This WEEKEND by Yale Daily News

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2012

THE EX-PRISONER’S DILEMMA

ON VOTING RIGHTS FOR FORMER OFFENDERS BY MONICA DISARE AND YANAN WANG, PAGE 3

STATEMENTS

EULOGIES

B6-7

INFLITRATION

LOCAL ARTISTS QUESTION CULTURE

GOODBYE TO SAFETY DANCE

BREAKING INTO THE ZOO

Devika Mittal evaluates New Haven art on display at the City-Wide Open Studios festival.

WEEKEND says its parting words to the Event that marked a generation of Yalies.

Ever heard of the CompSci Zoo? It’s a veritable jungle! Yuval Ben-David took a closer look.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

GRASS RIVALRY // BY CAROLINE TRACEY

KAHOE AND MADISON

The Game has never interested me — in four years, I’ve never been. But while taking this semester off, I unexpectedly found a rivalry I could get behind. When I got to California this August I stayed at first on a grass-fed cattle ranch, a small,

family-run operation 50 miles south of San Francisco. Its area’s proximity to the city and to Silicon Valley means that land is too expensive to buy for all but those who have made fortunes. What results is a present-day feudalism, in which those landowners pay a salary to a “ranch manager,” who works the land. My ranchers — who leased their land — were one of only three operations left in their county whose livelihood came through income from their stock. I learned from a newspaper article that there was another grass-fed operation nearby on a ranch owned by a hedgefund manager from San Francisco. I wondered what my ranchers thought of their grassfeeding neighbors, but didn’t hear any mention until one lethargic morning, when they were lingering over coffee until seven instead of six. “Why are we sitting around?” Jakob said. “ We ’re having a meeting,” Maria joked, squaring // KAREN TIAN off table space to mimic papers and

Dance: Dance Revolution? // BY CODY KAHOE AND CALEB MADISON

Dear Yale Community, As you all know, there has been some debate this past week over the cancellation, for the foreseeable future, of the Safety Dance held by Silliman College. The cancellation was due to the rising safety concerns regarding drunkenness and dangerous revelry around campus. Henceforth, because we truly do care about the drinking culture and student well-being here at Yale, we have decided to discontinue the provision of safe, moderated places and events at which to drink. Please take the time to review the following list of adjustments to some of our traditional students “get-togethers.” We think you will find that some of our alternative “socials” can be pretty “off the chain!” N. Ferguson Assistant Dean of UniversitySponsored Fun Instead of “Safety Dance,” Yale would like to welcome you to the new “Safety Rules and Regulations Dance!” For just $10, students can join administrators for some exciting and hilarious games aimed at familiarizing students with some of Yale’s most obscure and “wacky” rules! Can you dig it! Plus, enjoy smooth beats with our very own Police Chief and DJ, “Higg Poppa.” Instead of “Crushes and Chaperones,” get “pumped up” for the new “Chaperones and Chaperones!” We know how much Yalies love the opportunity to gain leadership experi-

F R I D AY OCTOBER 12

GREENBERG

TRACEY

WEEKEND VIEWS

ence, and this dance will do just that. At this party, everybody is a chaperone! Keep an eye on all your friends, but watch out! They might be keeping an eye on you too! Instead of traditional “cast parties” held after Yale’s dramatic productions, get ready for a series of late-night chat sessions about the plays with our very own Harold Bloom! Port will be served. Instead of Calhoun College’s traditional “Trolley Night,” put on your red, yellow and green for “Public Transportation and Infrastructure Expo Night!” Red means, “I’m interested in civil engineering.” Yellow means, “I own a metro card!” Green means, “I only ride a bike.” Instead of the annual “Highlighter Party,” get your “party face” on for the “Highlighter Party!” Bring your highlighters, ’cause we’re going to be Blue Booking the night away in the Chaplain’s Office, where you can get your very own Blue Book! Get ready for a steamy, unprotected hookup with knowledge! Instead of the annual “Foam Party,” come to “Phone Party.” Bring your phones! Contact CODY KAHOE AND CALEB MADISON at cody.kahoe@yale.edu and caleb. madison@yale.edu .

laptops. “A meeting,” Jakob scoffed. “This is what people on salary do. Sit and have meetings.” “This is what the Bobkats do,” suggested Maria. Bobkat, of course, was the other grass-fed ranch. *** A week later, Bobkat Ranch appeared in person, in the form of its towering and bulky ranch manager Zachariah, whom Jakob invited to his daughter’s fourthbirthday campout in order to liven up the party once the kids went to bed. Zachariah showed up wearing a cowboy hat and red boots and was perpetually holding a can of Tecate. When it got dark and all the adults settled around the campfire, he started to gab. “Any kind of grass I have, I can get my cows to eat it,” he said. “People say there are some plants cows don’t like — they haven’t seen my cows.” He went on and on. Finally the ranchers and I went to sleep in their converted train car, their friends returned to their tents and Zachariah lay down in a C-shape around the fire pit. Maria and I got up the next morning at 5:30 to milk the dairy cows. “Hold on,” she said as we got in the truck. She took off the door magnet and stuck it to Zachariah’s passenger door. “The only reason Jakob agreed to get these

magnets was so we could put them on Zachariah’s truck — we’re pretending that he’s leaving his job to work for us. Now he’s gonna show up at work with our sticker on his door!” When we came back, though, Zachariah’s truck was gone, and the magnet was stuck to the side of the boxcar. *** A few weeks later, Jakob and I pulled up to the town tacqueria after hauling fence posts all morning. We were tired and already on edge. As we parked, Jakob got even more agitated. He turned off the car and started rummaging through the things piled in the backseat. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” he said, finally pulling up something black and flattening it. He jumped out of his truck and into the bed of the one in front of us. He started trying to stick the bent magnet to the roof of the truck’s cab. Zachariah appeared in the doorway of the tacqueria and watched as Jakob realized he’d been caught. Jakob jumped down from the truck sulkily. We walked over to Zachariah. “Maria was over at your ranch, I hear all the cows are just jumping all over the electric fence!” “Yeah, yeah,” Zachariah said. “I’m training ‘em.” “Well, sounds like that hotwire’s working out real well for ya. Anyway, when are you gonna

EDITOR’S NOTE: All names have been changed because, in Tracey’s words, “not everyone likes being portrayed as a goofball.” Contact CAROLINE TRACEY at caroline.tracey@yale.edu .

Lessons from Salta // BY ZOE GREENBERG

One compelling reason people do Study Abroad programs is that they do not know a language well enough to live in and contribute to a city without studying its language. I did not think about how compelling this

// KAREN TIAN

reason was when I signed up to go to Salta, Argentina. I had only taken Spanish in high school, where our curriculum consisted mainly of reading poorly translated books that were originally written in English and watching Sprint ads that featured salsa dancing. But I was scornful of Study Abroad programs and had the idea that I wanted to be free from the shackles of the classroom. So when I headed off to Salta last fall, I went not to study, but to live. By my third week there, I realized I did not, perhaps, have the necessary knowledge of Spanish that I needed to be a functional person in a city I did not know. Surro u n d e d by Spanish speakers, I thought in English and translated myself, brokenly, to my host mother and siblings and my supervisor at work. One day I found myself holding a pair of socks and realized I had no words for the object in my hands. Often I would begin sentences but trail off when I reached the central verb or noun, saying things like, “We have to go to the … .” I found it fascinating to analyze the ways in which I was linguistically incapable. My host mother would ask me if I wanted to go to the school, a question embedded in a paragraph of context, and my brain would sweetly knit together her word “school” with the word “school” from another conversation. In the space between her question

YALE FAMILY WEEKEND WELCOME RECEPTION

and my answer I would craft myself, unknowingly, an illusion of understanding. My sense of what was happening at any moment was not based on the things other people said, but instead on my brain’s desperate need to understand, even if that required filling in the broken spaces in another language. I would often accidentally commit myself to hours of tedious errands or extended family reunions because I simply did not know what I was saying yes to.

BY MY THIRD WEEK THERE, I REALIZED I DID NOT, PERHAPS, HAVE THE NECESSARY KNOWLEDGE OF SPANISH THAT I NEEDED TO BE A FUNCTIONAL PERSON IN A CITY I DID NOT KNOW. Eventually, I learned a lot of Spanish. I learned from talking with my host siblings and reading Spanish newspapers and listening to Spanish radio. Every afternoon, I copied new vocabulary words onto index cards and memorized sets of related nouns. I learned from practicing and watching and writing. But, ultimately, I learned the most from swallowing my pride and signing up for Spanish language classes twice a week. When I was back in a classroom, I realized it is not always so bad to seek out a good teacher and submit to some shackles. Native speakers, for example, know their language better than you do, and it can be helpful to learn from them. I found that studying, abroad, can actually be quite fun. Contact ZOE GREENBERG at zoe.greenberg@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Yale University Art Gallery // 1 p.m.

Get your parents to come see the new renovations. Tuition money being put to use, yo!

come over for a beer?” “Why don’t you come to one of my meetings?” Zacharah said. “Meeting? That sounds boring.” “A meat-ing. That’s what I’m calling my barbeques.” “Oh, a barbeque. With your meat? I’ll bring over some of mine and show you what good meat tastes like.” “Okay. See you at the next meat-ing.” We headed back to the truck. “I can’t believe that magnet was bent!” Jakob shook his head. “I’ll get him next time.” I said to Jakob that someone ought to make a TV series out of his antics with Zachariah and the two ranches’ competitiveness. He replied that it would be silly — comparing the two operations, one big-wealth, one family-run — was apples and oranges. That was exactly why it would be so perfect, I told him: the underdog holdout versus the super-rich! The changing socio-ecological landscape! He shrugged and got back to work.

Circle of Women

Community service sorority comes to campus!

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

HOW TO END AN “INDEFINITE SENTENCE” // BY MONICA DISARE AND YANAN WANG

ike Clemente, 26, has been on probation for eight years. This election season, he is registered to vote for the first time, along with 200 other ex-offenders in New Haven, who were unaware they had this right.

walked through the lobby’s metal detector and up to the office for a routine meeting with his probation officer but was greeted instead by Melissa Lavoie ’12, who had stationed herself on one side of a folding table, armed with a box of pens and a stack of registration cards.

THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE THAT CRIMINALS LOSE THEIR STATUS AS CITIZENS FOREVER. NHPD CHIEF DEAN ESSERMAN Clemente filled out his registration form at the New Haven Probation Office, a small room situated on the second floor of a nondescript building on State Street, beside a Dunkin’ Donuts. The office consists of one twoway mirror, three brick walls and a semi-circle of plastic chairs, positioned for periods of waiting. This past Tuesday, Clemente

Lavoie had set up the stand as a representative of “Unlock the Vote,” the New Haven Re-Entry Initiative’s campaign to register former prisoners in the city. This was the program’s third drive in as many weeks. By the end of the day, Lavoie had regis-

tered 53 former convicts: white, African American and Hispanic individuals — men and women. They wore Yankee hats and Patriots jackets, chains and necklaces, leather jackets and jeans. Some had dreads, others shaved heads. Clemente said that he’d been on probation so many years that he assumed he couldn’t vote. Many of the other ex-prisoners who registered expressed similar sentiments. To city officials such as New Haven Police Department Chief Dean Esserman, registration is a vital step in prisoner reentry and reintegration in the city. Esserman said that he’s a “believer in punishment,” but also in the restoration of individuals’ rights once that punishment is over. “In the constitution, cruel and unusual punishment has been interpreted as an indefinite sentence,” said Esserman. “In my view, taking away someone’s right to vote is equal to giving them an indefinite sentence.”

STATE BY STATE

Disenfranchisement laws about prisoner’s rights vary from state to state. It was not until 2001, under legis-

lation signed by then-Governor Jo h n Rowland, that the vote was extended to former felons on probation in Connecticut. As the law stands today, the only ex-felons that are barred from voting are those who are currently serving a sentence, those who are on parole and, aptly, those who have been convicted of election fraud. As soon as someone is released from prison on probation, she may register to vote in the next election, and those who are currently in jail but awaiting trial are eligible to vote by absentee ballot. According to The Sentencing Project, an advocacy group for changes in incarceration policies, Connecticut is one of only 19 states that allows individuals on probation to vote. Only in Maine and Vermont are inmates granted the right to vote, and laws in four states — Iowa, Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia — enforce permanent disenfranchisement for all individuals who have been convicted of felonies. Reform of felony disenfranchisement laws in the United States began approximately 30 years ago, when changes in the criminal justice system caused legislators to reconsider their positions on systems of correction. Since the new millenium, all amendments to disenfranchisement laws have served to give more voting rights to ex-offenders.

“GET YOU GOING SOMEWHERE”

As a child, Nia Holston ’14 recalls going with her parents to the local voting station and helping them select the names on their ballots. Since she has come of voting age herself, Holston has voted in every single primary. “I recognize the problems in the system, but I want to work within that system,” said Holston, who is now an active volunteer for Unlock the Vote. “The two-party system is imperfect, the right to vote is imperfect — but I recognize the history of people who have fought for the right to vote.” Holston’s experience at Yale has left her both dismayed and impassioned by the state of the local voting population. On one hand, she expressed dissatisfaction with voter apathy among Yale students, some of whom seem to take their right to vote for granted. On the other, she sees ex-offenders as people who actively want to participate in the process but don’t necessarily believe they have the right to due to “consistent marginalization.” Since 2001, little has been done to inform the previously incarcerated of their voting eligibility, despite agreement among city officials and re-entry workers that civil engagement is among the most effective ways to become reintegrated into society. Through work as an intern for the New Haven ReEntry Initiative, Lavoie noticed that mainstream voter registration efforts tend to avoid the ex-

offender population, likely out of fear of political backlash, she said. Holston said that voting is a simple but vital step in encouraging former felons to become engaged in the community, but it isn’t everything. “Registering to vote isn’t necessarily going to get you a job, it’s not going to feed your family… But I think it’s a step to get you going somewhere,” she said.

INVISIBLE BARS TO VOTING

Before the Unlock the Vote campaign, few efforts had been made to engage with ex-offender registration. At the drive at the probation office this past Tuesday, many people who lined up to register were surprised to learn that they could vote at all. This misconception is one that has been propagated by the very people that former convicts are taught to trust, such as correctional officers and jail staff, according to Holston and exoffenders who registered through Unlock the Vote. Over the summer, Holston worked at a public defender group in New York City. Her role involved going to local prisons to register detainees. The atmosphere at the jail, she said, was less than conducive to their cause. When she and her colleagues arrived at the jail, the guards made a muffled announcement over the P.A. system. The detainees who ventured into the registration room were extremely timid, and they informed Holston that their correctional officers had followed their hurried announcement of the drive with the claim, “You can’t vote anyway.” Although Lavoie and Holston both contend that the development of the campaign has been relatively smooth, they admit that they have met opposition from those who are altogether against the notion of convicted felons being eligible to vote. “There are people who believe that criminals lose their status as citizens forever,” said Esserman. “They believe that one forfeits that right one commits a crime.” At her office in City Hall, Lavoie devotes one wall of her room to well-known figures who have served time in prison. Among these are Nelson Mandela, Martha Stewart and Mark Wahlberg. “I feel a little weird about having Nelson Mandela in the same place as these Hollywood personalities,” Lavoie admitted. But the wall display illustrates a simple point: Regardless of where a convict comes from or the nature of his offences, a jail sentence should not signify a permanent withdrawal from society.

RATE OF RETURN

“Although conclusive studies on the subject do not yet exist, there is some evidence that the recidivism, or ‘return-to-prison,’ rates for released prisoners who are given their civil rights back is lower than the rate for those who are not fully integrated back into society,” said Mark Abraham ’04,

executive director of DataHaven, a public statistics and information collaborative within the city. Evidence of this correlation can be seen in Florida, where a study conducted by the Florida Parole Commission found that ex-offenders were 22% more likely to return to prison if their right to vote was not restored upon their initial release. This difference can be crucial in light of Connecticut’s high recidivism rates. According to Abraham, the three year recidivism, rate for the state’s inmates was 43.7% between 2004 and 2007.

SCHOOL IN CELLS

The failure to successfully reintegrate prisoners is one of the main reasons Arvind Mohan ’14, the co-coordinator for Yale’s prison tutoring program, and about 10 other Yale students travel to Mason Youth Prison every Saturday morning to teach prisoners GED prep. Tutors not only prepare prisoners to take the GED, but they also discuss current events and help to foster non-GED related academic interests once students pass the exam. The idea is to prepare students for success so once they leave the prison, they leave for good. “This is the only time on weekends when they get to leave their cell,” Mohan said. “Our goal is to give them the tools for advancement.” Each week at tutoring, one prisoner consistently arrives before all the others, said Mohan. One day, Mohan finally asked him why he shows up so early. “I just don’t want to come back here after I’m released,” the prisoner said.

TRANSITIONS, ADVANCEMENT

Across the city, organizations are making similar efforts to smooth the transition between incarceration and release. Transitions Clinic, founded by Emily Wang and Clemens Hong, provides health care to chronically ill patients who have recently been released from prison. The clinic is staffed by several ex-offenders, whose own histories of incarceration give them a personal understanding of their patients’ struggles. Jerry Smart, a Transitions community health worker, experienced firsthand what it means to be released into society after spending a considerable time in prison. Every week, Smart goes to the New Haven police station to meet newly released prisoners who are “coming home.” Many of these individuals have not seen primary care providers since serving their sentences, and many of them do not have adequate health insurance. “So many of these guys, you know, they’ve been sold dreams. People say to them: I’ll get you a job, I’ll get you an apartment — and a lot of these programs don’t end up helping them. But we can guarantee that they’re going to see a doctor,” he said. At the Transitions Clinic, SEE ELECTION PAGE B8

// CREATIVE COMMONS

F R I D AY OCTOBER 12

ARCHITECTURE OF YALE TOUR Yale Visitor Center // 2:30 p.m.

Discover the gems of Yale’s campus on an English-only tour. Sorry, internationals.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Registering to vote

Because you can. It’s a race that matters.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND ARTS

GRAB YOUR PASSPORT,THINK A LITTLE HARDER // BY DEVIKA MITTAL

Tucked away in downtown New Haven amidst financial centers, Arabic hookah joints and organic food delis, there lies a small gallery called Artspace. Each year, through the City-Wide Open Studios initiative, that one venue expands how much work it can spotlight by helping turn the studios of hundreds of local artists into mini-galleries in their own right. CWOS has been a New Haven staple for 15 years. That makes this year, festival organizers reminded me, its “crystal” anniversary. In a fitting tribute to that milestone, CWOS is focusing on the “literal and symbolic manifestations” of crystal. Arming visitors with specially-made, crystal-themed passports to New Haven, the initiative encourages guests to find the hidden gems throughout Greater New Haven. I like mine; it caters to my vanity. “You are beautiful,” it tells me. “Explore your city.” I obey. First stop: the Main Exhibition at Artspace, aka 50 Orange Street. Wait. Orange Street? I mean … that’s across the Green. But my passport pulls me forward. As I walk in, I note that crystal walls and crystal glasses reflect the last rays of sunlight, and paintings of the summer remind me of warmer days. I’m acutely aware of how much exploration awaits. Subtle crystal motifs adorn the walls

and a range of works lies ready for my perusal. Here, the exhibit offers a little bit of everything: multimedia and performance art, paintings, prints and photographs. Pieces are clustered on the basis of the neighborhoods that are home to New Haven’s artists, with each participant showcasing only one work in the exhibit. Despite the variety, though, a clear theme arises. Margaret Mead told us to “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world.” Many of our local artists seem to have taken that message to heart. The pieces at the Main Exhibition together represent a form of collective art activism which questions modernity and consumption by focusing on issues pertinent to American lifestyles. While some installations explicitly comment on capitalism, others have messages that are open to interpretation. Earrings made out of condoms hang next to installations made up of old storage units. Gaudy pink hats stay perched on their stools and videos play in loop. Bizarre installments consisting of everyday consumer goods are placed next to photographs of New Haven and paintings range from the abstract to the detailed. The political aspect doesn’t rule out emotional pulls. Watching a video of a solitary man wandering around town, a symbolic comforter

on his shoulders but no solace in his heart, I can almost feel his yearning for conversation and his allconsuming loneliness. But, thinking back to my own rather happy Indian childhood, I find that it’s the other video, in which a rainbowhued kite fails to catch the wind and almost mocks the dark expression of the young man who just wants to see it fly, that makes me even sadder. Beyond the immediate pathos I recognize, I also begin to ask myself questions about the daily grind and the fruitfulness of modern society. These issues surrounding individuality in American culture are further scrutinized in the “Play House” segment of the exhibit. Keliy Anderson-Staley’s work, a series of tintype photographs featuring unsmiling faces staring back at the viewer, fights back against the digital snapshot age that we live in, focusing instead on the process of using wet plate collodium plates and a different interpretation of an artist’s subject. She further problematizes how we view those depicted in art by placing portraits of homeless New Haveners adjacent to shots of Americans from various walks of life. Trying to identify those who were homeless, I found myself unable to tell the difference. Anderson-Staley, meanwhile, made her point. No one knows, and nor should it matter. Each subject asserts his/her individuality and resists stereotypes. Classic in form

and modern in thought, the photographs interrogate the state of “becoming” a subject and freeing oneself of societal categorizations. All those feelings and I haven’t even reached the most dynamic, explosive part of the Main Exhibition’s display: Darwin Nix’s contribution to the “Play House.” Nix plays on the double entendre behind words by toying with the names of commercial consumption brands — names that also function as aliases for brands of drugs. Nike, Titanic, Godfather, Gatorade and the rest aren’t just cultural touchstones; they’re also lethal killers, and we really don’t treat them that differently when it comes to marketing. All in all, the exhibition lets New Haven artists ask us to take a deeper look into the issues that surround us. Before I walked all the way to the other side of the Green, I was just a skeptical, clueless Yale student who didn’t know too much about New Haven or its arts scene. Walking out, I’d like to think that I’m a lot more informed, a hell of a lot more impressed and very, very glad that I dared. “There are 130,000 people living

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

This year marks the 15th or ‘crystal’ anniversary of New Haven’s City-Wide Open Studios Festival. in New Haven. There are many great people doing many great things – running non-profits, art studios and the like,” said photographer Chris Randall. “There is undiscovered talent in every pool, and CWOS helps foster their talent is see it to some level of completion.” City-Wide Open Studios consists of a lot more than the Main Exhibition pieces. The festival had its first weekend of open artist studios this past week. The coming weekend will be in Erector Square and the next in the historical, abandoned site of a now-vacant New Haven Register Building. I know that I’ll be bursting my Yale bubble with relish, and I hope you will too, as you enter your own quest to discover the hidden gems in this city. Contact DEVIKA MITTAL at devika.mittal@yale.edu .

Adams and Bergman: Out of the Same Light // BY ISABEL ORTIZ

I’ve only been in Denver, Colo. once, and on that occasion barely “in,” having merely slipped through the semipermeable membrane of one of those strange non-spaces we call airports. After my phone’s autocorrect redirected my search for a “Denver Airport Chipotle” to what turned out to be a sprawling online community centered around the “Denver Airport Conspiracy,” I spent the remaining five hours of my layover poring over increasingly hysterical forums that illuminated me on the DIA’s sinister underside: massive underground facilities experimenting with extraterrestrial life, unexplained amounts of plane crashes caused by strange electromagnetic frequencies, celestial maps hidden in murals in the baggage claim. Though I won’t be making an account on diaconspiracyfiles.com anytime soon, I left with the sense that there was perhaps something weird about Denver, a strange fre-

F R I D AY OCTOBER 12

quency in the air. At the Yale University Art Gallery recent Robert Adams’ exhibit “The Place We Live: A Retrospective Selection of Photographs,” similar intimations of the unknown seemed to pervade his stark Colorado landscapes. Indeed, there’s an eerie stillness to Adams’ open fields and shadowy suburban driveways that seems to reach beyond the quotidian toward some sort of alternate plane. This vaguely unsettling simplicity draws the eye toward moments of breakage within his quiet compositions; the slight blur on a leaf, the off-kilter gleam of gas station kitsch, sunlight filtering through cheap hotel curtains. These rustlings within suburban wastelands and agrarian expanse work in tandem to create Adams’ otherworld, taking us out of “the place we live” toward somewhere else entirely. “Out of This Same Light,” the accompanying series of six of Adams’ favorite films, examined

his influences, translating tensions within his oeuvre from photograph to film. The line-up of “Meek’s Cutoff,” “Tokyo Story,” “A New Leaf,” “Five Easy Pieces,” “Le Rayon Vert” and “Winter Light” offered a cluster of films unified by their commitment to emotional realism and visual resonance within everyday spaces. Be it from Yasojiro Ozu’s simple cuts and low camera height expressing generational drift in “Tokyo Story” or the sweeping strangeness of landscapes in “Meek’s Cutoff,” Adams’ particular interest in these films reveals their role in the development of his visual language. However, it is perhaps Ingmar Bergman’s 1962 “Winter Light,” the final installment in the series, that holds the greatest affinity with the otherworld of Adams’ photographs. “Winter Light” grapples with questions of faith, love and loss within the confines of a hermetic church house in rural Sweden. Bergman’s

incisive camera follows the unraveling of an aging pastor, Tomas, as he questions his belief in God after his wife’s death. On the visual level, Bergman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist’s deft manipulation of natural light throughout the work creates moments of tentative optimism within the film’s unsettling quiet. For this reason, the Bergman/ Adams relationship is particularly defined by “Winter Light”’s spatial and visual climate. What ensues is a correspondence between the artists fittingly removed from chronological constraints. The transportative moments in Adams’ photography exist in “Winter Light” as puffs of breath in the cold, or as beams of light coming in through church rafters. Conversely, the film’s imprint on Adams’ photography lies in its ability to reveal questions hidden in the unflinching flatness of his Colorado plains. This creates a starkness that is almost comfort-

OKA!

Contact ISABEL ORTIZ at isabel.ortiz@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Whitney Humanities Center // 7 p.m. Writer and director Lavinia Currier will be there answering questions. Her film, set in Africa and revolving around issues of multiculturalism and the environment, is a force to be reckoned with. Go see it!

ing in its harshness, characterized by brief moments of solace within an unfriendly world. It’s a familiar feeling, that in its universality, best encompasses the ability of both artists to simultaneously unsettle and comfort their viewers, a feeling that takes me back to that strange state of mind in which I found myself as my plane pulled out of one of those Adams-esque Colorado fields that border the Denver Airport’s swastika-shaped (!) runways: a little creeped out, a little weirded out, finally edging towards sleep within a chaotic universe. But in the end, perhaps the sensation is best expressed by Adams himself — it’s an oft-quoted but nonetheless poignant adage of his, that the perfect photograph should express “a tension so exact that it is peace.”

Kale

Boil it, season it, eat it. This vegetable is “very high in beta carotene, vitamin K, vitamin C, lutein, zeaxanthin and reasonably rich in calcium.” In short, it’s darn good for you.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND DRINKS

DON’T WANNA LOSE MY BOOZE TONIGHT // BY LEAH MOTZKIN AND CLAIRE ZHANG

On the night of Saturday, Sept. 29, scores of Yalies pulled on their neon legwarmers, teased their hair and prepared to belt out some Madonna. But on the morning of Tuesday, Oct. 2, they found a News headline that read “Safety Dance cancelled.” Though a makeshift tombstone put up later that week proclaimed that students were “never gonna give [Safety] up,” administrative decisions meant that, realistically, they had to. In doing so, they joined generations of Yalies who saw their favorite parties fade away — and eventually found that they didn’t have to stop believing. Safety Dance is the latest in a line of oncerobust Yale-sponsored parties that have bitten the dust or devolved into lesser forms over the past decade. TD’s “Exotic Erotic” party reached its final climax in 2003; Pierson’s Halloween “Inferno” went up in flames that same year, though the fire was somewhat rekindled in 2008; and Morse-Stiles’ “Casino Night” went bust in 2008, though it clung on for dear life for two years as “Prohibition.” Fo r students, the loss of t h e s e parties hosted b y resi-

dential colleges is troubling because it reduces the number of social options open to all Yalies, whatever their niches on campus. “I’m sad to see [Safety] go, because I thoroughly love dances and there are very few, if any, college-wide dances in Commons that have that many people,” said Chelsea Savit ’13, who has attended the dance religiously over her past four years at Yale. “It’s the one dance that brought everyone together, that everyone on campus got together for.” *** Large school-sponsored parties have traditionally been a vital part of Yale’s social scene. Their names

ning of fall rush for Greek organizations and new mandatory registration requirements for off-campus gatherings of more than 50 people. While students said they understand why Yale seeks more control, many feel that changing administrative policies is unlikely to influence alreadyestablished binge drinking practices or reduce students’ desire to party. “I think you’re just shifting it from their end destination being Safety Dance to their end destination being somewhere else, and I think a big venue like that with a lot of security is almost better to make sure that if someone is in trouble they’re getting help,” Ballard said. “But I think binge

“THERE WERE TOGA PARTIES, JULEP PARTIES TO WATCH THE KENTUCKY DERBY, THE BEAUX ARTS BALL AT THE ART & ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL, THE ST. A’S [HALL] PUMP AND SLIPPER BALL AND THE INFAMOUS FENCE CLUB GIN FOUNTAIN PARTY.” — Safety, Crushes and Chaperones, Spring Fling, Screw — are circulated around campus by upperclassmen each year, passed down through the grapevine to freshmen in conversations that build up buzz. These more accessible, better-known events often draw substantially larger crowds than typical suite or frat parties. Without them, students from different social groups at Yale would have fewer opportunities to mingle at the same events, said Audrey Ballard ’13. Ballard, who said she associates with the Greek community on campus, added that some events not sponsored by residential colleges or University money simply are not “obviously open to all Yale students.” Rachel O’Connell ’15, who does not drink, said school-sponsored parties are a “good alternative” to Yale’s Greek scene, adding that she considers them safer than other party situations. “I found them integral to my social life personally, as someone who doesn’t like to rage all the time,” O’Connell said. O’Connell is not alone in holding this view: the campus party scene, generally replete with alcohol, is widely considered an inimitable part of life at Yale. Alumni interviewed said that they recall themed parties — and, in some cases, their cancellations — as significant events in their time here. “There were toga parties, julep parties to watch the Kentucky Derby, the Beaux Arts Ball at the Art and Architecture Schools, the St. A’s [Hall] Pump and Slipper Ball and the infamous Fence Club Gin Fountain party,” said Jesse Lovejoy ’66. “A very large number of students, probably a majority, attended them regularly.” Speaking of her own experience 20 years on from Lovejoy’s time at Yale (and a decade after Yale College first admitted female undergraduates), Debra Bakal ’85 said Yalies in the early ’80s attended events at which beer flowed freely on the University’s dime, such as college social activities committee events and Feb Club parties for seniors. But while attending a University often willing to pay for campus parties and alcohol might seems ideal for students, Yalies throughout the years have found that the administration is just as quick to put those festivities to an end at its own discretion. For instance, Lovejoy said, Yale cancelled Julep Day and the Fence Club Gin Fountain to the outrage of the student body. However, he added, such policies resulted in no significant change in campus life or the drinking habits of students. *** The cancellation of Safety last week occurred amidst various other changes to social life policies, including revised tailgating rules, the ban-

drinking is going to continue.” Students said alcohol consumption is seen as a way to feel more comfortable in social situations or to disconnect from the stresses that they said characterize life at Yale. “I have … friends who I think are just frustrated with how difficult school life is and I think it provides a really nice escape for them to just let loose and relax,” O’Connell said. Ballard said she believes Yale student culture promotes the idea that drinking is a critical part of “having fun,” and that that manifests itself in heavy pre-game drinking seen as necessary before a night out. According to a Syracuse University study titled “Peer influences on college drinking,” college campuses incubate social expectations that lead to binge levels of consumption. Such pressure, the research shows, comes in the form of overt offers of alcohol, the promotion of pro-drinking social norms and the establishment of excessive drinking practices as normal behavior imitated by others. Savit said she has been part of peer groups exerting such pressure. “I was involved in organizations my freshman year that binge drank every weekend,” she said. But students added that the appeal of such binge drinking seems tied to age and campus seniority. “I think things get less shiny and exciting after freshman year,” said Alex Haden ’14. Without the illicit allure initially attached to heavy drinking by those who are underage, some Yalies said they come to favor a less alcoholsoaked social scene. “When I turned 21, the appeal of drinking just disappeared,” Savit said. “That happened with a lot of my friends too.” This trend is not a new one on Yale’s campus, Lovejoy said. He added that the process of learning “to work and focus and find the proper balance of fun and work was an important part of maturing.” Stephen Feigenbaum ’12 MUS ’13, a former member of Yale’s Committee on Hazing and Initiations, said in an email that he shares this view on the evolution of perspectives on drinking. There is, he suggested, a clear solution to the problems within Yale’s drinking culture, one that doesn’t require administrative action. “Everyone agrees (including Yale’s administration) that the solution to this would be lowering the drinking age back to 18 so colleges don’t have to fight drinking and don’t risk liabilities associated with kids drinking underage,” Feigenbaum wrote. After all, college students — even the underage ones — just wanna have fun. Contact LEAH MOTZKIN and CLAIRE ZHANG at leah.motzkin@yale.edu and claire. zhang@yale.edu .

// SARAH ECKINGER

F R I D AY OCTOBER 12

WHIFFENPOOFS AND WHIM ‘N RHYTHM PARENTS WEEKEND CONCERT Battell Chapel // 8 p.m.

A cappella! A cappella! Your parents will never, ever get enough of it. Like, ever.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Switched at Birth

ABC Family’s most recent (and super-effective) attempt at showing us how ridiculous our lives could be. Want teenage drama? Come and get it.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND EULOGIES

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// ANNELISA LEINBACH

BOOTS MADE FOR DANCIN’, LESSONS LEARNED WORTH KEEPING

SUSPENDING MY INHIBITIONS // BY FREDDIE RAMOS

// BY TAO TAO HOLMES It was all due to the boots. Tall, shinyred platform boots, a glorious $3 at Salvation Army. I spotted them there on the Thursday before Safety Dance, an event that was quickly shaping up in my mind to be nothing short of Legen — waitforit — Dary. The night drew near and I searched for anything shiny and spandex I could find, pulled out my “New Haven: Friendly With Benefits” T-shirt and found a YouTube video demonstrating how to cut a shirt so it looked “retro” or whatever. My new red boots waited impatiently in the corner of my closet-size bedroom. Saturday night, I suited up. The shirt, the silver spandies, the headband — and finally — the boots. The world suddenly shrank below me, my suitemates, all below 5 foot 4, scurrying around the tops of my boots in pre-dance feverishness like inhabitants of Lilliput. I had added a full five inches, making me just about 6 feet tall. I may as well have been wearing stilts. And I realized, even before getting the Intro Micro lesson on sunk costs, that stilts and alcohol seemed a perilous combination. And so, I went to Safety Dance …

sober. My memories of Safety Dance (which are loud and clear, emphasizing the fact that I did it — let’s be honest here — wrong), consist of Tao, the awkward freshman Ent-woman, clomping about a sea of horny hobbits in teetotal despondence. Yale is not known for the height of its student body, and my shiny platform boots allowed me a 360-degree view over the scene at hand, which, admittedly, was not wanting for entertainment. Now, it looks as though Safety Dance, which I always saw as a pivotal rite of passage for freshman n00bs of all shapes, sizes and levels of Dubra saturation, is being abandoned, just like that sobering pair of $3 boots. That is a damn pity. I only abandoned those boots after they taught me my lesson (interpret that as you will). By getting rid of Safety, we are depriving all future freshmen of lessons of their own, whatever they inevitably turn out to be. We are depriving them of silver spandex. Now there’s a loss. // KAREN TIAN

Contact TAO TAO HOLMES at taotao.holmes@yale.edu .

afety Dance is dead. Long live the ’80s. We dug its grave, we lowered its casket, we poured dirt (and whiskey) all over its decomposing carcass. We even erected a tombstone, one as ephemeral as the event itself. Sure, the cancellation of Safety Dance is technically our fault. We hammered the nails in that coffin with our stomping dance shoes. Now it’s up to us to mourn, to remember the good, the bad, the schwasty: the dance-floor makeouts, the trips to the hospitals, the hangovers. Our WEEKENDers are up to that task. So grab these two pages and hold onto them with deep grief – the decade that never died just did, and it’s time to face the music.

I thought I might get lucky when I bought my red suspenders. With my turquoise V-neck, yellow cuffed short shorts and spiked-up hair, the only thing keeping me from being Safety Dance’s most eligible homosexual were the little metal clasps that took 20 minutes and two suitemates to fasten to my waist. Straps secured, I walked alone to Commons, sober and shivering, hoping to meet the man of my dreams. Instead, I found a group of friends swaying in the mosh pit under the unblinking stare of a plainclothes cop. But after an hour of shuffling and counting the number of guys wearing American flag tank tops with gold lamé running shorts — at least four — I stopped hoping for one of them to dance with me.

Just then I felt someone against me. I turned around. I got my wish. He was wearing pink shorts, but I was still into it. We started to dance, then we started to hug, then we started to grind. For my second try at same-sex dancing, things were going pretty well. Then things got intense. Too intense. So I pulled away and we did the whole I’m-dancing-in-front-of-you-butnot-with-you thing until he found somebody else more willing. I ended up walking home with my schwasted friends. So maybe I’m not the most eligible gay guy out there. But the next time I get lucky, I’ll suspend my inhibitions instead of my short shorts. Contact FREDDIE RAMOS at wilfredo.ramos@yale.edu .

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

WITH OR WITHOUTYOU // BY KAROLINE KSIAZEK

A TOXIC PREDESTINATION // BY ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER Maybe ignorance really is bliss. Especially when knowing means drinking yourself into an 80’s-themed stupor. You might counter: isn’t ignorance what causes people to make risky decisions? Shouldn’t we engage one another about the risks of binge drinking? Isn’t discussion necessarily better than silence? Well, yes — but we often do unintended harm in not choosing our words carefully. Consider this scenario: You’re a freshman. You’ve been at Yale for just over a month. You’ve survived your first paper or test, found something edible to eat in the dining hall, and even met some people you like in the process. But when Thursday slowly creeps to Friday and the weekend looms, you’re faced with a whole new set of challenges and uncertainties. Beyond the specifics — frat or athletic house, that off-campus thing on Dwight Street or Toad’s — you’re faced with larger questions. Should I drink? How much? And what are the alternatives? You’re sure they exist, but the maxim rings in your ear: “All roads lead to Toad’s.” And that’s the context for the email you get from your Froco the day before Safety that warns of a culture of heavy drinking tied to the dance.

Hours later, a second email, this one from the Silliman Master and Dean, describes an alarming “campus culture that surrounds this particular event.” Safety Dance, they warn, has been “an excuse for campus-wide binge drinking of risky and dangerous proportions.” So what do you do? It’s no wonder that many freshmen felt perversely compelled to test boundaries, to up the ante that night. Drinking meant participating in what had been sensationalized as nothing short of a Yale tradition, an alluring rite of passage. We want to be part of something; missing out is the cardinal fear. As sad as it may be, this applies to drinking rituals as much as it does to classes and extracurriculars. So what do we do? I do not advocate keeping freshmen in the dark about the problems of substance abuse that persist on our campus. Quite the opposite. But discussions of drinking should not happen via proliferating email chains. Yale will only begin to address its drinking culture once it provokes us to see that being drunk is not the imperative of weekend play.

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

SAFE+ GLORIOUS + RESPONSIBLE // BY AARON GERTLER My freshman year, I wasn’t exactly into dancing, or the “mainstream” side of ‘80s music (I was a prideful listener of Sirius XM First Wave, the hip “alternative” “new wave” “station” with only a few million or so listeners in the obscure neighborhood of The Entire Planet). But I’m always a sucker for spectacle, so that October night found me over/underdressed in a modest orange polo, yearning to hear snatches of New Order amidst the pulsing waves of Madonna. No luck. I stumbled upon some new friends of the sober variety (back in those heady days when all friends were new) and pro-

Contact ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER at isaac.stanley-becker@yale.edu .

ceeded to boogie. None of us lived in Old Campus, so we were unfamiliar with the full extent of our young peers’ drunken escapades — the wobbling and lurching (ironic moves for such a rhythmic decade) took a while to get old. Then, my friends spotted an acquaintance, looking lost and very small in a crowd of basketball players. The boldest freshman sashayed over. “[Name withheld]! How’s it going? Hey, you know something? I like tacos. What do I like?,” my friend asked. “Tacos?,” [name withheld] retorted. “Good! Remember that!”

A few minutes later, we checked in again. The boy didn’t remember what a taco was, and so we formed a flying wedge to guide him from the Neon Sea onto Beinecke Plaza’s safer shores. Rarely had I been prouder of myself. In summary, I think Silliman College will regret their decision of cancelling Safety Dance. Where else are responsible young people like Freshman Aaron going to learn to apply what we learn in Camp Yale alcohol workshops? Global Grounds?

We thought it was bad juju when the Master of Silliman cheered at the sight of us. In the moment just before we walked past the doorways of Commons, the thought occurred to me, “What if we’re the only ones here?” It was 10:02 on that Saturday night and we were, in fact, the only ones there. I had somewhere else I needed to be in less than an hour, but the thought of missing Safety Dance was too much. Rather than letting me skip the occasion, my boyfriend joined me in following Master Krauss’ suggestion to arrive “maybe even at 10 p.m. when the dance begins.” For 25 minutes, everything called attention to the fact that we were the only ones there. The light and sound technicians casually walked around us, tampering with equipment, and the DJ didn’t hesitate to use the microphone to communicate with his crew. The bright blue and green lights fell not on heads, but

on long stretches of empty floor. The “crowd cam” simply showed the silhouette of our lone dancing figures, displaying our aloneness back to us. We found ourselves alternating between ludicrous waltzes that no one could judge, and moments of stillness where we marveled at our unique position. The music was horrible — they had clearly saved the Michael Jackson for the larger crowd. It wasn’t until we were leaving that others started to trickle in. As the party grew, the DJ encouraged a conga line, transforming the vibe into something out of a Sweet 16. Hearing about the dance’s cancellation the next morning was odd, but I didn’t feel like I’d missed out on my last Safety Dance. Rather, for half an hour, the best outfits and best dance moves in the room were ours. For that half-hour, we were Safety Dance. Contact KAROLINE KSIAZEK at karolina.ksiazek@yale.edu .

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

Contact AARON GERTLER at aaron.gertler@yale.edu .

// CREATIVE COMMONS

S AT U R D AY OCTOBER 13

¡FIESTA LATINA!

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Peabody Museum of Natural History // 10 a.m. This is right up WEEKEND’s alley. Go for the Latin American music and dance, the fossil dig, the crafts, the face painting. Oh, and the Zumba!

Men Without Hats

Listen to their “Rhythm of Youth” album on repeat, curl up in a ball, cry on your pillow, consider your life, look at your choices. Repent! Bring Safety Back!

S AT U R D AY OCTOBER 13

“ON VIEW: THE SITES AND SIGHT OF BRITISH PAINTING” Yale Center for British Art // 2 p.m.

It’s the Family Weekend Student Guide Tour! It’s like the Holy Grail of Student Guide Tours for All Things British and Artsy!

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Crushes & Chaperones

Now that Safety’s gone, let’s move on to the next decade. Soon enough, our Yale heirs will be celebrating the 2000s, and that’s just sad.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND EULOGIES

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// ANNELISA LEINBACH

BOOTS MADE FOR DANCIN’, LESSONS LEARNED WORTH KEEPING

SUSPENDING MY INHIBITIONS // BY FREDDIE RAMOS

Contact TAO TAO HOLMES at taotao.holmes@yale.edu .

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

WITH OR WITHOUTYOU // BY KAROLINE KSIAZEK

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

Contact ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER at isaac.stanley-becker@yale.edu .

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

Contact AARON GERTLER at aaron.gertler@yale.edu .

// CREATIVE COMMONS

S AT U R D AY OCTOBER 13

¡FIESTA LATINA!

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Peabody Museum of Natural History // 10 a.m. This is right up WEEKEND’s alley. Go for the Latin American music and dance, the fossil dig, the crafts, the face painting. Oh, and the Zumba!

Men Without Hats

Listen to their “Rhythm of Youth” album on repeat, curl up in a ball, cry on your pillow, consider your life, look at your choices. Repent! Bring Safety Back!

S AT U R D AY OCTOBER 13

“ON VIEW: THE SITES AND SIGHT OF BRITISH PAINTING” Yale Center for British Art // 2 p.m.

It’s the Family Weekend Student Guide Tour! It’s like the Holy Grail of Student Guide Tours for All Things British and Artsy!

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Crushes & Chaperones

Now that Safety’s gone, let’s move on to the next decade. Soon enough, our Yale heirs will be celebrating the 2000s, and that’s just sad.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

// CREATIVE COMMONS

“THIS ISN’T ABOUT TRYING TO WIN THE ELECTION” ELECTION FROM PAGE B3 Smart has found a niche. He was employed through the Re-Entry Program, and he, too, had not been registered to vote until the launch of the Unlock the Vote campaign. Joseph Onofrio, who was also registered through Unlock the Vote, said that he had felt isolated from the civic process while in jail. “When you’re in prison,” he said, “they don’t tell you that you’re allowed to vote. The correctional officers, the jail staff, the counselors — they tell you you’re not allowed to. I don’t know if they’re even aware of [the laws].” “A lot of people come home, and they don’t feel like they have any rights,” Smart agreed. “The attitude is that society doesn’t really care about them. What [Lavoie] is doing is very powerful.”

STATE AND NATIONAL IMPLICATIONS

As election day nears, Connecticut has become a battleground with the hotly contested senatorial race between Democratic nominee and U.S representative, Chris Murphy and Republican Linda McMahon.

“This race is one of the three most important races in the country, hands down,” Alderman Doug Hausladen ’04 said, “[The race is] more important for the nation than Connecticut has seen in a long time.” According to Real Clear Politics, a website that averages polls from across the country, 46 seats are likely to be Democrat, 43 are likely to be Republican and 11 states’, including Connecticut’s, seats are still “toss-ups.” Connecticut is one of the states up for grabs, according to the website, but Murphy has an approximately 3 percentage point lead over McMahon, at press time. The race is so tight that both Hausladen and political science Professor Kelly Rader agree that Unlock the Vote may could be crucial to this election. Ordinarily, voter registration efforts do not gain enough voters to affect the outcome of an election, Rader, said. But, according to Hausladen: “This election could be decided by as few as a hundred votes.” Over the course of the campaign, Unlock the Vote has already registered over 200 people. Historically, roughly 85-90 percent of African-Americans

vote for the Democrat in the presidential election, and ex-convicts are more likely than the general population to be African-American, Rader said. Since people assume ex-convicts are more likely to vote for the Democratic party, the Unlock the Vote campaign has received criticism for having a partisan agenda. “People assume that this is a partisan campaign. After an article was published in the New Haven Register following the launch of the initiative, there was backlash from [online] commenters,” Lavoie said. “I think one person said, ‘Look how low the Democrats will stoop.’” At a meeting of the Democratic Town Committee for which Holston chairs a subcommittee on ex-offender voting rights, town officials warned her against publicizing Unlock the Vote for fear that it would be attributed to a politically-motivated push on behalf of the Democrats. Althea Brooks DIV ’01, the coordinator of the New Haven ReEntry Initiative, said that she had been approached by members of the Chris Murphy campaign who hoped to collaborate on Unlock the Vote. But she denied the request, emphasizing the need for the project to remain nonpartisan if it wants to achieve its goal of reaching out to as many ex-offenders as possible. Meanwhile, Chairman of the New Haven Republicans H. Richter Elser ’81 said that he was not aware of Unlock the Vote. At the probation office, political affiliations were varied. Some exoffenders expressed their approval of President Obama, while others criticized him, and still others didn’t name a preferred candidate. Nationally, voter registration is low historically and compared to other countries, Caleb Kleppner ‘89, a green party member running for voter registrar in New Haven, said. “This is a vital sign… our democracy isn’t as healthy as it should be,” he added. Kleppner said ex-offenders have particularly low voter turnout, which may be attributed to the fact that ex-offenders do not feel represented in government. “Think of the 435 members of Congress,” he said, “I’m not sure many of them prioritize looking out for the issues of interest to exoffenders.” Voter ID laws, such as one recently passed in Texas that requires residents to have a license to vote, may be part of the reason for the decreased number of registered voters this election cycle, Zak Newman, president of the Yale College Democrats said. Newman, who is from Texas, said that his mother had to spend 10 hours and take two trips to the DMV

to get her license. Rader, looking back for years, said she thinks fewer people are registered to vote in this election because enthusiasm is not as high as it was in 2008, which she said was an outlier in terms of the number of people registered.

Mississippi dreamed up the grandfather clause, further blocking African Americans whose ancestors didn’t have the vote before 1870, from casting ballots. It was not until 1965 that the Voting Rights Act eliminated the literacy test. Decades later, in 2001, Connecticut extended

“UNLOCK THE VOTE” HAS ALREADY REGISTERED OVER 200 PEOPLE. H. SIMPSON FOR PREZ

Regardless of Unlock the Vote’s specific effect on elections or national trends, both Rader and Newman agree that ensuring exoffenders can vote is objectively important. “This isn’t about trying to win the election, it’s about giving these people their fair chance,” Newman said. “They’ve paid their debt to society and they need to be reintegrated… and see government and elected officials as people and institutions that can help.” At the first drive held by Unlock the Vote, Lavoie vocalized the importance of voting for ex-offenders of all political stripes. “This country has a history of going up to certain groups and saying to them, ‘Vote for this person,’” Holston said. “We don’t want to be a part of that history. So on the first day, Melissa stood up and told the people in the room, ‘You can vote for Homer Simpson for all I care.’”

A HISTORY LESSON

“No taxation without representation” may have seemed a selfexplanatory slogan in 1775, but Americans would spend the next 237 years defining what representation means. When the constitution was drafted, the only “represented” demographic consisted of white male property owners. Radically, in 1870, the Voting Rights Act extended suffrage to adult male citizens of any race including African Americans, but it wouldn’t be until 1920 that women could participate in the electoral process. Along the path to democratic parity, there have been many rocky legal impediments. Connecticut passed the nation’s first literacy test in 1855, an attempt to block immigrants and the uneducated poor from the ballot box. Other states implemented poll taxes in late 1889.

voting rights to those on probation, but as history teaches, removing legal barriers is only the first step in the voting process. Many other concerns play a part in fully opening up civic and political engagement.

NOVEMBER 6TH AND THE UNCERTAIN FUTURE

At the New Haven Re-Entry Initiative’s office in City Hall, exoffenders come in and out to talk to Brooks and Lavoie about their plans to find jobs, to secure living arrangements, to get re-acquainted with communities from which they had been removed for years. And although they have all registered to vote, it is clear that the question of voting is a small one compared to the challenges they face on a daily basis. On Nov. 6, they will make a choice between spending time on these everyday struggles and going to the voting stations. “Residents making less than $35,000 a year are much less likely to vote, be registered to vote or to participate in other civic activities like attending public meetings,” Abraham noted. “Many ex-offenders most likely fall into that income category — this indicates that the barriers to participating in civic life extend beyond the issue of incarceration.” Ex-offenders may have peeled off their orange jumpsuits and removed their handcuffs for good, but the implications of their sentences are less easy to escape. There is no single key to freeing them from the difficulties they will face, though the doors to their cells may be open. Contact MONICA DISARE AND YANAN WANG at monica.disare@yale.edu and yanan. wang@yale.edu .

1 IN 41 ADULTS HAVE CURRENTLY OR PERMANENTLY LOST THEIR VOTING RIGHTS AS A RESULT OF A FELONY CONVICTION. S AT U R D AY OCTOBER 13

CLASICALLY BLACK

Afro-American Cultural Center // 2:30 p.m. Performed by African-American students who are advanced recitalists. Take your parents to something other than a Duke’s Men concert (just because they’re s0 cOoL).

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: “NW” By Zadie Smith

To better understand the people in a city across the pond.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND ZOO

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE // BY YUVAL BEN-DAVID

Here are the animals I saw last night at the Zoo: penguin piñatas, a caterpillar doll, some stuffed quadrupeds I couldn’t quite identify and — yes, even though they wouldn’t they like me to say it — some beastly computer science students, communing with the animal spirits of the 38 multiprocessors with names like “ladybug” or “scorpion” or “dolphin” or “perch” (it’s a species of fish, apparently). Rewind to a few days earlier. The WEEKEND editors took a latté break from their Kant and whispered, like the urban jungle explorers they are, about the strange rumors they’d heard about Watson Hall, the computer science building. Apparently students spent nights there, in a study space called “the Zoo.” Rumor had it there was even a kitchen, a few showers … a pingpong table, even. Who would be the young Columbus to chart these barbarian waters? Bored of writing for the A-section about customer satisfaction on the Metro-North, I jumped at the opportunity to write the article. This would be my big journalistic break, I knew. Growing up by Carnegie Mellon University, which houses one of the world’s top Comp Sci departments, I’d heard echoes of some

crazy shit: apparently, incoming CS students at CMU were given a crash-course on hygiene and small-talk. A few years back, I heard, they’d even been forced to log their showers and conversations. Now, a friend in that program tells me students submit pictures of themselves in scenic locations around Pittsburgh, to prove that they go out. So, you can’t blame me for putting on a gas mask and flak jacket when I went to the Zoo the other night. I could already taste the success of this blockbuster ethnography. But I’m sorry to report that the wildest — and foulest — thing about the Zoo was the coffee creamer in the cabinet when it should have been in the fridge. And even then, strictly speaking, the Zoo comprises only the cluster of computers on Watson Hall’s third floor. The lounge and kitchen, both on the second floor, don’t have a name. Far from the pigsty I anticipated, a sterilizing panic hangs over the Zoo. It’s clear enough from the bolded, all-caps sign someone tacked up on the bulletin board —“Don’t Panic” — and from the fixed grin on a cartoon that says, “There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.” There’s an exercise resistance band, for late-night release, lying around the stuffed animals. In the kitchen, “Tension Tamer” tea and not much else: Old Bay seasoning, a can of Maxwell House coffee, but lite, with only half the caffeine, funny considering the kitchen and coffee are presumably for the benefit of night owls. “Do you spend a lot of time at the Zoo?” I interrupt Kwabena Boateng ’14 at around 1 a.m. on a Tuesday night, as he scrambles to finish a problem set. “Yes,” he heaves. “I’m a computer science major.” “How many nights a week would you say you spend here?” Obviously, by this point, I’m determined to disturb his problem set as much as possible. “Aaah, it’s kind of rough. Maybe five nights a week.” “And do you ever sleep here?” “No, but I have spent an allnighter here. And I guess I pass

out … I nap here on occasion.” Once, he says, “I came into the Zoo at two in the afternoon and left at 9 a.m. the next day.” I ask Boateng if there’s some sort of competition to see who can spend the most time at the Zoo. No, he laughs, “You come in, you take care of your business and then you leave.” “I’m not nearly as intense as some people are,” he explains.

SO, YOU CAN’T BLAME ME FOR PUTTING ON A GAS MASK AND FLAK JACKET WHEN I WENT TO THE ZOO THE OTHER NIGHT. I COULD ALREADY TASTE THE SUCCESS OF THIS BLOCKBUSTER ETHNOGRAPHY. Ethan Li ’13 says the most time he’s ever spent in the Zoo was “30-something hours” — not consecutive, I’m guessing (hoping) — three weeks ago, when he had a problem set due for CPSC 323, “Introduction to Systems Programming and Computer Organization.” It’s a notorious class, by the way — I heard about it before I even came to Yale (and, frankly, I still don’t know what the class title means). But Li isn’t attached the Zoo at the hip. “I actually only do programming here, because the computer’s all set up and it’s easy to work here,” he says. For non-CS classes, you’ll find him studying in the library or his room. “I don’t understand,” I say to Ethan. “You’ve got a checkers set here, backgammon, a lounge, not to mention a ping-pong table. Don’t you like hanging out here?!” But the thing about computer science work, Ethan says, is that there’s never a good time.

As long as you’re programming, you’re in a flow — it’s really easy to be engaged in it and actually think and focus. You’re too busy for ping-pong. On the flipside, in the polishing or “debugging” stage, you’re too bugged to play ping-pong, too antsy: you’re working against a deadline and you can’t figure out where you made the minor error that’s screwing with your entire program. And in most cases, Ethan says, debugging takes even longer than programming itself. Jake Albert ’16, a potential computer science major currently taking CPSC 201, also goes to the Zoo almost every night — for the soothing “pitter patter of keyboards,” yes, but for the camaraderie and assistance as well. Sometimes, he says, TAs will hang around the Zoo during the day and offer their assistance. The other group that’s there to help is the Computer Science Departmental Student Advisory Committee (DSAC), a group of five Comp Sci majors elected by popular student vote to be managers of the Zoo. Daniel Tahara ’14, who sits on DSAC, says their current project is to put together a library of technical manuals at the Zoo, to compensate for Yale’s dearth of programming print material. The group also hosts regular pizza parties for problem set crammers, and an annual social event at the start of the school year. I imagine that event as a massive kvetch-sesh, but even if the wildest thing at the Zoo is a mind-bending p-set, I’m inclined to think there’s something right about a community built around some sweat. “There’s definitely a community,” Boateng says. “Last year, when a couple people [from CPSC 223] were here working on a really difficult problem set, one of the student managers of the Zoo ordered pizza for us. We noshed and then went back to work, but chatted about life — life outside of computer science – and then got back together and worked on the problem set together. It’s a fun place.” Contact YUVAL BEN-DAVID at yuval.ben-david@yale.edu .

// MARIA ZEPEDA

At the Zoo in Watson Hall, it’s a computer science world after all.

S AT U R D AY OCTOBER 13

“HARD WORKS AT YALE” OPENING RECEPTION

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Afro-American Cultural Center // 4 p.m. Artist Gordon Skinner describes his artwork as “Integrity Art” — “Art that is real, honest, and promotes creative consistency.” Other adjectives include “organic,” “bold,” “spontaneous” and “hard-edged.”

Joe Biden

Those pearly whites are hard to resist.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

ROWLING GETS REAL Apparently, J. K. Rowling thinks a lot about sex. Genitalia, masturbation, pedophilia, incest, rape, teen pregnancy — these are all peccadillos that delight her fancy. Now, after decades of writing magical children’s stories, her pent-up prurience can finally break free; the reader is treated to such phrases as “pink labia pulled wide to show dark gaping slits” and “Lots of pushing to get in properly. It’s tighter than I thought.” There seems to be a formula for reviews of J. K. Rowling’s new book, “The Casual Vacancy.” They start out warning rea d e rs

SCOTT STERN READING BETWEEN THE LINES that the new book is quite different from the deservedly celebrated Harry Potter series — you’re not in Hogwarts any more. They drop hints about the titillating and disturbing content, and then they transition to calling the book slow-moving, one-dimensional and transparently political. Some reviewers accept t h i s , claiming to have unearthed hidden

merit, while others outright dismiss it, damning Rowling’s attempt to transition to adult literature. Each of these interpretations is as correct as it is oversimplified. “The Casual Vacancy” will not achieve anywhere near the same success as the Harry Potter books, nor will it be a failure. True, Rowling seems to dwell a little bit on the gritty and grotesque details of sex, drugs and poverty, but she is attempting to break out of a niche. The Harry Potter books were phenomenal in the original sense of the word — a miraculous and stunning occurrence — a revelation that taught a generation to love readi n g .

// KATE MCMILLAN

The Two Smiles “Hey, I like that smile!” I had already hurried past the two young guys in front of the New Haven Free Public Library when I heard these words behind me. I had smiled at one of the men, the taller one, as I walked by, and I knew it was him talking. “Can I see it again?” he called after me. I was in a good mood, and, though his tone was ironically coy, it wasn’t sarcastic, so I thought, “What the hell,” and flashed my pearly whites again over my shoulder. He laughed, and I caught a glimpse of his grin before I kept walking. “Can I take a picture?” he shouted, and I shook my head while I turned the corner. After three years in this city, I’m used to this occasional attention. Whether it’s 9 a.m. or dusk, I’ll show you a genuine smile. *** My night smile is different. When a figure approaches me on my late walk home down Chapel, I give a weak grimace — no teeth — staring a little too long and walking briskly. And though my heart doesn’t race, my brain starts churning with possible outcomes and contingency plans. Most of these aren’t fearful thoughts, just prepared ones. At least that’s what I try to tell myself — that part of this is practiced awareness and preparedness. Better safe than sorry. After traveling alone for three months in Europe, I’m an expert at being overly cautious and ready for anything. *** I love my new neighborhood, but I know from Ronnell’s emails that it’s far from safe. The unpredictable side of me likes to smile at strangers as much as the idealistic and friendly side does because I like to remind people that kindness is out there where you least expect it. The self-protection side of me wonders if a big, friendly, unassuming grin might be just enough of a surprise to make an

S U N D AY OCTOBER 14

KALLI ANGEL NEW HAVEN NORMAL opportunistic thief change his mind. *** A few weeks ago, I planned to explore the West River where it runs along Ella T. Grasso Boulevard and discover a secluded picnic or study spot. Not able to find an available friend, I decided to wander over there alone after class. I looked up the way on Google and gathered my keys, my phone, my book, my ID and nothing else, and, resolving to be home before dark, I set off down Chapel. I’d walked that stretch of Chapel before – twice round-trip, each time to and from The Game as one member of a drunk parade that floods into Westville on the way to the Yale Bowl. I imagine that we are intimidating as a group, or at least far too annoying to deal with. But this time, alone, I felt distinctly uncomfortable after only a few blocks. Not long after the Hospital of St. Raphael, I knew that I had crossed some invisible line, and I admitted to myself that I was scared. Surrounded by peeling paint, empty storefronts, untended grass and what felt like dozens of staring eyes, I was acutely aware that I’d wandered somewhere I didn’t belong. I desperately wished for an internal filter — a barometer to tell me if I was afraid because I was legitimately unsafe or whether my trepidation was driven by something less rational. After an eternity of throwing quick glances over my shoulder and trying not to make eye contact with anyone, much less smile, I found a park bench looking out over a deserted soccer field, an empty parking lot behind it and the river just beyond. I pulled out my book and read about 10 pages, but I kept looking behind me at the

Rowling can’t possibly beat that, and she isn’t trying. Instead, she is doing her best to build for herself a post-Potter career. (And if that entails slipping in a few too many graphic details, then so be it.) “The Casual Vacancy” begins with the sudden death of Barry Fairbrother, a parish councilman in the little village of Pagford. This seemingly small tragedy in a small town ignites warfare of the most vicious variety. Three men decide to run to fill the “casual vacancy” (an opening created by an unexpected death): Miles Mollison, the soporific son of Pagford’s self-appointed first family; Simon Price, an abusive and s l o ve n l y laborer and Colin “Cubby” Wall, a high school administrator with a serious and disturbing mental illness. Choosing among these a t t ra c t ive ca n d i d a te s becomes too much for the citizens of Pagford, and all hell breaks loose. The election is particularly fraught because, before Fairbrother died, he was the leader of one of two warring factions on the parish council. The two sides were split over a housing project and drug addiction clinic, with one side, led by Fairbrother, feel-

ing a sense of duty to help the poor, and the other side, led by the “grotesquely obese” Howard Mollison, wishing to expel the black marks on Pagford’s otherwise sterling small-town credentials. It is not a battle between good and evil, but rather a battle between the empathetic and the apathetic. And with Fairbrother out of the way, the conservative bloc seems poised to claim victory. One legitimate criticism of “The Casual Vacancy” is that it has far too many characters — it is initially hard to follow — but if there are “main characters,” they are Andrew Price and Krystal Weedon. Andrew, the 16-yearold son of Simon Price, faces deep internal struggles over his feelings toward his abusive father, his conciliating mother, his sociopathic best friend and the pretty new girl at school. While Andrew is distinctly a member of Pagford’s middle class, 16-year-old Krystal exemplifies life on the other side. She is the daughter of a heroin addict and prostitute, a feisty and impulsive and promiscuous girl forced to grow up too fast. With no structure at all in her dilapidated home, Krystal is the only parent her neglected three-year-old brother Robbie will ever have. A discerning reader will see elements of Harry in both Andrew and Krystal. The orphaned or ignored child trying to find his or her own in a cruel world, fighting for friendship, love and truth — this will surely have resonance among fans of Rowling’s earlier work. Indeed, many parallels can be drawn between Harry Potter characters and those of “The Casual Vacancy.” The narrowminded, repressed, busybody couple of Howard and Shirley Mollison are practically carbon

copies of Vernon and Petunia Dursley. And for every flat and comically one-sided character, Rowling can produce another as complex and conflicted as Snape: Parminder Jawanda, a local doctor and council member, or Tessa Wall, a guidance counselor in need of some guidance herself. At times, the politics of gossipy small-town people is humorous, at other times, it is heart wrenching. Rowling’s central message is, and always has been, one of compassion. The one thing Voldemort could never understand was love — or its cousins kindness and hope. In the magical world of Hogwarts or the darkly comedic hamlet of Pagford, compassion is crucial. And in a town dominated by small minded, self satisfied people preaching self-responsibility, compassion is threatened. Don’t let the sex or suicide or salaciousness fool you: This is a book about class. The central battle of the book is one over the merits of government intervention and the meaning of responsibility — the battle between rich and poor, the haves and the have-nots. Rowling, who once described herself as being as “poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless,” is exposing her readers to the miseries of poverty that they never saw even in a cupboard bedroom or second-hand wands. She is arguing powerfully for the responsibility we have to help the least among us. There is no magic spell to cure heroin addicts or uplift downtrodden children, and Rowling does not sugarcoat. This will not be a book with a happy ending. Yet it is an important one, from perhaps the world’s most important living author. Contact SCOTT STERN at scott.stern@yale.edu .

Outer Space on a Dime quietest noises and the sun kept sinking lower, so I admitted defeat and turned back toward Yale. I walked home down Frontage, where there are fewer rundown homes and more cars on the road. I searched for friendly faces behind the windshields, and I tried to walk quickly without running. When I finally reached Howe Street, climbed up the stairs and dead-bolted the door behind me, the mixture of relief and confusion and frustration at things I couldn’t even name tied knots in my stomach. *** Every once in a while I walk home down Edgewood late at night. For just the one long block from Pierson’s locked gate, it feels stupid and weak to call Yale Security. But a 16-month-old child was shot in a drive-by this past Wednesday just four blocks from my apartment. Ronnell sent no email this time — that block is two streets too far to concern most Yale students — but, confused and frustrated, I followed the story on Twitter. The truth is that mostly I don’t know why I feel the way I do — and I worry that, as much as I fight it or deny it, there’s some invisible gravity that’s pulling my subconscious off track. There are a lot of reasons to feel uncomfortable in New Haven, but I want to ensure that I feel uncomfortable for the right reasons. I want to be able to look at every person I walk past with an offputtingly genuine smile, and I want to trust my sympathetic nervous system without wondering if my gut is responding to body language or to something less rational. But I’m still trying to figure out how to figure out what I’m feeling. I’m still looking for that barometer. Contact KALLI ANGEL at kalli.angel@yale.edu .

NASA’s final space shuttle mission ended July 2011, to the sadness of countless nerds, science enthusiasts and people who simply believe in exploring the universe to better understand the mysteries of life. (I fall into the “nerd” category.) But why was this a big deal? Mostly, I think, because of some misconceptions. The end of the space shuttle program does not mean the end of NASA. NASA continues to do important work in everything from air traffic controller design to commercial aircraft fuel efficiency. This also doesn’t mean the end of NASA space missions. NASA recently put the robotic rover Curiosity on Mars to continue exploration of the planet after the previous two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, ended their 7-year tenure on the planet two years ago. Finally, and most surprising to me, the end of the space shuttle program does not mean the end of NASA putting humans in space. The organization is currently building the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle designed to do just that, and the International Space Station will continue to have U.S. astronauts working there year-round. What, then, does the end of the space shuttle program mean? Well, just that the space shuttle orbiters — those things that look like blocky, vertical airplanes — are being retired (just as had been scheduled from the very beginning of the program). They’re just being replaced by newer spacecraft. That’s all. But the end of this program comes at the time of another change: the shift of space exploration away from government and into the private sector. For example, so-called reduced-gravity aircraft (planes that fly through parabolic trajectories, giving the passengers the sensation of weightlessness) have traditionally been operated solely by NASA. Remember Tom Hanks floating around in “Apollo 13”? That was NASA. (As a side note, the Yale Drop Team is a club that has performed zero-gravity science experiments on such planes as part of a NASA initiative.) But in 2004, the Zero Gravity Corporation began running these same flights as part of what they call the “extreme tourism” industry. And private companies are going beyond the atmosphere too. Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, created SpaceX, the company that put the first privately built liquid-fuel rocket into orbit and later attached the first commercial vehicle to the International Space Station. Musk now sits on the board of the X Prize Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to incentivizing scientific developments with multi-million dollar prizes, alongside people like Google’s Larry Page, Segway inventor

PUPPET & ART WORKSHOPS FOR THE CARNIVAL AND DAY OF THE DEAD PARADE

Bregamos Community Theater // 2 p.m. Children under 16 must be accompanied by an adult. Either way, take your ’rents to Fair Haven. Make them feel like you care about your city. <3

JACOB EVELYN THE FUTURE Dean Kaman, Arianna Huffington and James Cameron. Though the organization gives out awards for things like high-fuel-efficiency cars, it in particular has done a lot to promote advancements in space exploration; $2 million in prize money was given out for Earth-based testing of lunar landing devices, $10 million was awarded to the first private manned spacecraft to enter space twice in two weeks and $30 million is offered to the first team to land a lunar rover that can perform certain tasks. Even outside the X Prize Foundation, similar incentive prizes have sprung up. A hotel entrepreneur offered $50 million for two manned spaceflights to an inflatable space station. (The prize expired two years ago when no one had accomplished the feat, making the $30 million X Prize not quite “the largest incentive prize of all time,” as it claims on its website.) NASA-sponsored prizes for building components of a “space elevator” — which is exactly what it sounds like — such as super-strong ultralight tether cables. My personal favorite is the N-Prize, which, according to its website is “a challenge to launch an impossibly small satellite into orbit on a ludicrously small budget, for a pitifully small cash prize.” Need clarification? Impossibly small = 9.99 to 19.99 grams (less than a twentieth of a pound). Ludicrously small budget = £999.99. Pitifully small cash prize = £9,999.99. (The only other questions in the website FAQ are, “Are we serious? Yes.” and, “Surely it’s impossible? Very nearly.”) But it’s near-impossible goals like these that have the opportunity to shape the path of humanity. If global warming continues along its current path, having companies capable of putting some humans in space might not be such a bad idea. Allowing amateurs to put satellites into orbit for a few thousand dollars would dramatically change outer space from one controlled by governments and, increasingly, corporations, to one belonging to ordinary citizens too. And the more competition and innovation in this area, the better. We are earthlings, yes, but as far as we know we’re also the only intelligent life in the universe, and the universe is always ready to be explored. Contact JACOB EVELYN at jacob.evelyn@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Guacamole

A friend once said: “There’s nothing a nice bowl of guac can’t fix.” WEEKEND salutes you, friend.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND ARTS

90S ROCK BOOMS IN CALHOUN CABARET // BY JULIA ZORTHIAN Thankfully, the four or five clocks ticking over Jon’s (Jack O’Reilly ’13) opening monologue did not continue throughout the entire production of “tick, tick … Boom!” that is showing at the Calhoun Cabaret this weekend. The ticking does, though, return with regularity throughout this production of “Rent” composer Jonathan Larson’s lesser-known autobiographical rock musical, effectively conveying the protagonist’s “mounting anxiety” over his lack of success and future as a musical composer. “tick, tick … Boom!” has a much smaller scale than “Rent,” with only three actors and comparatively less tragedy, but deals with similar issues of changing relationships, disillusionment and fulfillment. Add to this the fact that O’Reilly’s voice has an edge similar to that of Anthony Rapp, who played Mark in the original Broadway production and movie adaptation of “Rent,” and you get a lead who ably anchors the show’s musical numbers. While his vocals are expressive, O’Reilly is less effective at conveying his understanding of the character. His acting sometimes feels overbearing and not fully thought-out — it seems, for instance, that he shortchanges some of Larson’s dry humor because of his determination to sound exciting and youthful. O’Reilly’s performance is, to an extent,

illustrative of that of the cast as a whole. Kyle Picha ’14 shines as Jon’s best friend, with his vocals complementing O’Reilly’s especially well when the two perform duets. Along with his adept handling of the rock score, Picha also brought the most humor to the show, at one point providing the audience with an especially memorable moment involving a Twinkie. Ari Fernandez ’15, playing Jon’s girlfriend Susan, adds clear, sweet vocals to the mix, though her influence is at times limited by the loud instrumentals. Yet Fernandez’s acting has weak points as well, albeit in ways that are different from O’Reilly’s. She alternated between infusing her dialogues with subtleties and liveliness and going through scenes or musical numbers with a glazed look on her face. While this may have been an artistic choice meant to reflect the nature of emotional distance or the struggles of finding happiness, it came off as disconnected more than anything else. This is a cast, then, defined by its vocal performance and strong musical cohesion with its band — but one whose acting during musical numbers and vocal scenes is occasionally underwhelming. The actors’ stage presence, meanwhile, is undermined by minimal choreography and movement, particularly during musical numbers.

The show’s production end is consistently impressive. The set of Jon’s apartment is the perfect mix of cool and struggling artist, with a highlight being the poster of “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat, serving as a reference to Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George.” (As a side-note, Larson’s song “Sunday,” which had O’Reilly singing about brunch toast and decaffeinated tea while working at a diner, is also a very funny take on Sondheim’s song of the same title.) Less obvious parts of the staging were deftly executed by producer and lighting designer Laurel German ’15, who employed spotlights and string lights to elevate both the mood and drama of the production. “tick, tick … Boom!” is a relatable show being staged in one of Yale’s more intimate theater venues. Students can connect with the characters’ indecision as they make plans for their future careers and lives. Where else will they get to do that in what’s basically a rock concert format? “tick, tick … Boom!” will run through Sunday in the Calhoun Cabaret theater. Contact JULIA ZORTHIAN at julia.zorthian@yale.edu .

// ZOE GORMAN

The three-person cast of “tick, tick ...Boom!” is big on vocals ...and leg stamina.

Back on Madison Avenue, but only briefly // BY PATRICE BOWMAN

“Mad Men” is a nice show and all, but I’ve been wanting to learn about 1960s advertising without womanizing, boozing and blackfacing interrupting my experience. This past week at Yale, I was in luck. Posters across campus featuring dapper fellows in black suits and cheeky women in yellow dresses invited me to attend a screening of Tim Kirby’s documentary “Selling the Sixties: How Madison Avenue Dreamed the Decade,” with a Q&A featuring producer and Yale 2012 Poynter Fellow Adam Harrison Levy tacked on for good measure. As I walked to the event, I was hoping to soon be in a room full of people in retro clothing chatting over martinis and smoking their lungs black. My fellow attendees’ decidedly contemporary tennis shoes and jeans brought me back to reality — and 2012. No matter. Though “Selling the Sixties” is too short to fully accomplish its creator’s goals, it does a decent job of capturing and trying to explain the zeitgeist of yesterday. What first struck me about the film — a real slap in the face — was learning that the BBC commissioned this documentary as a way to prepare the Brits for “Mad Men.” As Levy explained, the rights to show many of the advertisements in this documentary were cleared only in the UK, not in the USA. The footage is American, the interviewees are American, but the narrator — a pivotal point of any documentary — isn’t. Denis Lawson is a shining example of Proper British Dialect; kudos to him for not sounding condescending towards a foreign culture. He keeps a distant tone throughout, his words making him sound like a well-spoken but slightly detached teacher. He does know when to use his voice to acknowledge the anxieties of the period, as when he states that the main question of the abundant 1960s was “how to be happy, not how long will this happiness last,” but it’s still odd to hear a Brit tell me about America. His dialect, though it helps

S U N D AY OCTOBER 14

with objectivity, becomes a barrier to a full immersion into the narrative. British narrator aside, the film goes full force into the American Sixties. The content moves in leaps and bounds, touching the ground only for fleeting moments. Even though the narrative is bookended by John F. Kennedy’s brief presidency and largely concerned with only one overarching question, i.e. asking what America’s material consumption really signified, there’s just too much stuff and too many interesting people. George Lois, a former adman and a model for Don Draper, provides funny reflections. Daniel Horowitz, a cultural historian, talks about the pioneering role of Ernst Dichter in exploring consumer behavior and sexualized consumer culture (in one ad, buyers talk about cars’ curves and softness in lingering detail). Joel Meyerowitz, a photographer, discusses Irish, Italian, Jewish and other “ethnic” young men who slammed the industry with bright, quick, sexy ads … and there’s still more! If only the documentary had the time to weave all this together and make a cohesive point. The structure, though, is serviceable — and sometimes exceptional. The general presentation is, unsurprisingly for a documentary of this style, a mixture of talking heads, still images and archival footage: an interviewee says that the Sears and Roebuck catalogues were like Bibles; we see fingers stroking pages that promised glorious consumption. But then there are the unexpected moments, the truly striking ones, in which some of editor Michael Duly’s work cuts into the mind and into the heart in an instant. Consider the montage of images that accompanies an American-accented reading of Allen Ginsburg’s iconic “Howl” (1955), which equates America’s over-consumption and messy industrialization to the sacrifice-demanding pagan god Moloch. Factory work portrayals transition to

“DON’T CUT ME OFF” WITH JUST THE TIP Morse-Stiles Theater // 8 p.m.

Start the countdown to this CoMiCaL event: 99 sexual innuendos, 98 sexual innuendos, 97 sexual innuendos …

a seemingly random shot of woman turning to the right with a slice of cake in her hands. The background sound is a cacophony of ad soundtracks. And the score effectively uses horns to hammer in the idea that a darkness aptly identified by Ginsberg lurks behind the trappings of abundance. But just when the documentary is about to enter the more turbulent — the more interesting — part of the 60s after Kennedy’s assassination, it stops. Lights come on. Back to 2012. Here at the Yale of the present, the black hole of midterm preparation sucked in most students, but a couple of us did manage to squeeze the screening into our schedules. But why did we care? We can’t be nostalgic for a decade that we never experienced and that’s so different from our own. Advertising now, Levy said, “is in a more fragmented landscape.” We have more than three channels. We lean on the internet, not newspapers or magazines. But according to Yale School of Art lecturer Jessica Helfand ’82 ART ’89, who includes “Selling in the Sixties” in the curriculum for her class “Studies in Visual Biography,” the 1960s still resonates today because the period parallels our own in very specific ways. “Beyond the lure of Mad Men, the early 1960s was an era of cautious optimism. Not unlike contemporary culture — the Occupy movements, the Obama campaign for “hope” — it was an exciting time to be young and engaged in a greater good,” Helfand wrote in an email to the News. “And for all the aspirational similarities, we are also two generations transfigured by unprecedented tragedy: the assassination of a young President was, in a sense, the 9/11 of that era.” If only we had a better Beatles equivalent than One Direction. Contact PATRICE BOWMAN at patrice.bowman@yale.edu . // CREATIVE COMMONS

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Being nice to your parents

They love you. They came to visit you. They paid for your education, be it with money or sweat and tears. Now hug them. Then ask them for a new iPhone 5, nicely.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

RICHARD MONTOYA // JENNIFER CHEUNG

Playwright, Chicano, culture clasher // BY VIVEK VISHWANATH

his fall, American actor and playwright Richard Montoya has been on campus as a Yale School of Drama Beinecke Fellow. You might have seen posters for his latest play, “American Night: The Ballad of Juan José.” During his time on campus, Montoya has been directing productions for the play, filming scenes for his upcoming movie “Water and Power,” and giving talks on immigration and Latino culture. WEEKEND recently caught up with Montoya after his talk at the Office of International Students and Scholars on multiculturalism, stereotypes and the “American dream.” Montoya, a founding member of the performance collective Culture Clash, passionately and candidly spoke about his views on the plight of Mexicans in America. Mr. Montoya, who believes that immigration is one of the most urgent issues in this country, has brought these matters to the foreground in “American Night.” Through satire and his self-labeled “Chicanowit,” he will be captivating audiences at the Yale Repertory Theater till this Saturday night.

A.I was not much older than my son is now when I saw the craziness of beautiful, urgent, political theater. And absolutely, that was the bud. I was in “Alvin and the Chipmunks” in first grade and I don’t know … something as silly as that was transformative. A combination of American television and hardcore Chicano theater. American television — anything from Jerry Lewis, “Gilligan’s Island” — to some of the Mexican comedies that my parents were watching, to the political theater Teatro Campesino. Q. The Chicano culture with which you identify was evidently a formative influence on you, but how did this culture impact your writing and your worldview? A. When I was a small child I would go to the farm-worker theater shows that were happening in the fields. There was a theater company around at the time that was also used as a tool to organize farmworkers and it was hilarious, between commedia dell’arte and Greek, very earthy and very real. And as a child I just responded to this fantastic style of theater. Some of the style of it is very evident in “American Night,” that very broad humor that was unapologetically political and tried to make a point. For me, the story of the immigrant is more pressing and more urgent than my economic stability as a Chicano. I’m really worried about what’s going on with immigrants and anti-immigrant fervor. So it’s almost like I’ve taken my Chicano wit and I’ve applied that to a story of a Mexican man.

Q. And from there you’ve been a part of the performance collective known as Culture Clash.

we’re not supposed to discuss these things. But in the theater, we can discuss them.

A. Since 1984. So I went to the American Conservatory Theater in ’83 and ’84 and I was working with Teatro Campesino [during that time]. Then we created Culture Clash in 1984 in a small art gallery in San Francisco. We were part performance art, part stand-up, part political theater and part cabaret. When you see “American Night,” you’re going to see basically empty space, and that comes from performance art. It’s just empty. For me, there’s a kind of urgency. It makes it very urgent for the audience to feel what we’re talking about. Because you have to understand: For this largely Anglo audience, this might be the first time an articulate immigrant is talking directly to them. I’m telling you my story. It’s not like “Thank you for the tip.”

Q. Your show “American Night” has been a huge success, but it is constantly undergoing transformations as you move from city to city. How would you say this play has changed specifically for East Coast audiences?

Q. Your plays always involve elements of satire. For example, “American Night” includes disco-dancing sheriffs and comic Tea Party members. How does the serious nature of your work evolve from the humor? A. The absurd humor allows for the serious message to be delivered. Some people, and even acting students, are offended and I think that is essential and great that they be — there have been very few walkouts here at the Yale Repertory Theater. But when somebody does walk, I know I am doing my job. Q. Would you say that satire helps you connect to your audiences? A. Yes. I use satire to diffuse [my ideas] to a polite New England. New England is so genteel and polite that

A. One thing that didn’t change that I think is really hitting home here is the immigrant man that was killed on Long Island, Marcelo Lucero. That happened here on the Northeast corridor. It didn’t happen in Arizona, it didn’t happen in San Diego, it didn’t happen in L.A. It happened here, in this region. And I think the audience goes, “Woah. I heard about that on NPR. Woah.” The ICE raids, the immigration raids on factories and elementary schools … America can do better than that. And I think they’re really listening to that. We’re throwing little bits of the region in there. If your cell phone rings during the show, the announcement says “You will be deported to East Haven, Connecticut.” Q. Given the experiences you’ve had with theater and playwriting, what do you think lies in store for future generations of Mexican immigrants in America? A. You know, it’s such an unfinished chapter and I really am a little worried. I am always hopeful, but I’m full of Mexican hope, not Obama hope. But I’m hopeful that the safe and inviting America will find a way to get in touch with its own immigrant story. Every American is descended from immigrants. Why have we forgotten that? No one’s

been able to answer that question for me. So I’m always hopeful, but there will always be close-minded people who think, “We made it but no one else should make it.” Q. What does it mean to be American? A. Well, it’s all I’ve ever been. It does mean a privilege. I’m a working playwright in America and that’s a privilege. I’m not scrubbing floors or mowing lawns. Q. What have been some of your most memorable experiences as a playwright? A. I think meeting August Wilson, who wrote the “Pittsburgh Cycle,” and having him see my work; doing plays about New York City, Miami; being near the border near San Diego and Tijuana. Taking shows up to Seattle, Chicago. Just being a world traveler. Even though I’m within

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the borders of America, there’s still many, many worlds I get to go to. And so it’s a journey that just keeps continuing. Q. What inspires you? A. Events, man. “American Night” is so close to “The Daily Show.” It’s so close to “The Colbert Report.” Events keep getting more crazy and surreal. I get inspired daily by the outrageousness of what’s going on in the world. The audacity of Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. I have to be the voice of the other side. And I’m paying the price with some asinine reviews of the show that just are choosing to misunderstand it. But I don’t care, the audiences are loving it, they’re on their feet every night. That blows my mind. That’s what inspires me to keep going. Contact VIVEK VISHWANATH at vivek.vishwanath@yale.edu .

I AM ALWAYS HOPEFUL, BUT I’M FULL OF MEXICAN HOPE, NOT OBAMA HOPE.

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Q. Could you tell us a little bit about your early years?