chirps about a tern. By publicly relying on a fundamental community of scholars-do not spend every principle, they enlarge the debate so that it waking moment pondering the future of westbecomes larger than it ever had to be. The New ern civilization, the exploitation of the working l'Ork Times (which covers Yale almost as well as class, the validity of queer theory, and the the Yak Daily News) would have hardly batted moral poverty of the dorms. However, those an eyelash at a story chronicling the negotiations who do feel strongly about any of these isSues over bathroom rules and visitation practices. spend their time within the institution lobbyInstead, the Yale Five complaints, which ing for small changes that will make life at Yale basically amounted to living conditions-a more accommodating to their needs and gripe virtually every Yale student shares-have wants. turned into a debate about Church and State The Slifka Center, Yale's relationship to and the essence of modern religion. & a Yale New Haven, the REFLAGS committee, and srudent you have to wonder, "Don't these directed studies have all become things Yale things happen at other schools?" They most can brag about. What were once gaping weaklikely do, but problems at other schools never nesses in the university (religious intolerance, seem to make it much funher than the U-Wtre. poor town-gown relations, a lack of any studAnd, well, we wouldn't want to criticize, ies) have been filled by a series of smaller meabut Yale only seems to come out looking silly. sures that most agree are steps in the right The administration was all too willing to claim direction. leadership in gay studies, but when their bet The national media is much less likely to was called, they were forced to fold and reveal pay attention to these because small, local their lack of confidence in gay studies as a valid actions are sure to draw a yawn in a USA Today academic field. Their everyday actions, such as editorial meeting. But when a controversy does the Homebuyers Incentive Program and the manage to cause a ripple of interest in the Kosher Kitchen seem hollow when Yale's national media, Yale gets caught up in a tsunagrander statements send the opposite message. rni because its spokespeople are quick to cast what could be a minor problem into a do-or-The Editors

Poring over the Foundation

F

THE NEW JouRNAL

Running Late For most of us exercising is drudgery: slowly moving half-hours wedded to a machine that forces us to move our legs up and down or long minutes spent under a bench press trying to expand the muscles above our ribs. To combat our boredom, fitness fads will continue to come and go. There isn't just this year's clothes, there's this year's way of getting into them. Thus jazzercise emerged, then Buns ofStee~ and now two Silliman roommates have found a new way of avoiding workout doldrums: running in New Haven after-hours, long after the Yale Police advise staying indoors.

They come out after midnight, sometimes after 1 a.m. Mila wears a pair of orange boxer shorts and an old T-sh.irt, Annie appears in a more sophisticated running outfit, her high school gym shorts. They look like normal students on their way to burning a couple of calories, but they're not heading to the weight room. Tonight's route takes them around the periphery of campus, down Chapel Street, huffing and maybe wheezing since they also smoke.

They invoke an image of weirdness like hybrid tomatoes in a transportable garden.

Running so late is ideal, they say, because the weather is perfect and there are fewer people on the street. They aren't embarrassed to be seen running but are attracted by the desolation that fills the streets at night. According to Annie, "I see my workouts as romantic in the original sense of the word-when I'm running I enter into my own zone." For Mila a sense of privacy is important as well. "It's just a rest from people.

College is exasperatingly full of people. But most people study at night." The recovery of primordial loneliness is just one of the advantages of their unique workout routine. More likely they cannot get up in the morning and run at night because that's when they're awake.

In talking to these girls something else emerges about their workouts--a sense of bemusemem with their own oddity. It seems as if they're not so much generally in awe of night as they are in piquing interest, in creating a cult of themselves. As they're running down Crown Stteet when the rest of the world is considering sleep, rather than pass them by, they seem to OcTOBER 17, 1997

want us to stop and think, "What are those girls up to?"

Despite their fa~de of ambivalence, one continues .to wonder if these women ever feel genuinely scared, especially when one considers that Mila or Annie often runs alone. According to Annie, "Never-I took model mugging classes in high school. I know how to defend myself' Mila, though, has occasional moments offear. "When I get too far away from campus I start to feel uncomfortable. Like sometimes I've been alone and cut through the Green to get home faster-that made me feel a bit queasy."

But has she ever met anyone threatening? "No, when people have stopped us, it's been because they thought we were crazy, not because they wanted to hun us. Like this one time this guy I know asked me what I was doing, and I said working out, and he said, 'Are you crazy? Do you want to get yourself killed?' But I just laughed about that." Annie remembers being stopped by a man on a bike on Dwight Street as she was running towards Whalley. "I don't want to be rude," he said, "but this is kind of a dangerous neighborhood." "Thanks," Annie replied. "I think we're okay. He was sort of weird." Jogging under the street lamps, they slyly mock their spectators; all the rest of us hurrying home on such dark, unquiet streets.

-DanKeUum

Donut Abundance My suspicions were true. "Old people like the French Crullers best," said Leah Beabout, recem emigre to New Haven and current employee at the Park Street Dunkin' Donuts. It seems so obvious: their wonderful blend of air and dough, emptiness and substantial weight correspond well to the elderly's fragile, yet hefty condition.

Leah freely gave out this information as though it were a donut handed out fTee of charge. Indeed, Dunkin' Donuts offered just such a promotional give-away a few short weeks ago in honor of Fred the Baker, the company's retiring ad-man, famous for his catchphrase, "Tune to make the donuts." However, if I had come in earlier dressed not in my Levi's and green Gap plaid, but in blue seersuckers and a

red polo, Leah would perhaps have refrained from so readily exposing this Dunkin' Donuts lemon-jelly-like inner secret. On that "hellish, long-ass shift" when Leah and her co-worker Eva handed out one free donut after another, she soon realized that some customers were returning, dressed anew in hopes of attaining a prized second free donut.

To what extremes will New Havenites go for donuts? Did these conniving, unlawful citizens not realize they easily could have fulfilled their gluttonous wishes by other, simpler means? Had these dasrardJy deceivers carefully executed their plan, they could have come home with not one but eight foe donuts, without a trip tb the changing room. Ah, the poor fools, ignorant of New Haven's Dunkin' Donuts abundance.

The relatively young students of the Yale School of Drama, like the geriatric, often enjoy the French Crullers found at the Park Street Dunkin' Donuts. As Leah explains, they enjoy French Crullers not for their potential medicinal qualities, but simply because they come from France (home to Racine and sometimes Beckett). Luckily for these students, the new Dunkin' Donuts sits directly behind their York Street theatre space. It's likely that these drama students may never have had the opportunity to taste a French Cruller, seeing that before the new franchise's opening in September, only seven other Dunkin' Donuts existed in the Yale area: one behind Timothy Dwight College on Whitney; one on Church Street across from the Chapel Square Mall; one near the Medical

5

School Co-op on Vork Street; one on Chapel graduate students are gathered at the door to other things, a Japanese public school, a magical adjacent to Nii Haven Book and Video; one on Silliflicks, a cozy theatre in the basement ofSillipendant, a high school track meet, a crush on man. They are here for the bi-weekly screening an older man, an alternate reality, a lecherous State Street; and finally, Union Station houses two---count 'em two--Dunkin' Donuts due to of the Yale Anime Film Society. The previous brown monster, a handsome blond prince, a group still hasn't left the theatre, and insists playfully sexy cat-girl, and lots of big robots. the overwhelming rush-hour demand for In subsequent videos I make a concerted portable baked goods. One might rightfully upon seeing the end of their film right up to the effott to follow the plot line. In Slayers I wimess ask, "How can these eight Dunkin' Donuts last few credits. Despite their growing restlessthe awe-inspiring magic of a new heroine, Lina adequately serve Yale and the greater New ness, the anime vanguard is not an aggressive Haven community?" (For now, let us ignore the bunch, and they let the movie watchers have Inverse. At the beginning of the episode, this luscious freedom fighter proclaims, "Anyone additional 20 Dunkin' Donuts listed in the their way. who's jealous my power and my beauty won't New Haven phone book.) In fact, this question One of the members notices that I'm a tad must have entered the mind of one Mr. Vinny lost and flashes me a little grin. Hopeful, I try to , $et away!" Chastened, her enemy replies, "You Gagliardi, owner and founder of the new Park strike up a conversation. Scrambling to find got balls kid, ofcourse, being a girl, you have no Street shop. This capitalist savior stepped up co something to say, I mutter something innocuballs!" The room erupts in hoots of laughter.

Unsure of how to react, I smile sheepishly and the plate at the hour of Yale's greatest need. ous along the lines of, "Tonight's Japanimation sctacch my goatee. When Lina's blond heartLeah reports that the new shop's most intense looks pretty cool." He knows at once that I'm throb, Gourty, decides to flee the evil dragon, hours of donut demand are early in the mornnot among the initiated. Those who know call it anime and pronounce the word "animay." A brave Lina cuts him down to size with her ing and from about 2 to 3 p.m.

This leads me to wonder at precisely what genre of Japanese animation, anime plot lines acidic wit, "BAD! Gourry, mummy men aren't time the severely intoxicated man and his equalencompass everything from innocent kid's stomy type." I turn to the person sitting beside me, ly drunk mother entered the store, ordered one ries akin to the Care Bears, to more adult seeand ask why the heroine is called Lina Inverse.

He gives me a puz:z.led look, as if I just asked Bow-tie, and then asked for whipped cream · . narios more along the Lines of Debbie Does Dal"Why do people breathe?" or "Why do you spread all over it. Leah did not speculate as to las. As the members of the society will have you know, much of this stuff isn't for kids. watch anime?" Obviously, I'm missing somewho these two inebriated saps might have been. thing here.

I suspect the handiwork of two over-imaginaAs the theater opens, the bleary-eyed movieAfter three videos, I am a little dizzy and tive drama students, out for a night on the goers slowly diffuse out of the room. Since there can no longer feel my legs. I decide to sneak out town. I also wonder at what ungodly hour the are far fewer chairs than people, the anirne stabbed-in-the-wrist-bleeding-all-over-thewatchers jostle to get prime sears. There seems to the back door and get some ITesh air in the Silliman counyard. I think to myself, "Not safe! counter man barged in and took plenty of be a definite hierarchy, with the anirne intelliMust Ree." I know how Lina would react to my Dunkin' Donuts napkins co heal his wound. gentsia sitting in the chairs up at the front. I sit cowardice.

She would toss back her hair seducUnfortunately, this latter man chose co be cross-legged on the cold floor hunched up knifed near me wrong Dunkin' Donuts, for had against the wall. Near the front of the room, but tively, square her shoulders, look me in the eye, he been hankerin' for a Blueberry Crumb down far off to the side, I have a very oblique view of and proclaim, "Mummy men aren't my type!" on York Street, he would have been but a few the screen and have to strain my neck to see me - jason D'Cruz feet from good medical attention. He must subtitles. One of the Anime Society leaders have been one of the same guys who returned stands up to introduce the video we are about to From Dust to Dust for that extra free donut.

-jesse Dilicn watch, The Vmon of Escaftowne. He mentions the "superb quality of animation" and the "cool The Sterling Memorial Library stacks: no stotyline."

He also tells us that tonight we have other Yale building inspires such dread, such Look! Movie Weird! the rare treat of viewing six consecutive episodes. intrigue and such romance among students.

"What did you think of the last Hentaz?"

I resent my position on the floor even more.

Privacy is easier to find man that elusive history or psychology tome. Despite the recent library asks a voice from the comer of the room. Before The first episode opens with achingly sappy anyone has a chance to answer this curious theme music and a number of still shots renovations which have left me stacks in question, another query is made, "How about of an attractive girl with long even greater disarray, the shdves still Ramna ~ Number 34?" Soon the brown hair and doe-like hold some surprises. A look at one room is awash in arcane references eyes. The girl shelf reveals a set of Shakespeare, to Magic Knight Rtzyearth, Slayprinted in London in 1757. (George sings something ers, and Ah!My Goddess. in Japanese and Washington was fighting for the the subtitles for The group is 90 perBritish, and Connecticut Hall had cent male and rather just been built.) On another shelf, the lyrics come up as enthused. I am trying "Go for love, go for love!"

14 volumes of Chaucer printed in my best to fit in.

The audience is transfixed.

Edinburgh· in 1782 (each small About 50 underWhat follows is a bit of a enough ro fit in a pocket). The muddle grads and a for sleepy security guards at the main smattering of involving <:uu•.......c would never notice. A fan 6

THE N Ew JouRNAL

ofRoman politics? Elihu Yale's father might have read this edition ofTacirus printed in 1622. But now the book's cover and spin~ are detached from its body, and little chips of the Imperium's history fall offwith each turn of the page.

The SML renovation is meant to create a suitable modern home for Sterling's holdings, but the rebuilding process now stands in violation of Hippocrates's famous dictum: "First, do no harm."

The treasures of SML sit unnoticed in corner alcoves and temporary carts, carelessly stacked and exposed to the choking grit of the long, slow installation of new wiring, elevators, and ventilation systems. Up on floor 4M, the books on the shelves are in disarray, tossed in at odd angles like pieces of an unsolved jigsaw puzzle. A thick volume rests uneasily between two larger texts, unprotected by a cover, without title page or call number. No scholar could ever find this book-a shame because in it are three years worth of newspaper clippings from the Civil War. Not reprints, not copies, but actual newspaper columns reporting the decisive Northern victories ("the following account of the battle of Gettysburg on Wed. last ... "), cheering Sherman's march through Georgia, and scrutinizing Lincoln's peace negotiations.

In Beinecke, these relics would be in an airtight glass cube, protected &om theft and the dements by futuristic alarm systems and translucent marble slabs. Here in the hean of SML, however, newspapers from the Civil War are at the mercy of the dust, the water, and the kindness of whoever happens to stumble upon them.

So, as you turn the pages, be careful not to pull too roughly because the wrinkled 18-inch-page might come loose. Remember, while you run your fingers over the newsprint to feel the texture, that you are depositing oil and sweat on the kind of primary source that historians pore over.

While putting the volume back, be gentle-the book is already in two pieces. Among the hacksaws, blowrorches, and hammers, this little bit of history never really had a chance. ¡ -Simon Rodberg

Working Sucks The Yale Midterm god is not a happy god. lt is not a forgiving god. It is not a kind god. It is a relentless, jealous, angry god. It requires appeasement.

Week after week and year after year, like humble supplicants, we offer up rituals to OcroBER 17, 1997

Midterm god and her friends Finals god and Homework god. We present to them long hours of study without sleep, daily meccas to class, and the memorization of important religious texts on math and history. On important holidays, we endure all-nighters, hoping that our misery will inspire a spark of pity in the gods who. will grant us a prosperous career, a white picket fence, a beautiful spouse, and Ultimate Happiness.

Th.is is utterly ridiculous. Let's all quit school, burn our books, and live happy and productive lives without the crutch of higher education. Working sucks.

So says Tun, a Harvard dropout who works five hours a week as a computer programmer.

Five hours. Tun languidly passes his days on his coUective farm, reading, playing the flute, volunteering, and writing. Armed with a pen name of no less than "Tun Righteous," he is the author of a bright-yellow pamphlet titled W&rking Sucks, which presents some pretty heavyduty thinking in plain English on Tun's way of life as an alternative to the normal grind. This year the pamphlet made its way to Yale via Tim's friend Lydia Stein (DC '01) and into my hands a couple of weeks ago. My midtermsoaked brain, beaten down by hours of studying, drank it all in.

The pamphlet starts with the idea that

work stunts a fulfilling life: "Work takes time from other, better things like being with our families and friends, travding, making love, drinking beer, painting, writing, reading, playing music, cooking, eating good food, etc.

These are things that make life rich and interesting. Work makes life boring, short, and gray."

Then Tun gives us a way out of the "work and consume trap" by outlining a strategy for working less. "The trick is learning how to work less by learning how to spend less."

According to Tun, spending less involves pinching pennies, living communally, and quitting school.

Okay. Maybe this is going a bit far. But, going back to the first part, I mean, working really does suck. And no one knows this better than the stressed-out Yalie.

In fact, Tun had us in mind when he put together his pamphlet. After I tracked him down, he told me, "The middle class propagates itself by insisting that you always. defer happiness by going to school, then coUege, then climbing the career ladder. It puts up the illusion that if you stop rurining, something bad will happen. It took me all the way to graduate school to realize that I could stop running and disaster wouldn't befall me." Tun advises us to take some time off from school and examine whether or not we really want to be here.

Lydia, the student who gave me the pamphlet in the first place, says, "I think W&rking Suckstdls us to have a lot of fun, not to put ourselves in the track of work and consume, work and spend. It encourages us to be critical of the institutions around us. I think we should really seriously consider this way of living, not just philosophically ponder it."

Perhaps you're tempted to laugh. Myself, I can only think about Tun who is probably hanging out on his farm and wondering what he's going to do with all that beautiful free time.

-A.ndmv Youn

I'll Be Watching You You leave your parents when you come to Yale, only to find another set of people keeping tabs on your life. Your seminar professors take attendance. Your section leaded monitor participation. The bursar's office counts every dollar you owe. Even your peers keep an eye on you.

But once you graduate, you're free, right?

Wrong. Mother Yale is keeping a close eye on

7

you, even after you think that you've escaped her omniscient gaze. High in the tower of the Yale bureaucracy:sits an office that you probably never knew existed. But they certainly know that you exist. This is the Development Office of Yale Alumni Affairs. And they make sure that they know as much as possible about

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your affairs.

The office hires undergraduates to devote themselves entirely to the job of following your career. Roger Labady OE '01) and Nadira Stewart (CC '99) are two of eight undergraduates who stalk you through the pages of various high-profile publications. Armed with highlighters, they read entire magazines, highlighting every single name they come across.

"There's a cubby area filled with magazines," Nadira explains. "We just go and pick a magazine, read it, and highlight names as we read." The stack of previously read magazines ·contains copies of Forbes, Fortune, Crain's, Wall Street fourna4 and The New ·lOrk Times all bearing bright yellow streaks.

After highlighting, they enter the names into a computer datab~ of Yale alumni. If there is a match, the undergraduates enter a summary of the article featuring the alum.

Then, they photocopy the article and tuck it away in a file folder labeled with the alum's name.

These innocent spies even have a title within the world of the Development Office: scanners. The undergraduate scanners are a small part of an entire subculture devoted to faithfully following your post-collegiate life. There's a reason Nadira and Roger only read through business-specific publications. They only scan for the ones who strike it rich.

The Development Office is actually not an obscure, obsessive fan club of Yale graduates-it is a cottage fundraising industry. The office has made procuring money from Yale graduates a fine art which makes the Development Office a favorite of Mother Yale. The university has given the office three Boors in One Century Tower, a huge building complete with marble Boors, plush chairs, and revolving doors. And the luxurious, wood-paneled elevators

announce floor numbers in a voice distinctly similar to the infamous voice-mail lady.

Directly across the street from the Development Office is the abandoned child of Yale's financial administration: the financial aid office. A nondescript building which makes do with makeshift computer-printed signs which read "Undergraduate Financial Services- 2nd floor," this particular office is clearly a victim of neglect.

But back across the street, Yale graduates are received with open arms. "We even meet the alums in person," says Vilandria Turner, the manager of research. '1\nd we have extensive background informacion, which the scanners provide, on each alum's interests."

So, ifYale is a home away from home, can we ever leave? Turner laughs good-humoredly.

"Nope! We hold 60th year reunions!"

- Monica Kim

Triumph of Translation . On the third Boor of the University Theater, a wire-mesh barrier sections off a dimlylit corner of the Yale School of Drama library, protecting the 70-year legacy of the YSD alumni. For some, these "cages" are little more than a dungeon of forgotten theses, the final resting place for material that once held the spotlight on the stage two flights below. But for James Magruder (MA '84, MFA '88), a visiting lecturer whose own doctoral thesis entered the cages in 1992, these volumes represent the theatrical hits of the future.

Magruder's contribution to the dramatic legacy is his English translation of Pierre de Marivaux's obscure 18th-century French comedy La Triomphe de /'Amour. His script made its public debut with a 1993 production at Center Stage Baltimore. But after the curtain fell on closing night, The Triumph ofLove wasn't quite ready to return to its dusty shelf in the drama cages. Instead, it prepared for yet another translation-this time into another genre. Magruder will unveil this final incarnation on October 23rd, when Triumph ofLo~ opens as a musical at the Royale Theater in New York City.

'fHE N EW jOURNAL

Magruder dubs his path to Broadway "a jaw-droppingly freakish stroke-of-fortune."

He adds, "For my collaborators, it is the idealization of a dream. As somebodJ who wishes he were writing more fiction, this is like a freak accident-an extraordinary freak accident."

Magruder says, "Triumph of Love the musical marries theater, French literature, and musical theater-kind of a weird culmination of my prevailing interests."

This Yale-bred marriage had a bittersweet homecoming last winter during the production's engagement at the Yale Rep where it was greeted by a mediocre reception. "The Yale Rep had not done a new musical in 22 years, and I don't think they were ready," he says.

The Broadway audiences, on the other hand, have been far more receptive, lapping up the preview performances of the reinvented Triumph, extensively rewritten and recast since its New Haven engagement. With each successive draft, 25 in all, Magruder finds himself relying less on the literal Marivaux and more on the author's style. "My guiding principle was that if I'm entertaining myself, I might be able to entertain others," he says. "I wasn't going to create a translation that couldn't have been on the stage." With the imminent Broadway opening and prospects of a national rour with a London company, Magruder can expect a healthy stage life before his creation at last returns, albeit transformed, to its original home in the drama cages.

-Dustin Brown

The Choice is Yours Lucas Campos (PC '99) is Chicano.

Yet, the reason he identifies himself as Chicano might be difficult for some to grasp.

While Lucas's father is from Mexico, his mother is mainly of English and French descent. Standing six-feet tall with blue eyes and light brown hair, Lucas certainly does not stand out as a member of any particular ethnic group. His parents divorced in his infancy and he was raised by his mother with almost no contact with his father in a household which did not emphasize his Mexican heritage. "I only really started thinking about being Chicano when I was around 16 or so. My mom definitely encouraged me to examine my identity more."

OCTOBER

17, 1997

Since coming to Yale, Lucas's connection to the Chicano community has grown stronger. He is a member of Yale's Professional Society of Latinos, and has participated in both P.R.O.P. and Science, Technology, and Research Scholars, a Yale program that helps minority students find positions in research labs. "Shannon Salinas [the former dean and director of the Chicano Cultural Center] was my mentor here when it came to learning about Latino programs," Lucas says. "Through organizations and experiences I've had over the past few years, I know many more Chicanos and a lot more about my own culture than I've ever had the chance to in the past."

Indeed, Lucas's Chicano identity, coupled with his academic excellence and love of chemistry, was instrumental in winning a two-year $10,000 grant from Yale's Boucher Fellowship, a program designed to encourage minority students in graduate studies.

Lucas takes exception with those who would question his Chicano identity, no matter how latent. "My father was from Mexico," he says, "and that makes me just as Chicano as anyone else."

Dean Richard Chavolla, director of Yale's Chicano and Native American Cultural Center, emphasizes that at Yale ethnicity comes down to more than just skin color. "It's basically a process of self-identification," he says. "If one chooses to identify as Chicano, then we don't question whether they are or not."

Much like Dean Chavolla, Dean Kimberly Goff-Crews, director of the Boucher Fellowship and the Afro-American Cultural Center, makes it clear that students at Yale must define their own ethnic identity.

"There can be no litmus test for race," she explains. "It is only the individual himself that can decide what his own identity is."

When deciding who is eligible for programs for minority students, the same rule applies.

"If a fellow identifies as Chicano, or any other ethnicity, his identity is valid and will inform him as a scholar as well as diversify the field of study he enters." As Lucas puts it, "I may not have grown up eating Mexican cooking every night or speaking Spanish, but I'm learning more about what it means to be Chicano every day."

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As Herb walks through the one-room museum, he lovingly describes the marvelous trinkets and pictures. He walks by display case upon display case filled with figures.and drawings of everything from 1950s Western heroes to Aladdin characters. He shows off an antique Mickey Mouse watch made in New Haven (value: $800). He brags that he even has the very rare original box for that watch (value: $1,200). Herb loves his stuff, and he loves the prices too. "Everything is worth money," he admonishes. No matter how nostalgic one might get at the sight of a childhood hero, one mustn't forget that the item has a hefty price tag as well.

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THE NEW jOURNAL

Night Vision Lila Subramanian

OCTOBER I?, I997

ll

Nightfall transforms our surroundings. The naruraJ darkness of the night and the isolated man-made lights that punctuate: this darkness suggest uneasiness, adventure, mystery and solitude. I walk through urban and suburban spaces searching for evidences of life. The spaces I photograph are used spaces-backyards, construction sites, driveways-inhabited during the daytime: and abandoned for the night. These pho-

12

rographs are about the discovery of the presence of other people through an exploration of space.

Inanimate objects stand in for the absent human figures. What remains in the: landscape after nightfall is a haunting residue of human spirit, left behind as a testament to our fundamental loneJjness.

Lila Subramanian is a smior in TrumbulL Co/kg~.

THE NEw JouRNAl

OCTOBER 1], 1997

IJ

With neither telephone numbers nor street addresses, the food vendors near the Medical School try to sort out the city's plans for their future.

Serving Up Misinformation Jessica Winter ETWEEN II A.M. AND

B

3 P.M.

EACH WEEKDAY, THE CORNER OF

York and Cedar streets near the Sterling Hall of Medicine becomes a movable feast. Dozens of vendors' pushcarts line the circular sidewalk, and the surrounding air hangs heavy, laden with the heat misting off cooking grills and the sick-sweet scent of frying oils and simmering noodles. Festooned with garishly-colored umbrellas, the pushcarts are chrome-and-Formica affairs, occasionally belching up gusts of steam. Customers come &om all directions on this mid-autumn a&ernoon, many &om Yale-New Haven Hospital, just across York; they wear white coats and laminated ID tags. Those in white are less likely than other customers to sit down with their Styrofoam boxes of pad thai or General Tso at a picnic table on the stonetiled courtyard. They hurry back across the street, leaving the vendors an extra moment to take a breather as the a&ernoon's shadows lengthen.

The vendors lean against their Chevy Blazers and Toyota pickups, parked nearby; in about an hour they will load the cars with coolers filled with unsold soda and food, hitch up their pushcarts, and head home. For now, they steal a smoke and chat with neighboring sellers.

Baseball comes up a lot-vendor Lam Nguyen, who goes by "Phil," is rarely seen without his Red Sox cap. The weather. Local politics. I ask them about the bill currendy under the Board of Aldermen's consideration that would place stricter limitations on outdoor vending in New Haven. "The question is why. We need an answer," Phil says between pulls on a Marlboro Red, his eyes focused over my shoulder as he watches for approaching customers. "There's a lot of rumors going on in the city that there is some proposal. If that rule is put into effect, there will be no vendors. We heard about a rule that will make us go 200 feet away &om any public building. We heard there might be an English test to get a permit." Phil gestures vaguely at a nearby vendor; when I approached her earlier with a few questions, she silendy demurred with a confused smile. Her English appeared limited to "Can I help you?"

"I don't know why they're doing it," Phil goes on. "Talk to that hot dog guy. He knows." But I've already chatted with the hot dog guy, Kevin Murphy, of Jack's World Famous Hot Dogs. "I hear they're trying to shut us down," Kevin told me. "But people got a right to eat where they want to eat." He was explaining to me how his grill worked when he wandered off, mid-sentence, in search of an extra gas tank.

Left alone, I went to talk to Shou Bim Chen at Liu's Lunch. "Now we might have to find new jobs," he said. "It's the city of New Haven doing it, but Yale doesn't want us around. We get too much business."

Indeed, the only food-service competitor in the immediate area is the 14

Yale-New Haven Hospital cafeteria. Chen then pointed me toW3..\"d Phil. "Oh, you already talked to the hot dog guy," Phil says, "Yale is behind it. I don't know why. We still haven't heard what is going to happen. We might have to leave. We find out October l, when we have to get new permits." Phil is friendly and talkative, but seemingly against his better judgment; he is standing up straight now, and shifting his weight back and forth between his feet. He points toward the Mamoun's cart and tells me, "The Greek guy knows. Ask him."

Ask Joelle Rhodes, legislative liaison for the Office of the Mayor, about the vendors' assorted concerns, and her smooth phone voice reach~ a slighdy higher pitch. "There has been a campaign of misinformation to incite people on this issue. This always happens when we are trying to negotiate new legislation," she says. The official language of the proposed ordinance claims only to regulate the location and operation of vending stations and establish tighter procedures for the suspension or revocation of licenses. Rhodes dismisses nearly every vendor's qualm I bring up. "We're not trying to attack the vendors or get rid of all vending in New Haven. We just want them to be consistent with stated distances from schools and churches," Rhodes says. No, the 200feet limit probably won't be passed. No, there was never any plan to administer an En~ish competency exam. No, Yale is not working with the mayor's office on the proposal. As for October 1, the date that so many of the vendors at York and Cedar seemed to regard as a D-day of sorts, Rhodes explains, "Well, permits are renewed October 1. I guess the vendors expected the ordinance to be passed and enforced by then."

It's just one piece of misinformation wafting in the smoking air between the vendors, but in its own way, it makes sense. If Kevin Murphy or Shou Bim Chen are under the impression that the Mayor's office, the police, or Yale intends to shut down their operations, and they had to wager a guess, a logical time for the crackdown to occur would be the day their licenses expire. I recall what Phil said when I asked how he heard about the proposal-"Everybody talks. People around here talk about it"-and realize that the 20-odd vendors working at York and Cedar are engaged in an ongoing game of Telephone.

The mayor's office has contact with lawyers hired on retainer by the owners ofJack's Hot Dogs and Brittany's Lunch. Those lawyers talk to the owners, who then talk to their workers. Those workers then talk to the self-employed vendors. Faets shift and warp. They are even, perhaps, lost in translation-first languages among the vendors include Greek, Thai, Vietnamese, and Hindi. ¡ "I can't sit here and counsel the vendors 24 hours a day," Rhodes says. "I know there's a lot of misinformation going around, but all I can THE NEW JouRNAL

say is, the proposal is a working document. What was proposed is not the end-all, be-ali." Rhodes points out that under current guidelines, the city can be held liable for any accidents that befall a street vendor or for any problems they cause, such as obstruction of pedestrian traffic.

But she stresses that much of her office's interest in presenting the proposal is due to the fact that the vendor ordinance has not been overhauled since 1928.

"And ignored since then," John Williams rebuts when I talk to him later that day. A lawyer representing several vendors, Williams likens the efforts to revise the vending ordinance to overhauling a decree against, say, jaywalking. "Who card" he keeps repeating. "But they're doing more than just revising. They want to make it impossible for vendors to vend." Williams points out that under the proposed ordinance, licenses would be non-transferable; instead of just a single establishment, each and every worker would need a permit. "It amounts to harassment, and these issues come up due to intermittent spasms of yuppiefication," he says. "The mayor's office wants to turn New Haven into Disneyland or Greenwich, if there's a difference." While Williams confirms that calk of an English test for vendors was never anything more than idle rumor, he says, "It speaks to the attitude the vendors perceive, that the city is looking down its nose at them."

By the time I have my conversation with Williams, October 1 has come and gone, and I head back down to York and Cedar. Phil sees me coming and taps a co-worker on the shoulder; they watch me walking toward them, wearing hesitant smiles. "They extended our licenses

OCTOBER 17¡ 1997

until January, so we'll know by then," Phil tells me before I have a chance to ask him anything. He says the Board of Aldermen will vote on the resolution in November. We chat for a bit, but I'm stuttering, fogged over with distraction. Neither Joelle Rhodes nor John Wtlliams mentioned a November vote to me; both called the ordinance's timetable "indefinite." I suddenly realize the latest factual casualty of the vendors' gossip machine: aldermanic elections are in November, so, via the grapevine, voting for aldermen mutates into, as it were, aldermen voting. "So we don't have to worry about anything until next year," Phil concludes.

The next morning, I ask Maureen Butler, New Haven licensing officer, about the three-month extensions granted on the food vendors' permits. "Well, that was true for a couple of days," she says, "but now the mayor's office has decided that the vendors have to renew their permits. The licenses are good until March. They're working on the laws, you see." I mention that I spoke with some vendors just yesterday, and no one told me that they needed to renew their permits. "They'll find out within the next week, probably," Butler replies. I ask her how.

"Well, they'll find out through word of mouth," she .says. "We don't have their phone numbers, so there's really no other way." I glance at my clock. It's 10:30 a.m. The pushcans rolling into York '\;Od Cedar just about now might as well be the wheels of the rumor mill, clicking intogear.

18)

]mica Winter is a junior in Saybrook Colkge.

15

The Lives Behind Welfare Reform Eli Kintisch

,

It's th~ first ofth~ month. Your last nam~ starts with B, ch~ck is d~ to arriv~. Is it in th~ mailbox?

so your we/fore

Ifyour~ not worrying about this, so~IJne a let worse offthan you cer-

tainly is.

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T'S ALL ABOUT MONEY. IT's HARD PAYING TAXES AND HARD TO CON-

vince the taxpayers that the government is spending taxes on the right things or the right people. But it's never been easy being poor, making decisions based on your next meal. And it's even harder if you're disabled, or if you have children, or if you've been addicted, or incarcerated, or abused. We know vaguely that welfare is being cut, but who is being affected and how?

'Every little bit helps' "When I first carne here to Columbus House, I wanted to get on my feet, get a job, but it just didn't work out that way. I don't know what I woulda done without this place," Wtlhamena tells me.

Wtlhamena's face is wise; her hard eyes indicate she's a veteran of poverty. Through the years, she's been homeless, a single mother, and an inmate. Wtlhamena, 44, battles alcoholism and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a minor mental illness which is caused by trauma earlier in life. She sits across a table from me at the shelter, affixing safety pins to the metal backs of buttons. She earns $4 per thousand buttons, netting her $25 each week. The work may seem like exploitation, but in her position Wllhamena is glad to be doing something productive. She sighs as she attaches another pin, "Every little bit helps."

The Columbus House dining room smells like cigarettes and cafeteria food. It's grungy and public, much like a church soup kitchen.

Most of the homeless clients leave in the morning; the mentally dis-

16

abled who remain now stare at the television or talk to one another.

"I've been through several treatment programs, I've recovered and relapsed. I've been on welfare. Past year I lived on the streets of New Haven." Each day she takes two buses from her apartment in Westville to Columbus House up in the Hill neighborhood.

Mental illness often appears concurrently with long term addiction, and a life of poverty and addiction often creates mental disorders.

According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, 20 to 25 percent of the homeless have severe, persistent mental illness.

PTSD makes Wtlhamena irritable, prone to depression, and moody.

Combined with her alcoholism, she is barely employable and at times too volatile to statt a job. Three years ago, based on the condition of dual disability, Wllhamena would have easily been eligible to receive Social Security Insurance (SSI), commonly called "disability." Single individuals on SSI receive $548 per month. Since SSI reforms were passed, minor PTSD and alcoholism are not debilitating conditions which qualify for benefits.

"Disability is being defined more narrowly by the stare," says Gretchen Mrozinski, entitlements coordinator ~t the Connecticut Mental Health Center. This reform leaves a large segment of the disabled population with both little hope of a monthly check and poor job prospects. Those who petition for SSI face the ironic task of staying afloat with a few hundred dollars of standard benefits while trying to prove to the system that they cannot work. The process of proving a disability has always been long, but with more stringent rules the task is even more dillicult, requiring ten months or more of doctor's appoint. ments, legal consultation, and paperwork.

Without substantial monthly checks, Wtlhamena is pulling her life together only with the help of Columbus House case managers. Under

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Wilhamena has battledpoverty and addiction for years. their guidance, she's applying for SSI. In August they referred her to Pendleton House, a supportive living environment for recovering addicts. There she receives relapse prevention counseling. "I still have urges to drink," she admits, "but I've been clean for eight months."

"The goal is independent living on my own," she says. It's clear to Wilhamena that her chances of receiving SSI are slim. Her General Assistance welfare (GA) and federal food stamps amount to only a couple of hundred dollars per month. Her case managers have helped her arrange vocational training so she can soon begin earning a wage. Pendleton House provides both a place to live and prepares her to function without a disability check. But what about those who suffer minor mental illness but lack Wilhamena's supportive environment? The state is laying off the very case managers who would help the disabled poor navigate the process of securing benefits and finding programs. Those unrepresented will likely remain sick, addicted, impoverished, and forgotten.

Wilhamena knows she's fortunate. "I feel like Columbus House is my house," she says. "They set me up at Pendleton House. They got me the pins to make some money. I'm getting there, bit by bit.

Lona people still out there not getting help, bur they're helping some of us."

OcTOBER 17, 1997

..........................................

Seeking Shelter from the Cold The clock is ticking. With autumn waning and winter imminent, the City of New Haven has only a few weeks left to live up to its promise of finding a replacement site for the Crown Street Overflow Shelter which provided 75 beds for · single homeless men.

For years, the city leased a building on 353 Crown Street from November through March to serve as an overflow space for the Immanuel Baptist Shelter, which has consistently turned away homeless men during the winter months. This spring, the building on Crown Street was put up for sale by its owner who could no longer afford to lease it to the city for just a fraction of the year. The city declined offers to buy the building, and it was purchased by Yale to expand its art and architecmre space. Yale made the city aware of the purchase well before the deal was closed and the city in response made a promise to find a replacement for the Crown Street Shelter.

The city, however, has not yet fulfilled that pledge. "We need closure this month," says Alma Ayala, the human resources administrator for New Haven. "We have two sites that look promising and we have the vendor who would operate the program. There is also a fallback that we're working on."

But vague answers like this concern We The People, a·New Haven activist group made up of homeless and formerly homeless individuals. "They're wasting their time," says Andrew Levels, a representative of the group. He also comments on the city's request late last summer for We The People's assistance in searching for a site. "We're not paid to look.

It's the city's responsibility," Levels says.

The request is perhaps indicative of the problematic task that Ayala and other city officials face. "It is difficult to lease because the sites we are considering are temporary," Ayala says.

Dismayed by the city's lack of a solution, students in the Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project (YHHAP) mobilized student supporters and made the need for a shelter space an issue in the city. YHHAP members Deborah Dinner (CC '98), Nicky Tuchinda (MC '99), Rebecca Charnas (MC '98), and Karen McFadden (BR '98) sent a letter to Mayor John DeStefano in which they declared it "imperative that the city fulfill its responsibilities by acting immediately to ensure that a permanent overflow shelter is running by November 1."

The letter was signed by city activist groups and local organizations as well as businesses on Church and Chapel Streets and various student organizations.

These organizations know that the city has already exhibited commitment to its homeless. The city's "no-freeze" policy states that once temperatures drop below freezing, shelters cannot turn away homeless individuals. There is hope this season that the city will prove consistent in its commirmem. ~ut with an ever-increasing number of homeless men wandering the streets and only 113 shelter beds available, time is running out.

-julia Rusinek

17

'Some time my mind is crazy' Like Wilhamena, Ramon Jaime knows that it takes much more than a monthly check to beat the streets. The directions to his apartment lead me to West Haven, four exits south of the ghetto. The housing complex isn't fancy, but these aren't the projects.

We sit in the kitchen. A teenager is flipping channels on the television. The apartment is nicely furnished and clean. Ramon speaks enthusiastically with a marked Spanish accent.

Ramon shows me photos of his foster family. He's thinking about his former wife and child in New York. "I did construction in the city," he explains. "I supported my family in Manhattan. Some time my mind is crazy, I miss them."

Trouble with alcohol and drugs broke up his marriage, leaving him broke and on the street. He was homeless in New York for four months until he attempted suicide. The City of New York, which sponsors GA, gave him a monthly check to stay alive while on the street.

GA is the classic entitlement; government stipends for single poor people date back to colonial days. Over the last decade, the states have passed stricter laws regarding GA; over half the legislatures have eliminated their assistance programs altogether. In Connecticut, GA has gone from city to state control.

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enroUed in treatment programs, like Ramon, or disabled clients can receive up to $200 per month for a lifetime total of 16 months.

Before recent cutbacks, individuals could receive nine months of GA every year. Connecticut lawmakers hope that the changes in GA will work for most clients as they have for Ramon: a short-term safety net for individuals fighting addiction or a temporarily disabling condition.

It's a rebuilding process for Ramon. W ithout monthly welfare checks, he has depended more on individuals and non-profit programs than the entitlement system. Francisco Perez and his wife Ester Rizek have allowed him to live with them in their apartment. As part of the agreement, they will save his money for him until he has enough to be independent.

Ramon now keeps two jobs, driving a bread truck early in the morning and delivering tuxedos in the afternoon. He's working his way back to self-sufficiency, one 56-hour work week at a time. Both employers pay under $10 an hour. Current market value of a one-bedroom . apartment is about $640 a month. Since about half of his monthly salary will go for rent, it will be a long time before he'll be secure on his own.

He is a success story, no doubt, but one which demonstrates the need for outside su~ port. The Salvation Army helped him rehabilitate himself. A state funded job training program prepared him for work and through a local church, Ramon met Francisco and Ester

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Helen, with her son Kajuan, may rose her family's welfare benefits this month. who offered to take him in. "She's the only one who would have helped me," Ramon says of Ester. "I thank her everyday.

'Gotta help yourself" David has lived without welfare at Immanuel Baptist Shelter on Grand Avenue for several months, floating from temp job to temp job.

"If you need help, gotta help yourself.

Ain't nobody gonna take care of me but me."

David is black, tall, wears a pony tail and a graying goatee. He looks pretry together for a client at the shelter.

A supervisor announces the 7 p.m. smoke break at the shelter; men roll from their cots, scrounging for cigarettes. Some of the clients are dean and well-shaven. Others stagger out smelling like garbage. "I'm just keeping it real with you- the system stinks," David fumes through his cigarette. But, he sees welfare cuts as inevitable, almost warranted. "People took advantage of the system and the system is just paying itself back."

"I've been in and out of jail." H e got out of prison last January and has been clean for a year and a half David is regaining his independence the hard way. Like most poor, unemployed individuals, he relies on temporary manual labor.

He sleeps in the shelter, saves his wages in a bank account, and ofren eats at soup kitchens.

Food stamps save him money, and although as a recent inmate he's eligible for GA, he has chosen not to use his months of eligibility

OCTOBER 17, 1997

while he has steady work. He knows that GA alone can't get someone off the streets. "Twenty-five bucks a week, man? That's nothing."

With 12 years experience as a trucker, David has a marketable skill, but he can't drive commercially until he works out a dispute with the state over his license. He's content to slowly regain his independence with whatever work he can find. "I work my ass off for five bucks an hour," he says.

He looks around the shelter in disgust. It's a filthy place, a ragtag boot camp of destitution and boredom. "I'm working, hoping to get myself up outta here," he tells me. "Welfare was designed to help you get a job. We got people who wanna work, though there are many who would fuck the system at any chance they get. But there are negative and positive views. A lot of families gonna get hit, a Iotta people gonna need a Iotta help."

'I'm gonna pray' Helen and her children could use some of that help. "They giving me 'til December.

Then I gonna be off." If Helen cannot find a job or convince the state that she has looked for one, her family benefits, which she desperately relies on, will be cut immediately.

Helen's family lives in the second story of a shabby brown house in the Dixwell neighborhood. After 50 years of white-Bight and povetty, this working-class street has aged, peeled, and overgrown into a quiet but poor srreet. Three-story houses with porches and terraces line the sidewalk. Most lawns are lit-

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24 Water Street, Palmer, MA 01069 1-800.82INKIT • 1-800.824-6548 The New Journal thanks: Dustin Brown Josephine Coakley Jason D'Cruz Jesse Dillon Dan Kellum Monica Kim Eli Kintisch Julia Lee Jon Mallow Navin Manglani

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Lee Wang Jessica Winter Andrew Youn

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tered with trash.

Inside, the house smells faintly of decayed wood. Kajuan (pronounced "Ka-won"), a chubby, wise-cracking eight-year-old, runs to meet me on the creaky steps. The living room, lined with a faded carpet, is tidy but the furniture is old. Helen lives here with her children, Kajuan and Malika, and Grafton, her 33-year-old brother who suffers from epilepsy and diabetes.

Helen has received welfare since she was pregnant with Malika in 1982. Like over 80 ..Percent of the households receiving Temporary Family Assistance (TFA), there is no father in the house. At the time Malika was born, welfare for families was called Aid to Families with Dependent Children. With the federal changes in 1996, families now face a limit of 21 months on TFA. In order to be granted an extension after the limit, one must be employed or demonstrate an effort to find a job. Mothers must attend job search programs and keep a log of applications and interviews. Termination of benefits await families who do not follow the stringent jobsearch regimen. The system requires single parents to simply find a job and to accept any position they land. "I have to do what I have ro do to make someone independent," a Department of Social Services (DSS) worker tells me. "If that's a minimum wage job at Burger King, well, it's better than nothing.

And when they work they'll still receive benefits. " As an incentive to work, any income up to 125 percent of the poverty level can be earned without getting cut off ofTFA. With her poor education, spotty work history, and handwritten resume, it's likely that the only work Helen can get is a minimum wage position. Unemployed, H elen is totally dependent on entitlements. DSS sends her $407 per month. She receives $180 in food stamps from the federal government.

She's fortunate to receive substantial rental assistance because most poor families must wait years before receiving housing grants.

But the approaching deadline threatens to put the family out on the street.

Along with family photos and decorated magnets, two letters are attached to the refrigerator. One is a reprimand from Kajuan's principal, the other is a threatening note from DSS. At yesterday's meeting with her DSS case worker, she received the ultimatum she'd

THE NEW jOURNAL

expected for months but not planned for: either demonstrate a commitment to finding a job or not receive an extension.

"I knew about the limit, I just didn't expect it so soon. I know I'm gonna find something, and I'm gonna pray. I applied for the six-month extension, but they told me I had to find a job," Helen cries angrily. "I tried to find a job, it's not my fault if I can't get a job." She's not sure what she's done wrong.

Approximately 2,000 families in Connecticut will reach their 21-month limit this month. DSS estimates that nearly 700 will have their benefits terminated. Food pantries which deliver groceries to families have already felt an increased need as women scramble to find jobs.

Helen's job search has not gone well. "I worked temp at Pez candy for a whole month, but then they cut me off," she frowns. These days, she works for a cleaning company, though they only calJ sporadically. She's filled out countless applications; even fast food restaurants down the block have not calJed her.

Helen lives day-to-day, but there's food around the house. While we're talking, Kajuan sneaks into the kitchen. We hear him pour a bowl of cereal. "!'low Kajuan, I told you not to fix no snacks before dinner time!"

Helen shouts, shaking her head and rums to me. "And I know he won't finish his dinner."

Helen's proud of her children. "You doin' hairsrylin', plumbin', and computers, right Malika?" She beams at her attractive daughter who attends a vocational high school.

Malika is soft-spoken, but aware of the problems surrounding her. "The president should do something about it. T here ain't enough jobs and it's just gonna get worse. I would try and be president, if I could, even though I'm a woman." Helen has a bank account for her daughter's future, but that money too will be spent if need be.

Her brother, Grafton, is unemployed and cannot find work due to severe epilepsy. The fumily will depend on his disability checks if their benefits are terminated. But for now, I'm eating Kentucky Fried Chicken with Helen and her family. We're laughing, and the Jackson Five is blaring in the background. The happiness is eerie. I wonder where this family will go if their next check doesn't come.

Ia) Eli J(jntisch is a junior in Ezra Stills Colkgt.

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21

On the Cutting Edge Vanessa Agard-Jones and lainie Rutkow

L

ET'S SAY YOU'RE PlANNING A NIGHT OUT ON THE TOWN, THE

social event of the season, and you have nothing to wear.

You don't have much time, so you head to Chapel Street, bypass the Gap and enter Ann Taylor, searching for something sexy yet sophisticated. Toting your new silk charmeuse blouse out of the store, you continue down Chapel. That's when it strikes you-the perfect complement to this evening's ensemble is just three doors away. It's something daring, spontaneous, eve'n sensual: a nipple piercing.

Even if you don't opt for that item (perhaps out of concern for time, or more likely out of pure fright), it's impossible to miss The Edge Beauty and Tattoo Company's hulking, faux-Gothic storefront opposite the New Haven Green.

The word "TATTOO" in neon lights casts a blue shadow on those who peer into the shop's tinted front windows.

Passersby are arrested by The Edge's striking appearance and are drawn to press their noses to the glass. Employees and their friends loiter near the store's entrance, smoking cigarenes and eating food from nearby China King. They watch in amusement as the sign on the door deters potenrial customers. Ir reads: PLFASE: NO SMALL CHILDREN NO FOOD NO BEVERAGES NO ALCOHOL OR DRUGS NO ONE WILL BE TATTOOED UNLESS

Cl>

18 YEARS OLD

Those who do decide to enter The Edge's cavernous expanse are

t:,

'g> assaulted by industrial music piped through the mouths of

~ strategically placed gargoyles. Pornographic cartoons play on a ,; television screen mounted against an imitation-stone waH, high 1; above the buzzing needles of the tattoo artists. Glass cases exhibit ~ silver jewelry of widely varying shapes: barbells, hoops, plugs-the &_ tools of the trade. The potencial client, if overwhelmed by sample

22

tattoo designs covering the walls, can sit on an overstuffed black leather couch and peruse the latest canoo magazines. If this frightened lamb hasn't yet mustered the courage to undergo the procedure, she can escape with a few sticks of incense or a store T-shirt.

Bill Steward, manager of The Edge, stands behind the front counter surveying the clientele. The only hair visible above his shoulders are his goatee and eyebrows. A silver hoop dangles from each of his ears. A large, Native American-inspired band is tattooed around his ¡left calf, and he bends down to proudly show off the mushroom that he recently tattooed on his ankle. In contrast to this hardened exterior, Bill laughs freely and often brings his employees cookies when he returns from lunch breaks.

Four months ago, Bill's easy smile dimmed when he found an article entitled "Getting Under New Haven's Skin: Tattoo Parlor Has Critics Fuming" splashed across the front page of the New Haven Register. H aving never been approached by a reporter, Bill wondered just why the critics were fuming.

"We really didn't hear anything about this until after the doors opened, and then not even from the city. What we knew we got from reading the paper like everyone else," Bill says. He pulls a file from behind the counter, and reveals an inch-high stack of newspaper clippings. As he leafs through the pile, he periodically stops and says, "Nothing. We heard nothing from these people." Ludicrous as it may seem, the controversy over the store's location developed without The Edge's knowledge or direct participation.

Following the shop's opening on July 1, its name surfaced in several local newspapers and on local talk radio. The Chamber of Commerce issued a press release on July 7 stating, "We would no more advocate location of a tire-changing facility and car wash, or an indoor flea market, on the corner of Church and Chapel than we would this type of business ... there are plenty of places for tattoo shops to locate outside of the core downtown district." A car wash? A

THE NEw JouRNAL

flea market? The Edge is not "this type of business;" it is something altogether different.

The Edge is "cool." It's "in." It's "hot." Everything about the place, from its mobile advertisement, courtesy of a souped-up second-hand Hummer, to¡ its selling of Punky Color hair dye and patchouli incense, screams "twentysomething," "shocking" and "rebellious." It may seem strange that Yale no longer has a video store, a department store, or a mainstream movie theater near campus, but The Edge brings to New Haven an alternative element that has become typical of university life.

A recent article in The New York Times Magazine detailing contemporary collegiate culture featured a photograph of a student being tattooed. At least three of the seven other Ivy League schools are in close proximity to tattoo parlors. Body piercing has been featured in everything from Seventeen magazine to 20/20. And the way the trend is heading, the more outrageous the piercing the better. You may not know it, but that cute guy sitting next to you in orgo could be sporting more. metal than just his belt buckle.

Like most things classified as cool, this phenomenon is all about image. The Edge draws its clientele as if by subliminal attraction. Irs mystique contributes to its appeal as much as its employees' appearances do. Sandi Mansfield, a full-time piercer, can be found lounging on one of the black couches at The Edge. Her fuchsia hair starkly contrastS with her pale complexion. The jewelry from more than ten piercings above her neck occasionally catches the light and makes her face sparkle. She says, "I think it's more upscale to fit with the look of New Haven. It's like a new breed of tattoo shop. There's been a lot of money put in here." This upscale nature is what draws Yalies into the shop. At Denton's Jewelers ir. the Chapel Square Mall, piercings are $5 across the board {they do ears, noses, and sometimes eyebrows). Though piercings at The Edge begin at $25, students opt

OCTOBER 17, 1997

for their services-partly because of the image and partly because of ~

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With its bourgeois-youth-gone-wild mystique, The Edge also ~ brings the newest, and arguably the safest, piercing techniques.~ While piercings at the Chapel Square Mall are done using a piercing ~ gun, The Edge uses a hollow piercing needle. As Bill explains, they ~ "core out" a hole for the jewelry, rather than "splattering and';; stretching" the skin with a gun. This method reflects the importance l of sanitation at The Edge. With white linoleum and mirrored walls, ~ the shop's back room resembles a hospital more than a tattoo parlor. ~ Inside, sterilization machines loaded with tattoo needles and body 3 jewelry hum in constant combat with germs and bacteria. !!!.

Visions of a seedy one-room tattooing dive may have danced through city officials' heads this summer, but soon after The Edge opened its doors, the city quietly accepted its existence. As Sandi says, "New Haven didn't realize what this was going to be." While downtown New Haven is being revitalized with the Omni Hotel and

23

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other enterprises, the arrival of businesses like The Edge and the nearby Temptations strip dub worries urban developers. There are no guarantees that places such as these will be attractive to the city's desired patrons. But do city officials really know who these patrons are?

Yalies are flocking to The Edge. At any given time, three or four students roam around the shop, pricing both jewelry and procedures. They comprise roughly 25 percent of the shop's business, but Sandi says, "I think once everyone gets settled in, 'we'll get more students." One afternoon a Yale student has Korean characters tattooed on her shoulder; on another, a New Haven man has a Samurai warrior tattooed across his entire bicep; later that day, a New Haven teen comes in to have her tongue pierced.

Bill boasts that numerous policemen and firemen have been tattooed in the shop as well, including a fire chief. "We've gotten nothing but positive responses fro~ people.

The communiry's been really supportive," Sandi affirms.

After four months, all the hype about having The Edge on the greater Yale camp4s seems to have been generated out of pure sensationalism. Students and New Haven residents alike have not hesitated to patronize the shop. In fact, The Edge is one of the few stores on Chapel Street that always has customers inside, if not there to buy, then at least to look. It is one of the nicer establishments on the strip, unquestionably cleaner than China King's kitchens, and better kept than the Casablanca Boutique. "The conception of tattoo artists as low-class is historical, but it's changing now," Sandi says. "Back then, work was done in jail or little shops without sterilization. Now it's more acceptable and a lot of people are coming back to it." The Edge's management and patrons aren't looking to tarnish the city's changing image.

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~nessa Agard-fones, a sophomore in Calhoun College, is a research di"ctor ofTNJ. Lainie Rutkow, a junior in. Morse College, is production manager of TN].

THE NEW JouRNAL

Women'

ports Are Here to Stay But at What Cost?

Genny Taft

O

NE OF THE THINGS THAT STICKS Otrr IN MY MEMORIES OF

preseason freshman year is the glimmer of my coach's gold ring from winning soccer nationals in college. The rest of preseason was ten days of aerobic exercise punctuated by anaerobic exercises, some suicide drills, and a few sprints. Four times a day the women's varsity soccer team gathered to workout-a run at 6 a.m., then onto morning and afternoon practices, and recreational sports at night, which were barely recreational. At afternoon practices we lined up on the goal-line for suicides and our legs pleaded for mercy.

Throughout the year there was chatter about the team winning the Ivy League championship ring. It didn't materialize that year, or last year, but the fingers of this year's women are clawing for it. The pleasure of playing the game was never a dull incentive compared to a shiny ring, but it did move the game in a more professional direction. There were scouting reports, warnings about dangerous players, and meetings in the Srnilow Field house conference room. The more business-like competition also meant that for those stranded on the bench it wasn't all adrenaline and enthusiasm. Some cried for not playing, some cried for not playing well enough, and some cried for playing and getting injured. Though this intensity made winning all the more sweet, it made losing all the more harsh.

After the federal government passed Tide IX in 1972, requiring all colleges to fund women's sports, there was often a shortage of women athletes and a lack of enthusiasm in athletic departments. To drum up suppoi the government printed propaganda pieces like the one tided, "Try it, you'll like it!" Far from the days when the government pleaded for women's athletics, women's soccer is now a well-established part of Yale.

The program boasts a growing fan base, an increasing interest among OcrosER 17,1997

prospective srudents (ten new recruits this year), a locker room, laundry pins, and an extensive wardrobe sponsored by Fila. No one's going to push these ladies off the field.

As women's sports have become established at the collegiate level, women have been moving into more professional sports arenas. Through institutionalization, commercialization, and unprecedented hype, women's sports have emerged as a growing industry. Twenty-five years after Tide IX initiated the catch-up game, what are the effects of becoming better established? Does the development of professional sports mean that in future years I'll find the hand of soccer captain Jill Rubenstein plastered across my Wheaties?

Yale women's basketball coach Cecilia DeMarco says that the ex:pansion in the basketball program has provided opportunities for students who wouldn't have otherwise thought¡ of Yale. "A number of prospective students gained their first exposure to Yale through a phone call by a coach who made them aware of the possibilities open to them." On the negative side, DeMarco notes that the college athletic system that banks on a successful win is dangerous. "It allows young players to be taken advantage of, manipulated, and, at a young age, get entangled in a large business," she says. DeMarco also cited the trend of not graduating, or less dramatically, ofgetting credit just to play and not to learn. "Injury is a reality check," DeMarco says. "One injury and that's it. This. new career could evaporate, not even leaving a diploma with whlch to build another career." These concerns are slight enough to slip through the cracks of Yale's flagstone paths, but for schools that chum out athletes, they are serious issues.

Men's sports, a multi-billion dollar industry that serves as the model for nascent women's leagues, has long been prone to corruption. Ma,rcus 25

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Camby graduated two years ago from rhe University of Massachusetts and landed wirh rhe Toronro Raptors as the number cwo NBA draft pick. Camby now admits that as an undergraduate agents hoping to land his talent gave him thousands of dollars in rhe form of cash, rental cars, jewelry, stereos, and prostitutes. One agent, Wesley Spears, is accused of procuring a prostiruce for Camby and allowing him co have sex with her in his house. Camby isn't too worried abour rhe exposure of his exploits ruining his career. "People have a right to hold what I did against me. But I think all it will take is for me to make the All-Scar team a few times in a row to make people forger about the mistakes I made in the past," he has said. After both playing the agents and being a victim of their games, Camby, now 23, signed with the large sporcs agem company Proserv for a three-year $8 million contraCt. I saw the women's national SOCCer team, which oompctes professionally, play last year; the majority of the women on the roster were fresh from the University of Nonh Carolina and weren't over 20 years old. These women, rather teenagers, are forced to make critical

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career decisions when others are still thinking about their get-up for the Saturday night Safety Dance. When I see little girls in ice skates on 1Y, I wonder if after the oompetitions they go searching for their innocence in the crevices of their nylons, the way I was always curious about what was in my sock when it crumpled at my toes. The development of women's sports, on college and professional levels, has opened doors co many, to be sure. But as men's sports have shown, the existing precedent is prone to manipulation, greed, and a grinch-like grasp on innocence. nce upon a mid-day dreary, we came to play some ultimate... " I thought they were 12 angry Wesleyan women running at us to vindicate their loss. They lined up in front of us and-sang.

"Yale, why you want to give us a run-around?

Sure-fire way to pump us up!" I hadn't heard a cheer after a game since the perfunctory "twofour-six-eight who do we appreciate?" in middle school and even then it was almost too compromising for my competitive mind-set.

Two years after I walked on the soccer field, '' o

I walked off and onto the ultimate frisbee field across the street. I never would have guessed that the view of sports could be so different from the other side of the fence. There is nothing in this club sport~cept perhaps striving to be exceptionally weird-chat inhibits players from playing to play the game. We piled in cars to get to a sectional tournament which seemed to me just a meadow with four cones to delineate a field. After a game we would sit down to think of a cheer. Trying co come up with rhythmic compliments about the other team, no matter if you have won or lost, puts the game in perspective. By cheering you show respect to not only the other team, but also to the spirit of the game.

"Spirit of the Game"-the unwritten rule book for ultimate-isn't a goddess demanding sacrifices but a theme which replaces game regulations and refe~. In ultimate, there are only self-<:alled fOuls, which horrified me at first since I have always enjoyed taunting the referee and his or her mother. But the spirit of the game is to play the game, not to create obstacles in the pursuit ofa win.

I substituted into one game, the girl I was marking smiled and

Whm

THE NEw JouRNAL

asked me how I was. AHHH! Horror number two: no trash talking. Spirit of the game also means that everyone seems _so know everyone at tournaments and this caniaraderie reflects an attitude of a common goal-advancing and enjo~ the spon-not just a team goal of winning. Sitting in our circle after the game, the atmosphere, besides the lingering foot odor, was positive. If it wasn't, people wouldn't play, because ultimate doesn't come with any other benefits. There are no laundry pins, no Gatorade, no Fila uniforms. Ultimate is not a means to anything else.

The missing perks do not go unnoticed.

Ultimate players eagerly seek out the services of Yale spons therapist Dr. Barry Goldberg during the two hours each week he treats club-spon athletes. But I asked co-captain Ann Lightbody what she would say if ultimate could become a varsity spon. Despite the shiny benefits, she told me, "No." The fact that the ultimate team would turn down the offer of their very own practice field, uniforms, coaches, and travel expenses shows that, to them, something greater would be lost than gained in the exchange. Not to mention that dashing plaids and argyles would probably be outlawed.

I stopped playing soceer when my veteran posicion, left bench, was getting crowded and the time commitment infringed on my other extracurricular activities. But from the sidelines I still celebrate the equality, opponunicies, and higher quality of competition that the progress of women's sportS has created. As assistant soccer coach Fritz Rodriguez says, "This is an overall positive phenomenon. This is where women should have been years ago." But as I celebrate, I question what the government meant by the "it" in "Try it, you'll like it!" Is "it" cooperation between universities and women, or is "it" simply the men's sportS industry model? I'm afraid that in the hype of the women's spons indUStry, women will, at all levels, give up their supportive cheering and follow in the footsteps of the men's $150 shoe market. Women have tried "it," are good at "it," and institutions like "it." Now that the industry is established and prosperous enough to ignore that prodding motto, perhaps it should simply be, "Try it as you like it." 18)

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27

Life on Saturn Jazz's first and last extraterrestrial band leader

by Alec Han ley Bemis Space Is the Place: The Uvea and nmes of Sun Ra, by John F. Szwed (Pantheon, 1997), pp. 476.

''I

DON'T SEE HOW THE GOVERNMENT

or anyone else could expect me to agree to being judged by the standards of a normal person," Herman Poole Blount wrote to the National Service Board for Religious Objectors in 1942 pleading for an exemption from the World War II draft.

Blount, an introverted and hernia-ridden young piano prodigy, had his appeal rejected.

For four months he bided his time in a jail cell and, finally, at a service camp where conscientious objectors did forest work in lieu of military service. During this period he wrote another letter, concluding with a chillingly bleak postscript, "It would probably be more merciful to be killed than to be as I am." He returned home to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1943 a changed man, one ready for a new life, a life to which earthly standards would never apply.

In 1952, after 38 years spent working under terrestrial constraints, Blount renamed himselfLe Sony'r Ra-Sun Ra to friends, associates, and the world at large. When be began to claim Saturn rather than Birmingham as his birthplace, it was assured that no one would again characterize him as normal. Sun Ra developed into the most unconventional member of the jazz avant-garde, a local eccentric wherever he went, a scholar of mystical etymology, Egyptology, and secret Biblical equations whose derivations only he could trace. As a jazz composer, his songs supplemented standard jazz instrumentation with a bevy of handmade and foreign instruments with names like the flying saucer, the lightning drum, the boombam, the rnistro clarinet, and the cosmic tone organ, shaping a musical corpus whose creativity and uniqueness rivals that of any musician.

Performances by his band, the Arkestra, might find between five and 80 musicians clothed in

flowing multi-colored robes and headdressesSun Ra decorated his with a scale model of the cosmos-blowing and beating their instruments in a fury while dancers, vocalists, and free-form gesticulators moved, grooved, and chanted amidst a host of colored lights. By the time he left this earthly plane in 1993, Sun Ra had gained countless acolytes and fans and recorded over 120 albums filled With the most out sounds ever to vibrate the ear drums of this planet's simpler, humanoid populace.

While Sun Ra's life was filled wirh the kind of unique incidents readers love to read about, the mysterious existence he led offers a daunting challenge to the biographer. In his recently published Sun Ra biography, SptU-e is the Place, John Szwed (Hon. MA '82), Yale professor of anthropology, Afro-American studies, and American studies, welcomes the challenge that Sun Ra's life provides. Szwed, known to undergraduates for his popular jazz history course, acknowledges the difficulty of reading Sun Ra in a section of the book entitled "The Interview as Jeremiad," which positions Sun Ra's words as an extension of his playing: He talked in an unceasing monoronic flow which absorbed everything in its pa~ues­ tions, comments, objections, disrractions. He soloed wirh words, calling and responding to himself, using per licks or filling back on patented phrases when memory or creativiry tailed him, riffing, keeping the music of his words moving forward in a scream of energy which propelled him and maimained his Strength and hdped bring a hint of danger into his performances. Threaded through all of his talk was rhe literature of the world, references to daily news events or what he had jusr seen on television.

And he never strayed far from the Christian scripture which he sometimes used ironically, sometimes literally. He had the preacher's love of the extended meraphor, pushing a single figure to its breaking poinr, revising, and shifting direction in mid-senrence.

To draw meaning from these verbal gambits, these impenetrable constructs of reference and apparent non sequitur, Szwed tells us one might have to read 20 lectures or 30 interviews.

Always in search of a clear summation of philosophy, a key document to elucidate the tangle of a life, what is the scholar to make of such a man? How does the writer cope with a subject from outer space?

T

he answer, perhaps, lies in secret history, an offihoot of postmodernismthe punching bag for those who confusedly point at academia and ask, "What madness passes for knowledge in the 1990s?" Proponents ofsecret history are dedicated to reinforcing the elusive connections which bind together cultural moments by the thinnest of threads.

Perhaps Szwed's most direct predecessor in this endeavor is Greil Marcus, a writer with the intellectual and cultural breadth to go from teaching American studies at UClA Berkeley to writing for Rolling St<Jne. In his 1989 book Lipstick Traces: A Seem Hist<Jry ofthe Twmtiah Century, Marcus constructs an ornate non-linear narrative connecting the 1916 founding of Zurich Dada, the French Situationist International of the 1950s, and punk rock circa the Sex Pistols' 1976 American tour. Weaved throughout his book are unexpected references to pop culture detritus like Police Academy 2 and Michael Jackson and more intellectual domains like Gnostic Christianity and the Frankfun School. Marcus gave license to many THE NEw JouRNAL

to view history as a continuous web of hermetic geniuses, avant-garde intellectuals, and crackpot artists linked by onqmiversal unconscious. In some cases his method has led second-rate authors to use tangential connection as the basis for establishing impossible causal relationships. This tendency has bled into the mainstream as well. Between X-Files and the militia movement, alien abductions and Men In Black, there is a liberal sprinkling of the dissociative associations of which secret history is made. Thankfully, Szwed returns secret history from the realm of the paranoid conspiracy theorist, proving that sometimes such associations stem from more than imaginative leaps.

Signs that Szwed has ingested Marcus litter the book. (His occasional mentions of the Gnostics- secret history's favorite touchstone for explanations of all that is hermetic and unexplained, essentially the black helicopters of secret history's adherenrs--<:inches that conclusion.) In the figure of Sun Ra, Szwed has found the perfect candidate for this historical method.

Sun Ra not only had a deep-seated belief in the connections between the ancients and the future, he did his best to express this belief in every word and gesture.

A

t first glance, Sun Ra's pattern of thought seems scattered-he made connections between Egypt, outer space, and the plight of blacks in the United States. It would be easy to plot out the points in Sun Ra's intellectual life as a series of solitary dots on a nonsensical chart. Indeed, many have painted Sun Ra as a brilliant buffoon-a ridiculous, albeit talented footnote in the history of music. Szwed, however, connects the dots and depicts Sun Ra's crackpot ideas as a unified intellectual landscape. He does this by taking Sun Ra seriously, a method previously untried with a man known to most as the jazz. king of the cosmos.

Sun Ra's identification with Egypt is connected to black nationalism by way of obscure, early twentieth-century philosophical and quasi-academic books with names like The Children of the Sun, God Wills the Negro, and The Anacalypsis: An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil ofthe Satanic Isis or an Inquiry lnw the Origin oflanguages. Szwed points out that a 1791 essay on Sun Ra's all-time favorite reading list-Count Augustine Vo1ney's The Ruins, or Meditation on the Revolutions ofEmpires and the Law ofNaru~was also a favorite ofWilliam Blake, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and

OCTOBER

17¡ 1997

Walt Whitman. With a figure as unconventional as Sun Ra, it is easy to pass offcertain interests as mere outlandishness for its own sake. Szwed goes directly to Sun Ra's sources and reads them with the same attention and seriousness he uses to read the man. Szwed's path lets us imagine how Sun Ra might have thought, why he cherished what he did, and how he made the trip from the South to the spaceways.

By the later pages of the book, Szwed goes even farther, entering Sun Ra's mind and mimicking his mental process in prose. Take, for example, the question of Sun Ra's distaste for earthly religion and the signs and symbols of Christianity. Sun Ra left us with traces of his faith: a few harsh reactions upon seeing the crucifix, a flair for wordplay and punning, his insistence that he was never born because birth meant you must die. Szwed solves the riddle.

The cross represenrs death, the worship of the god of death as opposed to the ever-living god. A whole civilization has been created establishing the values of death as good. So the cross is something sinister, a reminder of a trick and a failure.

It reminds Christ and all the messiahs mat if you rerum, you'll get it again. "When Simon, Peter, and Andrew were fishing with ners, Jesus called to them, and told them he would make them fishers of men" (Matthew 4:19]. "Net" reversed is "ten"; X is the Roman numeral for "ren." The net is Christ, he is being used to trap humans.

"X-mas" is a mass for the dead.... The confederate Aag has an X on ir....

When Szwed first begins to spice his narrative with bits such as this, it jars, but the overall effect slips the reader's consciousness into Sun Ra's-the only way to make the beliefs of this unearthly character ring true. Szwed quite persuasively argues that Sun Ra's belief in the alchemy of the word as the key to meaning is an intellectual system with an unshakable form ofimemallogic.

T

hankfully, Szwed allows himself to go beyond the evidence his subject left on this earth, connecting him to traditions of a more recent vintage. Images of intergalactic escape--the common focus of Sun Ra's chants from the stage--are compared to slavery-era spirituals and Baptist hymns which evoke previous struggles at the base of the pyramids, a return to the Promised Land, and flight.

For Szwed, Sun Ra's pseudonym is more than a spuriously chosen stage name. First there is a quote from an address by the Nation of Islam's founder, Elijah Muhammad, who was making his way around Chicago at the

same time as Sun Ra was getting his chops in the Windy City as an itinerant jazz man: "My poor blind, deaf, and dumb people are going by the wrong names and until you accept the truth of your identity and accept the names of your people and nation we will never be respected because of this alone."

Szwed then traces the .evolution of renaming among Mrican-Americans, moving from names which connote the lack of a true identity (Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass) to a discussion of stage names meant co lend a regal air (Duke Ellington, Count Basic) to a concluding quote from The Artist Formerly Known as Prince which indicates another possible rationale for renaming: "I don't mind if people are cynical or make jokes-that's part of it- but this is what I chose to be called. You find out quickly who respects you. It took Muhammad Ali years before people stopped calling him Cassius Clay."

Szwed points out the traditions Sun Ra followed and the practices he strengthened, citing another intergalactic entertainer, George Clinton, who said, "This boy was definitely out to lunch-the same place I eat at."

Despite the impressive scope and erudition of Szwed's book, there are some areas sadly lacking in attention. After the minute details given in descriptions ofSun Ra's early years, the later half of this book comes as somewhat of a disappointment. From the 1960s onward, the decades seem to bleed together. This is understandable--after Sun Ra assumed an intergalactic form of citizenship, he became less forthcoming regarding the minutiae of his life-but it is a shame since this will likdy be the best account of the man that we ever get.

Finally, though, Sun Ra is a figure defYing rigid categorizations, closed loops, definite answers. Szwed kindly gives the reader the room to hold onto a piece of the unreality whicb Sun Ra fostered. So, when we read in another ofSun Ra's notes to the Board for Religious Objectors, "Although I do not know you, I feel more at home writing to you than I would anyone nearer to me in vicinity," we can believe that he was writing not just to a group of men and women who were deciding his fate on earth, bur to beings who danced among the stars--a hello note in advance of his final, posthumous homecoming. laJ Alec Hanley Bemis, a senior in Berkeley College, is a managing editor ofTNJ.

So, You Want to Be an Academic Superstar?

Watch a master and learn .

by Gabriel Snyder

A

SPIRING ACADEMICS! HEADS UP! AS ANY GESO MEMBER

knows, you can't get a job .in academia unless you're a star. But if you want to be one of the truly great-a lecturer who can draw 500 students to a class, a scholar known beyond the ivory tower-you're going to have to work hard and start soon.

Jonathan Spence (SY '61, GRD '65) is just such an Academic Superstar. A world-renowned scholar of Chinese history, he allegedly penned the bulk of the 876-page-long The Search for Modern China with nothing but a notepad while sitting in a booth at Naples. And, with his Sean Connery looks, he has long been a campus sex symbol. Now, Spence is in the middle of an international tiff that has managed to make the front page of The New Yt>rk Times and newspaper entertainment columns across the country.

Lowly Oxford knowledge worker David Selbourne was set this fall to publish a book, The City of Light, which describes the voyage to China in 1271 of Jacob d'Ancona, a Jewish-Italian merchant. If true, Jacob would unseat Marco Polo's title as the first European to tell the West about the rich culture of Asia. Astounded, the Times gushed in a front page arricle that Selbourne's book "is an immensely important find."

Not so fast, our dear Spence said. Word had leaked out that in a soon-to-be-published review of The City of Light (incidentally for The New York Times Book Review), Spence would call the manuscript a hoax.

Eight days after the book was heralded as a triumph, publisher Little Brown announced that the release of Selbourne's book has been postponed indefinitely. A Little Brown publicist was quoted, "We heard through reporters last week that Spence felt it was a fake and would be saying so in the Times." For his part, Selbourne whined, "Uncreative _ academics are always distressed when a fellow academic writes some~ thing which attractS attention and becomes popular or sells." But to no ~ avail; a Titan had spoken. ~ If you wish some day to wield enough intellectual might to topple a ~ ground-breaking book in one fell swoop, pay attention. t: We find Spence in a bright and airy office in the House That Gaddis ~ Built, otherwise known as Luce Hall, waiting to counsel undergraduates ~ during office hours. Spence is properly attired in a striped button-up ~ shirt and dull green sweater vest. Preferred accessories include his tor~ toise shell reading glasses (though he's nor wearing them at the moment) ~and a salt-and-pepper beard. ~ Academic Superstar ruk number one: To be an Academic Superstar, you

must look like an Academic Supmtar.

After a reporter intrOduces himself and asks if he can schedule an interview with him, Spence is quite gracious as he offers a seat at his table and says, "Oh no, let's do it right here."

The reporter, embarrassingly unprepared, sits down to begin.

Spence claims to have no idea why the media has paid so much attention to his gripe with Selboume. "I think this is very much a non-story," he says. Spence even aims a dart at his own editors at The New York Times for putting the article lauding Selbourne's "discovery" on the front page in the first place. "Entire revolutions get less space. I cannot understand the thought process behind it." However, Spence is no stranger to the media; he frequently contributes to the New Yt>rker, The New Republic, and The New 10rk Times Book &view. And over the pastweek, Spence has received numerous calls from magazines, newspaper~, and radio stations. During the interview he pulls out a yellow notepad with several sheets almost entirely coated with pencilings of names and telephone numbers. "If anything, it shows the media loves a good mystery," Spence concludes.

Academic Supmtar rule number two: Hold the press in disrtgard, but be nice to them all the same. Above all, get hooked up with a good media outfit.

Though even the publisher says that it was Spence's opinion which led Little Brown to shelve The City ofLight, Spence does not think Little Brown should have canceled the book on his account. He says, "It seems to me it would be silly to do so. Book reviewing is an egalitarian process.

They should have cast the net much wider." Yet, he does not feel Setbourne's book merits publishing. "I wouldn't censor Selbourne, but I don't think scholars could get much from his book." Rather than Spence: Destroyer of Books, he sees himself playing a much smaller role in the incident. "Here I am," he claims, "simple homespun Yalie, saying I don't know about this. If anything, I would say it's the majesty of Mother Yale. I'm just one of the workers in the vineyard."

Academic Superstar ruk number three: Act aloof No matter what the situation, never admit thatyou are, indeed, an Academic Superstar. HOUJa)er, making grand, authoritative statnnents is requisite.

Coroliary tQ Academic Superstar rule number three: &main unyieldingly loyal tQ the univmity that grantedyou tenure in thefirrt place.

When a student shows up to talk with her professor, the reporter excuses himself On his way out, Spence, in his dignified and learned British accent, says, "It was a pleasure meeting you."

Academic Superstar rule number four: Master a foreign accent.

Gabriel Snyder, o senior in Berkeley College, is editor-in-chie f ofTNJ.

OcrosER 17,1997

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