WEEKEND

B6,7

EPICURUS

B9

ALL OF THE FOOD

MUSES AND MUSINGS

WEEKEND reviewers venture out for New Haven Restaurant Week.

Yuval Ben-David talks the fall—and rise—of Yale’s Philosophy Department.

FO R

David Whipple explores Yale’s independent music scene.

G RA D

R

O R

EATS

Even in the midst of a national controversy, Yale students are drawn to Teach for America. RISHABH BHANDARI and WESLEY YIIN report on the reality behind the program's appeal. // Page 3

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

FROM BUSCH TO BEINECKE

KOENIG

ROUNER

WEEKEND VIEWS

// BY HELEN ROUNER

PRESTON

On Wednesday evening my beat reporting brought me to a lecture at the Beinecke in which Professor David Kastan, a renowned scholar and my Shakespeare professor this semester, introduced a guest lecturer in book history. Kastan joked about to what titan of another field he might compare the distinguished guest, suggesting that we might dub him the David Ortiz of literary analysis. The tweed-clad members of the audience laughed — how preposterous to compare a prominent scholar in the distinguished field of book history to the lumbering slugger at whose brute force they cheered from barstools last week. I laughed, too, but for a different reason. Ortiz is a powerful player, preferring homers to the meticulous turning of a double play. The joke thus insinuated that the visiting lecturer is not a fastidious scholar but perhaps a manufacturer of popular essays on book history — it’s like calling the lecturer the Dan Brown of literary analysis. Having spent eight of my childhood summers learning to play baseball, the game of symmetries, I see little methodological difference between crafting a sonnet and crafting a proper swing. During weeklong hitting intensives in a kids’ baseball program in rural New Hampshire, the few dozen players — of whom nearly all were boys, mostly locals and under the age of thirteen — spent hours practicing just the stride a batter executes before he swings. I remember standing with my feet in a wooden frame marked with metrics, meticulously lifting up one foot and placing it down an inch further to the left before replacing it and repeating the careful motion again and again. A hitter’s stride has to be short, soft, slow and straight — a careful alliteration that my coach, a retired college English professor,

had us recite in unison. During hitting intensives, dozens of wooden frames lined the baseball diamond, each occupied by a sedulous young ballplayer practicing his stride without a pitch coming, without a swing, without so much as a hint at a hip rotation: simply by moving his striding toe back and forth to the correct inch markers on the wooden frame. The stride practice was only a small component of hitting week, only a subchapter in the 80-page manual our coach wrote for us and had us dissect. I imagine it was the same kind of work he assigned as a professor, asking for a careful reading of canonical texts in preparation for a senior thesis. As I sat through the lecture at the Beinecke, surrounded in white marble and with a Gutenberg Bible in my line of vision, I wondered: must a practice be shrouded in erudition for us to recognize the craft in it? Are the ballfield and the Beinecke really so different? In a way, it’s the same question that arises in these inane national debates on why studying the humanities matters. Careful, analytical thinking is the impetus of human progress, valuable independent of the content to which it is applied. Just as Chaucer executes symmetries and surprises us with his masterful manipulation of form, so does Mariano Rivera — albeit on a different kind of field. I’ll forgive my professor for mocking David Ortiz as unworthy of comparison to a distinguished scholar, but that’s only because Ortiz’s footwork at first base is questionable at best; if the comparison were to the technically exquisite Rivera, we’d have a problem. Contact HELEN ROUNER at helen.rouner@yale.edu .

Kelly Nell Does Not Exist // BY ANDREW KOENIG

I don’t know much about Kelly Nell or how she found me. I don’t even know whether the girl in the pictures is the same person as “Kelly Nell.” The name sounds suspicious. The internal rhyme suggests a stage name, and it has that oily and unmistakable smell of falsehood. Girls like her sometimes add you on Facebook: They’re called Amber Rose or Emma Kaye. They’ve put up half a dozen or so pictures, all taken in dim lighting with disposable cameras. Kelly Nell is blonde, maybe dirty blonde, though it’s hard to tell from the black-and-white photographs. She has a slim physique and ample breasts. She demurely covers them with her hands in one photo. She doesn’t wear much clothing in general — just lingerie. In one photo, she alluringly thumbs the string of her thong, looking away. There is a mirror behind her. It shows her buttocks and the rest of the room — unfurnished, unadorned, the size of a closet. I’ve culled a few more personal details about Kelly. Here, she says a little about herself: “Is this week over yet for me. stupid thursday I didnt get the gig This girl is in desperate need of a cocktail and a job.. maybe any combination of the two lol . If you got anythign to keep my mind busy plz Txt me lol (415) 429---- #selfshot #selfie #notop #drunk[.]” Kelly wants to be in entertainment, though what kind is unclear. She says she likes to drink, but she doesn’t even look tipsy in any of her photos. Her face lacks the relaxed vacuity of drunkenness. Kelly’s is a skeletal identity. She lives in black and white, without clothes. She never leaves

the house. You could only find her equivalent in Abercrombie and Fitch catalogues — cinematic shots of languorous, soulless bodies. She has only a few facial expressions — flirtatious, abashed, tempting. She’s every woman and no woman, living in the corners of windowless rooms, caught between mirrors and camera lenses. Her life lasts as long as the photo shoot someone took of her. She’s been purged of all qualities, save your desire for her. Before and after do not exist for Kelly — instead, she’s suspended in those fleeting moments between camera flashes. She’s “in desperate need” and asks for “anythign [sic] to keep [her] mind busy.” Kelly hovers on the border of personhood, waxed, undressed, made-up, pushed up against a corner, waiting for you. She can hardly move; you’re very close. You could almost touch her, pin her against the wall and thumb the strings of her thong. She slips away every time. Kelly Nell’s profile could just as easily be mine. It doesn’t seem so as first, since my online identity is more fully fleshed out, less blatantly pornographic. But the person known online as “Andrew Joseph Koenig” does not exist, as surely as Kelly Nell and Emma Kaye and Amber Rose don’t exist. Andrew Joseph Koenig puts up intriguing, self-deprecating statuses and quotations from Chekhov. Sometimes he posts articles he’s written and makes bad jokes about self-promotion. If you visit his profile, you will gather the following information about him: He’s religious; he loves books (!); he stole his autobiography — “I am a strange and extraordinary

person” — from Liza Minnelli in “Cabaret.” The person known online as “Andrew Joseph Koenig” is an ugly amalgam of clichés, a perfectly packaged caricature of myself. When I crafted Andrew Joseph Koenig, I did what the unseen director of Kelly Nell’s photo shoot did. I turned “I” into a hunk of photographed flesh — smiling at a party, thanking friends for their birthday wishes, summing myself up, backing into the corner of a black-and-white room. Parts of me had to be pruned away — my enthusiasm for middlebrow movies, the moments I spend making grotesque faces in the bathroom mirror. I watered down my personality and believed I was distilling it, finally making it consumable, tangible, appealing. I thought documenting my every stray thought and musical taste would make me appear ripe for friendship outside of the confines of cyberspace. Yet for every picture I put up, there are the thousands of unseen, less flattering negatives. Each smile is earned with an unseen grimace. Between every bit of text, there is a lacuna of myself, a blank space that my every Facebook friend will color in with his own perceptions. Kelly Nell and I both play the ventriloquist — composing narratives for one another that may correspond to reality but almost certainly do not, stories strewn with red herrings, false impressions and second guesses. Ultimately, Kelly Nell is the perfect fraud in her careful façade of intrigue and plasticity. But then again, so am I. Contact ANDREW KOENIG at andrew.koenig@yale.edu .

Alphabet Soup // BY OLIVER PRESTON

I was in the JE library the other night, trudging through Spenser’s “Mutabilitie Cantos,” when a girl sitting at the table across from me decided it was a good time for a phone conversation. From the sound of it, the person on the other end of the line was hard of hearing. The girl had to repeat everything she said three or four times. She was asking about soup. “Do they have soup?” “Do they have soup?” “Do they have soup?” Something strange happens when a sentence is repeated more than, say, three times. The phonemes blend together and begin to sound alien, the words lose their meaning, the sentence becomes just a series of sounds. When “Do they have soup?” inevitably became “DoothayavSOOP?” I felt an overwhelming sense of dread. It was if I were staring at the dank, muddy underbelly of existence: Language was artificial; meaning, a construction. It was not unlike the feeling I had had just a week before when, while taking a quiz on “The Library of Babel” in my class on Borges, I was asked to translate the phrase “hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö” into Spanish. I have always been terrified by lapses in meaning. I remember the first time I had alphabet soup. I must have been about seven. I was at a friend’s house, and it was getting to be lunchtime. My friend asked me if I was hungry. I told him sure. He scampered off to the kitchen, where his mom was watching a soap opera on a tiny TV set. “Oliver says he wants you to make us lunch!” he yawped. Letting out a terrific sigh, his mom slid down from her stool, pulled a can of Chef Boyardee alphabet soup from the shelf and dumped it into a pot. I was ecstatic. My mother had all but banished canned foods from our household, fearing that we’d all die of

botulism or something. I, being a kid, mythologized what I couldn’t have — alphabet soup in particular. After blatantly misreading a scene in “A Goofy Movie,” I had come to believe that the little pasta letters actually formed words on their own, that secret messages from Chef Boyardee or God or the wind or the ghost of a Cockney street urchin would bubble up from the broth as I ate. So, when my friend’s mom slung the lukewarm bowl of red slop in front of me, I was a bit disappointed. “What the hell?” I thought. “This doesn’t say anything! This doesn’t say anything at all!” I suspect that I’m not the only Yalie who has peered into a bowl of alphabet soup expecting to find a message. Maybe I just tell myself that so I can feel better about how much of an idiot I was at age seven, but I think it’s probably true. As chronic, incurable thinkers, we are constantly churning the soup that is existence, probing it with our spoons in search of meaning. Everything has to say something. It can be exhausting. It can cause a crippling fear of gibberish and Jorge Luis Borges. It can also be dishonest. It’s easy to forget that a large, perhaps overwhelming portion of existence consists of tedium, of white noise. Plato may have said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but he, like everyone else who has ever existed, spent about three years of his life on the toilet. Confronting this fact is essential for the intellectual’s survival, but it can be hard. It can take courage to just exist. To watch “Toddlers and Tiaras” without irony. To stand in the absurdly long

line at Durfee’s and let the crackle of “Billy Jean” wash over you. To see that falling yellow leaf not as a symbol for the ruin that lurks within all things (as Shakespeare notes in “Sonnet 73”) but as just that, a yellow leaf, a yellow leaf with some flecks of green, drifting slowly down — a stated fact. Back at the library, the girl had finally hung up. After a few minutes of silence, a boy came in bearing a bowl of soup from the dining hall. He sat down next to the girl, who thanked him and began to slurp the soup happily. I kept my eyes fixed on Spenser, absorbing none of it. I sat there for a while, not moving, not thinking, just listening to the human sounds: the girl slurping, the boy shifting in his chair and flipping pages. I then

decided to put down “The Faerie Queene” in favor of a nap. I walked back through the cold and stubbed my toe on my desk and flopped onto my bed and let myself sink into the inky senselessness of sleep. Contact OLIVER PRESTON at oliver.preston@yale.edu .

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

F R I D AY NOVEMBER 8

ROSHNI

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Woolsey Hall // 7:30 p.m. From Bhangra to Bollywood, it’s the largest cultural show on campus!

The Bechdel Test

Two women, one sixty-second conversation. At least the YDN passes.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8 , 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B3

WEEKEND COVER

BEYOND THE SPIEL // BY WESLEY YIIN AND RISHABH BHANDARI

It was almost impossible to make out what Zachary Groff ’13 was trying to say on the other end of the line. All you could hear were the sounds of children: shouting and shrieking. Eventually, Groff decided to leave his classroom in search of a quieter space. A brief silence, and then his voice reappeared. We resumed our conversation. It was just after 4 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon. Groff was only halfway through his week. Groff is currently teaching first grade at Jumoke Academy Honors at Dunbar School in Bridgeport, Conn. Every weekday, Groff is at the school from around 7:30 in the morning until 6:00 p.m. He doesn’t get back to New Haven, where he lives, until after 7:00 p.m. More than one thousand miles away, Groff’s former suitemate and best friend Bradley Cho ’13 goes through a similar routine — in rural Mississippi. “If you told me a year ago that I was going to be teaching or in Mississippi, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Cho said, chuckling on the other side of our phone call. While at Yale he majored in history and always thought he was going to go to law school. Groff also hadn’t planned to go into education during his Yale years. And both he and Cho are unsure whether they’ll continue to teach. After two years of teaching, they will decide whether to stay at their respective schools, move to one somewhere else or pursue something else entirely. These are not unusual choices for corps members in Teach for America. In 1989, Wendy Kopp was a senior at Princeton. In her senior thesis she proposed the idea that more top college students wanted to give back to society. But at the time, there were few well-organized, or well-publicized, programs that allowed them to do so. She developed Teach for America, which has since sent tens of thousands of high-achieving college graduates to participate in two-year teaching programs in some of the poorest pockets of America, many of which suffer from a shortage of qualified teachers. Last year, over 57,000 college grad-

tigious program has received a myriad of criticism recently, ranging from its alleged failure to prepare teachers adequately for the classroom to the claim that TFA actively seeks to dismantle America’s public school system. Despite these critiques, Yale students are still drawn to TFA. From the Class of 2013, 30 Yalies joined the corps, making the non-profit the second-largest employer of Yale graduates, behind only the University itself, and ahead of prestigious consulting and finance firms such as J.P. Morgan, McKinsey & Company and Goldman Sachs. Yale students who have enrolled in TFA readily admit to the existence of flaws in the program, but most believe that they profit from their experience. At times the program fails to live up to its lofty ideals, but Yalies in the program continue to find meaning in this work.

Graduating Seniors to Teach

For America’s 2013 Teaching

Corps

BOARDING THE SCHOOL BUS

Students interested in Teach for America must first submit an application by one of five deadlines that fall between August and February. In the next round, applicants are given a phone interview and are asked to fill out yet another set of short answer questions. In the final interview process, candidates spend a day answering face-to-face questions and mimicking classroom duties, such as designing and teaching a five-minute lesson. “I’ve heard that sometimes the interviewers will ask very antagonistic questions and pretend to be short of understanding,” said Meredith Redick ’14, who has recently been accepted to TFA and has committed to teaching at a school in Chicago. Though she didn’t receive any of these hardball questions, she said the final interview process was nerve wracking nonetheless. Redick also called this grueling twocmonth process a “major time commitment,” and it’s one that doesn’t always pay off. Only 14 percent of all applicants are accepted. Despite the many hoops one must jump through to apply, many Yalies persist, citing their affinity for TFA’s

A LOT OF PEOPLE [AT YALE] SEE TFA AS AN ETHICAL ALTERNATIVE OR OBLIGATION TO REPAY YOUR PRIVILEGE. CHRIS CLARK ’13

uates, many hailing from some of America’s most revered universities, applied for TFA’s 4,000 teaching positions. The program has an acceptance rate that rivals Yale’s own in terms of selectivity. Yet successful applicants from Yale to the program are not always greeted with the praise and even envy that they might receive if they had instead gotten a job offer from Google or a place at Harvard Med School in their senior year. If they accept TFA’s offer, these seniors will find themselves in the midst of a heated national debate instead. From education experts to opinion columnists on-campus, the pres-

Universities Contributing

mission. Cho, whose family immigrated to Los Angeles when he was very young, said that the opportunity to give back to underprivileged communities like the one he grew up in was his number one reason for taking on the job. “I believe that service to your community and country is one of the best things you can do,” he said, asserting that you need a certain idealism to do this job. Many other former Yalies cited this desire to give back among their primary reasons for joining TFA, and some said the pressure weighs harder on those from more privileged backgrounds.

26%

of the members of Teach for America are the first in their family

to attend college

University of Texas at Austin

Harvard University

Chris Clarke ’13, a first year TFA core member who teaches 11th grade history in Chicago, pointed out that time in the program can be seen as a way to atone in advance more cutthroat career choices later. “A lot of people [at Yale] see TFA as an ethical alternative or obligation to repay your privilege before getting your ‘real’ career started,” he lamented. Clarke hasn’t decided whether he wants to pursue teaching full-time but said he plans to spend at least another two years in the field after he completes his obligations to TFA. Coming from an immigrant household with a special-needs sibling, Cathy Huang ’14 came to college with a desire to become a teacher. However, working for TFA wasn’t in her initial plan. Huang cited the elimination of Yale’s Teacher Preparation program during her sophomore year as a prominent reason why she turned to TFA. Even in her first years of college, Huang knew she wanted to be a teacher, but, once that program was cut, she had no way to obtain a teaching certification without going outside the University. Huang laid out her options: she could take night courses at a different university, pay for “emergency certification” through state-specific certification programs or become a corps member of the TFA with a guarantee of a stable, salaried job for at least two years. With TFA, she could be financially independent and work in a highneed community. For Huang, there really was no better alternative. Elizabeth Carroll, director of Yale’s new Education Studies program, said that without the prospect of obtaining teacher certification at Yale, Yalies aspiring to be teachers have three options: TFA and similar programs (Carroll herself was certified through the New York City Teaching Fellows), three-to-five-year residency programs that train teachers over one year before allowing them to teach in their classrooms independently, or a traditional yearlong Master’s degree program that provides certification without a job guarantee. Therefore, Yalies like Huang who want to pursue a career in teaching find themselves with limited set of options. “Yale unexpectedly forced my hand in some ways,” she said.

REPORT CARDS

But as students are funneled into TFA, they also find themselves entering a national debate about whom the

F R I D AY NOVEMBER 8

program actually benefits, and if it really lives up to its high-minded ideals. The most recent, most discussed criticism comes from Olivia Blanchard, who wrote an immensely popular cover story for The Atlantic Magazine this September. In it, she explained why she quit TFA after just one year. She took her complaints to the press in September of this year when she wrote an article for The Atlantic titled “I Quit Teach for America.” In the article she decried the contrast between the promise of the program and what she actually experienced. Blanchard’s critique of TFA began with how the program markets itself: as a morally good alternative to other post-college options. Blanchard entered TFA after graduating from the University of North Carolina ChapelHill. She chose the program because she believed that as a TFA Corps Member, she would be an important leader in a community that would lack such role models. “Although I was thinking of working in Washington or going to law school, I decided to do TFA in part because I wanted to contribute something to society and I was really interested in social justice,” Blanchard said. But Blanchard didn’t believe that she got the training that she needed to be the role model she imagined.

more than

80%

of Teach for America members leave after

three years

24-HOUR THEATER FESTIVAL

Princeton University

Assigned to teach 5th grade math and science in Atlanta, Ga., she found herself at a loss. Like all TFA Corps Members, Blanchard underwent an intensive five-week training program in the June and July before her first year at TFA, but she said that she found this training insufficient. “The training program is ineffective in part because it’s just not specialized,” she said, adding that it was “disconcerting” that she, as a fifth-grade math teacher, was going through the exact same training schedule as someone who may have to teach twelfth-grade American history. All seven other current or former TFA Corps members interviewed agreed with Blanchard in saying that the training program was insufficient. “Are you ready to be thrown into a classroom of loud and bored kids after five weeks of training? No, not at all,” said Clarke of his experience in Chicago. But proponents of TFA push back on the notion that it doesn’t prepare teachers well enough. Aisha Turner ’02, the managing director of Corporate and Foundation Relations for Teach for America in New York argued that, while traditionally teachers come into their first jobs after years of graduate school in SEE TEACH PAGE 8

more than

50%

of Teach for America members leave after

two years

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Jonathan Edwards College Theater // 8 p.m. Participants write, direct and perform plays in marathon time.

Yale University

Spellcheck

Your best friend during resume season.

PAGE B4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND ARTS

PORTER, PORTER, BOW WOW WOW // BY EDDY WANG This year marks the 100th anniversary of Cole Porter’s graduation from Yale. In tribute, the Memorabilia Room of Sterling Memorial Library features “From Peru to Paree: A Cole Porter Jubilee,” an exhibit showcasing manuscripts, newspaper clippings, family photo albums and other artifacts from both the public and private life of the celebrated composer. The mixed-media show, which includes a touchscreen monitor-headphones complex, spans his childhood, his Yale years and his professional life. Porter is recognized as one of Broadway’s greatest composers, having penned perennial hits such as “Anything Goes,” “You’re the Top!” and “Night and Day.” But he is also the composer of “Bull Dog,” which I belted out for the first time as a freshman at last year’s Harvard-Yale game, packed among thousands of other Yalies in Harvard Stadium. I heard “Bull Dog” again in the Memorabilia Room through a pair of headphones in the exhibit’s audio installation. This version was a track off a 1991 EMI CD, sang by world-renowned American baritone Thomas Hampson and the Ambrosian Chorus, accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra, and while the song conjured images of the pomp and circumstance of another time, it was impossible not

to identify with the unmistakable and unshakable Yale pride that Porter wrote into the score. Also up for sampling is “Down in the Depths of the 90th Floor,” a piece composed by Porter for the musical “Red, Hot, and Blue!” — the namesake of Yale’s oldest co-ed acapella group.

IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO IDENTIFY WITH THE... UNSHAKABLE YALE PRIDE THAT PORTER WROTE INTO THE SCORE. The exhibit progresses chronologically along the Memorabilia Room’s rectangular perimeter, giving the viewer a sense of journey and ultimately returning him to where he began, at the room’s entrance. A long exhibit case stands at the center, containing various scrapbooks and postcards that illustrate Porter’s frequent travels to Europe and other countries across the Atlantic. I paused before one postcard in particular, from Paris. On the front is a picture of Porter and two buddies, sitting on a barrel and raising their tall mugs (of

// CARLY LOVEJOY

Harvard’s team may fight to the end, but Cole will win.

what, I wonder?) to the camera. On the back, the postcard is addressed to Mme. Cole Porter, with only the simple inscription, “Just before having breakfast.” I marveled at it because I realized Porter had sent a pre-Snapchat Snapchat, and had he lived in 2013, I could easily imagine him navigating Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and turning those antique scrapbooks into Picasa Web Albums. Near the front of the exhibit are a few of Porter’s childhood pictures. In one class photo, a primary schoolage Porter wears a stylish, goldbraided coat, while others around him are attired in mundane, solid colors. According to Suzanne Lovejoy, the show’s lead curator, Porter’s mother liked to dress him up. There are less than three weeks remaining between us and The Game. Exploring an exhibit on one of Yale’s most renowned musical alumni is well worth the study break — even if you’re just there to listen to “Bull Dog.” Contact EDDY WANG at chen-eddy.wang@yale.edu .

Ask What An Exhibit Can Do For You // BY LEAH MOTZKIN

While the crowd wasn’t too large in the Yale University Art Gallery’s new exhibit “A Great Crowd Had Gathered: JFK in the 1960s,” it probably should have been. Although the exhibition itself is small — just one room with fewer than two dozen photographs — it succeeds in telling the story of John F. Kennedy as a cultural icon, both alive and in his memory. Tucked away in a corner on the gallery’s fourth floor, the exhibit space is characterized by different shades of blue — the Democratic Party color — and sleek, gray writing. A timeline runs above the photographs, listing important events that occurred in relation to Kennedy’s impact across the ’60s. The timeline serves as a guide to how the exhibit should be viewed, and following my natural inclination, I began by viewing the image below the “1960” label. The first work may have been the most powerful. Garry Winogrand’s “John F. Kennedy, Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles” focuses on Kennedy’s broad back as he is televised. Though the image does not directly capture the audience — all of America on TV — the vast presence, and power, of the unseen multitudes is clearly felt. In the foreground of the image, a television behind Kennedy’s legs presents his face so that the viewer sees the man in the same way as a supporter of the time would have seen him. We thus become a part of the unseen, yet implied, audience. A modern viewer with knowledge of the violence that awaits Kennedy,

F R I D AY NOVEMBER 8

however, would describe the work as having a foreboding undertone, but I believe that at the time it would have been received as a hopeful image. The bright light of the television camera could be seen as illuminating a path for change. Continuing through 1961 and 1962, images of Kennedy’s supporters hang under announcements of the major events that characterized his presidency — the Bay of Pigs, the announcement of his plan to put a man on the moon, the Cuban Missile Crisis.

A CROWD IS GATHERED WITH THEIR EYES TOWARD THE SKY, THEIR ARMS WAVNG AT SOMETHING OUTSIDE THE FRAME. The images of 1963 range from the expected — photographs from the fatal assassination in Dallas and of Lyndon Johnson’s taking the oath next to Jackie Kennedy — to more intimate, poignant pictures of the constituents he left behind. One particularly striking photograph by Diane Arbus depicts Marguerite Oswald, the assassin’s mother. The image, which ran in Esquire Magazine, presents a woman dressed in every way to appear put together and

// IHNA MANGUNDAYAO

A trip back to the “Mad Men” era.

refined, but to me the effort seemed contrived and as a result, lacks believability. Juxtaposed with Jackie Kennedy’s elegance, the portrait is jarring. In a style typical of Arbus, Marguerite’s vulnerability shines through. The inclusion of this piece in an exhibit devoted to Kennedy may seem counterintuitive — even potentially insulting — but in examining the multiple dimensions of Kennedy’s role as a cultural icon, the image captures the mystique surrounding his complicated narrative as one extending beyond the individual. Interestingly, Kennedy’s involvement with Vietnam is absent from the exhibit. But given the limited size of the space, perhaps depictions of his involvement with and the fallout from the war throughout the decade would have been too overwhelming. The final image leaves the viewer with a sense of hope. At the John F. Kennedy Space Center, a crowd is gathered with their eyes toward the sky, their arms waving at something outside the frame. With the 1969 moon landing, one of Kennedy’s longreaching goals is accomplished. In the foreground, a woman who is turned away from the crowd is taking a photograph of her own. Contact LEAH MOTZKIN at leah.motzkin@yale.edu .

ROY HAYNES FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH BAND

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Sprague Hall // 8 p.m.

Listen to the Grammy award winner spin some tunes.

Binging on Borgen

It’s the West Wing, set in Denmark and available online. #teambirgitte

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B5

WEEKEND FEATURE

TO A DIFFERENT TUNE // BY DAVID WHIPPLE

The lights in Woolsey Hall are hot as we break into our third song. A sea of faces, many masked or painted, gazes up at us with some interest. Woolsey’s notoriously poor acoustics mean I can’t hear myself singing, or the bassist playing, or really anything except my guitar and the drummer. Somehow, we hold it together anyways, and walk off after four songs to a smattering of applause. Maybe the best thing about opening for the Yale Symphony Orchestra Halloween Show is that, for as long as our band stays together, we will be able to say that our first show sold out a 2,700-person auditorium in eight minutes. So maybe we weren’t the main cause of that demand. And so what if no one was paying attention. When you’re in a band at Yale, you count your victories where you can. It has become a Halloween tradition for independent student bands to open for the YSO’s vaunted performance alongside a silent film. This year students trickled in dressed as Red Sox players and University administrators, finding their seats as we began our set. For undergraduate bands The Teaspoons, Low Strung and Rain Brigade — and for my own fledgling band — the WYBC Yale Radio-organized Halloween pre-show was an unusual moment near the spotlight. The narrative of Yale’s meager student band scene is a welldocumented one — each year, campus publications report on the dearth of venues and lack of interest. While musical groups with historical precedence on campus, such as the Whiffenpoofs and Tangled Up in Blue, boast a strong alumni community and attract crowds with ease, it is more difficult for independent bands who form and break up in four-year cycles. And without a pre-established fan base, many of these groups graduate without ever fully getting on their feet. Sitting at a table in the Trumbull basement, The Teaspoons’ Tommy Bazarian ’15 spoke about the struggles of being an independent band on a campus where so many other musical groups have established themselves within the Yale tradition. “There’s a lot of amazing music, which I really love, but it often crowds out the thing that we like to do,” he said. “We basically make it happen for ourselves.” According to Max Weinreich ’16, assistant director of records for WYBC Yale Radio, the “obvious problem” is the absence of suitable venues available for groups like The Teaspoons to perform in. But the simple explanation that there’s nowhere to play is unsatisfactory. On Thursday night, we certainly had a venue — we had the biggest and best hall at Yale. But if the stage in Woolsey gave us a platform, it also gave us perspective: the crowd was more focused on their phones and their friends than on Pineapple Rock (our band).

F R I D AY NOVEMBER 8

Maybe we weren’t good enough. But I got the sense that we could have been U2 in disguise and people still would have texted until the YSO came on. It’s just not in people’s minds to listen. Rock ’n’ roll needs more than a home on campus. It needs a hand. What kind of boost does the music scene need? According to Colin Groundwater ’15, “It’s a big question.” He is someone who spends a lot of time pondering that very dilemma. “I certainly think a greater diversity of venues would be helpful,” he said. “The other thing that’s hard, too, is that the campus music scene is rooted in a DIY ethic.” Groundwater was echoing Bazarian: we’re on our own. It’s not just a question of having venues, Groundwater continued. People are not aware of the scene, nor does it make itself known. My limited experience on the Yale band scene would lead me to agree. Pineapple Rock only earned the opportunity to open for the YSO show by winning a poll on Facebook. The poll, YSO President Claire Xue ’14 said, was meant as a way to select bands popular with the student body. At the time of the poll, our band had never practiced together, let alone played a show. And as if that shouldn’t have adequately disqualified us, we called ourselves Pineapple fucking Rock. But thanks to a Facebook/ email get-out-the-vote operation on par with that of the Ward 1 campaigns, we canvassed our way onto the program for one of the year’s most highly anticipated events. When a group like ours wins a contest aimed at choosing Yale’s most popular student bands, you begin to wonder where the bar for ‘popular’ is set for independent bands at Yale.

WATCHING NATHAN CAMPBELL

WYBC’s Colin Groundwater ’14, who organized the Halloween pre-show along with Max Weinreich, said he hoped the exposure it offered might help student groups expand the scope of their limited audiences. “Did I expect screaming fans? No. You’re opening the Halloween show,” Groundwater explained. “My expectation was a large room full of open ears, and I think that’s what we got.” The chance to play for a new and fresh audience wasn’t lost on Bazarian,who appreciated the chance to perform a “more anonymous” show. The Teaspoons don’t often do covers live; in front of such an unfamiliar audience, though, they added a cover of the Beatles’ “I Want You/ She’s So Heavy” to make their brand of folk more accessible. But winning the crowd over doesn’t require changing your sound, and for the most part, Bazarian’s group didn’t. He and Groundwater agreed that live music from an enthusiastic and talented group can appeal to an audience broader than those who might consider themselves fans of a certain genre. “The cool thing about live

music is you can really get into something that you wouldn’t necessarily buy on iTunes,” Bazarian said. A strong campus scene isn’t simply a function of the overlap in taste between those making the music and those listening to it. The YSO show gave bands the chance to convince students skeptical of bluegrass or garage rock that a bluegrass or garage rock show can still be fun. Groundwater believes that passionate performances, rather than simply songs with broad appeal, are key to developing the campus scene. W h e n e ve r G ro u n d wa ter brought up showmanship, he cited Nathan Campbell ’14 with near-reverence. Campbell’s band, Sister Helen, plays on campus a few times a year. While Groundwater acknowledged that Sister Helen’s style of music — “scary prog rock” — may not attract the average Yale student, the band has achieved quasi-fame through its captivating live performances, the power of which Groundwater can attest to.

BUT I GOT THE SENSE THAT WE COULD HAVE BEEN U2 IN DISGUISE AND PEOPLE WOULD HAVE TEXTED UNTIL THE YSO CAME ON. “I will never forget my first 216 show,” he recalled. “I will never forget watching Nathan Campbell rip his jacket off, and then fight it, and howl into a microphone. Did it scare me? Yes. Will I always remember it? Absolutely.” Halfway through our interview, someone started practicing piano in the Jonathan Edwards College common room. With the sound overwhelming Groundwater’s voice, we were forced to move. It was the Yale band scene in miniature: two self-professed rock snobs struggling to make themselves heard over a virtuosic, but thunderous, piano.

ODD ONES OUT

“Team effort: let’s not sound

like assholes this time,” Jake Backer ’14 said to his bandmates at a table in Bass Café, where I had sat down with the members of Rain Brigade. Backer, in a sweatshirt, jeans and a weekend’s worth of scruff, was referencing an interview they had done last week. According to a laughing Ethan Schneider ES ’14 (also a member of The Teaspoons), the piece “didn’t make [them] sound awesome.” But despite all that, Rain Brigade exuded the character of a quintessential Yale band: resigned or even content to play bars and distant basements, they survey their own situation with a cutting but lighthearted wit — all the while speaking in hushed tones about the independent music scene at Wesleyan, where “If you aren’t in a band, you’re the odd one out.” I’m a neophyte of the Yale band crowd, and while Groundwater is one of its champions, the four seniors who make up Rain Brigade have been a part of it for four years. At the Halloween show, Rain Brigade found themselves playing first at the SSS simulcast despite being the most senior band of the four selected to play. They discussed their show’s reception with characteristic humor. “If Facebook likes are any indication …,” Gelernter began, “— we got three,” Backer interjected. The organizers and musicians I interviewed all agreed: it’s the quality of the shows rather than the popularity of the genre that makes for a great rock scene. Some people who love rock will show up no matter how far off campus you put the radio station’s house; others wouldn’t show up to Woodstock if you gave them a free ticket. It’s those in the middle, of which there are many, that define a scene’s success. Those are the people that the YSO show, that great performances, are supposed to appeal to — the Taylor Swift fans who Nathan Campbell manages to enchant with his “scary prog rock.” But no matter how insistently you pursue that section of the student body, there’s no guarantee that you will be successful. “The thinking sophomore year was, ‘We’re gonna do the YSO show, and then people will start knowing who we are,’” Gelernter says. “And that didn’t happen.”

ADVANCED FINAL CUT PRO X WORKSHOP

Half an hour before Pineapple Rock’s first public performance, there was no functioning PA system in Woolsey Hall. The microphones and the speakers, both provided by the Undergraduate Organizations Committee, had incompatible input jacks. “Thank god Tim Follo [’16] thought to just stick the wrong kind of cable in the speaker,” Groundwater recalled, explaining the eventual improvised solution for the equipment problems that nearly derailed the entire preshow — which every band interviewed made a point of noting. Follo, who was managing sound for the SSS simulcast, said the equipment had been borrowed from five different places. By all accounts, running this year’s show felt like flying blind, even though the pre-show has been a tradition for years. But it’s always been chaotic. Last year, the stage in SSS was managed by WYBC, the stage in Woolsey by 1701 Records. This year, bands who opened were forced to pay for tickets to a show they were playing in. These issues all point to a larger one, a deeper campus unfamiliarity with the very notion of an indie rock scene. We aren’t used to making rock music at Yale, and we aren’t used to listening to it. That unfamiliarity itself is the result of multiple factors undermining the development of the Yale indie scene. When I asked Rain Brigade if they thought more places to play were necessary, Schneider responded, “Can you just put in a laugh for that question?” But to stop at that misses the larger point. The lack of venues is a symptom as much as a component of a cycle in which student apathy, physical space and a lack of new bands combine to keep the scene quiet. Backer, who’s seen this play out firsthand, explained the situation. “There aren’t enough spaces for the bands who want to play, but there aren’t enough bands to justify more spaces,” he said. And when you have neither bands nor spaces, as the students interviewed demonstrated, it’s hard to attract a potential audience. Without an audience, bands don’t form, and the cycle perpetuates itself. It’s not simply that the lack of physical space stifles the formation of bands on

// BRIANNA LOO

Pineapple Rock

campus, and this is a decidedly different explanation from those that have been offered in the past. It seems likelier that the cycle would be broken with the formation of more bands as opposed to the construction of new venues — there is more motivation to carve out spaces when there are groups to fill them. But Yale students don’t form bands like students at other schools. We’re busy. When I sent my bandmates a Doodle poll to find available rehearsal times in the weeks before the show, it took only a few seconds of looking at the results to determine that there was not a single hour for the entire week of October 7th when all three of us were free. Rain Brigade’s Sam Gelernter sympathized. “In order to play music and to play in a band, you have to be ready to devote a lot of time,” he said. “There’s not a lot of people, especially in that typeA environment, who are willing to spend that much time on music.” Backer interjected: “On rock music.” Yalies are willing to devote time to classical or jazz or a capella, but not to rock. Being in an independent student band is seen by many as an “opportunity cost,” Schneider said. “I think that Yale students have this complex where they really need to feel that they’re accomplishing things,” Weinreich said. “Starting a band even if you don’t think you’re going to have much of an audience just doesn’t really strike me as a very common thing to happen here.” As a veteran of Yale’s independent music scene, Backer has reason to be discouraged. “Honestly, after four years of wishing it would grow, I have no hope,” he said. Some of Yale’s more prominent bands — like Sister Helen and Rain Brigade — will dissolve when their senior members graduate this year. While Groundwater said he doesn’t yet see new bands taking the place of those that have left, he is “excited to see what the abyss spits back at us.” Contact DAVID WHIPPLE at david.whipple@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

149 York St. // 2-4 p.m.

WEEKEND wants to advance beyond Vines, y’all.

OPPORTUNITY COSTS

Gravity

The film is great, but WKND thinks it feels a little (2nd) derivative.

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WEEKEND EATS

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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OUT

A MEAL BUILT BRIQ BY BRIQ

AN OFFER YOU CAN’T REFUSE

// BY RUOXI YU

// BY HAYLEY BYRNES

// MINSUN CHA // ROUXI YU

It is an understatement to say that my dinner at Briq was a culinary marathon. We had a slow start. I arrived a little after my reservation time, only to discover that our table was not yet ready. About 40 minutes later, we finally relocated from our refuge at the bar to a small table near the front of the restaurant. With flickering candles and brick walls, the space, long and narrow, reminded me of a more pleasant (and lively) interpretation of the “Cask of Amontillado,” except this cavern had food, drink and company. Glancing at the menu, we rejoiced to discover that Briq’s unique “table-style” dining encouraged us to share plates among ourselves. Although less

than enthused by another 20 minute wait, we quickly placed an order for several table plates (appetizer courses), a main plate, and dessert to finish it all off. First came the skinny fries ($7), which seemed like a hollaback to Miya’s Sushi’s Tokyo Fro. This crispy mass of perhaps too skinny potato sticks came drizzled with secret sauce that made for a messy but savory dish. The caramelized butternut squash ($6) followed, a collection of cubes sautéed over maple ginger soy sauce and topped with panko crumbs and pomegranate seeds. I was perplexed by the addition of pomegranate seeds, which added a powerful, sour punch to an otherwise

balanced dish. The butternut squash, however, was too firm and this particular take on the fall vegetable favorite was off from the comfort I expected. Next, the shrimp salsa ($9.50) presented a playful take on the average taco. A crunchy, corn tortilla complemented airy, whipped avocado with fresh shrimp, followed by a delightful peek of spice in the aftertaste. The lobster mashed potatoes ($12), a dish I initially ordered with skepticism because of its description of “simply, ‘amazing!’” turned out to be the winner of the night. While I’m uncertain who was actually quoted in the menu description, it might as well have been me because this table plate sin-

gle handedly won over my heart. This dish managed to preserve the subtle, sweet taste of lobster amidst a rich and creamy sea of mash. The next courses, however, began to suggest a downhill trend. Mike’s Italian beef tartare ($12) fell short on presentation and taste. It was as if the beef tartare was so shamefully salty that it had to hide under a thick layer of shaved grana padano cheese. The tartare also arrived with two measly slices of slightly burned garlic bread. But their merits (nonexistent) I will not delve into here. While generous in portion, the burrata pasta pillow ($18), our main dish, offered no redemption. Although I don’t

know what a “pasta pillow” should look like, this dish had none of the characteristic fluffiness that its name might suggest. The overdone pasta to sauce and cheese ratio left me confounded. At the outer edges, it was a poorly made thin crust pizza; at its center, a ravioli lacking filling. After being left sorely disappointed after an incredible high, I looked forward to dessert. Despite being informed that they had run out of the Adult Birthday Cake we had ordered earlier (what), we compromised and ordered the Nutella and Banana Crepes ($7). The sliced bananas came under-caramelized, and missing that extra crunch, but the crepes them-

selves were traditional and homey, ending the night on a pleasantly cozy note. While Briq might have its fair share of service and supply issues to iron out, its repertoire remains competitive among the set of contemporary American restaurants around campus. Despite the unpredictable sizes of their table plates, Briq can prove to be a worthy culinary venture for those willing to share. Just make sure you’re ready for the wait and, no matter what you do, order those “amazing!” potatoes. Contact RUOXI YU at ruoxi.yu@yale.edu .

Given its obvious nod to gangster cinema, there’s something redundant in deeming Goodfellas an Italian restaurant – a bit like clarifying that “Major English Poets,” is, shockingly, an English class. Plasma televisions splash Robert DeNiro’s face across the restaurant’s walls, silently looping “The Godfather” and other genre classics (a bit Orwellian for my taste, but harmless enough). The result: an innocent Atlantic City atmosphere, buzzing but businesslike. Equipped with a newly minted upper patio level, the architecture betrays an American sensibility. Comfortably spread out, the tables favor intimate twoperson settings, not quite enough for the entire Corleone dynasty.

It’s spacious and swanky, with an admirable rooftop view of the city. Goodfellas is perched just outside the Yale Bubble, hidden on State Street. When I stumbled in on Wednesday afternoon, couples and businessmen populated its tables. Not a backpack in sight (except mine). At Yale, Italian is synonymous with pizza, a noted absence in Goodfellas’ offerings. Perhaps for that reason, the choices felt more mature, but still familiar. Gnocchi. Chicken Parmigiana. Nothing, it seemed, that required a badly imitated Italian accent. I knew exactly what I would get when I ordered, despite my inexperience with Italian food. Still, this experience with American Italian was an improvement on those I’ve had

before. At age four, I sat next to my mother at a Midwestern Italian restaurant (read: American restaurant with meatballs). Within five minutes, candle in hand, I had lit the red gingham tablecloth on fire. We never got our meatballs. My mom – allergic to garlic, vaguely vegetarian and prone to takeout – once bought Spaghetti-O’s a few years later. With that, my Italian culinary education came to a close. And given that lack of experience, anything would surprise me. In atmosphere, Goodfellas felt like a beautiful, if sanitized, hotel lobby, but in its offerings, the restaurant struck a more homespun note. Creativity was sacrificed for simplicity, but with success. Unsurprising, then, that we began with the

infallible bread-and-olive-oil combination. The breadbasket is my culinary equivalent to elevator music: done well, it is left unnoticed. If our breadbasket struck a pleasant — if forgettable — note, my garden salad crooned a more melodic tune. With a solid base of fresh greens, the garnishes were sparse: four succulent tomatoes, a sprinkling of balsamic. Unlike my usual hurried gulping of semifrozen packaged spinach in the dining hall, I cherished each bite here. Unannounced, our server surprised us with complimentary bruschetta — just as simple, just as fresh. As I swallowed my final leaf of lettuce, I glanced up at the subtitled scenes. Cops and gangsters faced off in smoky black alleys. But as sensationalized as

During Restaurant Week, New Haven opens it arms to foodies of all sorts. Local restaurants, often too expensive for undergrads, offer cheap lunches and dinners for relative bargains. Is this just an attempt to lure patrons? Are these meals worth it outside of restaurant week? Did you know you can buy food somewhere other than Durfee’s? WEEKEND sent a group of reporters into the field—their mouths watering and their pens ready.

it is in décor, Goodfellas’s menu avoided any culinary overindulgence. Each course successfully resisted the temptation of over-seasoning — my breath never reached un-kissable levels, despite garlic’s near-holiness in Italy. By the entrée, I felt full. But with the arrival of a supersized serving of pasta bathed in vodka cream sauce, my will returned. I felt the same heavy, rich satisfaction of a Thanksgiving meal. The portions were generous, with a liberal heaping of the vodka dressing. The tiny bite of gnocchi that I stole from my friend was just as comforting. There was something nostalgic about the meal, so easy was it to imagine a grandmother crafting the sauce from a time- and family-honored recipe passed down

from the shores of Sicily. Tiramisu and a cappuccino ended the meal on a creative note. The cappuccino, sprinkled with cinnamon, had an appropriately seasonal flair. The tiramisu, house-made, lingered with a subtlety, avoiding the sticky sugarcoated excess of poorly executed desserts. At 1:00 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon, Yale is not a calm place. Yearning for time, we jog to class and skip lunch and glance at iCals for guidance. At Goodfellas, I found refuge — tranquilized by carbs, mesmerized by plasmas. New Haven’s high-end Italian theme park is an indulgence, I think, worth taking. Contact HAYLEY BYRNES at hayley.byrnes@yale.edu .

I Think “Nuevo” Means “New” // BY LUCAS SIN

Thick, Goopy and Awesome // BY SCOTT STERN

Walking into Heirloom, all my fears are confirmed: The jeans and flannel shirt weren’t sufficient. Hey, it has a collar! Heirloom, a large, dimly lit restaurant with massive windows, exudes refinement and a polite, appropriate amount of warmth. I am nervous. “Reservation?” the maître d’ asks cheerfully. “It should be under Stern?” “Very good,” she replies, with all the pomp of a person twice her years and three times my classiness. “I hope this table in the corner will be OK.” Actually, it was wonderful! As out of place as I feel in any restaurant other than Subway, the meal was absolutely delightful. The service was fast; the waiter (who didn’t give us his name; weird) was polite and efficient; and the food was delectable. My first foray into Heirloom’s famous fare was its bread — excellent — served with a horseradish dip — a nice touch. The bread was so good, in fact, that it was hard not to fill up on it. The sophistication of the bread and dip was diminished, somewhat, by the appetizer menu that rested at the bottom of the bread bowl, positively staring into your soul and ordering you to order more just as your hunger is piqued. Thankfully, my stinginess kicked in; crisis averted.

S AT U R D AY NOVEMBER 9

For appetizers, I started with the oddly named “No Cream of Sweet Potato Soup,” a thick, delicious mixture topped with lime, honey, cilantro and spiced peanuts (at a slightly overpriced $10). My roommate, Gordon, who had never tasted kale before, tried the Starlight Farms kale salad, which he described as crisp yet smooth: “A lot like a fine wine, but it’s kale!” It was also a little on the expensive side ($11) — perhaps this was a trend — but it was a sizable salad, complete with hazelnuts, breadcrumbs and ricotta salata. An appropriate amount of time later, the entrees arrived. My hand-rolled penne ($24) came in a large and nearly overflowing bowl, while Gordon’s woodroasted salmon ($24; I know, right?) appeared puny and pathetic on its oversized plate. The penne came stuffed with milled tomatoes, garlic, chilies, thyme and quite a lot of walnuts. A frothy, crunchy, garlicy, herby mixture, it was as pleasurable for the palate as it was for the vocabulary. The salmon, too, was quite good, though I can’t reiterate enough how lonely it looked, beached on its small island of quinoa. Nevertheless, the few bites present were remarkably tasty, garnished with radish, Winesap apple (the oddest kind of apple), sugar snaps, pumpkin seeds (ooh,

YSO PRESENTS: A WORLD PREMIERE AND THE FIREBIRD Woolsey Hall // 8-10 p.m.

Harness your inner Pocahontas in pieces like Professor Kathryn Alexander’s “Become the Wind.”

seasonal!) and a carrot ginger vinaigrette. Dessert arrived just as the restaurant was really filling up. (I guess fancy people eat late?) Anyway, our unnamed server arrived bearing two mason jars filled with sweets. I received the butterscotch pudding, and Gordon sampled the Meyer lemon panna cotta. The pudding was thick, goopy and awesome. It was topped with a small, toasted marshmallow, which stuck to my spoon until pried off with furtive fingers. The pudding itself was like eating a cute, squishy cartoon character — sweet, supple and just a little salty. The lemon shortbread, gelato and curd were also tasty, though a little tart for my taste. Waiter-man approached with the check and quickly made his escape. Gordon and I remained slumped in our seats, surprisingly full considering the relatively meager portions. Besides, based on the bill in front of us, we deserved to loiter a little. All in all, Heirloom deserves its sterling reputation. While a tad stuffy and impersonal, it nonetheless provided the food and atmosphere for a fine evening. I left sated, happy and still slightly curious about what the hell a Winesap apple is. Contact SCOTT STERN at scott.stern@yale.edu .

// JENNIFER LU

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Brunch in last night’s clothes

Bonus points if you’re still wearing your mask from Masquerade.

// ALEXANDRA SCHMELING

S AT U R D AY NOVEMBER 9

BYOB PAINTING PARTIES 130 Park St. // 6-9 p.m.

Because wine and paint are fun.

Pacifico is a pretty punchy place, or that’s what it feels like it’s supposed to be. Its bright orange walls are laced with stripes of blue. Drawings of little fishes swim along these stripes, or perhaps they’re tadpoles, or just a series of swirls in unapologetic reds, yellows and greens. Early afternoon sunlight filters through wide windows. It seems as if all is bright, punchy and well. The flavors, one might expect, should match. In the trifecta of Latin Americaninspired restaurants that hugs the block on Crown between High and College (Oaxaca, Pacifico, and Rubamba), competition is particularly fierce. Even without the prix fixe menus, which you find for $18 during restaurant week, each restaurant is already pressured to distinguish itself from the others. Rubamba excels at the arepa. But Pacifico and its neighbor Oaxaca, compete with surprisingly similar cuisines: traditional Latin American fare with a modern twist. The questions that follow, naturally, are: What is the twist? Where does it come from? And why? Too often, fusion cuisine is blindly taken up by lazy chefs who have refused to put in the effort to perfect a time-tested cuisine. Instead, they devise their own cuisine as a shortcut to a niche market of perky foodies who always want something new. Instead, why not either devote yourself to one camp or the other: tradition or innovation? Chef Rafael Palomino calls his cuisine “nuevo Latino.” The “Latino” element, of course, is clear. At times, the “nuevo” element is far murkier. One appetizer, the Argentinean empanadas, is an example of such. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a treat. A coupling of braised sirloin and raisins lends the fluffy appetizer a characteristic sweetness. We’re told that Pacifico’s innovation is replacing the traditional flour-based crust with a cornmeal-based one. But that comes as a surprise, given that cornmeal empanadas are a staple in both Colombia and Venezuela.

Another seemingly Latino dish was the tilapia con cubierta de platano, or the plantain-crusted tilapia with shrimp enchiladas. A fish, well cooked and flaky, was perched delicately on two yellow corn tortilla rolls. The green mole sauce with its peculiar but nevertheless tasty bitterness bound the whole dish together to great success. But the combination of mole, plantains, salsa and enchiladas is fairly common and doesn’t quite evoke “nuevo.” The other half of the meal was neither “nuevo” nor “Latino.” The shrimp and corn chowder was chunky and creamy, like chowders should be, but left hanging the question of what a Latino chowder might actually be, especially if its flavor profile is reminiscent of one commonly found in the Davenport dining hall. The emparedado de pollo was a chicken sandwich. And, as chicken sandwiches come, this fell very snugly into the category of most chicken sandwiches. Grilled chicken, arugula, avocado and blue cheese are almost exactly what one would expect when one orders a chicken sandwich — especially if you realize that “emparedado” just means “sandwich.” There might’ve been promise of a hint of Latino flavors in the smoky paprika fries, but somehow they seemed to lack both smokiness and paprika. Thus far, this review might discount the simple fact that lunch at Pacifico is a great bargain. Unlike other establishments around New Haven, portion sizes and ingredient quality aren’t compromised for the sake of restaurant week. Not to mention, the food is good, if not inventive. It’d be unjustified to dismiss the menu as entirely uninteresting. After all, the meal did begin with that red salsa dip: a balance of Latino roasted red peppers and Italian sundried tomatoes, an almost tongue-in-cheek demonstration of nuevo Latino culinary ingenuity. Contact LUCAS SIN at lucas.sin@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Turning up your radiator Literally and figuratively.