yale daily news magazine Vol. xxxix · Issue 1 · September 2011 · yaledailynews.com/mag
10 years later
Yale reflects p. 26
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Plus, Why Yale Became New Haven’s Tennis Partner on page 18.
Christopher Buckley ’75. Fareed Zakaria ’86. Samantha Power ’92. YOU? join US: MAG@YALEDAILYNEWS.com visit US: yaledailynews.com/mag
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A Match made in new Haven by Eliana Dockterman D 18 D
9/11: Yale Reflects < 26 >
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Q’s Mark Oppenheimer '96 GRD '03 8
small talk The Sun Also Rises x Just Another Name x Toledo Blade 9
profile McClure Plays McDonalds Nicole Levy 12
crit Widening the Frame
Searching for Raymond Clark III by Everett Rosenfeld f 37 f
brotherhood by Molly Hensley-Clancy ©·™ 42 ©·™
Madeline Buxton 15
photo essay Cultural Exposure Sophia Clementi 24
Personal Essay Sexual Fantasies and the Farming is Easy Rachel Lipstein 34
poetry Lake Shore Drive x July The Oil Fire and the Ruby 48
dEAR Dr. Lipschitz 51
Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag
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Editor’s Note
nonfiction, fiction, poetry, art, design join the ydn magazine mag@yaledailynews.com
Editor
Magazine
Zara Kessler
Associate Editors
Eliana Dockterman x Jacque Feldman x Molly Hensley-Clancy x Nicole Levy x Lauren Oyler
Staff
Daniel Bethencourt x Madeline Buxton Edmund Downie x Sophia Veltfort
Design Editors
Raisa Bruner x Eli Markham x Christian Vazquez
Design Assistants
Cora Ormseth x Everett Rosenfeld
Photography Editors
Christopher Peak x Sarah Sullivan x Emily Suran
Yale Daily News Editor in Chief Vivian Yee
Publisher Kyle Miller
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hen I returned to my Manhattan school on September 13, 2001, my sixth grade history teacher told us to write. Anything that came to mind would do. For those first few days after the terrorist attacks, we had the ability, the duty even, to record history. It seemed easier to write about 9/11 back then, when the feelings were raw and immature. A decade later, the current generation of Yale students remembers the attacks but has also matured in a world wholly changed by them. And so as we commemorate the anniversary of 9/11, I felt it important to offer Yale students the same opportunity my teacher gave me ten years ago. To write. Bahij Chancey was at school just blocks away from the Towers, while David McNeill was living in Saudi Arabia. Esther Zuckerman realized personal pain is not a prerequisite for powerful memory. Clare Sestanovich channeled that memory toward one man alone. Ten years later, we are youth growing up with the specter of 9/11. So too, two years later, we are Yalies haunted by the murder of a classmate. As the Annie Le case has reopened with a lawsuit against Yale, Everett Rosenfeld explores his own psychological and journalistic fascination with the man who killed her. Tragedy can mark our youth, but it doesn’t slow us down. We continue to set off on our summer vacations, to journey through Europe, following in the path of a different Lost Generation. We watch the New Haven Open, a tennis tournament on its last legs when Yale offered support. We Google random words during our internships, internships for which we may very well be unqualified. A new crop of magazine editors will have taken charge by the next issue. I’d like to offer my gratitude and congratulations to my coeditor, Naina Saligram ’11. Thank you to all our writers, editors, illustrators, designers, and most of all, our readers. This issue explores the events that have shaped our youth. I’ve been lucky enough to have my past year shaped by all of you. — Zara Kessler
Cover Illustration by Mona Cao Vol. XXXIX, No. 1 September 2011
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Professor Recs
What are your back-to-school rituals? risa sodi Now that I think about it, I have a couple of back-to-school rituals, including filing old papers (boring) and leading a teacher preparation workshop (exciting). An enjoyable ritual is adding a new cartoon to my bulletin board. This year’s cartoon comes from the YDN. Sodi is a Senior Lector and the Language Program Director of Italian.
Marta wells One of my rituals for the fall semester is to go and check the giant hissing roaches and make sure they are ready for the lab! Another is to post syllabi on time. Wells is a Senior Lecturer of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
emily coates My back-to-school rituals changed last June, July, and August when I began trekking up Science Hill to meet with my amazing colleague Sarah Demers, to plan our course “The Physics of Dance.” Professor Demers is a particle physicist who works on the highest energy hadron collider in the world, the Large Hadron Collider. Finding common ground between our respective disciplines of physics and dance studies has been a highlight of my teaching and research career. The walk to Science Hill pays off. Coates is the Artistic Director of the World Performance Project and a Lecturer of Theater Studies.
dolores hayden I’m delighted to be back. I always meet with teaching fellows, and we talk about how to encourage creative responses to everyday American landscapes. Hayden is a Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies.
KATHRYN LOFTON I make a new mix for my walk to class. And I sharpen all my pencils. Lofton is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies.
Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag
book review tweet rafa by Rafael Nadal ydnmag what makes a champ? practice, loving family, practice, insecurities, surmounting insecurities, practice, book deal, ghost writer, practice.
VOCab•yale•ary Rush \ruhsh\ n. 1) An embarrassing series of tasks to which one submits oneself when joining a fraternity or a sorority (see “SAE”) 2) The sensation that goes to one’s head when consuming alcoholic beverages. v. A running motion carried out by a student shopping two classes at the same time.
Ydn, old school: Of the YDN Magazine published a decade ago, Editorin-Chief Siobhan Oat-Judge wrote, “This issue, focusing on the administration of Yale College, was planned prior to September 11. The choice seems particularly fitting in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. In such times, we instinctively look to figures of authority to guide us through our bewilderment and pain. Masters and deans, and President Levin, have been far more visible on campus over the past few weeks, eating meals with students, sending emails offering support and information. They have, with cookies and panel discussions, provided us with some comfort.” Yale remembers 9/11 ten years later… See p. 26
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Top 10
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“What should I do with my life?!“ It was worth a shot.
“iPhone how to get notes to stop emailing your Gmail” We just switched from BlackBerry and can’t figure out how this thing works. Every time we edit one of our notes, it emails our Gmail accounts, and it’s REALLY annoying.
“Resume spelling” We know how to spell résumé, but we needed to copy and paste the accents for this email we’re sending. We also Googled it for this article.
“Is eggplant a vegetable?” Unfortunately, no. Like the tomato, it really, really should be; however, it does have this thing in it that helps protect your cell membranes from free radicals!
“World Beard and Moustache Championships” With 17 categories including “natural,” “muskateer,” and “freestyle,” this year’s competition took place in May and featured a guy who styled his beard into a castle.
Things We Googled During Our Summer Internships
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“Are London restaurants open on bank holidays?” It really depends.
“Uxorious definition” “adj. – Having or showing an excessive or submissive fondness for one’s wife.” We at the YDN Mag think no fondness is excessive. Am I right, ladies?
“Do men like cuddling more than women?” In July, culture blog nerve.com reported the findings of a Kinsey Institute study that revealed that in straight, middleaged, long-term couples, kissing and cuddling was often a strong predictor of happiness in men but not in women. We read this on Twitter, but we wanted to get the wording exactly right.
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“Images: Bed bug bite” It was a false alarm!
“What is Beyoncé’s new album called?” It was on the tip of our tongues, really. Don’t tell us. We’re thinking. NO. We’re going to think of it! We know what it’s called! Don’t get out your iPhone! — Lauren Oyler Vol. XXXix, No. 1 September 2011
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Hide & Seek Want a serene view of one of Yale’s most beautiful courtyards? This climb above campus is a great place to relax … if you can find it.
sagar setru / staff photographer
Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag
8 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z If you could ask President Obama one question, what would it be? When are you going to come out for gay marriage? What is your favorite word and why? “Elder.” It is from the German. It means “older,” but in English the connotation is of an older person. Hence I like talking about my elder daughter or being an elder sibling. By the way, you didn’t ask, but my least favorite word is “lozenge.” It sounds like the last thing you would want to put in your throat.
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for Mark Oppenheimer ’96 GRD ’03 Mark Oppenheimer is the director of the Yale Journalism Initiative and a Lecturer in the English and Political Science departments. In addition to his biweekly religion column in The New York Times, Oppenheimer writes for The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Mother Jones, Tablet, The Forward, and his own blog, Bloggenheimer. He currently lives in New Haven with his wife, three daughters, two cats, and dog, and he will gladly show you the pictures of them he carries in his wallet. What is your favorite memory of Yale? Freshman year, my roommate Doug and I used to host “Beverly Hills 90210” viewing parties in our room. They were key events in the social calendar of the Class of 1996.
If you could go back to college now what would you do differently? Fewer extracurriculars. I would do my schoolwork more seriously, and I would party more seriously. Both of those are worthy activities. But the Political Union was a waste of my time, as was Yale Democrats (in a state where Democrats win everything). And three of the four plays I was in were atrocious. Yale should have far fewer extracurriculars. Basically, if you are not writing for a good student publication, acting at a very high level, or doing sports at a very high level, it seems to me you’d be better off doing your homework or napping. What’s your favorite New Haven establishment? It used to be the Anchor, but I don’t drink much anymore. So Modern Apizza on State Street.
You can’t live without … ... my girls. I am surrounded by extremely impressive ladies: my wife, my three daughters, our dog, and our cat. There was one male keeping me company, our other cat, Sowie, but he died three weeks ago. I guess I can live without him, because I am still here.
The most embarrassing moment of your career was … ... the time I called an editor at home at midnight to demand he change two words in an article that was about to go to press. When you are 25, you think every word you write is worth waking an editor for. At 37, you have grown out of that.
If you could meet one character from a novel, who would it be? Who wouldn’t want to meet the Great Gatsby? The parties sound amazing. I would also enjoy having tea with India Bridge, from the great Evan Connell novel Mrs. Bridge, and I would tell her to leave Walter. And it might be fun to hang with Franny and Zooey.
Most importantly, why is Yale better than Harvard? I am a winter, so I look good in navy blue. Slightly less significantly, we have much better curricula for future journalists and nonfiction writers. On a final note, Yale just seems to be a happier place.
Vol. XXXIx, No. 1 September 2011
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Small Talk
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Eighty years after establishing itself as a meeting place for expatriate writers and artists, Shakespeare & Company is still doing good business in the Lost Generation. Alternative vacationers arrive in droves at the famous bookstore, to take pictures by the iconic green storefront and buy slim volumes by Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Upstairs, writers’ groups meet weekly in rooms lined with old books, and guest poets give readings to interested crowds. This was a good place to start what would become my own literary journey through Europe. About to finish a summer session course in Paris, I had vague plans to spend time in Spain with my boyfriend. Before I left, I visited the bookstore on a friend’s recommendation that I pick up a copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The book follows expatriates drifting around Europe after World War I. Their path takes them from Paris to Pamplona during the running of the bulls. The characters — wounded, stoic veteran Jake Barnes; unhappy, promiscuous divorcée Brett Ashley — define the generation of expatriates that Gertrude Stein named the Lost Generation. But while psychological conditions make for a good story, I was seeking something more topical — dare I say, topographical? As we would also be starting in Paris and moving into Spain, Hemingway could serve as our guidebook. Of course, any advice would be out of date by definition. Add to that the questionable moral and economic conditions of many protagonists, and it may be difficult to see the point in invoking a writer when in search of a good restaurant — especially if you want to avoid becoming an alcoholic or blowing your budget of now-severelydevalued American dollars. But even if we skimped on the feasts and booze, what the book could offer in terms of authenticity would surely more than make up for it. And so, with no other direction, and no idea what we were getting ourselves into, we bought our tickets for the bus from Paris to Madrid. We would not be following Hemingway’s itinerary exactly; we were skipping over Pamplona and San Sebastian and the meatiest chapters to blaze straight into the last scenes in the capital. From a bus, however, Spain was still only an abstract concept, and even our descent into the country seemed rife with Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag
AMELIA URrY / contributing photographer
literary promise. This was the land of sunlight “hot and hard,” churches “cool and dim,” and everything surely louder and brighter than it is elsewhere. As we drove farther south, I leafed again through the book and made what comparisons I could. While Jake had merely to show his passport and stroll across a bridge to get into Spain, we had to wait blearily in our seats at 1 a.m. as officials, first on the French side, then on the Spanish, did cross-checks on everyone’s documents. Somehow, the man behind us managed to go back to sleep — we could tell because he began snoring, as he would continue to do for the rest of the night. Jake did not get much sleep either as his train pulled into Madrid, but at least he was conscious enough to notice the “compact white skyline on the top of a little cliff away off across the sun-hardened country.” I closed my eyes against the sunrise that flooded the sky with golden light, regretting each jolt the bus made on its climb into the city. Comparisons only became more complicated once we arrived in Madrid. Ready for some kind of “wonderful nightmare,” as Hemingway had described the fiesta and its long nights that ended as day broke, I was surprised to find restaurants stacking their chairs before midnight, the streets emptying soon after. During the days, we walked along streets and plazas whose names I recognized: Puerta del Sol, Carrera San Jeronimo. The doubled feeling of history in these places, both real and fictional, gave them a quality of super-reality, as if I could still feel the sustained attention of other minds in other times. Elsewhere, the names of things remain maddeningly inaccessible. While Jake and his friends seemed to float effortlessly across language barriers, I could barely “talk
10 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z Spanish.” My challenges were not the stuff of literature, but the banal impossibilities of asking for directions or buying metro tickets. While the young bullfighter Pedro Romero was facing down death in the arena, I could not figure out how to use the payphones. More than once, I found myself repeating Jake’s apt description that “in Spain you could not tell about anything.” On our last night in Madrid, we had dinner in a place called El Sobrino de Botín. Founded in 1725, the restaurant proudly proclaims on its menu that it is the “Earliest Restaurant in the World (according to the Guinness Book of Records).” Hemingway provides its other major endorsement. At the end of The Sun Also Rises, Jake and Brett reunite in Madrid to have lunch at Botín’s, “one of the best restaurants in the world,” Jake promises. They eat suckling pig — which remains the chief specialty — and admit that for all the circles they can turn in their lives, they will always end up in the same place. A bitter pill to swallow, perhaps, but at least at Botín’s one can wash it down with a glass of nice Rioja wine. I split dessert with my boyfriend as costumed musicians played traditional Spanish songs. We were listing the things we had enjoyed most — the Prado Museum, the Plaza del Toros, Botín’s itself — and began to forget the things we had missed. The next morning, we lugged our bags down to the bus station. As we left the city, I looked out the window and passed the time with a good book. — Amelia Urry
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The only tokens Chhet Bon-Her
has left from the beginning of his life are memories — no mementos, no photographs. Everything he owns now, from the rusty car underneath his raised house to the cow grazing nearby, is a glimpse into the last few decades of his life. Even the pictures lining the walls only tell stories of recent years. Everything else was lost when the Khmer Rouge took over his small Cambodian village of Dak Pour in 1972, a few years before the official beginning of the genocide that crippled the country. Before I meet Chhet, he is just another name, one more person who survived starvation, overwork and torture at the hands of his own countrymen. He is one from a list of about 20 survivors that two other Yale students, our translator and I are given when we arrive to record villagers’ accounts of their years under the Khmer Rouge. The goal of the trip, organized by the founder of Khmer Legacies — a non-profit documenting the genocide — and World Fellow, Socheata Poeuv, is to preserve the
village’s history and make the younger generation more aware. I have always taken these stories for granted — the descriptions of long hours in the field, the details of scavenging for food. Chhet’s history, I am sure, is like all the others’ survival tales. I have grown up on narratives like these. My dad — another survivor — tucked me into bed with memories from his teenage years under the regime, and I fell asleep to images of him climbing coconut trees and plodding through murky rice fields. Alongside those stories, I have read about the horrific years in textbooks, where dates and descriptions black out any real emotion I have about the genocide. I meet Chhet for the first time in the last week of June. His back bends forward, and his skin is tanned and wrinkled. The folds on his face droop from years of squinting in the sun, and when he looks over at me, I notice his eyes are cloudy and blue — cataracts. Over the course of two days, Chhet tells the four of us a condensed version of his life story: eighty years from his childhood to the present-day. We sit outside his home on a wooden bamboo bed he has pulled out for us, and he begins to tell of the genocide. Chhet doesn’t just speak. He is an actor in his stories, miming and twisting, motioning with his hands and adding crescendos to his voice. At one point, he hunches over, digging at the bamboo bed beneath him. When he finds whatever invisible objects he has been looking for, he wipes at them with his hands and hurriedly motions towards his mouth. All the while, his eyes stay wide open. At first, I can’t understand what Chhet is saying because he’s speaking in Khmer. I wish I could, but the only Khmer I know are the very basics — a “hello” here, a “thank you” there. It is through the translator that I learn that the years he remembers most vividly are the seven he lost when Khmer Rouge soldiers overtook Dak Pour. Because he lived in the countryside, he felt the effects of their policies years before the regime took control of the whole of Cambodia in 1975 with the capture of Phnom Penh. “Before the Khmer Rouge came to the village, the village was peaceful,” Chhet says while peering at us through his gold-rimmed glasses. As I look around, I can’t imagine it being anything but the place it is now. How could these roads have been filled with the ring of gunshots as soldiers thrust rifles in the air and herded families into crowded streets? I can’t imagine the place as a wasteland, empty of all its inhabitants who were sent to work long days in nearby fields. As Chhet talks, the village bustles with activity as motos speed along the dirt roads, children ride their bicycles and people chatter at the roadside stall down the way. “If we uprooted a tree and found yams, we Vol. XXXix, No. 1 September 2011
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JENNIFER GIANG / contributing photographer
would eat the yams with dirty soil on them because we were so hungry,” he says. “We had to survive. There was no water to clean them, we could only sweep off the dirt and eat. People had no food to eat so their bodies would swell like the dead.” Swell like the dead. The thought is so morbid I almost wish he hadn’t said it — the image doesn’t go away. Starvation was how Chhet lost his father. “My father died while he slept. I heard this from other people — I did not see him. They say that before he died, he wanted [something] to eat … I heard that and just cried.” On paper, this seems common, tame even. Everyone dealt with loss. Chhet lost his father, and, I find out later, two siblings, his wife, and countless others. Then again, so did many Cambodians, their family members reduced to tallies among the two million thought to have lost their lives. When I listen, I can’t help but think of my own dad and the way he sat beside me, painting pictures of a life I could never imagine. And that is the difference, looking at Chhet sitting there just a few feet away, this man who threads his words together so I don’t just see statistics and meaningless numbers. I hear his story, not just one that has been told a thousand times over so that it becomes flattened and devoid of all human connection. His is one I take as a token of my own. — Jennifer Giang
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I made it to the Toledo Blade newspaper every morning on a bike from Target whose rubber handles slid off slowly and whose back brakes were almost useless. Riding in khakis and a button-down, I looked so earnestly out of place that pedestrians who saw Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag
me were too confused to laugh out loud. In the office, I would stare out at the city through an almost two-story high floor-to-ceiling window in the Blade’s crisp-cold and polished but tranquil newsroom. I started to imagine Northwest Ohio as a series of outposts on a sprawling map, each of them holding strings of information that I, as an intern, should extract. The Blade was a control tower among the flatness. Early one Sunday, I crossed the newsroom to a phone in the corner with a list of about 40 police dispatchers in surrounding areas. The task was to dial every number in a row and ask for information about crimes or major accidents. But every dispatcher repeated the exact same words: “It’s been pretty quiet.” During a heat wave one exclaimed, “All the criminals are out floating in pools.” Throughout the reporting I did this summer, I wanted to avoid the basic truth that, all things considered, I really don’t have that much experience, that I still have three more years of college when the real staff writers have been writing stories daily for years, sometimes longer than they can remember. The Blade’s editors took its interns too seriously to point this out, trusting us with content they’d print alongside their staff ’s work. And there were plenty of signs that I belonged — I had a Blade email and ID card, and drove Blade-owned cars. Below the headlines of my stories were the words, “Daniel Bethencourt, Blade Staff Writer.” But the holes in my costume showed up in eerie pauses during my phone interviews, when my mind would race for new questions. For my very first story, I was speaking to a high school principal, a teacher, and the school’s PR agent all on speakerphone, and was so worried I had missed a question that I couldn’t accept that the interview was over. But I also had no more questions. I just sat there with my mind racing. In that quiet crackle of silence on their end, all I could think about was that silence, and what they all might look like sitting there. Maybe they were leaning forward in their swivel chairs, glancing at each other, wondering what they had done to make me go silent. Maybe the PR agent was mouthing to the other two, “I’ve never seen a Blade reporter sit still like this. Something must be really wrong.” Other signs that I was new emerged more slowly. Sources sometimes asked for business cards I did not have, and I would scribble a phone number on a rippedout page of my notebook. I worked at a desk whose rightful owner arrived for the late shift at 5 p.m., so I knew my articles had to be done. When sources asked how long I had been working, I would tell them the truth: something like three weeks. Then, of course, my stories ran. And I had to accept that I must have known just enough. — Daniel Bethencourt
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n the Financial District of Manhattan, the McDonald’s at 160 Broadway serves the usual hamburger fare. As cashiers at the first-floor register process orders within moments, Ron McClure contemplates his view from the crow’s nest window at his leisure, before sounding the piano keys of his next song. McClure’s jazz is anything but processed. And over the span of his 64 years playing music, it hasn’t been prepared quickly. But tourists, businessmen, and saleswomen from the Century 21 across the street barely register the strains of the Howard grand that McClure coaxes with deft, age-spotted fingers. They enter beneath a cascade of music, oblivious to the novelty of this garishly-decked hamburger joint the musician has made his neon-lit lagoon.
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The art of waiting isn’t hard to master — it only takes a lifetime.
on McClure, now 69, has served the very captains of jazz and piloted much of his own work. From 1966 to 1969, his stint as bassist with the Charles Lloyd Quartet, a progressive acoustic jazz ensemble, garnered attention from Downbeat critics and young audiences alike. In 1965, he was appointed to replace Paul Chambers — bebop’s preeminent bass player — in the Wynton Kelly trio. “It was a very brave thing for him to do, to hire me at that time,” McClure says of the risk Kelly took in abolishing the band’s black lineage. In McClure’s words, racial purists asked: “What’s that white boy doing there with him?” That white boy from North Haven, CT, raised as a “Tom Sawyer” of the suburbs, modestly attributes his spot on the bandstand to the whims of fortune. His sideburns long since silvered, McClure had come with the Maynard Ferguson big band to play Atlantic City, and, in down time, witness headliner Wes Montgomery perform with Wynton Kelly. Paul Chambers never showed up the night that Jimmy Cobb banged out a few rim shots on the drums and singled out McClure with one stick. “Talk about being at the right place at the right time,” he muses. To McClure, Cobb and Kelly were as nice as “Santa on steroids.” His analogies are frequently as unmanicured as his bushy eyebrows. McClure considers himself the antithesis of a “hustler” striving to get ahead, and he self-diagnoses his strengths Vol. XXXIx, No. 1 September 2011
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decade ago, the absolute worst came to pass: the Twin Towers were hit only two blocks away from the McDonald’s where McClure now stamps his timecard. The windows of the franchise were blown out, the floor coated in three inches of soot, and its 20 years of piano entertainment suspended. The restaurant would have been used as a center for triage, had there been survivors to save. Music resumed when Michiyo Tanaka, McClure’s girlfriend, who had been visiting the World Trade Center ruins with her church group to pray for the dead on the first anniversary of the terrorist attack, stopped by to relieve herself in the restaurant’s bathroom. Lofted above the door, attended to on most days by ailing entertainer Joe Panama, the lonesome piano waited. Tanaka asked the management if they would pay her to keep it company. Paul Goodman, the owner, was only too happy to oblige, hiring her to play Saturdays, and, when Panama died, the rest of the week. Soon McClure, closet pianist since mandatory study of the instrument in college and McDonald’s employee at age 16, when he blended milkshakes at a franchise in Hamden, began to sub for Tanaka two times a week. “It’s the day job I never had,” he jests, despite the fact he has taught ensembles and private students at New York University as an adjunct for the last 22 years. McClure has never planned a program for his McDonald’s set in advance because his contract stipulates none, and he has no particular audience in mind. “It would be like playing at Grand Central station at rush hour — who would you play to? There’s any possible combination of people at any moment,” McClure explains. Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag
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Among the variables, there are the grateful listeners: the Brazilian tourists who left McClure a note saying he had made their lunch much more than fast food; shift manager Carlos Luzuriaga, who thinks the live music is “awesome” and reports that enthusiastic customers have asked the McDonald’s staff for McClure’s name; Mary Langcake, an Australian trauma surgeon who frequents jazz clubs in Sydney and hardly expected to find free jazz in New York; and Lou Peterson, a freelance programmer who lives down the street and works on his laptop at the restaurant, because the live music is better than that broadcasted on Jazz FM radio. “It’s so loud and busy, [the music] fades into the background,” Peterson comments from his table in the far corner of the second floor. However, he believes diners generally appreciate it, “even subconsciously.” However, to the peanut gallery there belongs the woman who left McClure a scathing missive on a paper bag that wrote off his playing as dissonant, self-indulgent, and avant garde. There belongs that horde of kids who bombarded him with packets of ketchup, in their insistence that he play Beethoven, to which McClure responded by sounding the opening motif of the Fifth Symphony and telling them to go to their rooms. And there belongs the supervisor who continues to request covers of Pearl Jam and Lady Gaga songs. He’s but one of many to overlook the spontaneous improvisation so central to McClure’s music. “They think you practiced it note for note,” he grumbles.
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hen McClure began playing jazz, in the genre’s heyday, musicians worked six nights a week and sharpened their chops on the job. In his early teens, he played his first steady gig with the King’s Men, a quartet that performed jazz standards, rock, and sock hop music at bar mitzvahs and Yale fraternity parties, and to which two Yalies, pianist Jerry Swarski and saxophonist Dick Greenberg, belonged. “They were light years ahead of me,” he says of those students. “Playing with them “turned me onto the world.” At 16, he accompanied legendary jazz pianists Marian McPartland and Toshiko Akiyoshi while they toured through town. He had soon jammed at all the New Haven hot spots — the Golden Gate, Monterey, and McTriff ’s. Too young to earn his driver’s license, McClure had his mother drop him off and pick him up from work. At home, no one understood McClure’s passion. His parents, neither of whom had gone to high school, “just wanted you to be safe. My brothers didn’t go to college, they just got married, had kids, got jobs.” He accuses his family of always having “wallow[ed] in mediocrity.... They didn’t even have a record player,” a travesty McClure rectified with his own purchase.
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nicole levy / contributing photographer
It was John Coltrane’s sophomore album, the 1957 “Blue Train,” that motored McClure into his future. After studying theory and bass technique with Joseph Iodone, protégé of the composer Paul Hindemith at the Yale University School of Music, McClure attended the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford. After dropping out of the music education major, he studied bass performance, in what his professors thought was a risky move. “I wasn’t going to fall back,” McClure justifies his decision to push ahead as a professional jazz musician. If he was bound for failure, he would arrive with pizazz. “I was going to fall forward, on my face.” McClure nearly had the bruises to attest to his resolve when, in 1961, the dean caught him and saxophonist Houston Person playing what the administrator derided as “body music” in the school’s basement; he threw them out on the street, “like trash,” McClure recalls. Ultimately, instead of expelling the young musician for “slapping” the bass, Hartt created a jazz appreciation class, and today the school offers a jazz studies major, the foundation of which saxophonist Jackie McLean laid in 1970. But the world of jazz had had an unsavory reputation in the eyes of some for a reason: drugs were par for the course, and McClure himself would experiment with pot, hash, psilocybin, and cocaine, but never heroin, because “that would make me a drug addict,” he quips. Of his escalating habits, McClure says, “I hated it, but I did it anyway. People said, ‘You’ll play better; chicks will love you.’ Misery loves company. Nobody wants to get high and have you looking at them.” Eventually, “the writing on the wall became skywriting,” as his heroes died of overdoses, cancer, and heart attacks. McClure sought help from Alcoholics Anonymous and sponsored friends’ transformations in the wake of his own.
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ately, he avoids clubs where he’s offered drinks, and where he’s “not all that interested in what’s going on with music these days.… It’s hard to say
what the music of this period is. It’s really eclectic, it’s more about business, trying to sell units.” The music between McClure’s ears remains his only lingering addiction and can be sampled on the 27 albums he has recorded over the course of his diverse career as a bandleader. He continues to compose prolifically in his apartment on the Upper West Side, where he’s lived since 1977. Although this is the first summer in 35 years McClure has not had a club or festival date booked beyond Manhattan's boundaries, he looks forward to the Europe tour his band Quest will take next year. He describes the cutting-edge sound of saxophonist Dave Liebman, pianist Richie Beirach, drummer Billy Hart, and himself as “dark and lugubrious.” He kids, “We have a warning label on our records: don’t listen to this alone in the dark; you might hurt yourself.” Meanwhile, he has just finished a week of playing rhythm section with Beirach’s quartet at Birdland, a jazz club in Midtown, and he continues to play the piano on Thursday and Saturday afternoons at McDonald’s. “Success is creating a job for what you do,” McClure says, adopting bassist Red Mitchell’s mantra as his own. In anticipation of his 70th birthday this November, he has neither the energy nor inclination to network and promote himself, as he recommends his students should, but he continues to evolve as a musician, clocking 12-dollar hours at the McDonald’s piano from 11:30 to 4. “I just go on a trip, and I play whatever comes to mind,” he says from the bench of the Howard, on which his sweating cup of McCafé iced coffee rests. Unbeholden to the formal dress code for cashiers — a black cap, red vest, and white button-up top — McClure dresses for anonymity in an Under Armour t-shirt, and, if he feels mature that day, a snap-button tee. He ends the afternoon’s set of jazz standards, his own tunes, and other contemporary compositions with an interpretation of “Taking a Chance on Love.” “I play for more people in one day than you would in a month at the Vanguard … not that people are listening,” he ruminates. McClure can ramble on for hours, talking or playing, without looking anyone in the eye for more than a moment. Playing music channels the steady current of his choppy thoughts into a basin that’s “never been enough, but it’s been enough. I mean I’ve survived.” Over the course of a year, McClure’s gig at the McDonald’s pays $6,000, enough to cover his rent. His last notes rebound off the two-story mirrors on the striped walls and fade into the soundscape of “May I take your order?” and “Are you going to eat that last fry?” and, maybe, if the diners have been listening and waiting to tell him, “I’m lovin’ it.” ®{®}® Vol. XXXIX, No. 1 September 2011
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Widening the Frame B
by Madeline Buxton
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hy did she put him in the corner?” asks a leggy blonde as our group stops in front of the East wall of the Raphael Room. “Why did she put him in the corner?” our tour guide, Francine, counters. The blonde shrugs and looks slightly annoyed. “Is he taking a break? Looking outside?” prompts Francine. Our group steps in for a closer look, and a few timid voices chime in with suggestions. The “he” in question is Count Tommaso Inghirami, the subject of a portrait Raphael painted circa 1516. The “she” in question is Isabella Stewart Gardner, the wealthy patroness who placed Count Tommaso’s portrait beside a second-floor window in the Boston art gallery that bears her name. In his corner setting, the red-robed figure sits facing the window with one hand poised, pen in hand, over a sheaf of paper. His left pupil stares upwards; his misaligned right pupil looks into the distance. In front of the portrait stands an ornate chair and desk with a vase of dried thistles and Raphael’s tiny Pietà. Does the Raphael exhibit represent a woman’s vanity table? A confessional? We don’t know. Gardner’s galleries, which opened to the Boston public on New Year’s Day 1903, have not changed since her death in 1924, as stipulated by her will. The eclectic art collector modeled the space after a 15th century Venetian palazzo. Three floors of personally-installed galleries look onto a central courtyard interspersed with Classical statuary and clusters of blue and white hydrangeas. No pieces are added to the museum’s collection. No objects removed. No arrangements shifted. But amid all this permanence, there is one museum convention that is visibly absent: descriptive labels.
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efore this summer, my trips to art museums could be summed up in one anecdote. It didn’t matter if I crossed the Atlantic to see Renaissance sculptures at the Victoria and Albert, took a four-hour train ride to see the Marc Jacobs exhibit at the Met, or walked five minutes to the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG). I went because I wanted to learn about art. Of course, I always arrived with the intention of looking at the artwork. But more often than not, I gave in to self-inflicted pressure to read the standard 140 words that accompany artifacts, paintings, and fashion displays. I skimmed the short Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag
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identifiers — artist, provenance, time period — then pored over the curator’s interpretation of the piece and its significance in the art history canon. If asked to describe a single piece in detail, I doubt I could do it. Nevertheless, I left each museum feeling content. A textbook-trained student, I had learned all I needed to know from the cold, hard facts printed neatly on little white labels. It wasn’t until I came to the Gardner that I was forced to take a different approach. Like some other smaller, privately founded art museums, including Winterthur, a decorative arts museum in Delaware, and The Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania, the Gardner provides a more interactive learning experience by omitting curated labels from their standard places alongside artworks. “Not having labels gives you permission to have your own ideas,” says Peggy Burchenal, the Esther Stiles Eastman Curator of Education at the Gardner. “It’s not a museum expert telling you, ‘Here’s what you should think about this.’” If I encountered Raphael’s Count Tommaso in a large, public art museum, his accompanying blurb would probably have told me that the Count was a canon of Saint Peter’s, hence the red robe; his slightly rotated upper torso is intended to direct my gaze to his face and his intellectual disposition; his misaligned eyes are not an artistic liberty — the Count suffered from strabismus, a condition in which the eyes can’t simultaneously look in the same direction. In retrospect, this information, found in The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: A Companion Guide and History, adds to the painting’s intrigue. Yet had it been adjacent to the painting, I wonder how much my reliance on the text would have detracted from my seeing the portrait for the first time. Yes, I would have learned more about the Count and Raphael. But I wouldn’t have attempted to decode the painting’s message on my own or to think about the narrative Mrs. Gardner’s arrangement creates. It’s unlikely that I would have even spent enough time in front of the painting to form an opinion. According to Jennifer Deprizio, the Gardner’s Director of Visitor Learning, studies show that museum visitors spend an average of 17 seconds on each work of art. Only three to five seconds are spent actually looking at the painting. The rest? Reading the label.
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n a trip through the Gardner’s galleries without a tour group, I stop in the Dutch room to look at a portrait of Mary I, Queen of England — I know it’s her because the artist wrote her name in the upper left-hand corner. There’s another woman in front of the piece, and just as I’m about to walk away, she turns to me, a smile stretched across her face. “She looks like a man!” the woman laughs. “Don’t you think so?” I can’t help but agree. Queen Mary does look like a man in her incredibly unflattering portrait. We spend
a good five minutes talking about the shape of Mary’s jaw, her severely upright posture, and the sharp focus of her narrow-set eyes before we go our separate ways. The conversation adds a new dimension to the museum experience that I never enjoyed when my eyes were glued to descriptors. Our talk doesn’t tell me all I want to know about the painting’s history, but it makes me realize that viewing and learning about art don’t need to be static experiences. It’s undeniable that many museum-goers still rely on labels as a primary learning tool — the Gardner’s lack
Vol. xxxix, No. 1 September 2011
z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv crit vuv 17 of text remains the most common visitor complaint. When Francine began our tour, she addressed the issue and asked if we liked their absence. A strong “No!” immediately came from an elderly woman to my right. There wasn’t always such a firm dependence on text. According to Laurence Kanter, the Lionel Goldfrank III Curator of Early European Art at the YUAG, labels weren’t present in the earliest museums. There’s some evidence that they were still regarded as novelties at the beginning of the 19th century. The practice only became widespread once curators started to arrange paintings geographically and chronologically — in earlier museums, objects and paintings were ordered according to shape or size. Nowadays, says the Gardner’s Burchenal, “People are so trained to want to know what something is.” When she first came to the museum, Burchenal played with the idea of placing small wooden blocks with information next
we would ever consider not providing, at minimum, the information that resides on a tombstone label ... ” explains Tiffany Sprague, the Committee’s Chair and Director of Publications and Editorial Services at the museum. “This mission [to educate the public] is especially integral to the Gallery given the fact that we are on a university campus.”
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n a Saturday afternoon, the Museum of Fine Arts, a large publicly-owned Boston museum, is crowded with tourists and local culture-seekers. As I go through the rooms, I see people cluster to the left or right of the artworks in the bent-over, squinted-eye position I once knew so well. The space directly in front of the art is generally empty. I head toward the first level of the museum’s new “Art of the Americas” wing to look at John Singleton Copley’s “Watson and the Shark,” a piece covered in my History
Yet I wonder how much my reliance on the text would detract from seeing the painting for the first time. to objects. A trial run showed that the text interrupted the viewer conversation that Gardner strove to create. “As Isabella Stewart Gardner originally saw it, this was a place designed to fire the imagination,” Burchenal says. “It’s all about people having a direct response to works of art — having their own response.” The museum eventually placed laminated room-guides in each gallery. Apart from a few curator comments, the sheets offer just enough information to identify a gallery’s pieces. The Barnes Foundation has adopted a similar practice. “[Albert Barnes] didn’t stop us from providing information, but it’s clear we’re not supposed to have information on the walls next to the paintings,” says Andrew Stewart, the Director of Public Relations at the museum. “The notion we have is that the labels would distract people from looking at the paintings.” The YUAG has also recently evaluated the effectiveness of its labels. Each object currently on display is accompanied by a tombstone label, which has basic information such as the artist, title, and date. Only select “highlight” pieces in the museum’s collection receive longer descriptions. Certain installations have what the YUAG calls “checklists” that are similar to the Gardner’s room-guides and list tombstone information on one comprehensive page. In preparation for the YUAG’s post-renovation reopening in December 2012, an Interpretation Committee meets regularly to assess the museum’s explanatory tools and discuss the kinds of informational materials that should be provided. Though, “I don’t think
Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag
of Western Art survey course. Among static portraits of aristocrats on adjacent walls, the painting sticks out with its dramatic portrayal; a naked man violently struggles to flee a shark as his comrades extend their arms in desperation from the boat. The creature’s jaw is open and his tiny white teeth, noticeable against the dark cavern of his throat, advance towards the pale, white flesh. Though I heard the piece’s story in a lecture, I can’t remember who the man is, nor where and when the scene is supposed to take place. I can tell only that it’s a racially charged picture — there is just one African American figure, standing in the center of the painting on the boat. He clutches a rope tossed out to his besieged comrade. There is a label next to the painting, and I know it could clarify the scene. But I don’t trust the label with the same conviction I did in the past — I doubt that the words would to convey the imminent threat that pops off the canvas. As I take in the action, a curly-haired mother and her young daughter brush past me. The girl stands in front of the painting and stares. Her mother instantly goes to the right and bends down to read the descriptor, learning the details I’ve forgetten. When she realizes that her daughter isn’t with her, the mother steers her in front of the label and chides, “Are you reading? Make sure you’re reading.” The girl obeys. After they’ve finished skimming the words, they step back, take a quick glance at the shark, and move to the next available label. BBB
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A match made in new haven Last year, New Haven nearly lost its premier professional sporting event. Then Yale decided to save it. D
by Eliana dockterman
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photos by blair seideman Vol. xxxix, No. 1 September 2011
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he Sponsor’s Pavilion at the New Haven Open sits back from the traffic of fans walking to center court at the Connecticut Tennis Center to watch the next tennis match. The white tent is surrounded by a white picket fence that seems oddly out of place when separating cement from more cement. On a Wednesday night in August, a week into the tournament, guests who have paid $150 per plate are streaming into the Grand Tasting Event, the highlight of the Open’s Food & Wine Festival. Before entering the tent itself, they flash their purple “VIP” bracelets to two less-than-menacing bouncers — 20-something blondes wearing New Haven Open T-shirts and chatting about the next match — and receive a large, plastic plate, equipped with a hole for the stem of a wine glass. The tent is lit only by a purple light at the apex, bathing the collared shirts of those present — New Haven government officials, Yale spokespeople, bank presidents — in a pinkish hue. The walls are lined with booths covered in black linen displaying hors d’oeuvres from nearly every major restaurant in town. Guests attempt to balance small bites of Catalan-inspired flan from Barcelona, chipotle-glazed bacon donuts from Box 63, and deep red ceviche from Ibiza while shaking other guests’ hands. In one corner, Claire of Claire’s Corner Copia chats with a Yale student about the cooking classes she plans to offer at one of the residential colleges next semester. In the opposite corner, the Mayor of West Haven poses for a picture with his wife. It is five minutes until the featured match of the night, and only a few people are beginning to move toward the door.
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year ago, New Haven’s Pilot Pen Tennis Tournament was dead. The pen company, a corporate sponsor since 1996, was relocating its headquarters from Connecticut to Florida and thus pulling its funding. The tournament had, in the past,
attracted 80 to 90 thousand people to New Haven per year, according to the New Haven Chamber of Commerce, bringing with them business and the attention of tennis fans around the globe. But convincing corporations to take Pilot Pen’s place and share even just a fraction of the financial burden (estimated at $1.2 million) proved tricky. At a press conference on October 21, 2010, Butch Buchholz, the tournament chairman, explained, “We had to ask ... the USTA [United States Tennis Association] for two extensions.” The tournament remained on shaky ground until the final deadline: “It got down to literally hours.” The USTA had started looking for other locations to host the tournament when Yale, which was already a
signed a deal to keep the tournament in New Haven through 2013. First Niagara would join later as the presenting sponsor. The unusual plan of shared sponsorship was heralded by Worcester as “the best thing that ever happened to this tennis tournament.”
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ruce Alexander ’65 stands alone in the middle of the Grand Tasting tent, looking rather pensive. He knows perhaps better than anyone else at that event what change has come over New Haven in the last few decades. Alexander became Yale’s Vice President and Director of New Haven and State Affairs in 1998. He is responsible for much of the revitalization of New Haven, having led initiatives to redevelop the commercial
“Those of us who live in New Haven know of its spectacular renaissance. But other people around the world have not caught on yet.” —bruce alexander’65 sponsor and had always provided the facilities, stepped in to help. President Richard Levin recalls, “I remember sitting down [with the people involved] … and recognizing we really had to get this done in the next few months or Butch Buchholz would have to move the tournament somewhere else.” President Levin recruited sponsors, acting as a white knight of sorts. Anne Worcester, the tournament director, has often called Levin her “sales director,” saying that by opening doors and making introductions, he found the funds. His strategy? Convincing sponsors that the tournament was essential to the New Haven community. By the October 21st press conference, Yale University, Yale New Haven Hospital, Aetna Insurance, and American Express had become the four “cornerstone” sponsors, having
Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag
properties adjacent to Yale’s campus, and for Yale to reach out to the New Haven community. He also chairs the board of Market New Haven (of which Worcester is also a member), whose mission is, according to its website, “to enhance the positive image of New Haven, communicate its renaissance, and to improve the prosperity of the City, its residents, and its business.” Alexander and others on the board understand that this tournament brings national and even international attention to New Haven. Alexander says of the tournament, “Those of us who live in New Haven know of its spectacular renaissance. But other people around the world have not caught on yet. The New Haven Open is one of those events that showcases the new New Haven.” But Yale’s heavy involvement
20 xwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwx u with the tournament drew questions — universities rarely, if ever, act as a sponsor of professional sporting events. And yet Yale, in a year filled with economic predicaments and plans for a new campus abroad, has dedicated a significant amount of time and effort to the preservation of the tournament. Anne Worcester’s explanation is simple: “As goes New Haven, so goes Yale.”
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ohn Koelmel, President of First Niagara Bank, sets aside his food to keep up with the number of handshakes he has to make. When the four cornerstone sponsors had yet to reach their financial goal for the tournament, Levin and Worcester approached First Niagara for help. As a new member of the New Haven community — First Niagara merged with Connecticut-based New Alliance Bank in April — the bank saw an opportunity to help the city. “[The tournament] is a unique event that New Haven could not afford to lose,” says Koelmel. First Niagara’s investment is larger than that of the other cornerstone sponsors, and the tournament could have been called the First Niagara Tournament. But instead, it got a new name: the New Haven Open. “We’re not in the business of putting our names on things,” says Koelmel. “It’s about the New Haven community.” While the USTA itself does a great deal of community outreach through its various events, the New Haven Open has gone above and beyond in its efforts to help its host city, utilizing the celebrity of professional tennis to build interest at the community level. “It’s always been our philosophy that this is much more than a tennis tournament,” Worcester says. “We leverage this large-scale, international sporting event to engage the community, especially among youth.” Over the years, the tournament has partnered with the Parks and Recreation Department and local school systems to create
affordable tennis programs offered year-round. More than 5,000 children have gone through these clinics so far. And the New Haven Open has been consistently recognized as a leader in community outreach: last year, Worcester was invited to be the keynote speaker at the largest USTA conference on growing community tennis programs. This year, the New Haven Open’s featured community event was the First Niagara Block Party at the WexlerGrant School. Wexler-Grant is located in the Dixwell neighborhood, in which, according to the New Haven Independent, the police recorded 151 criminal incidents in the month of July alone. There, not only did rising 19-year-old American tennis star Christina McHale teach a clinic of 200 kids, but First Niagara also gave out tennis racquets to all the children. With the event, Worcester and First Niagara hoped to expose children to the sport of tennis and teach them about the importance of fitness. “We took it to the Dixwell/Newhallville areas because kids there don’t have as many afterschool activities and summer activities as other places,” says Worcester. The tournament followed up three weeks later with the first-ever summer tennis program in that neighborhood, which quickly became oversubscribed.
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nne Worcester, who has directed this tournament for 14 years, moves efficiently through the Grand Tasting. She stops occasionally to greet sponsors and city leaders but usually she’s explaining to her staff how to prepare for that night’s big match. Worcester is the picture of composure; each of her words, even side remarks, seems practiced. Throughout the tournament she is ubiquitous — holding a microphone at every game, every press conference, every promotional event. Worcester spent the entire year preparing for the revamped event, even persevering through a number of personal trials to reach the opening days of the tournament. Doctors diagnosed Worcester with breast cancer in March after she received an abnormal result from her annual mammogram in January. Just a few weeks later, Worcester’s mother, Karene, who also had breast cancer, passed away. Despite her personal tribulations, Worcester did not give up on work. Two days after her mother’s funeral, she traveled to Florida to try to recruit players for the 2011 tournament; she especially had her eye on the three-time champion of the Pilot Pen tournament and number one tennis player in the world, Caroline Wozniacki. “It would have been easy to cancel the trip,” Worcester told the Hartford Courant in June. “[But] I knew I had Vol. xxxix, No. 1 September 2011
u xwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwx feature xwx 21 to lay the groundwork.… And I also wanted to look Caroline Wozniacki in the eye and make sure she knew how important it was to come back.” Worcester underwent surgery in April, and Wozniacki agreed to play in the tournament. As living proof that early mammograms are essential to fighting breast cancer, Worcester decided to use the tournament as a platform for the breast cancer cause. Eight months before Worcester’s surgery, it had been decided that the New Haven Open would be a women’sonly tournament — unlike Pilot Pen, which had been men’s and women’s. The men’s side of the tournament had been added five years earlier but had never attracted much star power, largely because the tournament takes place the week before the U.S. Open, and many players want to take that time to rest. The men’s side was determined to be a financial drain, and thus it moved to North Carolina. Switching back to a women’sonly format proved useful financially. The target audience does not change dramatically between a mixed and women’s-only tournament, but many companies have women’s initiatives. “So,” Worcester says, “almost every company has a way to tie in with a women’s-only event that might not have been appropriate for a combined event.” Earlier in the afternoon, a crowd had gathered around a pink Cybex treadmill in front of the stadium. Caroline Wozniacki was running steadily at 8.8 miles per hour. She had popped one headphone in her ear, and the other was dangling down her shoulder. Her blonde braid swung back and forth as she jogged, and she smiled awkwardly at the 50 people surrounding her — fans, reporters, small children holding out giant yellow tennis balls that already sported the signatures of other players. The previous night, she won the second set of her first game of the tournament, against Polona Hercog, in 11 minutes. The next day, she
would play rising tennis star Christina McHale, whose claim to fame was beating Wozniacki in Cinicinatti two weeks earlier. Standing next to the treadmill, Anne Worcester explained that every mile run on the treadmill would raise donations for the Smilow Cancer Center at Yale-New Haven
to construct tents, set up lighting, and paint, among other jobs. According to Rescigno, 80 to 90 thousand people come into the area for the tournament, and while they are in New Haven, they buy gasoline, stay at hotels, go out to dinner, and shop. “And it all adds up to a fortune,” he says. But there are more
“It’s always been our philosophy that this is much more than a tennis tournament.” —anne worcester Hospital and the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation. The treadmill, which all the women playing in the tournament signed, was to be auctioned off after the the championship game. Wozniacki hopped off the treadmill, having completed three miles in 22 minutes. When she left, the crowd dispersed, and some headed toward the Mobile Mammography Van, a vehicle provided by Yale-New Haven Hospital to offer free mammograms. Throughout the matches, the players sport pink gear as they play. Everyone who runs on the treadmill — player or fan — receives a pink towel. “We may have done it if we were still a combined event,” says Worcester, “but being that we reverted to a women’sonly event again, and based on the fact that one in eight women in the country is diagnosed with breast cancer, it was a natural tie-in.”
subtle economic effects. “People say, ‘That was a good tournament. Those were good restaurants. Let’s go back to [New Haven] sometime,’” Rescigno continues. He gestures broadly around the room and jokes, “There are people here who never come to New Haven. What’s the matter with them?” Those involved with the New Haven Open hope that the tournament will showcase a city vibrant with culture, not the FBI-ranked fourth most dangerous city in the country. Of course, the sport itself also carries
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ony Rescigno, the President of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce, leans over a tall table in the middle of the tent at the Grand Tasting. As a representative of the workers of New Haven, he is pleased that the tournament, which generates 26 million dollars of economic impact, has remained in the city. The most apparent form of this income to the city is the work generated by the tournament: though Yale provides the facilities, the event employs workers
Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag
Eliana Dockterman
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sweet caroline
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n 2009, Caroline Wozniacki had just won her second Pilot Pen Tournament when Yale football head coach, Tom Williams, asked her to speak to his team. He hoped that the words of an accomplished (and not to mention very blonde) athlete their age — Wozniacki was 19 at the time — would inspire his players to stay focused. Tom Beckett, Yale’s Athletic Director, remembers that the football team was “riveted because she was talking about competing and staying in the moment.” “She seemed really down to earth,” says now-captain Jordan Haynes ’12. “I had no idea at the time that she was going to be the number one tennis player in the world.” Since then, the team has adopted her and started a tradition of coming to her matches every year. But the team’s love affair with Wozniacki was complicated this year when rumors emerged over the summer that the tennis all-star was dating Northern Irish golfer Rory McIlroy, who won the U.S. Open in June. Nobody knew if the team would show up to Wozniacki’s game with the threat of McIlroy in the stands. The footballers not only came to her semi-final match, but they also embraced McIlroy. After introducing the Yale football team as it ran onto the court and giving them a moment to celebrate with her and pose for pictures, the tournament emcee announced the addition of a new player to the team — number 96, from the foothills of Northern Ireland, Rory McIlroy. When he walked out in an Eli uniform, the team thundered. The Bulldogs reached out to high five him and patted him on the back as they posed for pictures with the couple. The players and audience cheered loudest of all when the couple kissed.
certain connotations. Charles Harris, a sports marketing expert, told the Associated Press during the first days of the Open that the audience Yale University is trying to reach often overlaps with the audience for tennis, which projects a sophisticated image. Events at the Open — such as a High Tea with former tennis star Stefi Graf (though Graf was unable to attend the tea because of Hurricane Irene), the Grand Tasting, and a Vineyard Vines Fashion Show — certainly suggest that the tournament and Yale are catering to the elite image of tennis. “You’re trying to attract and send a message to people who can afford to attend Yale,” Harris told the Associated Press. “If they were doing another type of sport that didn’t fit their demographic, you would raise your eyebrows.” Yale’s role as a sponsor is not just unusual, it is unprecedented. But the relationship is mutually beneficial: New Haven benefits from Yale’s fundraisers and name. Indeed, First Niagara spokesman James Bzdyra told the Associated Press the company would not have become a sponsor of the tournament if it were not for Yale. And Yale, in turn, takes advantage of the local and international attention to its home city. Worcester concludes, “I don’t know that there’s any university in the world that leverages a professional hometown sporting event in such a smart way for supporting the community with its year-round programs as well as its international branding.”
‘N
ihao.” With five minutes before Chinese superstar Li Na steps on court for her first match of the tournament, Anne Worcester is practicing her Chinese. Soon the Chinese Consul from New York, who has come to watch Li play, will be arriving at the Grand Tasting to meet Worcester. Li quickly rose to national attention in June when she beat out defending champion Francesca Schiavone in the French Open,
becoming the first Chinese Grand Slam champion in history. According to the Los Angeles Times, 65 million Chinese people watched her win. After Li wins the match, in a tiebreaker against Maria Kirilenko, she is swiftly taken off the court to a meet and greet. There, the emcee — who has now mentioned to the crowd several times that he is the father of the Bryan brothers, a doubles team that took home the bronze for America at the Beijing Olympics — is killing time before she arrives. “I’ve never seen such an organized group before,” he observes before cracking the joke, “I’ve never seen so many Communists before either.” The stands have filled with Chinese people, many who belong to the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars at Yale. Bryan asks the audience where the best Chinese food is in New Haven. The resounding answer is Great Wall, which prompts the owner of that establishment to stand up and introduce himself. Li steps onto the court quietly and without much fanfare. The staff is too distracted to notice when she walks up to the edge of the stands to sign one child’s ball. Suddenly there is a surge of Chinese children moving toward her, some encouraged by the gentle pushes of parents from behind. Adults follow the children, and soon everyone is out of their seats, standing on tiptoes trying to snap pictures of Li. A microphone makes its way through the crowd and questions are thrown at her in Chinese. Hongda Xiao, the President of the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars at Yale, says that he thinks speaking in the language of her hometown made Li feel like she was coming back home. “The New Haven Open at Yale puts the city of New Haven in a national and international limelight, as well as Yale,” says Worcester. The tournament is televised in 100 different countries around the world and features players from a variety of countries. The potential international exposure is not Vol. xxxix, No. 1 September 2011
u xwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwxwx feature xwx 23 lost on Yale. As Michael Morand ’87 DIV ’93, the Associate Vice President of the office of New Haven and State Affairs explains, “Yale is a global institution rooted in New Haven. [Thus the tournament] is a natural match for us. The best example this year of the tournament’s international reach is Li Na.” Li is a naturally appealing character, answering reporters’ questions with a deadpan sense of humor. In the interview after her first match, the emcee asks her how she pushed through a tough tiebreaker at the end of her last set. “I’m strong,” she answers simply, evoking laughter from the crowd. As a public female figure from China, the tennis star is somewhat of an anomaly. The meet and greet with the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars at Yale exemplifies her sudden popularity in China and beyond. Li’s success and her presence at the New Haven Open will increase the tournament’s exposure in Asia. “CCTV [China Central Television] in China and other Asian networks will expand their broadcast of this tournament because of Li Na,” says Worcester. “So all of Yale’s critical initiatives in Asia will be —” she pauses, “it sort of connects the dots.” Levin is well aware of the Chinese exposure that Li has brought to the tournament, and thus to Yale. “I think it’s great publicity for the city and wonderful publicity for Yale — [there’s] great footage of Yale in every show,” Levin says, mentioning that a friend in Beijing saw the tournament on TV. “The background [of the match] features Yale’s name prominently. It’s a great vehicle for letting people know that there are some first class things happening in New Haven, and Yale is associated with them.”
A
s Caroline Wozniacki follows through on the last serve of Saturday’s championship game, she launches herself forward onto her front foot and swings her back
leg, bandaged at the thigh, high into the air. Her motions reveal her bright pink spandex that match her bright pink sports bra, her bright pink nail polish, and the bright pink stripes on her shoes. Her outfit complements the free pink hats honoring breast cancer awareness that 7,500 fans received upon entering the final match. At match point, Wozniacki has all but won the tournament. Though she only escaped the first set of the match with a narrow 6-4 victory, she has destroyed Petra Cetkovska in the second set, five games to one. But she still needs one more point to be the champion. The ball comes back slightly to her right, and she squats so low to receive it that her knees practically touch the court. The remaining rally is barely a challenge: Wozniacki returns an easy backhand, and Cetkovska hits the next ball too long. Before the ball even lands out of bounds, Wozniacki is pumping her fist. There are few in the stands to celebrate Wozniacki’s fourth consecutive victory at the New Haven Open. A time change from 5 p.m. to 1
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p.m. because of the threat of Hurricane Irene and a one hour and 40 minute rain delay has left the stands depleted. Fans from the upper decks have slowly trickled down over the course of the game, taking more expensive seats soaked in raindrops. It begins to rain again as the trophies are brought out, and more people flee for their cars. The rain is a disappointment, and the tournament staff seems to recognize that. Worcester begins her speech, “Caroline, sweet Caroline, you are now our four-time defending champ,” before asking Wozniacki if she will return next year to defend her title, even asking for Wozniacki’s agent. Wozniacki smiles and says “I’d like to” in a cheery but slightly hesitant voice. Fans clap, not totally sure if that is the appropriate response. Minutes later in the press conference, a reporter asks again if Wozniacki will be returning next year. Wozniacki answers more firmly this time: “I’m sure I’ll be back next year.” xwx
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cultural exposure Photo Essay by Sophia Clementi
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10 years later
Yale reflects
Illustrations by Mona cao
We asked Yale students to write about the tenth anniversary of September 11th. The following pages contain some of their responses.... Vol. XXXix, No. 1 September 2011
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‘W
here were you when?” It’s a question that defines generations. The bombing of Pearl Harbor. John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The Challenger explosion. These are the events that our parents and grandparents remember, that dominate their stories. For us, that event is September 11th, 2001. “Where were you when?” We are among the last classes at Yale that will be able to truly answer that question. And we are among the first that, at the moment the planes hit the Towers, were unable to grasp what had actually transpired. The truth is most of us were in elementary school. We were young. And so, ten years later, when we asked Yale students to reflect on the attacks, we received answers that belonged distinctly to us. Shortly after the attacks, professor John Lewis Gaddis wrote in the Yale Alumni
‘You know, this is the first time I’ve
been back here,” my dad said, his eyes fixed on the halfbuilt frame of 1 World Trade Center. It was July 3. My mom, dad, and I had planned to go to Coney Island, but it was raining, and my dad suggested we go downtown instead. He wanted to see the construction site. Tourists brushed by us, but we stood fixed, looking at the scaffolding reflected in the building’s newly installed windows, unnerved by the planes that seemed to be flying a little too low. The last time my dad was this close to Ground Zero he looked at it from the other side, he told me. It was just weeks after the attacks. A boat took him, my mom, his father, and his sister to the site by way of the Hudson River. His sister Nancy’s husband, Alan, was missing. Smoke still rose from the ashes of the buildings and their inhabitants. We used to joke — as perverse as that might sound — that if we ever spotted a tin toy or a Japanese doll in the mess, we would know to whom those items belonged: my mom’s sister, my aunt Cathy, was known for keeping collections in her office. Cathy worked in the North Tower. Alan worked in the South. Cathy was not in when the planes hit, and we never did see any vintage trinkets in the smoldering landscape of grime. We did get word of a belt buckle and a keychain: they were Alan’s remains. After my dad recounted the story the three of us broke our gaze, wiped away our tears, and continued
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Magazine of his students at the time, “This generation had not previously been known for the precision with which it speaks and writes; but suddenly it’s found a voice.” He quoted a News editorial from the time, which read, “Will we serve? We must answer the calling of our time — for if we don’t, who will?” For those of us who were not in college on that day, but eight, nine, ten years old, the discussion is different. In this series of essays, Yale writers grapple with the reality of their relationship to 9/11. They ask, what does it mean to be defined by an event that many of us can remember only vaguely, and whose enormity and loss most of us could begin to comprehend only years later? What is it like to be the generation that straddled both “pre-” and “post-,” that grew up as much outside of 9/11’s shadow as within it? — Molly Hensley-Clancy
down the street. I knew I wanted to record the moment, and a couple weeks later I jotted down notes on my computer. I have written about 9/11 before. I wrote a poem in a composition book just after I was informed the towers were hit. I was on a retreat with my school, and I didn’t even know Alan had started a job in the South Tower. I recited another verse at Alan’s memorial service. Two years ago, I published a short essay in the News on the subject. I feel guilty, though, whenever I begin another essay about this. My impulse, as a writer, is to record my experiences, but for me the tragedy is only semipersonal. I now can barely remember my uncle. A photo of me squeezed between him and my aunt is the one image I retain. What right do I have to write about that day, when there are others, like my aunt, for whom the attacks were so personally devastating? That is why I worry I’m being disingenuous when I mention my uncle in class during a discussion of the topic, or when I cry looking up at 1 World Trade. But I hope no one faults me for doing these things, because I don’t fault those who mourn even though they only watched the burning buildings on television. We each understand 9/11 differently, and we should chronicle these varied understandings because that is our way of historicizing the day. The writers must write. Hopefully, this essay adds yet another new perspective to the archive of 9/11 tales that we all will
28 BCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCB V be forced to revisit throughout our lives. But it is no more special because a member of my extended family was killed in the towers. When I went downtown with my family this summer we also visited St. Paul’s Chapel, across the street from Ground Zero. After the attacks the stillstanding structure served as a place of sanctuary for relief workers. St. Paul’s was itself in the process of being turned into a living memorial. Visitors brought items to honor the victims. Now, the chapel is a sort of reliquary. There are firefighter’s badges and photos and origami cranes, gifts from around the world. On that July day, children were running around the space, children who hadn’t been born when the burning buildings were plastered on television screens around the world. These children will inevitably be taught about 9/11. They will read about it in textbooks and might yawn as their teachers dole out statistics on how many lives were lost. But it is our stories, even the semi-personal ones, that will stick. — Esther Zuckerman
The terror lasted as long as recess.
I sat cross-legged in the field behind my elementary school, with a few girls from my class. We picked the heads off dandelions and talked about what we’d heard from our mothers and homeroom teachers. Those girls — all eyes, freckles, and bubblegum breaths — talked about planes crashing and people dying. And it felt like gossip. Gossip about me. My dad had just gotten on a plane that morning. I grabbed the grass beneath me, as if the slightest breeze would knock me down. I thought about how I hadn’t said goodbye to him, how he’d kissed me on the forehead before leaving. All of the sudden, I was at the center of the tragedy. But my dad was okay. He was not on any of those planes. Everything was okay, and there was no tragedy at all. I slipped out of my distress, a sweater too hot to wear. I know that I am American. Over these ten years, I have decided that New York City is the best city in the
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V CBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCB cover BCB 29 world, memorized sections of the Constitution, and planned to become an English major. These are not sufficient indications of my nationality. Maybe tears aren’t either. But I also know that this September 11th, I will not be sad enough. On September 11, 2001, I had been nine for just two days. I loved my mom, dad, bike, and sometimes my sister. I had no particular feelings about America. What was it to love a country? America was golden retrievers, chocolate chip cookies, and TV shows I didn’t watch. I did not understand what it meant to be American. I did not feel for other Americans. Nothing feels real when you’re nine. I couldn’t understand how horrifying and permanent that day was for so many. And I hardly understand it now. I wish I had been older when it happened. I might have felt more. I might feel more now. Every year since then, when I see the flags, hear the trumpets, and stand among classmates and friends in a moment of silence, I have no tears. I will not cry this year. I feel like I am missing something. I’m still learning to be an American and to internalize the pain. But every year, I remember dandelions, warm sun, and a pounding in my heart for just one person. — Justine Yan
It’s September 11, 2001,
and today is a big day. Not only am I finally in fifth grade, but, for the first time ever, I’ve walked all by myself to PS 234. We are waiting in a double-line outside the classroom when we hear it: a big boom. A woman runs out of the stairwell, telling us that a plane has just flown through the Twin Towers. Jacob and I turn to one another in excitement. That’s awesome! I imagine a plane zooming between the buildings that tower above us, just three blocks away. But the adults around us aren’t happy. They’re scared. In the classroom, looking through the big, south-facing window, I suddenly understand why: there’s a huge hole in one of skyscrapers. Smoke pours from the hole where the tail of the plane sticks out. A flaming cloud is rising above the World Trade Center. Now, we’re all afraid. We sit on the rug. Our teacher, Shirley, tells us everything will be fine. Out the window I can see things falling from the floors above the hole in the tower. Those things are people jumping from the tower, and they are going to die. The PA comes on and tells teachers to draw the blinds down on the south side windows facing the towers, and Shirley does. I can see she is trying not to cry at the same time as she tries to calm us down. The PA is still talking, but we don’t hear Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag
it. The class shrinks, as parents arrive to pick up my friends. My dad comes to take me home, saying we’ll wait there, but I don’t like the idea. Our house is still only a few blocks away. I tell my Dad that the tower is going to fall. He keeps assuring me we’ll be fine. I tell him again and again that the tower is going to fall. I tell him we have to get away from here. The tower is going to fall. My dad finally agrees not to go home, and we get on the subway to go to my mom’s office. It’s hot and, in the packed train car, everyone is sweating. Crushed by the weight of the adults around me, I feel like I can’t breathe. Suddenly the train car comes to a stop, and the lights go dark. I’m afraid that I won’t be able to get out. But the car starts again. In my mom’s office, people are crowded around the TV. When my mom hugs me, she says that another plane hit the second tower. That dark, scary moment in the subway marked the first tower’s collapse. I want her to tell me that everything’s going to be all right, but she just keeps saying, “I hope it’s not the Arabs.” •• When we return to our home a week and a half later, after living with friends in Greenwich Village and on Long Island, we have to show identification to enter our own neighborhood. Just a few blocks to the south, dust still coats the streets. Our pride in our Arab heritage has not changed, but my mother fears what other people might assume. Among the first things we do after we get home is to remove the Lebanese flag from my bedroom window and the sign from our door, which holds a familiar Arabic phrase: “Ahlan wa Sahlan.” Welcome. — Bahij Chancey
My family was living
in Saudi Arabia at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It was a school night, and I was doing homework. My dad called me downstairs, yelling, “You have to come see this.” All I saw was the image of a tower, spewing torrents of black smoke. “Cool,” I said half-heartedly. Some background: I am an American, but I was born in Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War. When I was four, a car bomb killed seven people in Riyadh, and, when I was five, a truck bomb killed 19 and injured 372 in Khobar, about 15 minutes away from my hometown. The explosion shook our house. I never lost sleep when a car bomb went off, and no one else I knew did either. A family friend once said, “If it’s not happening on your street, then don’t worry about it.” In Saudi Arabia, I didn’t understand how 9/11 could
30 BCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCB V affect the entire world, how New York City could be on everybody’s street. The people I knew went to the movies so they could watch a building explode and then complained if it didn’t look realistic. Less than a year after September 11th, my family moved to Boise, Idaho. Back in Saudi Arabia, terrorists seized the ice skating rink where I’d celebrated my ninth birthday; they killed and beheaded several foreigners before being shot by the police. At my ice skating rink. Where I had eaten pizza and birthday cake, men had been killed. It was then, thinking about blood staining the rink where my friends and I had skated, that I finally understood what had happened on September 11th. I was more than 7,000 miles away, but I finally felt like it had happened on my street. — David McNeill
I had never heard of “Islam” before.
That was the least of my concerns: at that moment, I was more worried about getting to my new school in my new state on time even as I wasted precious morning minutes watching the CNN footage. The smoke billowing from the buildings looked like special effects in a movie. The skyline was, surely, stock. And these “terrorists,” “Islamic fundamentalists,” “extremists” — at ten years old, these were new vocabulary words. I swallowed them up. The next day, my mother took me to church. And to temple. The important thing was connecting with our community, she maintained, but I found it difficult to be moved by sermons. It’s hard to be unhappy when you are perfectly healthy and satisfied with your youth. In seventh grade world history we memorized the Five Pillars of Islam, which were a lot like some of the Jewish rules I had studied at Hebrew school. We discussed the ascension of Mohammed academically, detachedly, and learned to identify different architectural features of a typical mosque: the mihrab, the minaret. At night, the TV ranted about men with machine guns hiding out in caves. In class, we admired pictures of the Great Mosque in Cordoba, finding beauty in the symmetry and abstraction of Arabic calligraphy, in the iconic red-striped horseshoe arches. Something wasn’t adding up. I could not reconcile the devotion of five-times-daily prayer with the anarchy of guerrilla war. But everyone around me had no problem equating Islam with anger. Allahu akbhar was, through the rough lens of the media, slurred into a battle cry, and believing in a God named Allah was, in no uncertain terms, unpatriotic. That seemed unfair. When my family moved and I started attending a Catholic school, our class recited the Pledge of
Allegiance every morning, and then followed it up with the Our Father. I lip-synced; I had never been taught the words to either. “One nation under God … and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” I practiced under my breath at recess. Were people really following that maxim? We prayed in class each afternoon for the safety and success of our “men and women in uniform.” And what about the men and women not wearing uniforms? I fidgeted in my seat, uncomfortably bowing my head. Devotion evaded me. We were told we were under attack; we insulated ourselves against a hastily sketched caricature of an enemy, baptizing daily in the reinforced righteousness of Americanism and Catholicism and a healthy dose of faith and fear. Nearly ten years later, I found myself traipsing across Istanbul, guidebook in hand. At the third mosque, I enacted the usual tourist ritual: slip out of my shoes, step onto the cool stone, loop a pashmina around my hair. I sat cross-legged on the ornate carpet, an endless series of interconnected prayer rugs. The call to prayer reverberated across the vaulted domes above. And then the slow surge of men padding across the carpet, kneeling in ordered rows: rowdy young boys and their stern-looking fathers, tattooed teenagers and businessmen still with shiny briefcases. They hummed a low prayer, falling in and out of sync, bowing and standing in a studied rhythm. A wave of worship. I bowed my head, too. Terror, fundamentalism, extremism: these lived somewhere dark and unknown. Not here, where dedicated faith structured each day, where sunlight streamed in through stained glass and gilded every face in warm gold. In the echoing stillness of that mosque, I too could pray. — Raisa Bruner
I mostly dislike
the bells and whistles of commemorative occasions. On my birthday, I am made anxious by the “festive” ritual of unwrapping presents, the predictable moment when the cake is wheeled in and the singing begins. But there are smaller, if stranger, ways I mark the same day each year that bring the cathartic feeling of things coming full circle. I enjoy recalling exactly who ordered which dish at the previous year’s celebratory dinner. I set an alarm for 9:09 p.m., the precise time I was recorded “born.” The act of commemorating September 11th is a different kind of demarcation. The anxiety of approaching my birthday is not at all the difficulty of commemorating the death day of so many others. And yet the way that I want most to remember this day — and, somehow, to mourn it — borrows something from the way I choose to celebrate other days. Vol. XXXix, No. 1 September 2011
V CBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCB cover BCB 31 To observe September 11th as tragedy or history begins, for me, to turn it into a distant and abstract event — even, I fear, a meaningless one. To think of the dead as a long list of names or whole gallery of faces, to think of swathes of time as simply pre-9/11 or post9/11 blurs my memory of what happened that day and obscures my sense of why it matters. So, nine years ago, I chose instead to pick just one name from the list. On the first anniversary of September 11th, The New York Times published a special section called “One Year Later.” Among its features was a set of short profiles of those who had died. I no longer remember what the unifying principle of the profiles was: perhaps they were all New Yorkers or all firefighters or all fathers. The idea of the list — the length of the list — is of course what makes 9/11 an event we collectively commemorate. Just one New Yorker, just one firefighter, just one father dead does not bring a whole country grief. Just one, however, was what I felt I needed. That day in sixth grade, I picked Robert J. Foti, I think because he was the most handsome of the group, and looked the friendliest. He was from Albertson, New York, a fighter at Ladder 7, a father of three. The profile described him in the bathtub with his five-year-old son, James, where the two made “Santa Claus” beards with soapsuds. After 9/11, James began telling everyone he met that his “daddy died in the Twin Towers.” I decided that on September 11th, 2002, I would mourn just for Robert. In remembering just one, I would remember what it was about New York, about
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firefighting, about family and fathers that had been most terribly lost — and would be most terribly missed. On later anniversaries, I tried to find Robert’s obituary again. I didn’t remember his last name or his fire station, so each time I came up short, wishing I had a sharper memory of the face I had picked. Still, I held on to the image of a sudsy father and son splashing in the tub, of a five-year-old telling and retelling a story the whole world already seemed to know. This year, on the tenth (and so, somehow, more important) anniversary, I made a longer search and finally found the profile. Robert still looks handsome and friendly, though somehow I’d been expecting him — like me, and James, and everyone else — to have changed. — Clare Sestanovich
As I step on the plane — a week
before the tenth anniversary of September 11th — I silently send a prayer to God for safety. Admittedly, I’m not one to pray regularly, but every time I’ve located my airplane seat and fasten my safety belt, this short plea is always my next step in preparing for takeoff. I’m doing more than praying, though. I’m thinking: I snuck on a bottle of soap, but what threat might the man sitting next to me pose? Sit down and ignore everybody else. Act normal. Refrain from paranoia. Most of all, don’t think about September 11th. I scan the people around me. This is no longer an
32 BCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCB V Who would I turn to in my time of need? Would it be the North Carolinian woman, who had futilely offered the foreigner her own plastic hanger? The attendant shuts the cabin door and, as we prepare for departure, drops the keywords “cooperation” and “assistance,” as if leading a team-building exercise. I text my family the usual “About to take off, love you” before I let my compulsive need to prep myself for the survival of an 80-minute flight consume me. My mom’s response is not one of faith in my fellow passengers but rather a reliance on someone more omniscient: “May God bless your trip!” This trip will not end at the World Trade Center, and these passengers will stay calm. I turn up my music and try to ignore it all. — Emily Foxhall
September 11, 2001
idle curiosity, but a matter of personal security I can’t completely ignore. I put on my headphones and continue to scan the faces filling the rows. Passengers file down the narrow pathways to take their seats, but a shorter Eastern European woman makes her way against the traffic back to the front. She extends her left hand above her head, clutching a garment bag with dresses on several hangers. Approaching the flight attendant, she asks, in a thick accent, “Where can I hang my clothes?” I pause my music to listen. The attendant responds that the plane doesn’t have a closet, and she will need to lay the bundle flat in an overhead bin. She wants to use the empty hangers on the wall behind the last row in first class. The flight attendant again strictly denies her, citing FDA regulations even after a North Carolinian blonde in the second row offers to hang it for her as if it were her own. The woman begins to yell as a uniformed TSA officer boards the plane. What will we do if this continues while we’re in the air? He escorts her, crying and screaming, off the aircraft. Thank God we’re still on the ground. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, our country stood united by emotion. We like to remember the sympathy, patriotism, love, and to forget the anger, fear, and confusion. The crash brought us together, but it also drove us apart, weakening our trust and faith in one another. Who might help, were an actual emergency to occur?
was surreal. And as much as I love Yale, it was the last place I wanted to be. More than anything, I wanted to be home, in New York, with my fellow New Yorkers. But it turned out that Yale was just where I should have been on that day of fire. My day started with the unwelcome pealing of the telephone in my dorm room, Silliman 1747. My mother called and woke me up at the college-unfriendly hour of 9 a.m. and told me to turn on the TV. Something was happening at the World Trade Center. I didn’t even need to ask the channel. Every single one was showing smoke billowing out of the WTC. I had always had a love affair with the World Trade Center. For my tenth birthday, I went with my parents and sister to the top-floor Windows on the World restaurant for a celebratory dinner. I always insisted on taking out-of-town visitors to the WTC observation deck to see my favorite city from my favorite vantage point. And, in 1999, I had a summer job on the 93rd floor of 1 WTC (incidentally the exact point of impact of the first plane). So as I sat with my eyes locked on my tiny TV and watched as both towers came tumbling down, I started to cry, which I never do. The thought that dozens of people I knew were dying and a symbol of the city I call home was under attack was overwhelming. I felt helpless. I needed to do something … else. So I went to class. My first class that day was also one of my favorite in four years of Yale — Vince Scully’s “Modern Architecture.” Amazingly enough, we were in the middle of a unit on New York architecture, and the scheduled lecture for the day was about New York skyscrapers — including the World Trade Center. And that’s when I realized why Yale was where I needed to be that day. In Professor Scully’s class, I was reminded of New York City through a lens of love Vol. XXXix, No. 1 September 2011
V CBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCBCB cover BCB 33 and beauty and art, not smoke and fire and death. And walking to and from classes that day, I truly felt that the Yale community was the family we always describe it to be. I asked students if their loved ones were okay. They asked about mine. Every Yalie helped each other crowd out encroaching sadness by filling the silence with warm words and comfortable commentary. We all came together that night on Cross Campus to hold candles and remember. And amidst a throng of smart, caring, driven people, when it seemed like the world didn’t make sense anymore, I knew everything would be okay. That is what Yale has always been for me since: a foundation. — Alexi Nazem ’04, MED ’12
In commemoration of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, yaledailynews.com is running a series of interviews featuring students and professors reflecting upon the attacks. Excerpts from the interviews follow:
john lewis gaddis
Robert A. Lovett Professor of HIstory; Director, Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy “I was ... with [two professors and a student] sequestered for two hours [in an oral exam] ... while the planes were crashing into the Towers and the Pentagon.... We could hear people outside shouting at each other and running up and down the halls ... we knew that something awful had happened. But we had to get through the exam, and we didn’t want to rattle our student, because her whole career depended on doing well.... The buildings had collapsed by the time we [left].... It was a totally different world when we came out of that exam — that’s how dramatic it was.” “Part of the dilemma for me was ... what I was going to say in my big [Cold War] lecture class.... I opened the class by saying, ‘Obviously something horrible has happened. Obviously the world will not be the same. Yale will not be the same. But we should get on with what you are here to do: which is to get an education, to prepare for a career, and to fall in love.’ And they kind of laughed at that point, and it broke the ice.... So we went on and had a normal class.” “9/11 gave us a momentary glimpse of what it was like to live in the Cold War, when you always thought something might just fall from the sky and completely destroy your life.”
charles hill
Distinguished Fellow, Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy “I was walking along the Grove Street Cemetery and a student … was running at me down the sidewalk and waving her arms saying that ‘They’ve, they’ve destroyed the World Trade Center.’” “Yale is an institution that survives and thrives through storms and strife and hurricanes and whatever, and Yale — Mother Yale — is an old mother now and can handle these things….” Visit yaledailynews.com for the full video interviews, additional student essays, and more.
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Personal Essay
Sexual fantasies and the farming is easy D
by rachel lipstein
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n the fluorescent-lit spaces and dark corners of the barn, I sought my sexual fantasy. It was here, waiting for me among the circle of eight people on upturned flowerpot seats, flanked by two emptied flatbed crophauling trucks and a leaking water spigot. And I was nervous as all hell. As I resumed my place upon a pot on the rim of the circle, I asked, “Alright, how does it start?”
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This was just over a year ago, on my first Harvest trip. Now, as a new crop of freshmen arrive on campus, some still sunburned or poison-ivied from their own farms, they no doubt wonder if this Yale they are adjusting to will be the Yale that their Harvest trips prepared them to encounter. My trip had me picking tomatoes, swimming in a creek, shouting “Big booty!” and, of course, discussing my sexual fantasy. And, though the last was in some senses traumatic, it was perhaps the best preparation for Yale that the trip offered. We were playing a game called Sexual Fantasy, a game in which one guesser leaves the group while the rest invents a story, somewhere between bawdy and absurd, vulgar and comic, though they vary widely. Past fantasies — now something of lore — have included: phosphorescent microbes as sexual partners; ritual sacrifice on Beinecke Plaza; and a horde of Lord of the Rings characters, orcs and hobbits alike, in an
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After being prompted to leave the barn, I exited to the sound of keyed-up chatter about this location and that person. I was flattered that Ray and Marcus had chosen me, and, under normal circumstances, I would have walked back, excited to uncover their undoubtedly hilarious sexual fantasy, painstakingly tailored to me personally. Harvest games — Contact, Ninja, VegetableOff — were “my thing,” in the most unhealthily competitive sense. But now, I knew, I would walk back into the barn reluctant to discover their story. My reservations were not prudish, but practical. I knew in advance that it would be all wrong. The group would pick someone strikingly handsome: a rugged frontiersman given my outdoorsy interests, or some suspender-wearing ukulelist given my music tastes, or perhaps a sensitive intellectual bearded-type whom I would encounter in a dog park. To really shoot in the face a tired metaphor, all of these possibilities operated upon the false premise that I played for the Yankees, when it was more of an “A League of Their Own” situation. At this point, exiled to the misty fields outside the barn, it was too late to tell them I would probably like a girl in my sexual fantasy. Now, I wasn’t without a sense of humor. I understood that incandescent bacteria weren’t that poor Harvester’s idea of a good time. But this boiled down to an essential test: should I let their mistaken assumption stand? If
My trip had me picking tomatoes, swimming in a creek, and, of course, discussing my sexual fantasy. orgiastic bondage experience, which Tolkien would no doubt have considered violation of both copyright and character-integrity. Our leaders, Marcus and Ray, had selected me to be the guesser, and my only goal was to discover their invented plot. When I reentered the circle, unaware of the game’s legacy or the dilemma it would shortly put me in, I was to uncover their story relying only upon yes-or-no questions.
I proceeded with their story, I would confirm their assumption with my silence, and I would fail — in that large, symbolic way so intrinsic to being a scared, histrionic freshman — in the very first test of my newly instituted Will Tell, If Asked policy. No more silences at sleepovers; no more conversational acrobatics; and no more Escape-from-Guantanamo proms. From the moment I met these people four days
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Kat oshman / staff illustrator
earlier, I was assumed to be straight, an assumption that occurs sometimes tragically, often hilariously, but almost universally for people even just skimming the Regina George side of gender-normative (and, trust me, I am just skimming). But every time I was confronted with a chance to come out, my stomach would clench, I would hedge, and the moment would pass. Two days earlier, when I was asked about my ideal date while weeding kale, I played a different game, entirely on my own. Certainly outside the approved Harvest game arsenal, though a gay fan-favorite, the Pronoun Game involves excising all gender-identifying pronouns — as in, “my date … and they think …” — often performing grammatical feats that would make an English teacher choke on his red ink pen. Though the scared middle schooler in me was sympathetic to my hesitancy to correct these new farm-mates, my liberal, post-gay side’s indulgence was wearing thin. “And because of your pussyfooting around,” I said aloud, staring dispassionately over the fields of
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wildflowers while I waited to be called back into the barn, “this whole mess is your fault.” I jumped when I heard my name being called. Too soon! I thought desperately. I was still without a course of action. If I tried to correct them, their whole story would be useless, with the group plunged into inextricable awkwardness. If I didn’t, my whole confidence would be shaken, with the ink already drying on my stamp of failure. I was cornered. Walking in, dragging my whale-print rainboots under the gaze of the harsh industrial lighting, I shoved sweaty palms deeper into jeans. The group looked up at me in perfectly hysterical anticipation, but I had no idea where to start. Heart pounding painfully in my chest, I asked for guidance. Ray answered, “Just get some generals. Where are you? Who are you with?” “Alright, am I at Yale?” I asked, trying to swallow the knot in my throat. “Yes,” the circle chorused.
36 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z Rolling my eyes, trying to seem above it all, I asked, “Do I meet someone at Yale?” “Yesss,” the group replied. Ray leaned in as if to lead me on. Here, I paused. I decided that until they said something to the contrary, I would play the Pronoun Game — and play it hard. “Is this person a student at Yale?” “Yes!” “Do I know … this student?” “No.” “Are they a celebrity?” To this, they responded divergently with a scattering of sort of ’s and maybe’s. My narrative options were narrowing. Suddenly, and with a sense of glum certainty, I felt sure I had landed upon their chosen quasi-celebrity Yale student, whom we had discussed only that morning while washing carrots. With nowhere to go but forward, I muttered resignedly: “Is it James Franco?” The group’s laughter exploded into an enthusiastic affirmative, and a tingling wave of relief washed over me. There would be no more Pronoun Game. The decision had once again been made for me. A series of questions followed. Squirming in the throes of awkwardness, I whittled a marshmallow spear with my pocketknife, increasingly violently. I tried to steer their questions toward platonic activities. Through my questions, I found that Mr. Franco would reside in a Gothic castle in the center of Old Campus, in which his parents — who would give us snacks — would live. I would be there to film a movie in the lead role, apparently with Ellen Page in a supporting role (a question of wishful thinking on my part and surprisingly corroborating results on theirs). The movie, to be screened for all Yale students, would be “Pineapple Express II.” Ray pressed me to ask about the juicier details, and I asked if Mr. Franco and I would hook up on camera. “Yes.” Exasperated, trying to reach the end to the game, I snapped, “I suppose it ends well?” “No,” the group answered, among uproarious giggles. Half-joking, I asked if he commits suicide: “Yes.” “He … he kills himself after hooking up with me?” The group laughed still harder. “Yes — yes!” “That’s cruel, guys. That’s really just cruel. Is that it? Is that the game?” Ray was clutching her sides. “Okay,” she gasps, “okay. That is one of the best ones I’ve ever heard. His parents gave them snacks!” Numbly, I asked what she was talking about. The group, all wearing knowing smiles, watched me
intently as Ray looked up and said, “There was no story!” I stared blankly at the ruts in the dirt floor that I had neurotically gouged with the butt of the stick, the wood shavings strewn around me, my own bitten fingernails. “We answered ‘yes’ if your question ended in a vowel or the letter s, ‘no’ if it ended in a consonant, and ‘maybe’ for the letter y. You made the entire thing up yourself!” “You see,” Marcus interjected, “the guesser is really making their own sexual fantasy without knowing it, so it’s shaped unconsciously by their own desires. It’s always really entertaining to see what comes out.” While the group waited for me to laugh and cajole them on successfully-pulled eye wool, the fact that there had been no story, that everything I just went through was self-inflicted, began to hit me. In the heat of discovering the deception of the game, I began to feel resentful at the needless angst I had put myself through. Whittling even more intensely, though the marshmallow spear was now a fractured, inch-long twig, I was flushed, even angry. Marcus was, of course, wrong. It was not the guesser’s sexual fantasy that had been revealed but how she perceives herself to be perceived by the group. The questions I asked were based on the fantasy I expected them to create for me. As I sat in the barn, the conversation drifted on to other topics — QR’s, frocos, frats — but I remained silent. I thought about the operative deception of the game, that the script was written, and the fate was real. The game, though uncomfortable, was familiar. It mimicked on a smaller scale how I had molded my behavior, my statements, my self-presentation to meet a standard I believed was unyielding. Sexual Fantasy fabricated the impression of those expectations only to reveal that they had never existed concretely. My pocketknife slipped, and I cut my thumb, right where it meets the hand. I laughed aloud, bitterly, and then, looking up at the cluster of concerned faces, simply smiled. “Just a scratch,” I said, picking up another thin tomato stake to whittle to a point for s’mores later that night — when we would talk late into the night over a campfire. It took a shock like Sexual Fantasy to reveal that operative deception, which can seize hold and convince us, for a moment or for our whole lives, that we do not have the power to shape our own identities. Sexual Fantasy provided a realization that is the most freeing of all. After all, I could simply have asked if it was Ellen Page filming the movie in her castle on Old Campus and not James Franco. The best part is, they still would have had to say yes.
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searching for raymond clark III When the admitted murderer of Annie Le GRD '13 cried and apologized for his actions, he shattered popular opinion of himself as a stone-cold killer.
One reporter goes in search of some meaning in Clark’s tears.
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by everett rosenfeld
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hat disturbed me most was that he had cried. What right did he have to tear up? I had needed a casual devil, and here he was: a mere mortal crying in front of the courtroom, apologizing for all of the pain that he had caused. You cannot fake that, and there was no longer any reason to — Connecticut does not grant parole for convicted murderers.
Many unanswered questions still surround the murder of Annie Le GRD '13 on September 8, 2009. What we know is that Le was reported missing on the afternoon of September 9. Three days later, investigators discovered bloody clothing in the 10 Amistad St. building where she had worked. Four days after, they found Le’s body. And then, on September 17, authorities arrested Raymond Clark III. In March 2011, Clark pled guilty to homicide, as part of a bargain between his defense team, state prosecutors, and Le’s family. But that is not the whole story: as part of that deal, Clark also pled guilty to the charge of attempt to commit sexual assault under a court precedent called the Alford Doctrine. This means that he officially recognizes that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him of attempted sexual assault, but he refused to admit that he was guilty of this crime. These details are meaningless to those uninitiated to the criminal justice system. But because of this strange manipulation, when Clark is released in 44 years, at the age of 70, he may be able to avoid registering as a sex offender. I first reported on Clark’s March 17 plea hearing in my capacity as the Yale Daily News’ “Cops and Courts” reporter. Although other reporters had been in charge of the story in the past, the Le murder and its legal proceedings now fell to me. Through a lucky relationship with his defense attorney, Beth Merkin, I had learned two days before Clark's
court appearance that he would officially change his "not guilty" plea and announce the 44-year bargain. Knowing this outcome, I reported on the event with Harrison Korn ’11, who had originally covered the story when
room in 10 Amistad St., the building where both she and Clark had worked. When her body was discovered, Le’s bra had been pushed up, and her underwear hung around her ankles. Seminal fluid marked the inside of
It was easy enough to imagine Clark’s remorselessness when I reported on his legal deal-making, or interviewed faculty who had known Le — all of whom were shocked at the relatively light 44-year prison sentence, but deferred to the Le family’s judgment.... And then he cried. Le first went missing nearly two years ago. And there Clark was, in his first public appearance in over a year, pale and wearing a blue button-down shirt and black pants, winking at his family as he walked past them. He was easy enough to dislike.
After the hearing, Clark’s father, Raymond Clark II, stood outside of the courthouse and read a statement to the press and onlookers. “My family and I extend our deepest sympathy to the Le family,” he said. “I want you to know that Ray has expressed extreme remorse from the beginning. I can’t tell you how many times he sobbed uncontrollably, telling me how sorry he is.” But how could he expect anyone to believe this? During the plea hearing that day, co-prosecutor David Strollo told the court that Le’s body had been found upside down, partially decomposed inside a wall in a basement locker
these undergarments, but not enough to conduct a conclusive DNA test, Strollo told the court. Still, another area of the crime scene contained a semen sample, which was positively identified as Clark’s. There had been a struggle. Examiners had determined, Strollo said, that Le sustained a broken jaw and collarbone while she was alive. Clark had tried to cover up his tracks, Strollo said. Using a fishing line, he had attempted to remove evidence from behind the wall. He had scrubbed a drain clean and used air freshener in an effort to conceal the odor of the decomposing body. Clark had also tried to fabricate an alibi, drafting notes to coworkers that would clear him of police suspicion; police found these letters in one of Clark’s socks. This is the stuff of monsters. How could a man who had sexually assaulted a young doctoral student, beaten her, strangled her to death, and stuffed her body upside down behind
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fHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIM feature HIIM39 a wall — as Strollo said the evidence showed — be capable of remorse? It would be useful for my own psyche, and I believe more convenient for everyone, if Clark were not. It was easy enough to imagine this remorselessness when I reported on his legal dealmaking, or interviewed faculty who had known Le — all of whom were shocked at the relatively light 44-year prison sentence, but deferred to the Le family’s judgment. (That family has now filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Yale). And then he cried.
Hovering over my
cellphone in a midtown New York restaurant, I breathlessly awaited text message updates from a News freshman attending Clark’s June 3 sentencing — the final appearance for Le’s killer before he is put behind bars until 2055. More than a brief ceremony before incarceration, the sentencing was a final moment for the many victims to address the man who had caused them so much grief. Prosecutor gives context as to what 44 years of prison will mean for clark, one text message read. Mother to clark. You took away my only daughter, said another. Advocate reading father’s statement. We hope there will be greater security for all students on campus. That one might turn into a good story if anyone would talk to me, I thought. Raymond clark tears up throughout reading of the statements delivered by Le’s family. I put my phone down. Clark’s ensuing address to the court confirmed my worst fear about the murder of Annie Le. “I stand here today taking full responsibility for my actions,” he said in the final moments of the hearing, struggling through tears as he read his prepared statement. “I am truly, truly sorry for taking Annie’s life.” There was no legal reason to apologize, and certainly no chance that his words could alleviate his prison sentence. And so, as I followed the sentencing, I concluded that Clark
really meant his apology. I wanted to be negative about the whole thing, and I would have loved to be callous, but I couldn’t help but reel at the thought that Clark was something approaching a normal guy. Yet if Clark had really “expressed extreme remorse from the beginning” as his father claimed, why did he run Yale police, New Haven police, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation through nearly two weeks of frantic searching? And why did he originally plead not guilty, only to admit fault a year later when he had been given an agreeable deal?
In my obsession with his tears, I sent a letter to his prison address. Dear Mr. Clark, My name is Everett Rosenfeld and I am a junior at Yale and a writer-reporter for the Yale Daily News. I saw your sentencing and was overcome by a desire to write to you. You seem like a normal guy, and when you expressed your sorrow at your sentencing, I realized that you hardly fit your portrayal in the media. I know there are a lot of things you probably don’t want to talk about, but I was just wondering if you might ever want to talk about anything. A lot of people have a lot of perceptions, and I wanted to give you the opportunity to share your story. I never heard back.
And so I turned
to Jim McGee, a former Director of Psychology and Director of Law Enforcement and Forensic Services at Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Baltimore and a man who has acted as the chief psychologist and criminal profiler for the Baltimore County Police Department. McGee dismissed the notion that Clark’s shift in plea showed of any change of heart. Rather, he said, Clark was almost definitely following his attorney’s instructions. “Once he got in the hands of the attorney he was doing whatever the attorney told him to do in terms of pleas.” “Obviously it’s very easy to be sorry
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yale office of public affairs and communications
for behavior that you get caught doing,” McGee continued, adding that the evidence that Clark went to such great lengths to conceal his crimes further suggested that his apology may not have been perfectly sincere. It is true that Clark did not immediately turn himself in and, after enough time for reflection, even went back to cover his tracks. But could a year of incarceration have allowed him to gain some perspective on his deeds? McGee argued that Clark’s tears may have been more about his imprisonment than anything else. “It’s not rare for people facing nearly a lifetime of incarceration to be upset by that,” he said. “Even though the explanation for the tears was related to the crime itself, it’s equally likely that his sorrow and tears were about, ‘Oh shit, I’m about to be put in prison for basically the rest of my life.’ That’s enough to make anyone shed a tear in their beer.” This opinion could assuage the popular sentiment following Clark’s plea; many Yale community members voiced their discomfort with what they viewed as a light sentence. “It just bothered me — 44 years,” one member of the medical school faculty who had known Le, said in March. “How do you compare years to Annie’s life? And then you have this added component [of attempted sexual assault]. I just feel terrible for her family.” McGee’s answers somewhat allayed my fears that Clark may be just a regular
40 HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMf guy like me.
But this confirmation didn’t make Le’s murder any easier to comprehend. So I turned to another aspect of the plea hearing about which many Yale community members had voiced their opinions on the News’ website: motive. Some had postulated that the graphic details of sexual assault provided a clear motive for the attack on Le. A motive is scary for some, but comforting for others. “If he had a motive, then I feel more comfortable that some random stranger isn’t going to kill me,” said Evan WilsonWallis, a research assistant at a medical school laboratory. “I feel safer around campus.” But McGee says the facts of the case do not necessarily suggest a libidodriven motive. Not familiar with any
timeline annie le grd ’13 case SEPT. 9, 2009 Pharmacology student Annie Le GRD ’13 is reported as missing for the past 24 hours. sept. 12, 2009 Police find bloody clothes at 10 Amistad St., the Yale building where Le was last seen. sept. 13, 2009 Police find Le’s body hidden behind a wall in 10 Amistad St. Sept. 17, 2009 Police arrest Raymond Clark III, a Yale lab technician. jan. 17, 2010 Clark pleads “not guilty” to the charges of murder and felony murder. Mar. 17, 2011 Clark changes his plea to “guilty” for murder, and pleads guilty under the Alford Doctrine to attempted sexual assault. Through a plea bargain, he will serve 44 years in prison without possibility of parole. June 3, 2011 Clark is officially sentenced and taken to prison.
details of the incident prior to our discussion, McGee immediately asked if there was any known prior antagonism between Le and Clark when he heard about the sexual assault evidence. Rather than an act of lust, that type of assault is often the result of pent-up rage, he said. “With the violent nature of the crime and the sexual assault and degradation of the victim, you can plausibly suspect that part of the motivation was that he was really angry,” he said. “There seems to be a very hostile component about what he did with the body — you would have to wonder about some anger or resentment in the context of whatever relationship they may have had.” No details have ever been publicly released about the relationship between Le and Clark.
As much as I could guess at Clark’s reasoning, it still did not help explain the enigma of his tears. Despite the release of some facts of the case, Le’s murder has been marked by more questions than answers for all levels of investigation: from Yale’s administration, to the police, to the New York tabloids that quickly descended upon the campus. These questions also motivated every staff member of the News from the first word of a missing graduate student on the afternoon of September 9 through Clark’s arrest on September 17. The Editor-in-Chief at the time, Thomas Kaplan ’10, says he vividly remembers receiving the first email from the Office of Public Affairs on his BlackBerry as he left lecture. It was sent only to him, requesting that the News post a bulletin about the missing girl on its website as soon as possible. Kaplan complied, but he did not think much of the notice at the time. “Sure it was certainly weird, but no alarm bell went off that this would be a huge tragedy,” said Kaplan. “The next day we ran it big but not scary big [on the front page].” At the time, I was a sometimeProduction and Design contributor,
which meant that I had absolutely no idea what writing an article was all about. What I did get to do, however, was stay late at the building and watch the editors navigate a campus-wide crisis. It was entrancing to see: Kaplan and Managing Editor Bharat Ayyar tore about the editors’ room in a whirlwind of paper, emails, and phone calls, somehow leading an army of eager junior and sophomore reporters to produce the best coverage of the entire incident. Although Kaplan insisted that his and Ayyar’s response was simply the product of experience, even he admitted that the News outperformed the myriad of television stations and tabloids covering the story. “The one thing we were really pleased about in the long run is that we went through this entire story and were never once wrong — there were so many false reports,” he said. “There were a lot of totally insane tabloid stories and inaccurate TV reports throughout the two weeks, a lot of alarmingly sensationalized coverage.” Although I would like to attribute this perfect track record during the Le coverage to the superior journalistic ability of News reporters and editors, the fact is, members of the Yale community simply possessed a level of sensitivity that other media sources lacked. This involvement was the defining characteristic of the two-weeklong investigation for Kaplan; the only memory he could recall from that time was the moment when the News finally confirmed Clark’s name — other news agencies had already run it, but no administrators or police officials would confirm or deny any details on suspects. Two sources had already anonymously given Clark’s name, but Kaplan said he did not feel comfortable publishing the detail unless a third person could confirm. Then-reporter Victor Zapana '11 was on the phone with a third person as Kaplan and other reporters and editors surrounded him, listening in. As everyone craned their necks to hear, Zapana made a deal with Vol. xxxix, No. 1 September 2011
f HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIM feature HIIM41 the anonymous source that he would provide the initials of the suspect and he or she would either confirm or deny. Zapana said Clark’s initials, Kaplan recalled, and the person on the other side of the phone was silent for a second. “Anything else?” the source asked. “The third,” Zapana said. “Yes.” This moment of journalistic success, Kaplan said, made the long hours worth it. Although I only witnessed Kaplan and his contemporaries building front pages at 2 a.m., he was actually working 18-hour days on the story: Kaplan and Ayyar not only coordinated regular online updates and daily print exclusives, but they also did “dozens and dozens” of television interviews. For better or worse, Kaplan became the face of the Yale student body during the incident, as he regularly appeared on nightly newscasts, Nancy Grace, the Today Show, and Inside Edition to give updates on the case. Two weeks of this schedule eventually took its toll on Kaplan: he dropped two classes that semester. “Journalistically for me, and for almost all of us, it was the most challenging two weeks that I’ve ever experienced, and nothing since has ever come that close,” said Kaplan, who now works at the Metropolitan desk of the New York Times. Yet despite his complete immersion in the investigation of Le’s homicide, Kaplan said he was able to “keep [his] reporter hat on” throughout the twoweek marathon. His responsibilities did not allow for him to attend any of the vigils or the memorial for Le, he said, admitting that covering that component of the story would have been more emotionally trying.
If I couldn’t gauge Clark, and neither McGee nor Kaplan could help explain his actions, I wondered about those who were able to go where Kaplan couldn’t — those who had collectively mourned Clark’s crime. And so I
victor kang / staff photographer At the hearing, Raymond Clark III was accompanied by his father, mother, and fiancée (pictured); Le’s family did not attend.
contacted University Secretary Linda Lorimer, who led the Yale response to the crisis. “I will never forget the week of Annie Le’s disappearance. First, there were the incredibly anxious days of trying to determine where Annie might be and hoping she was safe,” Lorimer said in an email. “Then there was the growing dread that something dire might have happened: was she kidnapped? Was she seriously hurt? Was she still alive?” Lorimer said she had attended both the vigil and the memorial, and that both of these events were some of the most enduring memories of the incident for her. “I will also always remember the candlelight vigil on Cross Campus and the memorial service for Annie, and what those events teach us all about the strength and closeness of our community,” she said. It was when Lorimer emailed me this recollection, just before I sat down to write this piece, that I realized I had been wrong all along.
When the case
first broke and I was a freshman, new to the campus
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and to the world of journalism, I was struck by the closeness of the Yale community without even knowing it. The 10 Amistad St. building seemed impossibly far away from me, and the killing seemed so clearly a calculated act that I felt no immediate connection to the story. But despite this, I saw my colleagues on the News scramble to report the real truth of the incident and my peers on Cross Campus gather in hope and later in sorrow. And, after reflecting on Lorimer’s words, I realized that I had learned a truth: Raymond Clark III did not matter. I am glad he never wrote back to me from prison. In searching for Clark, I realized that it does not matter whether he is truly sorry, and it does not matter if he feels he got off lightly. Annie Le was who mattered, and her name and face live on in the memory of each Yalie who came together throughout that entire two-week period. She was more than just a juicy tabloid headline; she was one of us.
HIIM
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Fiction
Brotherhood
©·™
by molly hensley-clancy ©·™ Illustrations by Maria Haras Vol. XXXIX, No. 1 September 2011
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he was tall this time, with long legs that shone the color of dark mustard in the light from Mama’s room. Andrew watched her follow Michael into the muted blackness, listened to the door shut with a gentle click. Andrew was crouching with his back to the wall, blinking sleep from his eyes. He wore only his gray cloth shorts and a single sock. The night air slid against his skin. He would try to stay awake, but would inevitably end up on the mound of laundry in the hall, head pressed into one of Mama’s T-shirts. If he was lucky, Michael would carry him back into their bed that later that night. If he wasn’t, he would wake up stiff, smelling of Mama’s cooking oil, and slip back into the bedroom before anybody got up. Michael’s friend would be gone, leaving the sheets soaked in a sweet, musky odor. Andrew crawled over to the laundry pile. He found one of Michael’s big sweatshirts and put it on, wanting both the warmth and his big brother’s smell. The sweatshirt hung loosely around him, the arms dangling past his knees. He bunched the sleeves up around his elbows and went into the living room to find his Transformer. Their house at night was different than during the day. In the darkness, the shapes of the sofa, the linoleumtopped table, the chairs, were uncertain, as if they might change at any minute. Andrew regarded them with nervousness as he walked. They could be hiding predators, wild animals, in their soft, lumpy forms. His Transformer was on the carpet, arms jackknifed out to form the wings of an airplane, thick, muscular orange legs bent disjointedly. He snatched him up and ran back into the hallway, where the light from Mama’s room cast everything in certainty. He lay on his side to play with the figure, his face pressed against the itchy beige carpet, adjusting his perspective so he could imagine the toy was enormous and hulking. The noises began. They were harsh,
animal. Andrew pulled a stack of Mama’s clothes over his ears to block them out. In front of him, a miniature version of his brother was punched to a pulp by the protective arms of the Transformer until the carpet was stained with blood. Just then, he heard Mama’s door open at the end of the hall. He folded himself against the wall but she poked him with the toe of her slipper. “Andrew? What are you doing out of bed?” Mama was usually a heavy sleeper. She left the TV on her Judges (Mathis at 10:00, Judy at 10:30, and Joe Brown at 11:00, when Andrew was supposed to be in bed), and they drowned out the sounds of her children. She was asleep by the time Judge Marilyn Millan came on at 11:30 and had never woken up to find Andrew like this, despite the dozens of nights it had happened. “Playing,” Andrew told her, poking his head, and his Transformer’s, from beneath one of her Winnie-the-Pooh Tshirts. “It’s almost midnight. Go to bed unless you want me to wake you up for real,” Mama said. Her thin palm twitched where it rested on her thigh. “I can’t …” he began, his voice a soft whine. “Michael’s …” Mama swung open the bedroom door before he could finish. From the corner of his eye, Andrew saw his brother, the muscles on the older boy’s back rippling, snaking, the blankets wrapped around his pale torso as though trying to rein him in. The face of the girl was turned toward them, small and pointy and luminescent. “What the fuck, Michael!” Mama said shrilly. Andrew sunk back down onto the laundry pile and pulled the T-shirt over his head. “What the fuck’re you doing? Who is this? You kick your little brother out of the room to fuck this bitch?” He could still hear her. He could hear the thud of her hand against his brother. The girl cursing, fleeing. The belt. When Mama came to get Andrew, his ears were sore from
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having his fingers jammed so tightly inside them. “Go to bed,” Mama said shortly. “Yes Mama.” Michael’s face was pressed up against the wall, his naked back mottled in pink and red. He looked at his younger brother once, darkly, when he came into the room, then turned away again. “I’m sorry,” Andrew whispered as he pulled the comforter around him. The sheets were damp, and his skin prickled. “I didn’t mean to.” Michael said nothing.
T
he next morning, Andrew’s eyes were drawn to the thin ridges on his brother’s back, angry and red against his white skin. “I’m sorry,” Andrew said again as he watched Michael shrug his jeans up around his narrow hips. “Shut up, Andrew.” “I didn’t mean to is all.” Mama wasn’t in the kitchen, but her Judges were playing on the little black and white TV on the counter, so Andrew knew she was awake. He climbed onto the folding chair next to the refrigerator and looked around the room. The light coming in through the window above the sink seemed less friendly than usual. It cut across the linoleum in needle-thin white lines, making the curtain that Mama had hung there look faded, limp. Scars of dried-up sauce and blotchy orange-juice spills stared at him from the counters, no longer hidden in the harsh morning sun. “How many times have I told you not to stand on that damn chair, Andrew?” He climbed down, but not before grabbing the box of cornflakes. “Sorry.” Mama snatched the folding chair from him and pulled it up close to the counter, where she could make out Judge Mathis’ dark, square face on the TV screen. Her nightgown slid up her thighs to reveal a thin web of blue lines that cut through the white of her skin. Andrew thought of the imprints on Michael’s back. “Mama, I’m tired. I didn’t get no sleep last night,” he said as he poured the
44 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z cornflakes. “You’re not staying home from school today,” Mama said absentmindedly. “And I’m not driving you if you miss the bus.” “I could stay home ...” he began. “Andrew, I’m trying to watch this. You got 15 minutes before the bus comes.” She leaned forward to turn the volume dial on the television. “Sorry,” he said. Michael came into the kitchen, his backpack already slung over his shoulder. It was the kind you got at military supply stores, camo, like Andrew’s favorite pants, with a zigzag of straps and cords across the back. His short blond hair was shiny with gel. “You gonna pick me up from school?” Andrew asked anxiously.
When Andrew sat back down in front of his cornflakes, he was smiling a little. He thought of how he had made his Transformer beat up Michael last night, underneath Mama’s Winnie the Pooh Tshirt, and felt guilty. Nobody else had a big brother like he did. Andrew was the biggest boy in the third grade, so he sat near the back of the bus with the fourth and fifth-graders, who arm-wrestled and lobbed pencils across the aisles when the driver wasn’t looking. Usually he joined them, but this morning Andrew’s eyelids were heavy. He pressed his head against the seatback and stared at the lines that ran through the brown plastic. When he sat at his table in Room 112, Andrew stared at his feet. His shoes
If he was lucky, Michael would carry him back into their bed later that night. If he wasn’t, he would wake up stiff, smelling of Mama’s cooking oil, and slip back into the bedroom before anybody got up. Michael’s friend would be gone by then, leaving the sheets soaked in a sweet, musky odor. Michael grabbed the sleeve of Andrew’s shirt and pressed his face into his younger brother’s. “Yeah, but you better shut up this time, you little shit.” “Okay. I promise. Sorry.” “Dumb bitch,” Mama said to the small, fat woman who had told Judge Mathis off. She didn’t hear Michael and Andrew when they talked. She heard plaintiffs and defendants and bailiffs, and especially her Judges. Michael thudded his younger brother’s shoulder with his big, meaty palm. “Okay. You’re cool. I’ll see you.”
were new from Target, black with rows of white laces and gray skulls on the side panels. Michael had bought them for him before the first day of third grade. “You’re my little bro, you gotta look good, right?” he had said. Andrew smiled to himself and to his shoes. The teacher’s name was Mr. Cadbury, but he told his students to call him Dave. Dave was a thin man with mussed brown hair, rectangular glasses, and three argyle sweaters that he wore on alternating days. He sat on his desk
rather than behind it and used words like “cool” and “awesome” to describe math problems and the idea of reading chapter books. Michael said Dave was a faggot. “OK guys, I’m going to come around and collect your reading homework,” he announced, bounding from his desk. Andrew pulled the collar of his Vikings sweatshirt up around his nose and exhaled heavily. His breath smelled like cornflakes. “Andrew? Do you have your homework?” Andrew shook his head, face still buried in purple cloth. He made a face that Dave couldn’t see. “Why not?” “Dunno,” Andrew muttered. The other children were staring at him; he could tell without looking up. Andrew never had his reading homework. Dave sighed and moved on, leaving Andrew hunched over at his table, his short, cropped blond hair poking out from beneath the folds of his sweatshirt. On the way to lunch, Andrew spoke to no one. He put a plastic-wrapped cardboard dish of tacos, a carton of plain milk, and a dish of shredded lettuce on his Styrofoam tray. He pulled his hood over his head as he ate. “So, you okay?” Dave slid onto the bench next to Andrew. His sweater smelled stale. Andrew looked darkly up at his teacher. “Yeah.” “All you have to do is read for thirty minutes a night, get your mom to sign off on it,” Dave said, tapping his thumbs against the side of the table. Andrew said nothing. “You’ve got to start turning your homework in.” Or what? Andrew thought. He shut his eyes tightly, willing Dave to leave. Spears of light from the fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling played on his eyelids. “I know your brother used to go to school here. He had to take third grade twice, didn’t he?” Andrew’s chest burned. If Michael could hear Dave the Faggot talking about Vol. XXXIX, No. 1 September 2011
z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv fiction vuv 45 him, he would be furious. “You don’t want to have to do that. You’re smart enough to go on to fourth grade. You just need to start making an effort.” Andrew peeled the plastic away from the cardboard dish and picked up a taco. The tortilla was shiny and yellow with grease. He put it back down and looked over at Dave. “Can I just eat my lunch?” Dave sighed again. “Okay, Andrew.” oes it hurt?” Andrew asked, watching the way Michael shifted his back against the cloth of the driver’s seat. “Naw.” Michael tapped the cigarette resting between his fingers on the edge of the cup holder, sending a thin line of smoke up through the window. “I decided I’m not taking it any more, though. Next time she gets on me, I’m leaving.” Andrew frowned. Michael was always threatening to leave, especially after he and Mama fought, but he never did. “I didn’t take it from Dad, and I’m not going to take it from her either,” Michael continued. His eyes went dark. “Mama’s not like him,” Andrew said quietly. His stomach twisted. “Don’t defend her,” Michael spat, flicking his cigarette out the window. He swerved the car up against the curb with a single, slick motion. “Okay. Here we are. You hungry?” Andrew peered out the window. They had pulled up in front of a McDonald's, narrow and scummy, squeezed between a dusty Ethiopian deli and pawnshop. A homeless man, his jacket the same stone-gray of the wall he slumped against, stared blankly through the window at Andrew’s small, pale face. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, I got a meeting later, but I was thinking we could get something to eat first.” A meeting. Andrew liked the sound of the word. Mama never had meetings. But Michael — Michael was important. “Okay,” Andrew said eagerly. “Hey man, can you buy me some food?” The homeless man approached
'D
Michael, stumbling a little, as they left the car. “Hey man, just a hamburger, can you buy me some food?” “Get the fuck off,” Michael said. “Just a hamburger.” The man’s face was yellowing at the edges, like old paper, wrinkled at the corners of his eyes and nose; he turned to Andrew, bending his face close to the younger boy’s.
Meal, right?” Michael winked. “Right,” Andrew said. They got their food and sat down, and Andrew opened his brightly colored bag to find that the woman at the counter had put in a girl’s toy: a pink plastic horse with a curl of a waxy purple mane and a shooting star emblazoned on its chest. He thought about com-
Andrew leaned his nose against the cold pane and watched as Michael made his way through the snow. His brother’s jeans sagged down past his thighs, his jacket drooping long and black. Michael fingered something inside the paper bag as he went. After a few moments, he disappeared into the forest, where the bare trees protruded from the snow like bones against the fleecy gray sky. It was thin and sallow, as though he was sucking in his cheeks. “Little man, you don’t want me to go hungry, do you little man?” “I said fuck off, old man.” Michael grabbed Andrew’s arm and jerked him inside. “How come we can’t buy him a hamburger?” Andrew asked as they stood in line. He shuffled his feet back and forth on the slippery, slush-covered tiles, as if running in place. “He looked hungry.” “Look man, we watch out for ourselves, okay?” Michael said. “Okay.” Andrew glanced back over his shoulder. The old man had sunk back against the wall, face receded into the hood of his jacket. “Can I have a cheeseburger?” “Sure. Happy Meal? Or—wait, what am I saying? You want a Mighty Kids
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plaining but decided against it. He liked the horse’s big blue eyes, and thought maybe his cowboy could ride on it when they got home. Andrew set the figurine on his lap and ran his fingers through the horse’s mane as he ate. “What’s that?” Michael barked when he saw the flash of pink on Andrew’s knee. “My toy.” “Lemme see.” Michael snatched it from his younger brother’s hands. He held the thing up to the light. “What the hell is this? I thought you wanted a Power Ranger?” “I did. It’s okay, though.” “What are you, a fag? You want a My Little Pony?” Michael snapped. He stood and strode across the floor to the counter, leaving a wake of brown slush behind him. The woman there regarded
46 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z him dully, with eyebrows raised. “Can I help you?” she asked. “Yeah, you see that kid over there?” Michael gestured toward Andrew. “Does he look like a fuckin’ girl to you?” Andrew bent his head and stared at his burger, trying to ignore his brother’s voice. When Michael returned with two Power Ranger toys, he smiled weakly and stuffed them in his pocket. “You gotta demand what you want,” Michael said as he sat back down. “See how I did that? I even got you two. You can’t be a pussy.” “Okay.” Andrew took a bite of his burger and chewed vigorously. “Dave talked about you today.” Michael swallowed. “The faggot? What’d he say?” “Said about how you had to do third grade twice,” Andrew said, shrugging. “You should have punched him in the face. Fuck him.” “I woulda,” Andrew said quickly. “I was gonna.” Michael clapped him appreciatively on the arm. “So listen, I got a meeting to go to. You wanna help me out?” “Yeah!” The homeless man said nothing to them as they left McDonald's. Andrew walked with his hands jammed into his pockets and stared at the skulls on his shoes, not wanting to look him in the eye. “What do I have to do?” Andrew asked when he and Michael were back in the car. Michael slid a cigarette in between his lips. “You’re gon’ be my lookout,” he slurred, holding it there as he flicked his lighter. “Thum of my guyth are—” Michael took a drag, then took the cigarette out of his mouth. “They’re saying some shit, and I gotta set them straight. All you gotta do is make sure nothing goes wrong.” Andrew bit his lip. “What if it does?” “What are you, scared, little bro?” Michael jabbed him with his elbow. “Nah, nothing’ll happen, you just gotta make sure no other guys try an’ sneak up on
us. If you see somebody, shout.” “Okay.” Andrew pulled one of the Power Ranger toys from his pocket. “I’m not scared, you know.” “Course you’re not.” Michael said seriously. “You’re brave.” “Thanks,” Andrew said. There was nothing better than having Michael think you were brave. They drove to the river, where Michael parked the car behind a dumpster. Andrew had been to the river with Dave’s class that fall, when they had walked along the path and searched for gauzy cocoons that clung to the soft undersides of milkweed. But he never went in the winter. Andrew frowned. “Why are you having your meeting here?” he asked. Michael shrugged. “Why not? Here, you can just sit in the car. Jay and Kev are already down there—” he gestured towards the banks, “—so if anybody else comes, you honk the horn. Got it?” “Okay.” Andrew’s chest puffed a little with a sense of importance. Michael reached into the back seat, where he pulled out a heavy-looking paper bag and shoved it into his coat pocket. “Good man,” he said, and left. Andrew leaned his nose against the cold pane and watched as Michael made his way through the snow. His brother’s jeans sagged down past his thighs, his jacket drooping long and black. Michael fingered something inside the paper bag as he went. After a few moments, he disappeared into the forest, where the bare trees protruded from the snow like bones against the fleecy gray sky. Andrew pulled his knees beneath him in the passenger seat. He took out his Power Rangers and pulled them from their plastic wrapping, setting them both on the windowsill: the Blue Ranger, with a pinwheel-shaped pattern on his chest and a karate-chop arm, and the Platinum Ranger, whose white-gloved hands were curled into fists. They began to fight, teetering dangerously on the edge of the sheer cliff of the car door, each one battling not to plummet to his death. Vol. XXXIX, No. 1 September 2011
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Poetry lake shore drive ™ july © the oil fire and the ruby r
lake shore drive Hey Hannah (Mackenzie), remember me? We met on a Friday, around Irving, Playing kings. You said you wrote poetry. Between the blue lights down grove and lakeshore I drove back last night, recalling, turning Along those soft bends we had, but more Sharply and sober, now up front with the wheel: You said you wrote poetry, around Irving, Even keel. For the second time in my life I fell Asleep on the south side that night, burning Up in a well conditioned room. My cell Opened to signs taken down those bends, I fell asleep on lakeshore dialing a friend.
— Mackenzie Rivers
rebecca zhu / STAFF illustrator
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july Valentin, can you take your hands off your ears and see how the nice ladies are making you a swimming pool? Tired caretaker. Her charge hums and stands on his toes, which we figure means he is afraid of water — but still she strips him down to his makeshift diaper and taut kid belly, a miniscule pink penis caught between two layers of gauze. He hops back and forth with his legs apart while we wrestle with the hose. When the water finally comes we feel cruel for having made him wait, so we kneel and let him spray us too. For twenty minutes he screams and screams and drenches our heads, even Madame’s — Valentin, can you thank the nice ladies? He covers his ears again and starts to hum.
— Hannah Loeb
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rebecca zhu / STAFF illustrator
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the oil fire and the ruby A ghostly dancer screams in agonized silence, for no one hears him. The multitude streams from street to street, sidewalk to sidewalk. When they do not roll in private boxes, they walk with blinders. Tokyo? Manhattan? They are as ants without a queen. Each one plays a solo role, forgetting Truth is an ensemble, neither one nor many. They are alone. They do not welcome all of their guests. They let their mirrors rust. A man’s clear, pure bell rings for deaf ears. I am an oil fire, light shrouded by thick smoke. To clear the cloud, I need a different fuel. The moon that darkens the sun is a door that keeps out deserving guests. All guests are deserving. Friends encircle him. A red-robed dancer, springing. His feet leave the ground. Millions swirl like the arms of a galaxy around the Ka’ba. All face the tall, black cube, glowing white with reflected daylight. They bow as many. They bow as one. Rumi says, God picks up the reed-flute world and blows. Each note is a need coming through one of us, a passion, a longing pain. The Meccan pilgrims sing their notes, and house after house opens for all guests to enter. Their mirrors shine bright.
rebecca zhu / STAFF illustrator
I am a sunrise ruby. When my eclipse ends, I will be a world made of redness in the blinding red light. — Sam Martin
Vol. xxxix, No. 1 September 2011
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Dear Dr. Lipschitz Dear Dr. Lipschitz,
I
’m a freshman and am overwhelmed by all of the ridiculously stylish, put-together people on campus. It’s intimidating, especially because I come from a high school where wearing baseball jerseys to class was considered dressing up. I feel out of place. I don’t even own some of what appear to be uniform items on Yale’s campus, like those Sperrys.... —Never Owned Oiled Boatshoes Dear NOOB,
GKKKKKN
Dr. Lipschitz has all the answers. Got a problem? E-mail mag@ yaledailynews. com.
Believe me, your question rings true for an entire Yale Bookstore-clad horde of incoming freshmen. Even some of your peers who seem confident in their apparel — who still swagger with Hollister cargos and a jauntily slanted Sean Paul flat brim — might still secretly fear making some fashion faux pas. Before I continue, I should preface my remarks with two trite, but true, maxims: 1. it’s not what you wear, but how you wear it, grrrrrrrl (or bro)! and 2. clothing is a pretty powerful method of self-expression; if you want to seem too involved in physics lab/ track practice/your most recent painting to care what you wear, go ahead and show your slovenly self. You should never feel uncomfortable because of the real or imagined disdain of That Girl on Elm. If the worn-out wardrobe is here to stay, you need to project a Love-It-Or-Leave-It ’tude and inject a little confidence into that off-brand-sneakered step. However, if change cannot come from within, nothing buys a little confidence like a journey to J.Crew. And I don’t believe that it’s necessarily a betrayal of self to enhance/ completely overhaul your closet (especially if coming out of one, in which case it is, in fact, expected). Let’s face it: most of us make a few self-presentational tune-ups depending on our environment. Just as you would leave your elbow patches at home for a night at Toad’s and forego the fishnets for section, you’ll probably want to adjust to the Yale sar-
torial scene as you see, uh, fit. You’re not obliged to wear anything, NOOB — from boatshoes to boxers, it’s up to you. I mean, you can’t be naked in public places here — except for Bass Library during exams, that time on the Women’s Table, or basements on Lynwood on most weekend nights. But regardless of obligation, the judgment is real. Step too far outside the Yale dress code and no doubt, you’ll be met with some icy stares in the halls of LC. Leave your flannel and Woody Allen glasses at home, and you best not try to get past security at the Art and Architecture Library. The fact remains that we don’t live in a clothing-blind society. Sometimes the only way to get past the “bouncer” at SigEp — okay who am I kidding — the “bouncer” at Toad’s — no alright but seriously — the “bouncer” at the Lizzy, is to lower your neckline and don the push-up. If you want to wear cords, a collared shirt, and — some people think it’s too much but — a tweed blazer, NOOB, go wild. I’ll come right out and say it: I’d wear that. And I think Sperrys are pretty damn cute. But whether you splurge on the brown or navy pair, any confident, well-dressed person (introspective, interest in social justice a plus) is an asset to Yale. And any way you run with it, you’re sure to be as well. But please NOOB, just don’t look like you’re trying too hard — the folks in A&A already have that covered.
By Rachel Lipstein
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