Today's WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2012

THE MADAMA BUTTERFLY EFFECT A PERSONAL ESSAY ON PERCEPTIONS OF ASIAN-AMERICAN SEXUALITY.

BY LARISSA PHAM, PAGE 3

SCHEDULES

B2

MEMORY

B5

STORE FRONT

B9

“LET’S GRAB A MEAL SOMETIME”

THE MEDIA AND THE MESSAGE

ON THE PEOPLE’S ARTS COLLECTIVE

Jackson McHenry hits us where it hurts: why we struggle with spending time with each other.

The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies continues to fend off the silence, turns 30. By Ava Kofman.

Recent alumni set out to bring town and gown together through art. Joy Shan reports.

PAGE B2

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

ASCHER

WEEKEND VIEWS

HOW TO VOTE ABSENTEE: A TRUE STORY // BY JORDAN ASCHER

I may not be the “cool guy” for saying it, but you should vote. I mean, honestly, I’m not going to win any “popularity contests” here; nobody is going to call me “awesome” and “handsome” for talking about the presidential election. Heck, I can’t imagine anyone coming up to me and saying “Hey, you’re my best friend,” or “Let’s hang out.” I can’t imagine anyone saying that to me at all!

I’m sorry, I seem to have gotten a bit off track. My point is that the election is coming up, and you should vote. If you’re a Connecticut voter, then all you have to do is go to a place at a time and fill out a paper, and you’re set, you lucky duck. I, however, am trapped in the past and wish I were a child — so I registered in my home state. (To protect my state’s identity, I will refer to it only as “Massahcusetts” — a clever anagram of its real [secret] name.) This is the procedure for procuring an absentee ballot from my state, taken directly from the ancient scrolls in the basement of the state capital: 1. Prove your identity! How do

we know you’re really from here?

First, we will need a DNA sample — a piece of hair, some blood, a superfluous organ (appendix, tonsil, etc.). A team of warlocks will verify your residency by listening to the rhythms of your sample (for this reason, a more massive, fluid-heavy organ is preferred). They will then be able to pinpoint the location of your origin. This process may take up to 200 years. Please be patient.

2. Prove your age. A simple birth certificate will do. If you do not have one, you will need to repeat the process with the warlocks. They are a testy bunch.

3. Await delivery of your ballot.

I’m sorry, that was a mistake — we have no way of getting a small piece of paper to you in a timely manner. If only there were some nationwide service that would specialize in that sort of task. No, you need to come get it yourself.

The state will provide you with one (1) yak, equipped with a saddle and three-days provisions.

The yak, who is over 10,000 years old, knows the way to your hometown. Trust the yak. Also the yak can speak. You may converse with

the yak. The yak will take you as far as a woodland glade. You will arrive in this glade midnight of the second night. Follow Polaris for 10 leagues. At this point you will meet an old man, stooped and near death. He will take you the rest of the way in his Chevy.

4. Pick up your ballot at the election office. Don’t take too long though. The old man in the Chevy is out in the parking lot.

He will start honking the horn.

You should get back to the car — he’s double parked and holding up traffic.

5. Return by way of old man/ yak. Can’t vote in your hometown, otherwise what’s the point of even getting an absentee ballot?

6. Vote!

7. Ensure the delivery of your ballot. If you trust the yak, he’ll do it for you.

So now you see why voting sucks. I guess if I’m trying to make one point here, it’s this: don’t vote. Now, if you’ll excuse me, the quest begins.

Contact JORDAN ASCHER at jordan.ascher@yale.edu .

On Atrophy

MCHENRY

GIANG

// KAREN TIAN

// BY JENNIFER GIANG

If you’re not on my Gcal, it’s not going to happen // BY JACKSON MCHENRY

The homes on Barbashela Drive looked full and festive that New Year’s Eve, with Christmas lights still draped on rooftop edges and wreathes still hanging from doors. Inside, families were watching Times Square festivities and making New Year’s resolutions. Some, drunk off the night and the wine, wandered outside to set off stockpiles of fireworks, their smoke and laughter condensing in the holiday air.

All around the neighborhood, the atmosphere was a high buzz of anticipation.

One house was strangely silent.

It might have looked empty if not for the line of cars snaking out of the driveway and down the road.

The TV was turned off, and there were no fireworks, no laughter even. Just a crowd of about 20 surrounding one single figure: grandchildren and children, a husband and a wife.

The wife was lying on a makeshift hospital bed. Her eyes were closed — not peacefully but shut tight, as though she were struggling to suppress some hidden pain. She hadn’t spoken for months and months, and her family couldn’t remember what her voice sounded like. Neither could she. All she had to go by was the voice inside her head, and even then she wasn’t sure. It didn’t give her the same feeling of peace that hearing her voice out loud would have. But this was the least of her worries. Every few minutes or so, her breathing would turn shallow and erratic.

When it became especially bad, a nurse would walk over and adjust the blanket. Each time she did so, the nurse would glance at her watch and wonder what would come first: the time of death or

F R I D AY OCTOBER 19

the New Year.

By the time the sick woman took her last breath, she had spent four months in that bed and almost two years withering away from the disease that would eventually take her life. *** It had started with a fork. One night at dinner, she realized that the fingers in her right hand felt stiff and that the fork she’d been holding felt heavy, so heavy it dropped to the table. She looked around the kitchen to see if anyone had noticed. No one had, so she picked up the fork and began eating with her left hand.

She brushed it off at first — a pulled muscle maybe? — but it happened more and more often.

One time, it was her toothbrush, the next, a knife. The knife hit the ground right by her foot, scratching the tiled floor. She barely noticed. Instead, she pulled at her fingers, begging them to unstiffen so she could cook in peace.

Pretty soon, the woman who had spent sixty years raising ten children and even more grandkids felt the weakness traveling to her legs. The only way she could get around was if she steadied herself with whatever was closest: a counter or a chair or a hand, perhaps. She had never been graceful, even in her youth, but now, she could barely walk without lurching from place to place.

After she toppled over backwards, her family rushed her to the hospital. She knew right before it happened that she was going to fall. Her husband had been helping her up the stairs when, without warning, all feeling disappeared from her legs.

For a second, she thought she was floating. Then, her lower body

gave way. She tried to say something, tried to warn her husband, but it all happened so fast.

Now here she was, at the hospital, a nurse pushing her around in a wheelchair.

When the doctor diagnosed her with ALS in June of 2003, she hadn’t understood at first.

She spoke no English and barely comprehended simple phrases, much less words as technical as “amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”

Instead of listening, she studied the doctor’s face, so smooth and unlined. The man reminded her of her youngest son, who, only a few months before, had gotten married to his high school sweetheart.

She dreamt of the wedding as the doctor continued: “… atrophy of the muscles. It is most commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.” No translation was needed. All it took was one glimpse at the stricken expression on her daughter’s face before the older woman felt the familiar unsteadiness return. She laughed, and then, just as quickly, let out something between a shriek and a sob. The laugh had escaped her accidentally, and the doctor — it hurt her to look at him, he looked so much like her son — stared at her in surprise.

“So this is what it feels like to go crazy,” she thought to herself.

If the disease didn’t take hold of her first, she wondered how long it would take for the madness to set in. “Soon,” she thought. “So soon.” It was clear from the way the doctor kept looking at her with pity.

Contact JENNIFER GIANG at jennifer.giang@yale.edu .

You, yes you! I haven’t seen you in ages. At least since freshman year, when we got lost together on the way to our first lecture, or was it during Camp Yale? (Wait, were you my suitemate?) Anyway, those were good times.

Where have you been? What’s the deal with that? We should get a meal sometime and catch up.

On Mondays, I’m near Silliman, we could meet up around 12:30 p.m. and just stand in line for a while. Or, we could go across the street and grab something from Slifka, though that might be hard; I was banned from there after downing a third bottle of red wine at Shabbat dinner. Wait, I know, let’s go to TD! I’m kidding of course, like that would happen.

But still, I love hanging out with you — at least I think I do. Were you the one who stole the chalk from our English professor in seminar? That was hilarious. Wait, that wasn’t you? I swear it was. No, you’re right, that was James. (I love James! I should really check up on James.)

BUT STILL, I LOVE HANGING OUT WITH YOU – AT LEAST I THINK I DO. But really, we should grab a meal sometime.

Dinner? I’m free every other Thursday night, except the next three when I’m having rush meals for my chemistry study group. Next Monday, I’m free between 5:45 p.m. and 6:15 p.m., but only to eat in Morse and Stiles. Oh, but you couldn’t get in, could you? Or I could make Wednesdays work for lunch, but only if we sit at the Chinese Table and recite the dialogues I prepped to impress my professor.

Wait, didn’t you spend your summer in China? This is perfect! Oh, you were where?

Sorry, Instagrammed Facebook photos of food look the same no matter the country. Could you pretend to speak Chinese? I really want to

FURNITURE STUDY TOUR

Contact JACKSON MCHENRY at jackson.mchenry@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Yale University Art Gallery // 12 p.m.

Furniture can be really exciting, guys!

In anticipation of the crowds likely to overwhelm this event, the YUAG specifies that “space is limited.” Get there early and you might make the cut!

get the Light Fellowship. Okay, now, don’t be that critical.

We still have to find a time to grab a meal then! If you’re willing to climb up Science Hill, we can use both our swipes to split half a flatbread at the KBT Café for lunch on Tuesday. You could come to the farm next Friday for pizza with my FOOT group (though one of us just broke up with her boyfriend and gave up gluten, so that will be a little glum).

Or, if that doesn’t work, let’s get GHeav at 2:00 a.m. next Saturday, after I get back from Toad’s with my former FroCo group.

Oh, I forgot that you dated one of us. That would be awkward. You sure you couldn’t make it work? Really, that bad? And it started at Toad’s! I guess that relationship was doomed from the start. No offense.

Wednesday? No, I can’t do Wednesday. I have three midterms on Wednesday. I can’t do Tuesday night either — I’ll be studying then. Thursday doesn’t work either, I’ll just be complaining about Tuesday and Wednesday.

You know what, let’s invite Jerry too! You know Jerry, right? Don’t you do a cappella together? You don’t sing? I thought you sang.

You always seemed like the singing type. I can’t describe it, like, you always seemed like you were humming something under your breath or you were always coming back from “tour” (whatever that means). That’s not you, really? Are you sure?

Whatever, we should get a meal sometime so you can tell me what you do. You must do something. Everybody does something. If you don’t sing, then you dance, or do improv, or write for something. Did you do DS? Perspectives? Are you one of those people who love to hiss at even the least charged statements at YPU debates? Who are you?

Well, whoever you are, you’re making it hard for me to schedule you. I really do want to get to know you — why are you never free? You know what, I’ll put a reminder on my Gcal. I’ll email you, I’ll make it happen. I promise.

Going red

It wouldn’t hurt you to be Republican once in a while. Walking in someone else’s shoes yada yada yada.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B3

WEEKEND COVER

ALMOND EYE CANDY // BY LARISSA PHAM

I

have never been more Asian than I am when here at Yale. Or maybe I should say, the fact that I’m Asian has never been so remarked-upon as it has been here — particularly in the context of my sex life.

But this story doesn’t really begin with me.

“There’s a long history of exoticism: of seeing Asian women as eroticized, seeing them as passive and compliant.”

That’s the view of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies professor Inderpal Grewal, who explained her understanding of historicallyentrenched discrimination to me over the phone last week. I was sitting cross-legged on a mattress on the floor of my attic apartment as she spoke to me over the phone about

cussing sex and sexual attraction, we can certainly examine the language we use.

Take a seemingly innocuous screw date request. Some months ago I was helping someone figure out a date for his friend’s screw.

“Well, does he have a type?”

“Yeah — he said he wanted an Asian, one who would put out. He’s got yellow fever.”

So, an Asian girl. Any one would do. Just within this brief exchange, the identities of Asian women across campus were effectively compressed and confined into a one-dimensional exoticized and eroticized stereotype.

The fact is that being Asian, looking the way I do, I can’t escape this weird racist fantasy that seems to trail Asian girls. We’re so mysterious. We’re either naively asexual or exotic, sensual and crazy in bed. Actually, I’ll let

TO BE AN ASIAN WOMAN MEANS TO DEAL WITH THE FULL SCOPE OF PERSONAS AND FANTASIES IMPOSED UPON YOU. depictions of Asian sexuality in pop culture. We were almost too casual.

Alarmingly casual. And though warm, her tone was frank as she continued: we both understand quite well the ongoing effects of this myth.

“Those histories are important because they are a way of understanding images that become very sedimented in our societies, in our ways of thinking,” Grewal said.

Grewal is on to something the rest of Yale isn’t. For the past few years, campus has been astir with largely student-driven efforts to improve attitudes around sex. This quasimovement has included workshops on consent and events like Sex Week, incorporating discourse on topics from body image to BDSM 101. These events are widespread and fairly widely attended: Yale talks about sex.

Yet there is one aspect of sex that is rarely, if ever brought up in public, campus-wide dialogue — race.

Socially constructed racial stereotypes play a huge role in sexual dynamics in ways that affect everyone, perceived or not. And though we can’t really separate race from dis-

F R I D AY OCTOBER 19

you in on a secret: we are all and none of these things, and, what’s more, we’re all radically different. But such are the stereotypes that come with being an Asian girl. And people have spent a long time seeing us this way.

DEAR MADAMA BUTTERFLY, I AM SICK OF THIS

“Madama Butterfly,” a late 19th century book and opera, is one of the classic narratives of Asian eroticism.

Its enduring success is just one example of the ways in which the eroticism of Asian women has been historicized and accepted in pop culture.

In the tale, Butterfly, the lover of all-American navy man Lieutenant Pinkerton, commits suicide after waiting years for her man’s return from the sea. She is ultimately revealed to have been nothing more than a convenience for Pinkerton, a white man who sought a Japanese geisha wife. She lived and died a sexual object.

In her senior thesis, “Madama Butterfly Birthed a Monster,” Stanford alumna Jocelyn Jiao discussed the coded inferiority and explicit sexual

DREAMING UP CLASSICS: PETRARCH’S ‘AFRICA’ AND BEYOND 401 Phelps Hall // 12 P.M.

Take a break from your harried modern life to contemplate classicists’ search for origins and causation at this seminar by doctoral candidate Emily Schurr, part of the Classics Department’s 2012-’13 Departmental Colloquium.

purpose of this classic female Asian character. Asian women like Butterfly “cannot even be respectable wives; they must embody the lure of the strange, the obscene,” Jiao writes.

“The patronizing roles they play do not give them any measure of independence or intelligence,” she continues.

That is, Asian women, as represented in the media, all too often occupy the role of the exotic, erotic “other.” And while Butterfly’s death is tragic and makes her a martyr, it doesn’t detract from the hard truth that her role in the story is very much that of exotic, kittenish, sexual naïf.

While our images of Asian women have inevitably shifted since that era, some aspects of those old images do still live on, perpetuated in large part due to Madama Butterfly’s success and then helped along by stereotypes about Asian women propagated in the U.S. after the wars in Korea and Vietnam.

The 1960s, for instance, gave us the cinematic character of Suzie Wong, the prostitute with a heart of gold.

While the film itself was named for Wong, the character still wound up inferior to her white lover.

“The old forms don’t disappear — they continue on, albeit in different ways,” Grewal told me.

More contemporary evidence for Grewal’s point may be found in the portrayals of Asian women in the movie “The Social Network,” depictions that Grewal said she considers derogatory and ridiculous, serving neither to further the plot nor provide any real value for the movie.

“The women are just eye candy. It’s wacky!” she exclaimed, referencing the studious Asian Harvard girls who, despite other stereotypes surrounding Asians at university, were portrayed as exotic and erotic women.

And yet, because these images have drawn and will draw audiences, Asian women continue to be depicted this way in the media. These fictional depictions then naturally influence the way society at large thinks about actual, individual people.

“Sexuality is a racialized process, and racialization is a sexualized process,” writes film scholar Celine Parreñas Shimizu, a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, in a Yale Journal of Law and Feminism piece entitled “Queens of Anal, Double, Triple, and the Gang Bang: Producing Asian/American Feminism in Pornography.”

To put that more simply: we can’t extricate race from sex, and we can’t extricate sex from race. To be an Asian woman means to deal with the full scope of personas and fantasies imposed upon you. To be an Asian

woman means to see the effects of this long history, and to see these images recycled over and over and over again.

Here’s a quick experiment that can be run from your very own computer.

Open up Google Image search. Turn off Safe Search. Now run four terms, in order: American. European. African. And Asian.

For the first three searches you get flags, maps, maybe some scenery or landmarks, maybe some other national paraphernalia. And for Asian? You get hardcore porn. And not even one flag. If you don’t believe me, try it for yourself.

But all of this is not to oversimplify what happens in the real world, in the world of flesh and blood. Yale’s world.

It’s a lot more complicated.

NEITHER TABLE NOR CHAIR NOR SEX TOY

First, a quick definition of objectification, as the author sees it: to cause someone to lose agency in any situation or relationship. Objectification doesn’t just mean seeing someone as a table or chair — it’s more nuanced.

It’s taking away the agency of that individual and her ability to control how she’s perceived and treated and acted upon. It becomes objectification when someone doesn’t have a say in what’s happening anymore and when someone’s exoticized — or eroticized — without consent.

Jane Hu ’09 told me in an email that she believes the Yale community is capable of objectifying Asian women, and underappreciating the intersection between race and sex, because many of its members are clouded by their own racial and socio-economic privilege.

“I think the weirdness about race and gender on campus is inextricably tied to the amount of privilege most students have experienced in their lives, and, more importantly, the explicit denial that they have this privilege,” Hu wrote, identifying herself as an Asian woman who has experienced her share of Asian jokes and being called “exotic” during her time at Yale.

Hu speaks to a culture of Yale which has allowed and encouraged us to think how we want, act how we want, make arguments how we want.

But the flip side of this openness is the creation of a space in which any discourse, even that which may actively offend other members of the community, becomes seen as acceptable.

“It always seemed depressingly benign,” Hu said, thinking back to when she would hear what she defines, simply, as “Asian jokes.” “I felt like a lot of these people had simply never had to deal with Asians before, and hadn’t stopped to think of

me as a person, not just an idea.”

The truth is, a lot of people here haven’t dealt with Asians before, at least not in a context where they form one-fifth of the population. Many come from very white, or non-white, non-Asian places. And, according to Asian students at Yale, when their peers do deal with Asians, they often choose one of two options: hypersexualization or asexualization. Is this just reaching for familiar concepts?

Maybe. But even for students who are normally conscientious about language regarding race, Asian jokes somehow frequently seem to make it past the filter. “[The jokes] go beyond jokes about ‘yellow fever,’ which are offensive enough,” Angie Shih ’14 wrote to me in an e-mail. “I’ve heard, countless times, women be reduced to their ethnicity, and had it done to me as well — sometimes even by friends of mine, who are otherwise very culturally sensitive.”

We all, to some extent, fit stereotypes. That still doesn’t make it right to trivialize someone’s interests or behavior by claiming that they represent a set of preconceived notions.

“It’s not okay if people are coming to certain conclusions by looking at me, even if it’s not serious,” Meghan Uno ’13 said. “And whether that’s because I’m an Asian girl, or how I carry myself, it’s not a full representation of who I am.”

But it’s hard for everyone to admit they might be making these kinds of judgments. We are taught to make decisions for ourselves, to act convincingly and to speak persuasively.

We don’t want to think cultural and historical tropes are helping make our decisions for us. We often think we’re too smart and progressive for that.

“The denial of privilege is what makes it hard to talk to people about it,” Hu wrote. “Which is in turn why it keeps happening around campus: people don’t realize the privilege they have, and take for granted that they and everyone around them is ‘liberal’ and ‘socially aware.’ So if I tried to have a real discussion about it, or to tell someone that what they said hurt my feelings, people didn’t take it seriously... [or said] it was just a joke.”

Heidi Guzman ’14, a Yalie of Dominican heritage, said she believes that another part of the privilege that prevents honest conversation about latent racial discrimination is the fact that some people gain from a system which defines them as more attractive simply because they are white.

There’s both qualitative and quantitative evidence for Guzman’s conclusions. Davis Nguyen ’15 spoke to SEE BUTTERFLY PAGE B8

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Rain and snow-friendly shoes

Bye-bye, blue suede besties. We’ll miss you.

PAGE B4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND THEATER

“SPRING AWAKENING” SHINES – INTERMITTENTLY // BY YUVAL BEN-DAVID

There’s a number in “Spring Awakening” called “Totally Fucked,” and though this production isn’t totally fucked — no, not totally — it bears some resemblance to the song’s lyrics, which go, “Blah blah blah blah.” Don’t get me wrong; this is a thrilling musical.

It’s also just one damn thing after another. Instead of “The Vagina Monologues,” we get a “The Penis and Vagina Monologues” with the bonus of a few racy dialogues, if you catch my drift.

In “Spring Awakening,” 19th century German high school students become poster children of a sexual revolution they predate by a near century. This isn’t unreasonable, considering the rock musical is based on Frank Wedekind’s forwardthinking 1891 play. When Duncan Sheikh and Steven Sater updated Wedekind in 2006, they squeezed the plot to make room for the musical numbers, and ended up with a cautionary tale of sexual benightedness — something a sex ed class skit could do justice to.

In the Black Forest of Germany the mind is another black forest; only blond crotches light

up this universe.

But, of course, the musical didn’t win eight Tony awards just because audiences were getting off to characters getting off. There’s real pathos in the standstill traffic of musical numbers. The music doesn’t steal the show, it hogs it — and partially redeems it. Even if the lyrics sound like promotional talking points for a group called Adolescents United, each note here is a palimpsest, subtly turning every trauma into an archaeological dig of the psyche. And traumas abound: The musical’s a real smorgasbord of adolescent sorrows. Minor characters seem to exist as token sufferers, flitting on stage for a brief spotlight of suicide, or closeted homosexuality or sexual abuse. At this weekend’s Off-Broadway Theater production, some actors command more than their characters allow for: When Martha and Ilse come out from the ensemble’s periphery to sing of their sexual abuse, they refocus the show on themselves.

It’s as if Keren Abreu ’15 and Anna Miller ’14, with their clean, nymph-like voices, are

given leeway to play the part too well.

Director Samantha Pillsbury ’15 cleverly tries to capitalize on the show’s musical virtues, but that makes for a production whose individual scenes are stronger than the sum of the parts. When, in another casual aside in the plot, the show’s token gay characters confess their mutual affections, Truett David ’16 and Andrew Bezek ’13 mix naiveté and cautious seductiveness to conjure up a whole history of furtive glances. But where does this fit into the larger picture?

It doesn’t.

Characters, too, go rogue, maybe because each one shaves off the pop from their performances: Lead Alyssa Miller ’16 sings Wendla’s role with singer-songwriter calm and superstar James Dieffenbach ’13 endows her paramour Melchior with a coltish unBieberness no pop star would have the balls to pull off.

Occasional flourishes of gospel-soul make for silly ornaments. No one belts (thank God), but Chris Camp ’16, playing badass Moritz, is the only one loose enough to rock.

Stubborn, sniveling, sarcastic, suave, he’s a nuclear arsenal of spirit, a jerky Elvis Pelvis who totally owns “angst,” a German word after all. So his suicide comes as a total non sequitur. Sure, he flunked out of school, but wasn’t he just bitter about that? Even a voice like Camp’s can only convey so much; the plot gives him little to work with. As does this production’s ensemble, whose honeyed harmonies don’t burden themselves with the full spite of the lyrics. Shying from melodrama, the ensemble often ends up avoiding drama altogether. Individual characters get little propulsion from the cast.

Tonal indecisiveness is one consequence of the ensemble’s wise but effortful refusal to flash too much emotion.

Another is that the production divides itself in facile, predictable ways — boys versus girls, adolescents versus adults — pitting them against and towards each other in a reminder that “Spring Awakening” is a simple, didactic and entirely masturbatory play.

“A shadow passed, a shadow passed,” is how the ensemble

// TORY BURNSIDE-CLAPP

Innovative lighting and elaborate set design give the cast of “Spring Awakening” an exciting stage to work on but the show’s script cramps their style.

grieves Moritz. The characters in this play are shadows; the cast, crew and designers are most definitely not — this is one of the most talented teams at Yale. Their gestalt, alas, has much spring in its step, but goes nowhere.

Contact YUVAL BEN-DAVID at yuval.ben-david@yale.edu .

Chekhov’s contradictions brought to life in “The Seagull” // BY LARA PANAH-IZADI Anton Chekhov subtitled his play “The Seagull:” “a comedy in four acts.” “The Seagull,” a comedy? That’s strange, considering the second line of the play is “I’m in mourning for my life.”

But as the director of this undergraduate production Adela Jaffe ’13 reminds us: “When you come to the theater, you are allowed to laugh at

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

The current undergraduate staging of “The Seagull” largely stays true to Chekhov’s period, which strengthens its message and power.

F R I D AY OCTOBER 19

ARTIST TALK WITH PHOTOGRAPHER TOD PAPAGORGE Yale University Art Gallery // 2 P.M.

More Robert Adams commentary, this time from the Walker Evans Professor of Photography at the School of Art, who’s been in the field for over four decades. Go enlighten yourself!

any moment.” Chekhov’s realistic depiction of the frailty of human nature makes the comedic aspect in “The Seagull” palpable. The clear failure of all the relationships in the play is almost excessive: Masha (Alina Aksiyote ’16), the estate manager’s daughter, is in love with young playwright Treplev (Zach Bell ’14), who is in love with

actress Nina (Jessica Miller ’15), who ends up falling in love with the famous author Trigorin (Peter Lewis ’13). And, not surprisingly, none of them end up together.

Jaffe realized while putting up the show that there are many moments that aren’t “necessarily funny but end up being so.”

And that, in and of itself, justifies Chekhov’s original subtitle — the hilarious performances of Juliana Canfield ’14 as the proud and needy performer Arkadina, and Eric Sirakian ’15 as the ignored schoolteacher Medvedenko are also a helpful addition.

What makes “The Seagull” unique in the Chekhov repertoire is that it’s not simply a depiction of life in a country house estate in Russia. As the Yale production begins, its characters are about to witness Treplev’s own play. In general, when an author like Chekhov incorporates a “mise en abyme” in his work — the mirroring effect of having a work of art within a work of art — he makes a statement about the medium he is using.

In this play, Chekhov presents the dichotomy between realism and a new and abstract form of art, symbolism. Treplev, a young and extremely sensitive character, claims in Act I that an artist should depict life “not the way it is, or the way it should be but the way we see it in our dreams.”

While we can assume by his body of work that Chekhov was a realistic author, his main character’s passionate belief in new

forms of art adequately proves that Chekhov found the symbolist aesthetics fascinating. “The Seagull” is not just about the struggles of artists; it’s about the nature of art itself. Even if Chekhov gives no clear answers, his characters embody his own contradictions.

The current production has constructed a simple yet beautiful stage. Set designer Griffin Collier ’13 ornamented the Afro-American Cultural Center with large white drapes. Coupled with the lighting, this set creates a series of interesting shadowing effects that are relevant to the material/ethereal divide presented in the play.

The subtle attire of Nina, who is garbed in the tones of a seagull, provides a suitable interpretation to the play’s emblematic title, while enhancing Miller’s effective and natural performance. Sound designer Josh Stein ’13 nicely incorporated Mikhael Glinka and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s piano pieces, compositions that could have easily been played in Chekhov’s time.

While the production had a confusing start, everything took shape after the intermission. By the end, the choices of the production made sense, capturing the play’s complex essence.

With its astute handling of Chekhov’s harsh subject matter, this production brings the audience a little closer to his own perception of art.

Contact LARA PANAH-IZADI at lara.panah-izadi@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: “An Account of Sexual Assault at Amherst College”

A harrowing read but one that is, in the words of many of our Facebook friends, “so, so important.”

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B5

WEEKEND ARCHIVE

BETWEEN MODES OF MEMORY // BY AVA KOFMAN

Time is not often on the side of remembrance. Fighting against temptation towards silence, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies has been central in pioneering the processes of recording, researching, theorizing and preserving audiovisual testimonial materials. This year marks the archive’s 30th anniversary at Yale. The collection is home to 4,500 testimonies that have been recorded across the globe, from Kansas City to Paris. The conference “Achievements and Challenges: 1982– 2012” this Sunday, Oct. 21, will illustrate students’ and scholars’ innovative uses of the testimonials in Yale’s classrooms and beyond. “I wanted people to see how the testimonies are used in so many diverse ways just at this university,” said Joanne Rudoff, archivist for the Fortunoff collection. The conference will also feature presentations by distinguished visiting scholars such as Christopher Browning and Lawrence Langer.

Engagement with the testimonials has gone far beyond traditional methodological approaches. The new hermeneutics invented by viewers, scholars and archivists have been necessitated by the nature of both the video format and their traumatic, sometimes unspeakable, content.

“It was clear from the start that video made such a difference from audio,” recalled Geoffrey Hartman, one of the archive’s four co-founders. “The [original founders] were astonished by the force of speech and general impact of video,” he said.

Soon after, they started working towards an organization that would sponsor further visual

that the founders decided not to program topics or direct the course of interviews. They sought to record narratives that would be of use both for the news of that day and the histories of tomorrow.

Hartman said that the archive’s quick growth was unexpected. No one “was doing this systematically” at the time in America — “None of us knew there was a vacuum there.” What was more surprising, he said, was that they also encountered a “totally open field” in need of more archival documentation in Europe.

Today, the collection’s use and number of visitors has been on the rise due to awareness of the archive’s existence. This task was achieved, in no small part, by Rudoff’s outreach efforts.

Each spring, Rudoff combs the course catalog for classes that might be interested in using the archive’s materials as resources.

She then sends a personal email to the professor of the class. Jessica Helfand, professor of art, incorporated the testimonials into the syllabus for her freshman seminar, where students created works of multimedia art after watching testimonies. Many of their works are on display at the Sterling Memorial Library exhibit accompanying the conference. *** When watching testimonial video, the “distance of documentation” dissolves. The notion that “this all happened in the past” fades as the immediacy of the image breaks down the traditional defenses of the passive, disinterested viewer. “Numbers don’t tell you what happened.

THE ARCHIVE AND SIMILAR VIDEO PROJECTS GRANT VIEWERS ACCESS TO A “TESTIMONY OF A THINKING AND FEELING PERSON, RATHER THAN OF A VICTIM.” recordings. Once a sizeable grant had been secured, the archive was officially founded in November 1982.

The testimonials restore the humanity that the Nazi footage so completely denies. The interview process stresses that those who record their testimonials are “agents, not patients,” said Hartman, a Sterling Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature. The archive and similar video projects grant viewers access to a “testimony of a thinking and feeling person, rather than of a victim.”

There was a sense back in 1978 among survivors that the movie “Holocaust” released that year had not told their story. They wanted it told realistically and not the way TV was doing at the time, Hartman explained. Without funding but unable to withstand silence, some of the founders went into an empty room in 1979, brought a cameraman along, and started videotaping stories in New Haven.

The archive has since gone on to establish many of the recording standards for other similar projects. Unlike TV journalism, the archive’s interviews focus on careful and sustained listening.

This process and its subsequent viewing require a longer attention span. So too does the course of history. It is for this reason

It’s important to continue to say 6 million but it also becomes abstract,” Hartman said. “Seeing these survivors on television is a very different experience from reading.” This difference requires a certain amount of preparing the audience: “You don’t want to impose a barrier but you cannot pretend that these are materials that are ready to be presented unmediated. What is on the screen cannot simply be accepted without question.”

By all accounts, mediating interaction with the materials is a tricky tension. Fields of study promise knowledge to those that pursue them, and yet the study of Holocaust testimonials challenges the practices of scholarship and the limits of representa-

tion. How can scholars pursue the intelligibility of an event that is, by its nature, unintelligible?

It is this question, among others, that Hartman raises in his 1996 book of essays “The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust.” He writes that there is, historically speaking, an after-Auschwitz, but there is not yet a beyond-Auschwitz.

The “anxiety to settle to secure meaning” through extensive historiography cannot — and should not — achieve “closure.” Studying cannot replace the essential contradictions inherent to acts of remembrance and mediation.

At the same time, the alternative to this drive for closure doesn’t need to be an incomprehensible abyss. Or worse, silence.

Rather, Hartman suggests possibilities for positive forms of representation that connect history to memory: “We become, in Maurice Blanchot’s words, ‘guardians of an absent meaning.’”

The video format is one way of expanding the avenues of expression available to survivors. Hartman situates the video testimonial between documentary and oral history, general history and personal trauma. The testimonial format is not always the strictest recorder of facts, he writes, but is often the most sensitive register of their psychological and emotional effects.

To help cue students into these new ways of seeing, Rudoff often gives seminars and workshops to classes using the materials. “Tapes are often deeper and richer, but you have to know how to read them. How to read for posture, body language, tone of voice,” she explained. “The transcript often can do great injustice. Words like ‘10-second silence’ and ‘30-second silence’ are so lame compared to watching a person decide whether to speak, or chew words, or just resting because they can’t go on at the moment and need to take a break.

If you can’t see those silences, you can’t read them.” She recalled a recent interview with a man who was often so physically active — “standing and sitting down, acting things out” — that it seemed

altogether.

t h e mike on his lapel would fall off

*** Ironically, the instruments of preservation and dissemination themselves are one of the archive’s biggest threats to preserving public memory. The archivists must not only fight against denials, but also against the decay and disuse of their videotapes and playback machines.

Four flights down from the archive’s main offices, in a chilled basement room in Sterling Memorial Library, Frank Clifford, the Video Archive Project Manager, has been working for over two years to prevent the disappearance of memory. Along with the support of the archive staff and Yale ITS, Clifford makes sure that the tapes will be available not only for the 30th anniversary but for the 40th and 100th.

The entire forward digital migration is expected to be completed by 2014. Even then, the need for technological, in addition to cultural, vigilance will remain.

“When people think digital, they think forever. But digital is not forever,” Rudoff said. Clifford added that some of the playback and cleaning machines were no longer being made, and neither were their replacement parts.

Clifford sits in front of three monitors, day in and out, making sure that not a single bite of information is uncopied, unpreserved, unknown. Around his chair play videos of testimonials in the process of being transferred, or readied for transfer, by the machines.

“Emotionally, it can be overwhelming at times,” he said of his eight-hour days surrounded by videos. “But it’s also an honor to be the one preserving memories and words.”

Technologically, the process — to anyone who hasn’t been a video engineer for 30 years — seems equally overwhelming.

Just as new techniques of seeing have been invented in response to the testimonials throughout the years, so too has new technology.

The IT Department at Yale built much of the testing and feedback software themselves.

A series of graphs and charts

displaying the video’s audio, speed and color sit in tall stacks beside and on his desk; elsewhere on campus, computers doublecheck this information to ensure quality control. In short, each tape goes through layers and layers of testing to prevent any signs of corruption. Copies of the tapes are stored in geographically separate locations, and copies of these copies are made. As of now, 5435

or university and apply to use the testimony for up to six months. Their video will be streaming, not downloadable, and it will be marked with a timecoded finding aid, to help them locate specific sections.

Hartman emphasizes that preservation is important in both the physical sense and also with respect to “keeping memory and all the discussion that goes with it alive.” In his essay about the Yale Testimony project, ”Learn-

“WORDS LIKE ‘10 SECOND SILENCE’ AND ‘THIRTY SECOND SILENCE’ ARE SO LAME COMPARED TO WATCHING A PERSON DECIDE WHETHER TO SPEAK, OR CHEW WORDS, OR JUST RESTING BECAUSE THEY CAN’T GO ON AT THE MOMENT AND NEED TO TAKE A BREAK.”

hours of footage, or 2200 tapes out of the 6220 total, have been restored.

The end goal of this complex migration process is not only to preserve, but also to provide better access. More than 50 percent of current guests to the archive are visiting scholars. Universities can acquire the tapes through a loan process, and at a cost. But once the digitization is complete, users anywhere around the world will be able to log in through their partnering research institution

ing from Survivors”, Hartman discusses the universal aspects in the narratives of the “heterogeneous chorus of voices.” Each testimony, while original and deeply personal, also emphasizes the larger structure of injustice itself. An injustice that is both specific and completely impersonal, individual and “disastrously” alike.

Contact AVA KOFMAN at ava.kofman@yale.edu .

// VICTOR KANG

Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.

F R I D AY OCTOBER 19

PRETTY IN PINK: 4TH ANNUAL BREAST CANCER AWARENESS FASHION SHOW

Morse College Dining Hall // 8:30 P.M. It’s for a great cause, it highlights exciting original designs and it features WEEKEND blogger Aisha Matthews ’13 — what more could a Yalie need?

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: “I Knew You Were Trouble” – Taylor Swift

Taytay does quasi-dubstep and has feelings. We still aren’t done swooning.

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND POLITICOS

Remember, remember the 6th of November

LEAD, DAMN IT! // BY AUSTIN SCHAEFER

// BY WEEKEND

T

o say that the Yale campus is full of pundits-to-be and opinionated talking heads would be an understatement.

You’ve got your gung-ho Democrats rooting for 4 more years of Obama and his cute dog Bo and then your small but vibrant community of Republicans just yearning to see them leave the White House. WEEKEND recruited six of these young bright minds to take a look at the current election season – from healthcare reform to binders full of women, the discussion in these two pages has cast a wide net. We welcome you to our intimate political forum!

GUNS: A FAMILYAFFAIR

BINDING WORDS

// BY ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER

The 2012 elections have been a distressing indictment of the sorry state of American politics. The vitriol spewed from each campaign and its surrogates might cause one to question the humanity of those in Washington. The candidates’ own statements are full of pandering, demagoguery and occasionally outright lies. What has been utterly lacking thus far is leadership.

Obama’s leadership was essentially unproven when he took office. His voting record during his brief tenure in the Senate showed him to be a weak junior senator who consistently voted along party lines. And I’ll note, when Barack Obama assumed the highest office in the country, Sarah Palin had more executive experience than he did.

His first term as president has been pathetic at worst and underwhelming

at best. His foreign policy began with an apology tour around the Arab world.

He then proceeded to abandon strategic allies that had been loyal to the U.S. since the Cold War in favor of an uprising that elected a fundamentalist. He passed a widely unpopular health care bill while he had massive Democratic majorities in Congress, and has been unable to accomplish much since he lost those majorities.

He simply has not led.

I know that Mitt Romney’s policies are better suited to repairing America’s battered and neglected economy, re-establishing its preeminence on the world stage, and ensuring that it is safe from foreign threats. And I know that Romney the businessman is an exceedingly capable administrator who, as someone who started his own business over 25 years ago, understands the value of boldness

// BY YANAN WANG “Are you armed right now? You’re from a broken home.”

That was the text a childhood friend of mine received from her single mother during Tuesday’s presidential debate just moments after Mitt Romney set forth his novel solution to pandemic gun violence in this country: marriage and the two-parent family.

The moral indignation evident in the text’s sarcasm speaks to the logic that is Romney’s stock-in-trade. In disbelief, we wonder how the candidate can at once be so wrong and so offensive. But then we recall that such double whammies — statements both logically incoherent and morally reprehensible — have become as characteristic of the former governor as evasions, inconsistencies and outright falsehoods. It is impossible to forget his dismissal of 47 percent of Americans as “victims” who refuse to “take personal responsibility” for their lives. But this time he knew the country was watching.

“Gosh, to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone — that’s a great idea,” he said in response to a question about how to limit the availability of assault weapons in order to prevent gun violence.

Romney chose to rhapsodize about the virtues of marriage instead of explaining how to keep AK-47s out of the hands of criminals: “We need moms and dads, helping to raise kids. Wherever possible the benefit of having two parents in the home… We can make changes in the way our culture works to help bring people away from violence and give them opportunity and bring them in the American system.”

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. While President Obama endorsed an assault weapons ban, Mr. Romney invoked the pathology of the female-headed household, unwittingly echoing the infamous 1965 Moynihan Report, which attributed poverty and violence in the nation’s urban ghettos to the “tangle of pathology” created by the “female family head” and “children in broken homes.”

Extolling the heteronormative family as the panacea for cultural decay, Mr. Romney dismissed the 11.6 million Americans who are single parents (as of 2009) as outside “the American system.” Meanwhile, he proposed no method for keeping a semi-automatic away from someone like James Holmes, the suspected perpetrator of the Aurora mass shootings, whose mother and father live together.

If the former governor still keeps binders full of women, he is likely to find that they contain many single mothers.

And they — like the rest of us — may well be wondering if the candidate meant what he said: get hitched lest your children take up guns.

The problem here is not simply semantics in the heat of a debate but the blunt expressions of a man morally unequipped to lead the country.

When Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, teenage Mitt Romney had already made his debut in politics. As a 16-year-old volunteer for the successful Michigan gubernatorial campaign of his father, George W. Romney, Romney was fascinated by government work and soon made the Michigan State Capitol his second home. As Friedan and her second-wave compatriots took up arms against the oppressive social expectations of their time, Romney was busy being educated at prep schools and elite universities, working for investment firms and building the network that

would help him co-found one of the largest financial services companies in America. So we can understand, I suppose, why Romney might not have had time to pay attention when de Beauvoir cried foul on the sex hierarchy, and when Carol Hanisch articulated what women had already been feeling — that the personal is political.

For Mitt Romney, corporations are personal, and just about everything else is political. And women?

We barely fit within the frame of his concerns, so cumbersome and irrelevant and unwieldy are we that we must be jammed between two flat pieces of cardboard and clasped together by three steel rings. During his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, 73.3% of Romney’s senior administrative staff was comprised of men. During the 1980s and ’90s, when Romney served as CEO for Bain Capital, he had no female partners. These numbers are real problems, but Romney is more worried about finding the most efficient, high-grade three-hole puncher that the market has to offer.

As commenter “Sabriel” wrote on the Amazon customer review page for an “Avery Durable View Binder” that has now joined the Internet’s growing pile of Mitt Romney memes, “Maybe it’s just my women, but they don’t seem to want to fit into the space I’ve designated for them in this binder. They keep sticking out over the edges, even getting away in some cases. I thought using clear, glass-ceiling page protectors would help, but it doesn’t seem to slow them down anymore.”

Romney can keep his pristine page protectors, and I’ll save my vote for the candidate who hasn’t tried to make me just another file in his portfolio.

Contact AUSTIN SCHAEFER at james.schaefer@yale.edu .

// BY ELIZABETH GRAY HENRY When I think about PBS, I don’t envision Mitt Romney, clad in camouflage, out hunting for Big Bird, rifle in hand, stalking a big yellow target. Instead, I see him as freeing Big Bird from the cage of dependency on taxpayer bailouts and subsidies.

Jim Henson (a native of my home state of Mississippi) created both Sesame Street and the Muppets. Look at the lives the two have led: Sesame Street and Big Bird have gotten rich through crony capitalism and cushy government contracts, while the Muppets and Kermit the Frog are successfully competing in the free market.

If Kermit can stand on his two webbed feet, why must Big Bird lean on the government?

In fact, Big Bird need not lean on the government at all!

Sesame Workshop made almost $50 million last year from licensing fees for the sale of toys like “Tickle Me Elmo.”

The actors who voice the characters on Sesame Street make more than $300,000 a year.

Sesame Street is a multi-million dollar business with executives well-entrenched in the 1%. Do they really need government handouts financed by middle-class taxpayers and money borrowed from China?

Romney was making the important point that, with a mountain of debt blocking America’s path to a more prosperous future, we must have a serious discussion about eliminating all non-essential government expenditures.

Instead of joining in that discussion, Obama launched silly attacks against Romney, showing that the president is desperate to talk about anything but the big issues facing our country.

The stubborn facts are that, since Obama took office, the national debt has soared by more than $5 trillion to an unsustainable $16 trillion and is still rising. The inconvenient truth is that our generation will have to pay off the reckless debt that Obama has run up. Faced with those facts, the bottom line is simply this: Is it worth borrowing money from China to give corporate welfare to Big Bird and his fat cat friends?

Romney says no, and I agree with him because Big Bird, big though he may be — is not too big to fail.

Contact ELIZABETH GRAY HENRY at elizabeth.henry@yale.edu .

ROOTING RED // BY EMILY KLOPFER He appeared out of nowhere, the light grey of his “Yale Students for Obama” shirt gleaming in the bright autumn sun.

“Would you like to register to vote in Connecticut?” he asked. His voice seemed to have an ethereal thrum.

“I’m voting Republican in Alaska,” I said. The mirage broke.

“Then you should probably stay registered in your own state,” he said scathingly. With a huff he turned on his heel and tramped back to the Yale College Democrats table. I had survived my first Dems assault and I came out on the right side.

Slights against my party have been dogging me since I returned to campus this year, when I promptly pasted my Romney stickers on my wall, much to the chagrin of my Democratic roommate. I knew this election year at Yale would be tough, especially when my TA for microeconomics last semester used every section as a chance to spread anti-Republican messages in his examples.

I will admit, sometimes these slurs sting. It’s tough being in a minority and realizing that nearly everyone is against you, when you notice antiRomney allusions in English section or when you hear derogatory remarks against an inflatable elephant (well, the Democratic mascot is an ass). But I simply hold my head high. I am a Republican, and I could not be more proud.

My dad owns a local brewpub in Anchorage. Gov. Romney has spent considerable time in the private sector and understands that these small businesses are the backbone of our society. His tax initiatives will reduce marginal rates to increase hiring and wages. He will make it easier for my dad to employ upwards of 100 people and provide them with jobs they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

So I will continue to eagerly watch the debates and root for the red, and I will be gripping the arms of my seat on Nov. 6 as my voice grows raw from cheering for Mitt Romney, because I believe in America. All hail the Grand Old Party!

ANYTHING BUT A PLAN // BY ZAK NEWMAN

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

Austin Schaefer is the Vice-Chairman of the Yale College Republicans.

FREE BIG BIRD!

Elizabeth Henry is the Chairman of the Yale College Republicans.

Contact YANAN WANG at yanan.wang@yale.edu .

We are less than three weeks to Election Day and it still seems like Mitt Romney has failed to make the case that he is any more than the “not Obama” candidate. President Obama may never win over some voters, but is that really the reason they’ll vote for Romney? We know that Romney would have done things differently than Obama: Iran’s nuclear program would be handled “differently”, our relationship with Israel would be “better” and Wall Street reforms would be made with regulations “distinct” from the President’s.

Are any voters really persuaded by Romney’s promise for “something” else? Romney’s claim to Jeremy Epstein in last Tuesday’s debate that he knows “what a good economy looks like” wouldn’t qualify him for a job at any of the companies he

and leadership.

But as both sides of the aisle have noted, Romney the campaigner has often floated in the direction of the political current. Much of this is business-minded pragmatism — it takes a very different kind of Republican to get elected in Massachusetts than to the Office of the President. But it also indicates a lack of willpower to convince Americans that his principles are what’s best for the country and not just the most politically convenient. Being politically moderate is admirable, but being inconsistent is not.

liquidated, much less qualify him for a seat in the Oval Office. The bad math doesn’t help either. If tax reform is a plank, the American people deserve to know how it will work without creating a $4.6 trillion hole in our budget.

If energy independence is going to create 12 million jobs in four years, we should expect to see how the magic’s going to happen.

With the clock ticking and the number of undecided voters shrinking every day, it’s time the Romney campaign got serious on just what the man would do and how he intends to do it. That’s a reasonable request to make of someone who wants to be leader of the free world.

Emily Klopfer is the Treasurer of the Yale College Republicans.

Contact EMILY KLOPFER at emily.klopfer@yale.edu .

Zak Newman is the President of the Yale College Democrats.

Contact ZAK NEWMAN at zak.newman@yale.edu .

// KATE MCMILLAN

S AT U R D AY

CONTACT IMPROV WORKSHOP

OCTOBER 20

If you’re up this early on a Saturday, you’re probably cool enough to hang out with the New York-based guest artist, Elise Knudson, at this event organized by the Alliance for Dance at Yale and the Dance Studies Curriculum.

294 Elm Street // 12:30 P.M.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Getting your facts straight.

Politicians often just say random B.S. Don’t follow their example – confirm that all those fervently argued points you’re justifying are based in real evidence.

“DAVID COPPERFIELD”

Yale Center for British Art // 2 P.M. Can’t even explain. Just go see this and remember both the glory days of blackand-white film and Dickens.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Reconnecting with the soundtrack to your fave musical.

We know you want to. We know you’re now on it. Aren’t you glad we reminded you?

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND POLITICOS

Remember, remember the 6th of November

LEAD, DAMN IT! // BY AUSTIN SCHAEFER

// BY WEEKEND

T

o say that the Yale campus is full of pundits-to-be and opinionated talking heads would be an understatement.

You’ve got your gung-ho Democrats rooting for 4 more years of Obama and his cute dog Bo and then your small but vibrant community of Republicans just yearning to see them leave the White House. WEEKEND recruited six of these young bright minds to take a look at the current election season – from healthcare reform to binders full of women, the discussion in these two pages has cast a wide net. We welcome you to our intimate political forum!

GUNS: A FAMILYAFFAIR

BINDING WORDS

// BY ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER

The 2012 elections have been a distressing indictment of the sorry state of American politics. The vitriol spewed from each campaign and its surrogates might cause one to question the humanity of those in Washington. The candidates’ own statements are full of pandering, demagoguery and occasionally outright lies. What has been utterly lacking thus far is leadership.

Obama’s leadership was essentially unproven when he took office. His voting record during his brief tenure in the Senate showed him to be a weak junior senator who consistently voted along party lines. And I’ll note, when Barack Obama assumed the highest office in the country, Sarah Palin had more executive experience than he did.

His first term as president has been pathetic at worst and underwhelming

at best. His foreign policy began with an apology tour around the Arab world.

He then proceeded to abandon strategic allies that had been loyal to the U.S. since the Cold War in favor of an uprising that elected a fundamentalist. He passed a widely unpopular health care bill while he had massive Democratic majorities in Congress, and has been unable to accomplish much since he lost those majorities.

He simply has not led.

I know that Mitt Romney’s policies are better suited to repairing America’s battered and neglected economy, re-establishing its preeminence on the world stage, and ensuring that it is safe from foreign threats. And I know that Romney the businessman is an exceedingly capable administrator who, as someone who started his own business over 25 years ago, understands the value of boldness

// BY YANAN WANG “Are you armed right now? You’re from a broken home.”

That was the text a childhood friend of mine received from her single mother during Tuesday’s presidential debate just moments after Mitt Romney set forth his novel solution to pandemic gun violence in this country: marriage and the two-parent family.

The moral indignation evident in the text’s sarcasm speaks to the logic that is Romney’s stock-in-trade. In disbelief, we wonder how the candidate can at once be so wrong and so offensive. But then we recall that such double whammies — statements both logically incoherent and morally reprehensible — have become as characteristic of the former governor as evasions, inconsistencies and outright falsehoods. It is impossible to forget his dismissal of 47 percent of Americans as “victims” who refuse to “take personal responsibility” for their lives. But this time he knew the country was watching.

“Gosh, to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone — that’s a great idea,” he said in response to a question about how to limit the availability of assault weapons in order to prevent gun violence.

Romney chose to rhapsodize about the virtues of marriage instead of explaining how to keep AK-47s out of the hands of criminals: “We need moms and dads, helping to raise kids. Wherever possible the benefit of having two parents in the home… We can make changes in the way our culture works to help bring people away from violence and give them opportunity and bring them in the American system.”

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. While President Obama endorsed an assault weapons ban, Mr. Romney invoked the pathology of the female-headed household, unwittingly echoing the infamous 1965 Moynihan Report, which attributed poverty and violence in the nation’s urban ghettos to the “tangle of pathology” created by the “female family head” and “children in broken homes.”

Extolling the heteronormative family as the panacea for cultural decay, Mr. Romney dismissed the 11.6 million Americans who are single parents (as of 2009) as outside “the American system.” Meanwhile, he proposed no method for keeping a semi-automatic away from someone like James Holmes, the suspected perpetrator of the Aurora mass shootings, whose mother and father live together.

If the former governor still keeps binders full of women, he is likely to find that they contain many single mothers.

And they — like the rest of us — may well be wondering if the candidate meant what he said: get hitched lest your children take up guns.

The problem here is not simply semantics in the heat of a debate but the blunt expressions of a man morally unequipped to lead the country.

When Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, teenage Mitt Romney had already made his debut in politics. As a 16-year-old volunteer for the successful Michigan gubernatorial campaign of his father, George W. Romney, Romney was fascinated by government work and soon made the Michigan State Capitol his second home. As Friedan and her second-wave compatriots took up arms against the oppressive social expectations of their time, Romney was busy being educated at prep schools and elite universities, working for investment firms and building the network that

would help him co-found one of the largest financial services companies in America. So we can understand, I suppose, why Romney might not have had time to pay attention when de Beauvoir cried foul on the sex hierarchy, and when Carol Hanisch articulated what women had already been feeling — that the personal is political.

For Mitt Romney, corporations are personal, and just about everything else is political. And women?

We barely fit within the frame of his concerns, so cumbersome and irrelevant and unwieldy are we that we must be jammed between two flat pieces of cardboard and clasped together by three steel rings. During his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, 73.3% of Romney’s senior administrative staff was comprised of men. During the 1980s and ’90s, when Romney served as CEO for Bain Capital, he had no female partners. These numbers are real problems, but Romney is more worried about finding the most efficient, high-grade three-hole puncher that the market has to offer.

As commenter “Sabriel” wrote on the Amazon customer review page for an “Avery Durable View Binder” that has now joined the Internet’s growing pile of Mitt Romney memes, “Maybe it’s just my women, but they don’t seem to want to fit into the space I’ve designated for them in this binder. They keep sticking out over the edges, even getting away in some cases. I thought using clear, glass-ceiling page protectors would help, but it doesn’t seem to slow them down anymore.”

Romney can keep his pristine page protectors, and I’ll save my vote for the candidate who hasn’t tried to make me just another file in his portfolio.

Contact AUSTIN SCHAEFER at james.schaefer@yale.edu .

// BY ELIZABETH GRAY HENRY When I think about PBS, I don’t envision Mitt Romney, clad in camouflage, out hunting for Big Bird, rifle in hand, stalking a big yellow target. Instead, I see him as freeing Big Bird from the cage of dependency on taxpayer bailouts and subsidies.

Jim Henson (a native of my home state of Mississippi) created both Sesame Street and the Muppets. Look at the lives the two have led: Sesame Street and Big Bird have gotten rich through crony capitalism and cushy government contracts, while the Muppets and Kermit the Frog are successfully competing in the free market.

If Kermit can stand on his two webbed feet, why must Big Bird lean on the government?

In fact, Big Bird need not lean on the government at all!

Sesame Workshop made almost $50 million last year from licensing fees for the sale of toys like “Tickle Me Elmo.”

The actors who voice the characters on Sesame Street make more than $300,000 a year.

Sesame Street is a multi-million dollar business with executives well-entrenched in the 1%. Do they really need government handouts financed by middle-class taxpayers and money borrowed from China?

Romney was making the important point that, with a mountain of debt blocking America’s path to a more prosperous future, we must have a serious discussion about eliminating all non-essential government expenditures.

Instead of joining in that discussion, Obama launched silly attacks against Romney, showing that the president is desperate to talk about anything but the big issues facing our country.

The stubborn facts are that, since Obama took office, the national debt has soared by more than $5 trillion to an unsustainable $16 trillion and is still rising. The inconvenient truth is that our generation will have to pay off the reckless debt that Obama has run up. Faced with those facts, the bottom line is simply this: Is it worth borrowing money from China to give corporate welfare to Big Bird and his fat cat friends?

Romney says no, and I agree with him because Big Bird, big though he may be — is not too big to fail.

Contact ELIZABETH GRAY HENRY at elizabeth.henry@yale.edu .

ROOTING RED // BY EMILY KLOPFER He appeared out of nowhere, the light grey of his “Yale Students for Obama” shirt gleaming in the bright autumn sun.

“Would you like to register to vote in Connecticut?” he asked. His voice seemed to have an ethereal thrum.

“I’m voting Republican in Alaska,” I said. The mirage broke.

“Then you should probably stay registered in your own state,” he said scathingly. With a huff he turned on his heel and tramped back to the Yale College Democrats table. I had survived my first Dems assault and I came out on the right side.

Slights against my party have been dogging me since I returned to campus this year, when I promptly pasted my Romney stickers on my wall, much to the chagrin of my Democratic roommate. I knew this election year at Yale would be tough, especially when my TA for microeconomics last semester used every section as a chance to spread anti-Republican messages in his examples.

I will admit, sometimes these slurs sting. It’s tough being in a minority and realizing that nearly everyone is against you, when you notice antiRomney allusions in English section or when you hear derogatory remarks against an inflatable elephant (well, the Democratic mascot is an ass). But I simply hold my head high. I am a Republican, and I could not be more proud.

My dad owns a local brewpub in Anchorage. Gov. Romney has spent considerable time in the private sector and understands that these small businesses are the backbone of our society. His tax initiatives will reduce marginal rates to increase hiring and wages. He will make it easier for my dad to employ upwards of 100 people and provide them with jobs they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

So I will continue to eagerly watch the debates and root for the red, and I will be gripping the arms of my seat on Nov. 6 as my voice grows raw from cheering for Mitt Romney, because I believe in America. All hail the Grand Old Party!

ANYTHING BUT A PLAN // BY ZAK NEWMAN

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

Austin Schaefer is the Vice-Chairman of the Yale College Republicans.

FREE BIG BIRD!

Elizabeth Henry is the Chairman of the Yale College Republicans.

Contact YANAN WANG at yanan.wang@yale.edu .

We are less than three weeks to Election Day and it still seems like Mitt Romney has failed to make the case that he is any more than the “not Obama” candidate. President Obama may never win over some voters, but is that really the reason they’ll vote for Romney? We know that Romney would have done things differently than Obama: Iran’s nuclear program would be handled “differently”, our relationship with Israel would be “better” and Wall Street reforms would be made with regulations “distinct” from the President’s.

Are any voters really persuaded by Romney’s promise for “something” else? Romney’s claim to Jeremy Epstein in last Tuesday’s debate that he knows “what a good economy looks like” wouldn’t qualify him for a job at any of the companies he

and leadership.

But as both sides of the aisle have noted, Romney the campaigner has often floated in the direction of the political current. Much of this is business-minded pragmatism — it takes a very different kind of Republican to get elected in Massachusetts than to the Office of the President. But it also indicates a lack of willpower to convince Americans that his principles are what’s best for the country and not just the most politically convenient. Being politically moderate is admirable, but being inconsistent is not.

liquidated, much less qualify him for a seat in the Oval Office. The bad math doesn’t help either. If tax reform is a plank, the American people deserve to know how it will work without creating a $4.6 trillion hole in our budget.

If energy independence is going to create 12 million jobs in four years, we should expect to see how the magic’s going to happen.

With the clock ticking and the number of undecided voters shrinking every day, it’s time the Romney campaign got serious on just what the man would do and how he intends to do it. That’s a reasonable request to make of someone who wants to be leader of the free world.

Emily Klopfer is the Treasurer of the Yale College Republicans.

Contact EMILY KLOPFER at emily.klopfer@yale.edu .

Zak Newman is the President of the Yale College Democrats.

Contact ZAK NEWMAN at zak.newman@yale.edu .

// KATE MCMILLAN

S AT U R D AY

CONTACT IMPROV WORKSHOP

OCTOBER 20

If you’re up this early on a Saturday, you’re probably cool enough to hang out with the New York-based guest artist, Elise Knudson, at this event organized by the Alliance for Dance at Yale and the Dance Studies Curriculum.

294 Elm Street // 12:30 P.M.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Getting your facts straight.

Politicians often just say random B.S. Don’t follow their example – confirm that all those fervently argued points you’re justifying are based in real evidence.

“DAVID COPPERFIELD”

Yale Center for British Art // 2 P.M. Can’t even explain. Just go see this and remember both the glory days of blackand-white film and Dickens.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Reconnecting with the soundtrack to your fave musical.

We know you want to. We know you’re now on it. Aren’t you glad we reminded you?

PAGE B8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

“THINGS DON’T NEVER CHANGE” BUTTERFLY FROM PAGE B3 me about the observations he could make about race and sexual preference based on a matchmaking survey he designed for last semester’s Freshman Screw. His questionnaire asked respondents to specify the factors they would like in a potential date — while including traits like alcohol-friendliness, Nguyen also chose to ask his respondents about their racial preferences.

“When I was setting up screws, I figured people would have a preference, and I wanted to give them the freedom to state that preference,” he told me.

Then, in a comment indicative of the sensitivity surrounding this issue on campus, he added: “The survey was

“There is a particular problem of white gays saying they’re not into black men, for example,” Nicholas Leingang ’13 said. “The thing that’s racist about that is that it reduces the complexity of an entire group of people to a single other, in opposition to one’s self. And not only is there an other, but the other is [seen as] less desirable than the self.”

This particular reductive attitude can be attributed to the lack of representation of the black queer community on campus, said Gabriel DeLeon ’14.

“Images of gayness or queerness as black are estranged and rare compared to images of monolithic gayness...

What is monolithic gayness at Yale? A capella. Theater. The Art School. The Divinity School. These are cultural

QUITE FRANKLY, ‘RACIAL PREFERENCE’ IS A EUPHEMISM FOR ‘FETISH’ THAT MAKES YOU FEEL LIKE LESS OF A SEXUAL OBJECT. anonymous — when we publicly state that we have a racial preference, we might be considered close-minded or racist, and I wanted people to have the liberty to say it in private.”

Of the nearly 150 students in the class of 2015 who responded to Nguyen’s survey, 75 percent of those who chose to specify their racial preferences specified it as “Caucasian.”

This right here is indicative of the privilege white people have in a sexual context — at least here at Yale.

Although we can’t change these things, we can begin to see why these issues compel us to assume responsibility for the way we behave.

SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE OF DESIRE

It’s hard to reverse-engineer attraction. Why are we attracted to the people we’re attracted to? Well, who knows, really? I don’t. And there is nothing wrong, essentially, in liking whom we like. But it is important to critically examine whether forces beyond our control are affecting the way we treat the people we interact with — particularly in a selective sexual context.

Asked his own stance on how to discuss racial preference, Nguyen seemed uncertain.

“Race carries with it certain connotations. As in, if we share the same race, we share the same culture and interests. It’s a generalization, it’s not defining, but it’s something we do naturally,” he said.

Natural as expressing racial preferences might be, the way we do so may be problematically antagonizing — particularly when, as in some communities, people express what they like by identifying exactly what they don’t.

Some gay male Yalies identify the issues faced by black gay men on campus as a clear result of such exclusionary expressions of preference.

S AT U R D AY OCTOBER 20

items that maintain visibility and social currency, and perpetuate the archetype that casts the shadow on the other — in this case, the black queer community,” he added.

In cases like that of Asian women, when the minority community is larger and more widespread, others may approach individuals on the basis of affirmative declarations of racial preference that the sought-after individual finds suspicious — and wrongfully rooted in generalization.

“Quite frankly, ‘racial preference’ is a euphemism for ‘fetish’ that makes you feel like less of a sexual object. It doesn’t disguise the fundamental principle: when a man tells me that he prefers Latinas or Dominicans or Caribbean women, he almost always has a particular idea of what that identity entails,” Guzman said. “He assumes that I fulfill whatever idea he has of this identity on the sole basis of my nationality or last name, without knowing anything about me. He has reduced a part of my identity to a vacant essence.”

The most self-empowered response to this is, said Jenny Mei ’13, is to recognize that one may be objectified — and do one’s best to not let it happen.

What, then, can we make of our preferences? The reality of the situation — in our lives, in our beds — is infinitely complex. But in order to make any progress, we need to talk. We need to, at the very least, hear both sides.

ASK AN ‘ASIAN GIRL’

So what happens when you’re the preference?

The only way to find out is to talk about it. To hear about it. “‘He’s really into ‘the Asian thing’, ‘He’d definitely like you’ or variations of the same aren’t uncommon — as if one’s ethnicity were the only facet of their identity that’s noteworthy,” Shih wrote to me.

At Yale, Shih thinks that believing in such stereotypes is “prevalent,” she added, particularly when Elis are discussing the sexuality of Asian women.

This type of judgment extends to women of mixed Asian ancestry, who are forced to deal with these imposed identities and personas. One student, who asked that her name not be used, wrote to me about her experience regarding her half-Asian ancestry and its effects on others’ perceptions of her.

“Mixed Asians, particularly women, are supposed to be ‘so beautiful’ in this reductive, exoticizing way,” she wrote.

“It’s a ‘positive’ stereotype at that, but nonetheless lazily shoves varied and un-categorizable experiences and appearances into a convenient, ‘positively neutral’ and vague myth.”

So where is the dialogue? Melanie Boyd ’90, the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs and director of the Communication and Consent Educator (CCE) program said Yale needs to have productive discourse surrounding these topics.

And while the CCE program she directs has been talking a lot about racial dynamics and racially motivated romantic sexual interests, Boyd said it is not in its purview to specifically offer a forum to express dissatisfaction or negative experiences.

“It is more productive — more empowering to the community — to foster discussion on positive dynamics, imagining strategic possibilities for a culture in which everyone can thrive,” Boyd said. “The CCEs seek positive, often oblique angles of intervention.”

Some of the CCEs are already collaborating with the Asian American Cultural Center (AACC) on a series of dinner discussions about this and other related issues.

“Among the CCEs, we have started some dialogue about racialized sexual preferences, particularly with those of us who operate in conjunction with the cultural houses,” said Emily Hong ’14, a CCE liaison to the AACC. “At least with the AACC, we are hoping to pilot specific facilitated discussions and workshops that explicitly talk about issues of Asian-American sexuality. Some

examples include the hyper- versus asexualization of Asians, ‘the sex talk you never got from your parents’ [and] ‘Being Queer and Asian-American.’”

Still, even as these initiatives are being developed, students currently lack an institutional place to voice their thoughts — however cathartically negative or optimistically constructive these thoughts may be.

“There is a complete lack of dialogue on campus, in my opinion.” Shih wrote.

For now, campus remains largely silent about the intersection of sex and race.

WHERE WE’RE HEADED

Near the end of my work on this piece, I sat down to speak with Professor of American Studies and History Mary Lui, who offered me a nuanced yet optimistic perspective of these racial and sexual dynamics and their evolution.

“Things don’t never change,” she assured me.

And indeed, things are already not never-changing: there we were, two Asian women comfortably discussing our ideas in a place of academia opened to our particular demographic just 40 years ago.

“I think this situation is incredibly complex; it’s grown more complicated

Contact LARISSA PHAM at larissa.pham@yale.edu .

// Susanna Koetter Works: Girl 1, Ink on Paper, 2012 Girl 2, Ink on Paper, 2012 Almond Pussy, Spray Paint, 2012

Artist Statement: At this point, in order for me to communicate sex as a maybeAsian woman seriously, I can only articulate my opinions in a satirical manner. I guess it’s ironic, but irony seems to be the only way for people to get what I mean without feeling antagonized and instead can walk away chuckling (or believe that I at least am chuckling through the materials…).

PINK DANCE

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Branford Dining Hall // 10 P.M. Sometimes, our occasionally dodgy student government comes together with an organization Colleges against Cancer and puts out something well-organized and for an important cause. It’s beautiful. Be part of it.

in recent years. People are aware of the circulation of these images and don’t let their relationships play out these narratives. They understand these images and are thinking about them,” Lui said.

Do people still exoticize or eroticize Asian women? Of course; it still happens in some places. But according to Lui, “there’s enough of a pushback.”

During our conversation, Lui encouraged me to acknowledge and embrace the complexity of the situation. Rather than letting the narrative of the dangerous narrative itself create a dangerous precedent, I — and others — ought to consider all the different factors that go into why people choose their sexual partners.

In a follow-up correspondence, Lui wrote to me regarding how we might learn to properly speak the language of desire.

“I can only say that with broader cultural awareness and higher visibility of Asian-Americans that there are now more people than ever challenging those racist and sexist images you discussed,” Lui wrote. “That is what makes me hopeful.”

Eating right

Don’t let the sudden chill, scary midterms and prospect of Fall Break snacks inspire you to forget to think about what’s going into your body. You’ll thank us when you feel like a million carrot sticks as your suitemate pops his 59th M&M.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B9

WEEKEND FUN-RAISING

YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD ARTISTS AND ACTIVISTS // BY JOY SHAN

Beneath a darkened sky and a steady drizzle, one storefront on the corner of College and Crown streets emits a warm glow. Two silhouetted figures sit in the window beside a cluster of rainbow balloons. Others enter in groups, shaking rain off their jackets.

The date is Oct. 15, 2012, the one-year anniversary of Occupy New Haven, and people are celebrating. The sign on the storefront’s window glass reads “The People’s Arts Collective.”

Inside, music plays, and the atmosphere is festive. On the left wall of the room, a large chalkdrawn calendar marks events such as “Gender Fluidity Workshop” and “Free Skool Launch Party.” Below the blackboard is a shelf stuffed with books from across genres, and on top of the bookshelf are stacks of pamphlets and “zines” — small, self-published texts released by groups to spread their ideas efficiently and with low cost. A corkboard is crammed with flyers for events, parties and protests across New Haven.

Kenneth Reveiz ’12, one of the three founders of the People’s Arts Collective, is naturally at the party — sitting on a folding chair and chatting with some members of the Occupy movement. Only a few months ago, in August of this year, Reveiz, Gabriel DeLeon ’14 and Diana Ofosu ’12 came to this storefront. They brought with them folding chairs, used books and a vision of a new meeting place for the people of New Haven.

According to its website and its handmade poster in the front window, the People’s Arts Collective of New Haven is “a community of artists seeking to animate and advance social, racial, economic and environmental justice in New Haven through art-making and art-making processes. We particularly encourage the creative agency of women, queer-identifying folks, people of color and youth. We emphasize the collaborative, intergenerational and site-specific.”

It’s a long mission statement, but when asked what exactly PAC is meant to be, Reveiz begins his answer in simple terms. PAC’s potential, he says, is in its role as a movement space. His hope is for PAC to be what a good com-

munity center should be: a meeting place for planning and collaborating on projects that will have an impact, either locally or more broadly. Reveiz notes that the concept of such a place is not particularly new, but there’s a lack of it in today’s New Haven.

“In the ’60s and ’70s there was this coffee shop called Bread and Roses,” he said. “It was where activists chilled and hung out. It had lots of newspaper clippings on the wall. A lot of campaigns and activism centralized there,” he added. “I’d like [PAC] to be something like that.”

But Reveiz prefaces his answer by saying that each of the founders would have a different response for his or her vision for PAC. This variation among the three organizers is one of the organization’s strengths. “It’s a mistake to say there’s one way of doing something effectively,” Reveiz claimed. “To be prescriptive is to be politically and socially illiterate.”

According to Ofosu, each of the three founders is, in his or her unique way, part artist and part activist. The People’s Arts Collective is not the first project Reveiz, Ofosu and DeLeon have worked on together. Rather, it had its beginnings in an earlier collaboration that drew on each of the founders’ mediums: the Spring 2012 production of “Osama Play.”

Reveiz, a writer, wrote the play; Ofosu, a visual artist, designed the set and DeLeon, a performer, directed the show. Looking back, the next step seemed only natural: to try to extend this “performance space” beyond acting and beyond Yale. The concept began as The People’s Theater but over the course of a year evolved to what it is today: a collective that fosters creative agency among people, allowing them to make change. But what exactly does that look like?

“We’re still in our brick and mortar stage,” Ofosu begins when describing the roles PAC has been taking on in New Haven. Ofosu’s hope for PAC also centers on the many potential uses of the rooms they have begun developing. She envisions “an autonomous space that could function as an alternative to Yale and other set spaces.”

Ofosu is a visual artist, and she is excited about outfitting the col-

lective alongside people of the community. When talking about one project in particular, Ofosu’s voice grows more animated.

“There’s this amazing woman who’s in the New Haven scene … and in the middle of a casual conversation she goes, ‘You know what New Haven is missing? An independent press bookstore’,” she says. The idea had not even been on Ofosu’s radar before the two women spoke, but the project is entering its nascent stages, beginning with an in-house library while the two begin to work on the legal side of getting the store running.

PAC is already working with many groups across the city on projects that range from raising AIDS awareness to protesting police brutality. On the back wall of the College and Crown space is a large arrow drawn in crayon, which leads to a large glass case.

Inside, the objects range from the mundane (clothes, books) to some more peculiar knickknacks (a Norman Rockwell print of a girl with a black eye). This is the “Free Pile,” a box of stuff people can take from and donate to. The Free Pile was a collaboration between PAC and Hans Schoenburg ’10, one of the co-founders of GiftFlow, a nonprofit website where people can give away possessions they no longer need to other people in their community.

The party on Monday evening also symbolized the beginning of a working relationship between PAC and Occupy New Haven.

Many of the Occupy members were already familiar with the PAC, but for others, this was their first time coming to the space.

Amanda Roberts, one of the faces behind the online information hub “re-know.info” and a member of the Occupy movement, had only asked last minute to use the space for the party, but the organizers welcomed them.

“I feel like a lot of their missions … and the change they want to see in New Haven lines up with ours,” Roberts says. PAC, despite its physical space and its energy, could still run the risk of not having enough manpower to carry out its many ideas. Roberts says, “Occupy is a lot of willing people that at times doesn’t have a point of focus … [PAC and Occupy] seem like they’d mesh really well.

It could be really responsive to our manpower.”

At this point, it seems the People’s Arts Collective can adapt to fill many roles in the community, but Roberts’ observation about the importance of manpower raises another question:

// JENNIFER CHEUNG

Three Yale students are behind New Haven’s latest, most interactive arts venue.

can the collective be sustained?

According to the organizers, the response from New Haven has been warm, with sometimes as many as 20 people coming to PAC’s open hours to speak with the organizers. The second party of the year had around 200 people come throughout the night.

Over 20 people have signed up to teach a class at the Free Skool, yet another way PAC is reaching out to the community for collaboration. Launching in November, the space will be used for people to hold free classes that anyone can sign up for — subject matter ranges from sewing to disposable photography. When asked about the weekly literary and artistic workshops listed on PAC’s website, Reveiz’s response is matterof-fact: “Oh, we need to update the website. No one’s been coming to those.”

It’s almost a paradox: somehow, PAC has taken the active approach to reaching out to New Haven while, at the same time, maintaining a go-with-the-flow philosophy. According to Ofosu, some cases like the Free Skool require an active reach-out effort, but, at other times, it makes more sense to just let people come as they please. This way of letting things happen organically, she says, opens up a lot of possibilities. The element of spontaneity is necessary for a project that can go in so many directions. “Also, everything is kind of fun,” Ofosu says. “Every day there’s always something different going on, and people around here are really stoked … [PAC’s] just forming. It’s important for us

EVERY DAY THERE’S ALWAYS SOMETHING DIFFERENT GOING ON, AND PEOPLE AROUND HERE ARE REALLY STOKED … [PAC’S] JUST FORMING.

S AT U R D AY OCTOBER 20

MYKONOS.

228 College Street // 22:30 p.m.

The Yale Hellenic Society is going a little cray this weekend. Don’t let the opportunity to get some Greek island ragin’ in in this gloomy October pass you by.

to make things happen that they want to happen. It’s their community, too.”

According to Reveiz, the main concern now is with funding, but the organizers do not seem too worried. Right now, the collective uses crowdsourcing through indiegogo.com as a way to cover operating costs and materials for their activities. The organizers also throw “Fun-raising” parties at the space, and a friend has offered to help write grants.

Another obstacle the group might encounter in the future is the issue of staying in the storefront. Having a space is integral to the collective’s function, but Reveiz raises the concern, “The issue is less about getting kicked out … [The building] might get razed down or something. It’s one storefront in a row of five being used. There might not be enough economic activity,” he said. Though Reveiz does not worry about PAC getting evicted, the sublease for the space expires at the end of the month.

The storefront is leased by the Co-op Center for Creativity, a high school across the street from the collective that fosters creative talent in its students. Helen Kauder, the Co-op’s founder, helped Reveiz, Ofosu and DeLeon find the space and sometimes drops by to visit. “It’s not a longterm lease,” Kauder says. But she praises the work the collective’s organizers are doing, especially in connecting the youth of the city to the arts through student-writing hubs and play workshops. “I think they’re doing a phenomenal thing, and they’re really actively using the space … It’s only a sublease. But given the way things are going, we’re going to try hard to make it continue.” When asked about the future, Reveiz says he is committed long-term. Ofosu agrees, “It should just develop as it seems organic and disassemble as it seems organic. But the longer we work on it, the more committed we are.”

PAC holds open hours every weekday evening. From College Street, the organizers can be seen sitting in the whimsically-lit storefront, chatting with any locals who drop by. Tuesday evening, the night after Occupy’s anniversary party, a New Haven resident named Merv Brandy comes by to chat. He holds a notebook and talks and laughs with Reveiz, excited for a new project he wants to begin.

“I’m playing around with an idea for a kickback for gay youths in the city. They could come here after school and be creative, maybe do some performance art and put on demonstrations in the city,” Brandy explains. Reveiz, sitting nearby, agrees that it’s important, “especially at this age, to know there are other queer people around — not just in media — who are doing things like organizing and sharing their experiences.“ Brandy nods, “It’d be great for the city and great for the youth.”

The two continue to chat. Outside, a woman stops and reads the mission statement in the window. Curious, she walks into the space, and says, “Hi! What is this place?” She introduces herself as Joane, and she takes oil painting lessons at Gateway. She had stopped in specifically to ask about the usage of the word “queer” in the mission statement outside the entrance. “Is this only for people of color or gay people?” she asks Reveiz and Brandy.

Reveiz laughs and answers, “No, but there’s a lot of us here.” Joane stays for a while longer, talking and looking around the space.

As she leaves, she takes a piece of paper with PAC’s information to show her painting club. Reveiz tells her, “If you all ever want to use our space for something, just let me know.”

Contact JOY SHAN at joy.shan@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Reading non-school things

Toss out the textbooks; revisit the readings later. We’ve got a six-day break – and that means a chance to get at some real prose. Let’s not waste it.

PAGE B10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

REBEL WITHOUT A PAUSE // BY MICHAEL LOMAX a Wallflower,” and I was legitimately disappointed by some of the responses I heard from other theatergoers. The general adolescent consensus (as it was with Chbosky’s novel) was overwhelmingly positive. Young cinephiles and laymen alike were quick to proclaim it a contemporary masterpiece: a unique examination of what it means to be a modern teenager in an increasingly modern world. I couldn’t

Coming-of-age movies are pretty self-defeating when you think about it. You see, the problem with any given one is that it’s usually pretty difficult to translate across time: “American Graffiti” doesn’t hold the same weight for an ’80s audience, just as Emilio Estevez and “The Breakfast Club” are a bit out-of-date for someone from my generation. By itself, that’s not too profound of a statement. Obviously any work of art from any single era has a hard time staying relevant for successive ones. That’s why it’s important for all art to contain that intangible and hopelessly academic concept of “universality.”

These kinds of stories are universal to the extreme. Whether

MICHAEL LOMAX CINEMA TO THE MAX you were born in 1990 or 1690, we all went through the same shit: the vigor and excesses of youth, its subsequent pitfalls and everything else in between. So if you’re a young filmmaker trying to create your own comingof-age fiction, you have to either make a definitive commentary on a specific time you know the best (the more recent, the better) or try to nail a home run out of center field by making your story frightfully new. But while period commentary is usually easy to iden-

tify, it’s hard to find such a film that’s also a genuinely innovative approach to the genre, which is as old as narrative itself. In fact, these films are practically nonexistent.

The other day I watched writer Stephen Chbosky’s personal adaptation of “The Perks of Being

// CREATIVE COMMONS

disagree more.

That’s not to say I didn’t like the film. Our three stars Logan Lerman, Emma Watson and Ezra Miller are brilliant together. Their chemistry shines in every scene,

and even better, they use that chemistry to highlight a slice of high school life I didn’t personally see growing up. But homosexuality and the consequences of repressed sexual abuse are not profoundly original themes.

Instead I’d say “Perks” is one of the first films to deal with such issues up front, rather than indirectly deal with them. But does that make the film a home run?

More like a ground-rule double, or a triple at best.

This eventually begs the question: what are the definitive coming-of-age films? The answer here isn’t exactly straightforward. It really just depends on what you’re looking for: Comedy? Drama? Young kids? Teenagers? Gryffindor fourth years?

That’s the thing about this genre: it stretches all over the map.

“Rebel Without a Cause” is a great film — one of AFI’s original Top 100. But even the immortal James Dean isn’t enough to get us over some of the movie’s odd quirks, many of which are time-specific products of the story’s examination of the shattered nuclear family. What about “The Sandlot”? It’s a delightfully entertaining sports comedy that in some part influenced all of the baseball analogies I’ve been using thus far. But even it falls afoul of laughability at times.

So if we’re not going with “Rebel” or “Sandlot,” what about “Breakfast Club?” “The Outsiders?”

“Stand By Me?” “The Graduate?”

“Superbad?” And every other young adult film that’s ever been made?

No. No. No. No. No. — Infinitely and emphatically NO. So then, what the hell? Are there any truly great coming-ofage films? Well, I’m not entirely sure. I’ve named a couple of amazing movies that influenced generations upon generations.

But not a single one of them is a home run.

And that’s just it! There are no home runs when you’re dealing with young people struggling to come to grips with their respective worlds. Sometimes you get lucky at the plate, reaching second or maybe even third. But you never can get all the way home.

Your subjects aren’t old enough: they’re usually just adorably insufferable little shits that get into all kinds of mishaps because they don’t know any better — aka they’re just juveniles (in body or mind or both), barely scratching the surface of physical and emotional experiences. But that’s okay. As is universal with most adolescents, it’s only a matter of time before they get their affairs in order. The home runs are out there to be had in innings to come, so thank God we get more than one at-bat per game. And if you’re going to take anything from a coming-of-age film, it’s precisely that.

Contact MICHAEL LOMAX at michael.lomax@yale.edu .

A Case for Variation: On Allen and Mozart

Lookin’ for a Dollar

// BY BECCA EDELMAN

So Macklemore walks into a thrift shop with $20 dollars in his pocket.

It’s not the beginning of a joke (or if it is, I haven’t heard it), but the genesis for the catchiest, funniest, most criminally irresistible song that could actually have you listening to something other than “Gangam Style” for once. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s new hit “Thrift Shop” might have the most swagger ever for a song by two white guys rapping about wearing your grandpa’s clothes. Apparently, at this unknown thrift shop “down the road,” the duo picked up not only a broken keyboard and a pair of Velcro safety shoes, but also the most awesomely invasive sax riff since “Calabria” and enough awkward old-school strut for an army of Vanilla Ice clones.

I hadn’t heard Macklemore when I first pulled up the “Thrift Shop” video on Youtube. The clip opens up with our hero riding a little kid’s scooter in front of what for another rapper might be a “posse,” but for Macklemore looks more like a crew of senile retirees mixed with the dregs of a Williamsburg house party. Not that this cramps his style. Two Slurpee-sipping ladies escort Macklemore, still on his scooter, to his waiting 1988 Dodge DeLorean. The gull wings open up, the sax line kicks in, and off we go, not back to the future, but to the thrift shop.

Let’s take a second on that sax.

How often do you hear a saxophone in hip-hop? Not often, unfortunately, because this line just kills it. The sound is sharp and angled, stuttering through south-of-the-border funk.

This is it: no synths, no backing vocals, no samples, just sax and percussion. But like tequila, the syncopated rhythm will have you dancing before long. I dare you to keep from tapping your foot, or even breaking all-out into the goofy whiteboy salsa that Macklemore displays up and down the aisles at his local Salvo, his cape billowing behind him like some hobo emperor.

The rapper opens fire with a line not suited for Parents’ Weekend: “Walk into the club like, ‘Whattup, I got a big cock’/ Nah, I’m just pumped up on some shit from a thrift shop.” It’s hilariously crude, a throwaway line like he’s wearing throwaway clothes: At this point, he’s strutting through the club in a hooded faux-fur coat.

“But shit,” he cracks, “it was ninetynine cents!”

Like everything else in the video, the rapping itself is infectiously lackadaisical. Macklemore spits like he doesn’t particularly care, stretching the beat

“It seems to me I’ve heard that song before,” the movie score warbles. “It’s from an old familiar score. I know it well, that melody.” So goes the theme to Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters.” But I’m getting ahead of myself. *** A trip to the Mayo Clinic website today left me with some disturbing news. According to their definitions, I am officially an addict. Of Woody Allen, that is. Scanning the facts, perhaps I have been excessive; I watched twelve of his movies in a week last summer. What’s that, you say? There are other directors out there? The expansion of my film education is at stake? I steer my mind away from my more rational thoughts. In fact, I’ve already seen seventeen, so I really can’t see any harm in just one more …

“When you’re addicted,” the website warns, “you may not be able to control your drug use, and you may continue using the drug despite the harm it causes.” I guess I’m officially hooked.

My friends don’t seem to understand. They criticize the films I adore, and try to point out Allen’s flaws. “All of his films are the same!” they cry, attempting to dissuade me. I’ve heard multiple complaints that his films are repetitive and boring. The final straw came at last year’s YSO show, when students all around me buzzed about who that old man on screen was. Repetitive? Boring? Unknown?

These words couldn’t describe my Woody, my favorite director, my artistic genius. So I began to think of other artists — ones whom no one would dare criticize with these kinds of diminutive adjectives. And then, suddenly, it came to me.

In an opening scene from Milos Forman’s “Amadeus,” the Academy Award Best Picture winner from 1984, a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is introduced to the court musicians of Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II. Antonio Salieri, the court composer, has penned a celebratory march for Mozart’s arrival. In almost no time Mozart begins to expand on the piece, not only repairing problems that he sees in the original theme, but also improvising beautiful variations on it.

And here I have found my point. Allen, like Mozart and other composers of the Classical Era, plays not repetitions, but rather variations. ***

S U N D AY OCTOBER 21

BECCA EDELMAN FILM In classical music, a theme and variation consists of a melody, the theme, and then several alterations of it. These variations might be changes in pitch, harmony, rhythm or mode.

Composers often undertook simple themes that the listener would be able to recognize. For example, Mozart wrote several variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” In the first variation he plays the same melody, but adds rushing sixteenth notes underneath. In another variation, he changes the theme to a minor mode.

Allen’s work fits naturally into such a form. Take, for example, his two wonderful films “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989) and “Match Point” (2005). A basic outline of each film’s storyline would appear identical. A married man has a clandestine, drawn out affair. At some point, the affair backfires and the mistress attempts to reveal the truth. The man panics, killing his mistress. However, the man is never caught and he returns to his life without excessive feelings of guilt or regret. Here we have our theme: the plot. The cinematic equivalent of duplicated musical notation.

Yet, if we look at Crimes and Misdemeanors, the older film, as the original statement of the theme, we may look at “Match Point” as the variation. Allen adjusts the age of his characters in “Match Point,” perhaps akin to adjusting the meter and quickening the piece’s beat. He also changes the film’s exterior context, moving his arrangement from New York to London. Both of these variations create a fresh and new composition. Although we may watch the same theme, we watch it in a new light. In “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” Allen explores a midlife crisis and the influence of religion. In “Match Point,” Allen emphasizes the beginnings of family and the questionable importance of luck.

Thus, Allen’s variations yield potential for new insights and appreciations.

Another example might be Allen’s theme of time travel. Like “Twinkle, Twinkle,” the theme is simple in that an audience easily recognizes it from other works of art. Allen composes variations on the theme in “Sleeper” (1973) and “Midnight in Paris” (2011).

Unlike the previous pairing, a repeated genre does not yield an identical plot.

In “Sleeper,” a man unwittingly has his body frozen by scientists and two centuries later finds himself defrosted by rebels resisting an authoritarian regime. In “Midnight in Paris,” an equally unsuspecting figure steps off of a sidewalk in modern Paris into a car that carries him back in time to the artists and flappers of the 1920s.

The two films vary not only in their plot-lines and the contexts of their locations, but also in their tone. Allen conducts “Sleeper” in an eerie minor key. Its plot line is completely ridiculous; for example, Allen successfully fools those around him into believing that he is a robot. Yet, the ever-present authoritarian pursuers make the future a world of terror rather than excitement.

Almost thirty years later, however, with “Midnight in Paris,” Allen transposes time travel into a different key. Although this time a certain level of suspended disbelief may yield a more realistic version of time travel, Allen orchestrates entirely in a major tone. Though the protagonist finally chooses to leave the world of the past in exchange for the world of the present, it is not in escape but rather in a realization of the beauty and wonder of every era.

In his introductory music textbook, Craig Wright, a professor of music, notes “the capacity, indeed need, of a great artist for substantive change or modification.” He cites Leondardo da Vinci’s paintings of the same faces, Shakespeare’s endless metaphors for a sunrise. No one would dare call the works of either of these great artists boring. I would like to add Allen, citing each sequential film as a cinematic riff on earlier themes, to Wright’s list of great artists. Far from being simply uncreative or repetitive, Allen uses the method of theme and variation not simply because he can, but because he must in order to fully unfold each of his themes.

“Please have them play it again,” croon the lyrics of “I’ve Heard That Song Before”. “And I’ll remember just when I heard that lovely song before”.

No matter what his critics might say, I’ll always be happy to hear Woody Allen’s melodies again and again.

SAYBROOK COLLEGE ORCHESTRA 2012-2013 SEASON PREMIERE CONCERT Battell Chapel // 3:30 P.M.

They’re getting “grand” and “romantic” and “19th century.” We’re not sure you can handle this, but we have high hopes.

Contact BECCA EDELMAN at becca.eidelson@yale.edu .

// BY DAVID WHIPPLE

DAVID WHIPPLE TUNE-UP but staying with it, chopping syllables and throwing in “hellas” wherever he can. He rhymes when he feels like it and sometimes simply talks. As he strolls past old dorm room furniture and grungy Levi’s jeans, he steps up his game, tearing through line after line with machine gun accuracy. He raps with chaotic force, turning his flow on its head in the middle of a phrase, but keeping a percussive accent that propels his rhymes over racks of stained Old Navy khakis and garish Hawaiian shirts. All of this comes across as spontaneous and unpolished, without the thuggish showmanship of other rappers. It feels like a secondhand song, in the best way.

Soon Macklemore is rapping in front of JFK portraits done on tasteful black velvet, asking us what we know about wearing a fur fox skin as the tassels on his cowboy vest flail around like head-banging metalheads. He’s amazed by modern clothing technology — “They built a onesie with the socks on that mothafucka!” — and unimpressed by Gucci, which he disses while his deranged posse backs him up with a chorus of “sheeeyit!”

By this point the clothes are flying off the shelves at Goodwill, and everyone is bouncing up and down the aisles in your granddad’s clothes. We get to the chorus one last time, that unstoppable sax loop weaving in between bass drum thumps. Guest rapper Wanz, wearing a pink striped suit, announces what we knew all along: “This is fucking awesome!”

It is fucking awesome. Macklemore doesn’t care about “the game,” and “Thrift Shop” shows it rather than tells it. It’s anti hip-hop, with old Dodge sedans instead of inflated Cadillac SUVs, kiddie scooters instead of motorbikes, Granny shoes instead of Nike Hightops. It’s awesomely uncooked, totally tasteless, stupidly simple but clever as hell. What other rapper rashes on designers, or drives a gull-winged sedan? Who else gives few enough shits to open a song with a line about his dick? As Macklemore rhymes his way up and down the aisles of Goodwill, you know he doesn’t really care, and that’s what makes it so much fun.

Contact DAVID WHIPPLE at david.whipple@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Finding a drink that’ll keep you warm.

And we don’t mean anything pumpkin-y, spiced or caffeinated.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B11

WEEKEND ARTS

TIME TRAVEL: FOR AMATEURS ONLY! // BY IKE SWETLITZ

Before beginning the “Amateur Hour” event at the Institute Library, author and New Haven resident Jack Hitt passed around pieces of paper and asked everyone in the audience to write down where they would go and what they would do if they could travel back in time. He then read some of the responses aloud.

“I’d go back to 1975 and un-break hearts.”

“I would travel back to the last time I had sex with my ex-girlfriend because I didn’t know at the time that it was going to be the last time.”

“I’d go back to the moment immediately following the birth of Barack Obama so that I might cradle him lovingly in my arms and stroke his baby head.”

On Wednesday night, Hitt hosted a conversation with Ronald Mallett, professor of physics at the University of Connecticut, where Mallett spoke about his theory of time travel. Moderated by Hitt and author Joshua Foer, the “Amateur Hour” series “explores

the passions and pursuits of America’s most inspiring fanatics, obsessives, tinkerers and collectors,” according to the library’s website.

Indeed, if you could find a time machine anywhere in New Haven, it would probably be at the Institute Library. The library itself feels like a time capsule — it is filled with old New Haven directories, outdated maps and globes and a functional card catalogue.

Even its electric lights are gas lamps with light bulbs stuck into them.

So an “amateur” who is trying to build a time machine fits right in.

“There’s two places where one can be a kind of amateur,” Hitt said. “One is outside a fortress of expertise. The other is at the edge of knowledge.” Hitt placed Mallett in the latter category.

Mallett later shared what he would do with a time machine. He would travel back and tell his father two things: “I love you” and “Stop smoking.” Mallett’s father died of a heart attack at age 33, when Mallett was 10.

Mallett’s motivation to find a way to

travel back in time, usually relegated to the mad scientists of science fiction B-movies, arose from his father’s premature passing.

After reading H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” and falling in love with science fiction, Mallett realized that time travel could provide some sense of closure.

“If I went into the past, I could see him again, [and] then save his life,” Mallett said. “That became my goal, my mission.”

To that extent, Mallett spent the rest of his life fleshing out a theory of time travel throughout college and beyond, sacrificing a couple of marriages and his health (he was developing heart problems, “which was ironic”).

He kept his ideas under wraps until 2001, when he finally developed a feasible theory. If he had let the time-travel cat out of the bag too soon, it would have been “professional suicide.”

But now that he has a fuller idea of how time travel might be possible, Mallett was able to explain it to his audi-

ence.

His ideas piggyback on Albert Einstein’s theories — Mallett distilled these complicated concepts into two simple statements: gravity affects the passage of time, and light can create gravity.

“If gravity can control time, and light can create gravity, then light can… ” Mallett paused to let the audience connect the dots. A few finished his sentence: “ … control time.”

Mallett’s current proposal is to use a ring laser, which creates a circular beam of light. This would cause the space within the circle to twist. If the twisting is strong enough, it could begin to bend a helical slinky path of spacetime! Anything within this vortex could travel backward or forward in time. The device has a catch, though — you can only travel back in time to the point at which the machine was turned on.

A member of the Institute Library, who attended the talk and declined to give his name, was disappointed with this constraint. He has decades of

// IKE SWETLITZ

Ronald Mallett (right) will help you travel back in time.

regrets, he said, including the one he wrote about his ex-girlfriend.

Others were afraid of the possibility of time travel becoming a reality.

“I hope it never happens,” said Mike Cooper, a teacher from Shelton, Conn.

“So much could go wrong.” Renowned physicists Calvin and Hobbes, of comic strip fame, anticipated this concern.

“Something doesn’t make sense here, and I think it’s me sitting in this box,” Hobbes once told Calvin after building a time machine out of a cardboard box. Hobbes later said, “All this time travel makes [me] queasy.”

Contact IKE SWETLITZ at isaac.swetlitz@yale.edu .

It’s All One: In Conversation with Peter Cole // BY ELI MANDEL On Oct. 11 in Marquand Chapel, poet Peter Cole spoke on “the poetry of Kabbalah, the Kabbalah of poetry,” for the 2012 Lana Schwebel Memorial Lecture, in honor of the titular former faculty member at Yale Divinity School and Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Cole, the author of three books of poems and translator of works from Hebrew and Arabic, splits his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, and has taught at Wesleyan and Middlebury, in addition to Yale. His most recent book is “Things on Which I’ve Stumbled” (New Directions, 2008).

Q. What is Kabbalah, exactly?

// CREATIVE COMMONS

S U N D AY OCTOBER 21

A. Generally speaking, Kabbalah is the Jewish mystical tradition, in its many and varied manifestations through the ages. Technically, it refers to the Jewish mystical movements that first emerged in late 12th and early 13th century Spain and Provence and eventually spread throughout the Jewish world. Certain elements of these movements were in time absorbed into mainstream Judaism; others remained the province of “specialists,” working, as it were, in institutes of advanced research into the nature of first and last things, and our being between them. Unlike many other forms of mysticism, which tend to distrust language, Kabbalists through the centuries have seen language as a vehicle that might bring one into the worlds of the really real.

“THE SESSIONS” - SPECIAL PRERELEASE SCREENING

Whitney Humanities Center// 7:30 p.m.

Get ahead of the curve with this exclusive (!) opportunity to watch a Sundance darling.

Q. How did you become interested in Jewish mysticism?

A. Poetry made me do it. I came to this tradition early on in my writing life, when I was trying to retool and reschool myself as a writer by beginning to read deeply into the “Judeo” side of the Judeo-Christian tradition that English poetry is part of. The Hebraic or Judaic side of the hyphen seemed to me woefully unexplored in English verse, and as a Jewish-American poet, I decided early on that this was something I wanted to look into in a serious way, even if it turned out to be a dead end and a lethal waste of time.

My first concrete and conscious encounter with the tradition was my coming across Cynthia Ozick’s review of Gershom Scholem’s massive and magisterial late work — “Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah.” Her review made it clear to me that this was a direction I had to go in.

My second concrete encounter with the tradition was less conscious, but even more transformative. Soon after going to Jerusalem to study Hebrew (in 1981), I was invited to tag along with an Iraqi-Jewish friend of the family to attend and participate in the singing of bakkashot—petitionary hymns sung by certain Sephardic communities in Jerusalem during the rainy season (winter), beginning at 3 a.m. on the Sabbath and running through till dawn. There were gorgeous Eastern musical scales, fabulous soloists and powerful choruses

(of ordinary congregants), whiskey, snuff, simple food and a what amounted to a kind of classical Jewish gospel music. I was hooked, and when I asked my friend what we were singing, apart from certain psalms, he waved my question away and said, it’s Kabbalah — you wouldn’t understand. But, very gradually, I began to.

ing obsessively for a new long poem that I’ve been working on for several months: work connected to the Freud circle in Vienna during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In terms of poets, that reading has included HD’s book about her time with Freud and Robert Duncan’s book about HD.

Q. Do you see yourself as part of the literary tradition of the Kabbalists?

Q. Do you have a favorite poem, or favorite moment in a poem, from “The Poetry of Kabbalah” that you’d like to share?

A. I see myself as part of the broader tradition of Jewish poetry, or even the project of the Jewish imagination. Kabbalah holds an important place for me in that larger project, but the Andalusian literary tradition is as strong in me, or stronger. Both have come to inform (to give form to) my poetry in critical ways — technically and in terms of content.

Q. I see you’re from Paterson, NJ. Where do you stand on Williams? Or, more seriously, what poets are you reading right now?

A. Williams is one of the first poets I read closely once I’d figured out that I wanted to be one, and I’ve long loved his work. (That my grandfather was the first pediatrician in Paterson and lived a life very much like that of WCW — with his doctor’s bag and house calls and an office attached to the home — made it easy for me to conjure the poet as person.)

Right now I’m not reading any books of poetry. I’ve been read-

A. That’s hard — there are so many different kinds of poetry in this book, and I identify deeply with almost all of them: the primordial weirdness of “The Book of Creation” (Sefer Yetzirah), the symphonic majesty of Ibn Gabirol’s “Kingdom’s Crown,” the spooky, transgressive hybrid hymns of the Muslim-Jewish Shabbatian of the 17th century, the gentleness and intimacy of the Hasidic “Song of You,” the spectacular incorporation of so much of this in the work of a modern secular poet like Hayyim Nahman Bialik... As you can see, I can’t choose, and prefer to look at it all as one.

Note: Mandel spoke with Cole in the flesh after his talk, and the two exchanged emails on the record. This interview is drawn from Cole’s written responses.

Contact ELI MANDEL at eli.mandel@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Owning the messy look

Wuheva wuheva sometimes you just need to present yourself to the world with massive sunglasses, a baggy hoodie and other signs of roughness. Bitches should just deal.

PAGE B12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

SICHAN SIV

// SICHAN SIV

SICHAN SIV: Refugee, Ambassador, Bush Fan // BY HAN MYO OO

O

n Friday, October 12, former United Nations ambassador Sichan Siv visited Yale to speak at an event hosted by the Alliance for Southeast Asian Students (ALSEAS) and the Asian American Cultural Center (AACC) in Linsly Chittendon Hall. Born in Cambodia, Ambassador Sichan Siv escaped the nation’s Pol Pot regime in 1976, arriving in the United States with nothing but, in his words, “his mother’s scarf, an empty rice bag and two US dollars.” After holding a series of menial jobs, Siv earned a Master’s degree from Columbia University and embarking on a political career which included serving as deputy assistant to President George H.W. Bush ’48 and making history by becoming the first Asian-American deputy assistant Secretary of State under President George W. Bush ’68. In 2001, Ambassador Siv was appointed by President George W. Bush as an ambassador to the U.N., a position he held until 2006. His memoir, “Golden Bones,” is an international best-seller. WEEKEND spoke to Ambassador Siv about his homeland, what the United States means to him and why the Bush Presidents hold a special place in his heart.

A. I was really happy to return to Yale, because when I arrived in 1976, it was the first university I visited. I mentioned Yale a couple times in my memoir, “Golden Bones.” It has a special place in my heart. Two of my former bosses, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, are both Yalies. I always enjoy interacting with young people. The event at Yale was very well-organized by student leaders. You all came from different parts of the world and you represent our future.

Q. At the talk and in your book, you have discussed your transition from being a Cambodian refugee to a U.N. ambassador. Can you tell us about that evolution? What were the particularly important moments in your journey?

A. The initial months [in the U.S.] were quite a cultural shock for me, because I had just arrived in the most modern society from a refugee camp in Thailand. Before that, I was in Cambodia’s killing fields for a year. In Cambodia, you boil water and keep it in a bottle to drink. I’m talking about the mid-’70s. Here, at [the home of] my host family in Wallingford, Conn., they drink from the faucet. Everything was so big, so fast for me. But I was determined to adapt to America so that America would adopt me. I did everything that came my way to the best of my ability. I picked apples in Connecticut and moved to New York to drive a taxi. I applied to a lot of schools because I felt that it was important for me to get an American education since I grew up in the French system. I got a scholarship to Columbia, got my Master’s of International Affairs, went to work on Wall Street. I did a few other things before I ended up at the White House, working under Presi-

dent George H. W. Bush. In a sense, I made it from the killing fields to the White House in 13 years, thanks to the American dream.

Q. As a Cambodian immigrant, when did you first begin to feel that the U.S. became your new home and that you wanted to represent it on the world stage?

A. I felt that America would be my new home the minute I saw the Statue of Liberty from the plane when I was flying into Kennedy. I suddenly felt I was a free man. And that America was going to be my new home. I never thought I’d represent the United States. I moved around in my life, then I got to the White House. I was truly blessed to be able to represent the President and the United States of America.

Q. Can you talk about a few great moments when you worked in the White House or at the U.N.?

A. At the White House, I think the most exciting moment was when the President’s veto on a Congressional resolution on China was sustained.

At the United Nations, we won every [committee] election that we ran for. When I walked in, my colleagues from 191 countries looked at me and they saw America, her strength and her greatness. The proudest moment was each time I said, “On behalf of the President and people of the United States...”

Q. You left Cambodia at a time of violence, uncertainty and terror. What is your personal perspective on the country today?

A. I returned to Cambodia for the first time in 1992, while I was still at the White House. That was quite an emotional return for me. I left Cambodia on foot, running through

the jungle for my life. I went back as an assistant to the President of the United States, in a government aircraft. I did not recognize anything, so for a long time I was simply numb. Since 1994, when I took my wife for her first visit, we try to go there once a year. There have been a lot of changes. The country is more stable, despite the domestic problems such as corruption, impunity, injustice. They have had elections every 5 years since 1993. The future of Cambodia is with the next generation. They are going to want more political freedom, more justice and more economic opportunities.

“

Q. How do you see these domestic problems being solved by the government or the people?

A. I cannot speak for the Cambodian government. I know it is trying its best, but they need to incorporate opposing views into governance, because it is comprised of Cambodians and they want the best for their country.

Q. You’ve received numerous awards and honors, civilian, cultural and military. Could you tell us which have meant the most to you and why?

A. I think it’s the George H. W. Bush

Award, because it represents everything that is great about America … That you are able to serve other people, do well and do good.

Q. If you could tell young Cambodians or young students one thing, what would you say?

A. Be well, be wise, be worthy. Be flexible and be able to adapt to different circumstances. Follow your passion, and, when you do well, don’t forget to do good.

Contact HAN MYO OO at hanmyo.oo@yale.edu .

I LEFT CAMBODIA ON FOOT, RUNNING THROUGH THE JUNGLE FOR MY LIFE. I WENT BACK AS AN ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, IN A GOVERNMENT AIRCRAFT.

“

Q. Tell us a bit about your Yale visit.