WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2014

FUNCTIONS

B4

FOOD

B9

FANTASY

B11

IS COMPUTER SCIENCE A LIBERAL ART?

ELM CITY GROCERS

A PAGENT IN WONDERLAND

David Whipple looks into a class that’s about building apps and getting paid.

Andrew Koenig explores the changing supermarket landscape downtown.

Jocab Potash goes down the rabbit hole of the Yale Cabaret’s first show.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND VIEWS

ON FLYING AND ON TURNING 20 (WHILE FLYING) // BY NITIKA KHAITAN

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

Wake up. “Ma’am, your tray table must be closed for landing.”

Your hands, the well-trained hands of a frequent flyer, push the table back up on their own, and you don’t even have to interrupt your sleep.

You squeeze your eyes open and try to rub the sleep away but the cabin lights are bright and your head is achy and — Thud. The plane’s wheels hit the ground, and it roars and shudders and slows and hums and finally comes to a halt. The seatbelt sign goes dark, and seatbelts click open; it is time to leave. You drag your little black suitcase across the airplane aisle which is like every other airplane aisle, narrow enough so your suitcase keeps crashing into seats. You get off the plane and your legs automatically pick up pace even though you’re tired beyond belief because your legs know how long terminals can be, and you run through the Paris airport which is like every other airport, lined with walls of Belvedere and Miss Dior, and you stop and catch your breath at the immigration line which is like every other immigration line, reminding you that not all passports are created equal. Yours, with Republic of India lettered on its cover, always leads you to the longer wait, as one of the countless visitors to JFK or Heathrow, or one of the countless returning home to Delhi. Finally, you make it onto the plane which is like every other transatlantic plane, sterile white plastic interiors that remain uninteresting no matter how long you stare at them. You’re bored; so, utterly, thoroughly, bored. It’s your 20th birthday.

You’re flying! You try to tell yourself. You’re thousands of miles up in the air, and how is this not a cool way to spend your birthday? Not

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 19

even that long ago, you would’ve believed yourself. Not even that long ago, you were 18 and you’d spent most of your years waking up to the same view outside your bedroom window, and so the bed of clouds and Technicolor sunsets you could see from planes were your favorite things. Not even that long ago, you were 12, “Unaccompanied Minor” lanyard dangling from your neck, and you wondered how, in just 8 hours, a plane could take you from warm and dusty India full of people like you to cold and clean England full of white foreigners.

Not even that long ago, you were 8, and your plane took off in the rain but then you went above the clouds.

It was sunny again even though it was still raining down below, and then wisps of white suddenly appeared right outside your window. Before you knew it, the wisps had turned into a wall and you were inside an actual cloud. You turned to your uncle sitting next to you and told him you were in love with flying.

freeze to death that high up in the atmosphere. Also, there wouldn’t be enough oxygen for you to breathe. You used to want to grow up and do grown-up things like clear immigration lines by yourself and hold your own passport.

Then you grew up and you had to clear immigration lines by yourself, standing for three hours in JFK holding your I-20, the crumpled piece of white paper that would prove to the officer that you weren’t in the States to stay, or to detonate a bomb, but just to study for a few more years at Yale. You used to collect airline booklets of the films they had in-flight, sad that the journey wasn’t long enough for you to watch more movies. Then you had to take a bunch of 13-hour flights from home to college and college to home. You realized no number of movies could help with the knowledge that you wouldn’t see your friends, or your lover, for 13 and a half weeks. Right now, on this flight, it doesn’t look like your screen works. You don’t even care.

YOU’RE BORED; SO, UTTERLY, THOROUGHLY BORED. IT’S YOUR 20TH BIRTHDAY.

What happened to that feeling?

Every time you sat on a plane as a child, you used to look out at the clouds and imagine bouncing from one to the other, pillows strewn on a celestial playground, collecting soft fluff in your arms and pressing it against your face. Then, maybe it was the fifth grade, you learned clouds weren’t bouncy but were made of vapor, and you would

You plonk your head down on the tray table to try and sleep. *** The air hostess wakes you when she brings out the beverage cart.

You get excited about getting to drink wine on your birthday — you’re on Air France, after all. But the wine in the tiny screw-top bottle is shitty. You couldn’t really sleep, or get your TV to work, so

you’ve been a voyeur of voyeurs, watching other people’s screens instead — the thirty-something man with a mustache in front of you is watching Brazilian models who periodically shake their butts; the forty-something woman with Chanel glasses across from you is smiling at Aaron Eckhart having sex with Cameron Diaz. You remember because you’re writing all this down on the plane, because writing about something is supposed to make you look at it with new eyes, but writing isn’t actually helping to make the flight any better. Happy Birthday.

The Italian couple beside you doesn’t speak enough English to fill out their customs form, so now you begin to fill it out instead, trying to talk to them in Spanish because it’s the only Romance language you know. You’re terrified you’re penciling in the wrong thing and they’re going to get in trouble at customs.

But they won’t. You’ve done this often enough to know that customs isn’t actually that scary, that despite the Caps Lock instructions on the form, they won’t actually make a huge fuss if you don’t PRINT your letters with a BLUE pen.

You still get seated next to people who are strangers to flying.

Two months ago, you were sitting next to a girl from rural Punjab, and five minutes before take-off, she had shown you her boarding card, looking petrified, asking whether she was on the wrong flight and if someone was about to come throw her off it. It was her first flight. At least, looking out her window, she would soon discover what a sunset looks like from a plane.

Contact NITIKA KHAITAN at nitika.khaitan@yale.edu .

17TH THERAPEUTIC ERCP/EUS WORKSHOP

Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven // 7:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

It can’t be any worse than the last 16.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B3

WEEKEND COVER

FREE SPEECH AT YALE: A NEW VISION? // BY HANNAH SCHWARZ

want to end with something to the Muslim Students Association. Why don’t you spend all the energy that you’ve devoted toward me to exposing … the men and women who poison the minds of children as impressionable teachers. Don’t you think you should go after them instead of me?”

On the evening of Sept. 15, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, clad in a black leather jacket, grey slacks and cork wedge heels, stood in front of more than 300 lecture attendees, occasionally pushing her brown-framed glasses to the top of her head.

Delivered in her soft, childlike voice, the words almost sounded like a lullaby.

Almost.

Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born activist and writer whose repertoire of issues spans feminism, female genital mutilation, atheism and Islam, stood behind the podium on the stage of SSS 114. The event was titled “Clash of Civilizations: Islam and the West,” but Hirsi Ali was intent on addressing more than just religion.

Tonight, she said, is about free speech.

Tonight is about hearing opinions we don’t want to hear. Tonight is about the central purpose of a University.

The audience members — a significant number of whom were alumni whose 30th, 40th, perhaps even 50th reunions had already passed — responded with a booming round of applause. They — especially the members of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program, which was hosting the event — may not have agreed with Hirsi Ali on abolishing state funding of religious schools, legalizing drugs or increasing access to abortion. But on this, they stood firmly behind her.

Five days before, members of the Yale community had opened their inboxes to a letter from the Muslim Students Association expressing wariness about this very talk.

“Our concern is that Ms. Hirsi Ali is being invited to speak as an authority on Islam despite the fact that she does not hold the credentials to do so,” the email read. “[W]e are hopeful that the discussion is constructive and that Ms. Hirsi Ali speaks only to her personal experiences and professional expertise.”

But on this evening there stood Hirsi Ali, speaking on not just her personal experience, but also Islam’s role on the world stage.

Less than a month before, University President Peter Salovey had stood behind a similar podium in a similarly adorned lecture hall to deliver his freshman address.

He made clear where he and his

“I

administration stood on the issue of free speech.

Much of his speech had been written 40 years before, in the wake of free speech incidents involving segregationist George Wallace, former commander of the U.S. armed forces in Vietnam, William Westmoreland, and eugenics proponent William Shockley. “‘The history of intellectual growth and discovery,’” he said, quoting directly from the Woodward Report, “‘clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable and challenge the unchallengeable.’”

His blue robes draped by his sides, his mustache absent, and his eyes bespectacled, he signaled his vision for speech and expression in the years to come.

“I recognize that all of us here … might also like to live in a campus community where nothing provocative and hurtful is ever said to anyone. And that is the part that I cannot — and should not — promise you. For if we are not willing to be shocked, then we may not be allowing ourselves to be open to life-changing ideas — ideas that rock our worlds.” *** In May of 1974, a team of distinguished professors and scholars, headed by the pre-eminent American historian C. Vann Woodward, convened to craft a document that would articulate the University’s policies on free expression.

The resulting 51-page Woodward Report was brought to President Brewster’s desk on Dec. 23 of that year. The University released it in January 1975, under the title, “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression at Yale.”

The report was clear. Yale would staunchly defend free speech on campus — something it arguably hadn’t done so well 12 years before.

In 1963, the Yale Political Union invited George Wallace, of block-the-schoolhouse-doorway segregationist fame, to speak. Then Mayor of New Haven Richard Lee wasn’t happy. His eyes set on a fifth term as mayor of a predominantly AfricanAmerican city, he was adamant against Wallace setting foot in New Haven.

“The Mayor of New Haven … told Brewster that he feared there would be terrible riots [if he did come],” Sam Chauncey, who served as special assistant to President Brewster throughout his 14-year tenure, said. But, Chauncey continued, “I don’t believe there would have been terrible riots.”

Brewster bent, and the YPU revoked the invitation.

“It was a question of a naïve adminis-

Peter Salovey

t ra to r under g rea t pressure from the Mayor of New Haven, and maybe others,” Chauncey said.

Brewster had fallen into his position by default; the Yale charter calls for the Provost to become acting President if the President dies in office. He had only spent a year in the Provost’s office before President Whitney Griswold’s death, and was acutely aware of how his decisions might impact his own future — he was the leading candidate to become President of the University.

But, Chauncey said, Brewster realized he had made a mistake after the fact, and he was willing to admit it.

The Wallace incident was the first free speech incident Brewster confronted as President, but it was later, more heated incidents that would lead to the creation of the Woodward Report.

According to Nathaniel Zelinsky ’13, who won the Kaplan Prize for his senior essay focusing on free speech and co-education in the Brewster years, the President’s first disruption came not from an outside speaker, but from within the University.

In 1969, Yale fired a black dining hall worker for being, according to a Nov. 4, 1969 News article, “uncooperative” with students, almost all of whom were white.

In response, 60 students, affiliated with Students for a Democratic Society, occupied what is now the L-Dub basement post office, and what was then the dining hall manager’s office, demanding that the dining hall worker be brought back.

Administrators had little precedent for this type of situation; Chauncey would later note, “we were kind of winging it.”

He and Provost Charles Taylor (Brewster was away on vacation) ended up suspending 47 students who refused to leave.

Strike one. *** In 1972, then Army Chief of Staff William Westmoreland, who had led the U.S. armed forces throughout the peak years of the Vietnam War, including during the Tet Offensive, was invited by the YPU to speak.

Westmoreland’s visit soon became more than an issue of free speech.

“His staff was very concerned about his life. Not free speech, but whether he might be killed,” said Chauncey, who was in charge of securing the event in his role as special assistant to the President.

Prior to the event, the administration, worried that some might go off the rails, reached an agreement with students. Protesters could stand with placards at the back of the Law

y '57 Sam Chaunce

School auditorium, where the event was to be held, but they could not speak.

The administration had worked out other details, too.

“I had arranged for a very large number of plain-clothed policemen to be in the room, in case there was a real coup,” Chauncey recalled. “In case someone pulled out a gun to shoot him.”

Asked if he actually believed someone might attempt to assassinate Westmoreland, Chauncey delivered a history lesson.

“This was a period in American history when there were the Weathermen bombings,” he said, referring to the Weather Underground Organization, a radical left group that formed from Students for a Democratic Society, and delivered a slew of bombings, mostly to government buildings, from the early- to mid-1970s.

The administration made sure that, if anything were to happen, Westmoreland could escape as quickly as possible — they had chosen the Law School auditorium for its layout.

“You could get from the podium to the [off-stage] door in two seconds, and be out of the room. And behind that door were more police officers ready to open it and bring him out,” Chauncey said.

But at the last moment, right before Westmoreland was to make his way from dinner at Mory’s with the YPU officers and party chairmen to the auditorium to deliver his speech, either he or his security team balked. To this day, Chauncey doesn’t know what led to the last-minute 180 degree shift. He just knows that a lieutenant approached him as he waited in the YLS auditorium to inform him that General Westmoreland would no longer be speaking. He was afraid for his life.

Strike two. *** I think back to Hirsi Ali. Police officers adorned SSS 114, posted at every entrance.

But no bags were searched, no attendees escorted out, and although the side doors stayed tightly sealed until the moment she walked on stage, it seemed more of a toying with suspense than a true security concern. And no one, inside or out, went as far as to protest.

I ask Chauncey why this is.

He pauses. I listen to silence on the other end of the line.

“I think students today are incapable of outrage,” he says. Incapable of outrage, but not apathetic, he specifies.

“They are deeply concerned about social issues, but I don’t think they can act on their concern,” he says. “They’re parSEE FREE SPEECH PAGE 8

F R I D AY

THE 90S @ GPSCY!

SEPTEMBER 19

The only chance to run into your Shakespeare TF and shout “HEY JULIET!”

GPSCY // 9:30 p.m.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: The Terms and Conditions of Your Neopets account What birth date did you actually use?

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

// BY DAVID WHIPPLE

GET RICH SLOWLY

WEEKEND CODES

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 19

You might not know it, but a whole generation of startups is taking root at Yale. They’re developing apps for Android, the Google smartphone operating system, and have plans to meet with venture capitalists early next semester. With any luck, one of them will develop into the Next Big Thing, and Yale will finally have the tech-genius billionaire alumnus it’s been waiting for.

But before they get any funding, these fledgling companies will all get something else: a grade.

This is all taking place within Professor Daniel Abadi’s reimagined “Introduction to Programming” class, CPSC 112. After teaching it for years using only Java, Abadi has redesigned the syllabus around a group app development project meant to simulate launching a tech startup. He’s also worked with School of Management Professor Kyle Jensen to create an entirely new course, CPSC 113: “Programming and Entrepreneurship,” to be offered in the spring as an extension of CPSC 112. And while “Introduction to Programming” will retain its focus on computer science basics, its revamped curriculum and the addition of CPSC 113 have one goal.

“The purpose of the course is to better enable our students to go off and create the next Facebook,” says Jensen.

Student interest in practical computer knowledge and startup culture has existed at Yale for years, as shown by organizations like HackYale and Y-Hack. But Yale’s Computer Science department has long been known for focusing on theory rather than application. The entrepreneurial-minded revamp of CPSC 112 and the invention of CPSC 113 are a response to that demand. The question remains, though: Can a liberal arts education teach you to get rich quick? *** The narrative surrounding computer science at Yale has been of a department wary of classes focused on entrepreneurship rather than academics. The department’s consistent refusal to accept course credit for HackYale, a student organization teaching programming basics and web design, has only contributed to that.

According to Alex Reinking ’16, who has taught for HackYale in the past, “The Computer Science Department has been reluctant to expand into things that aren’t computer science explicitly.”

Abadi agrees that some faculty were skeptical of moving away from pure fundamentals, but he specifies that the new course isn’t the result of a power shift within the department. Instead, he says there was simply no one willing to teach it.

Until Abadi came along, that is.

As a Ph.D. student at MIT, Abadi worked part time on tech startups VoltDB and Vertica, the latter of which Hewlett-Packard bought for $350 million in 2011. At Yale, he founded Hadapt, a databasemanagement startup that Teradata bought this July. Abadi says he doesn’t think anyone else in Yale’s computer science department has founded startups on a similar scale.

Though he had taught more theoretically based classes including CPSC 112 for several years, this summer, he decided to bring his startup experience into the class. Having gotten tenure last spring, he felt

“IPHIGENIA”

Whitney Humanities Center // 7:00 p.m.

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ready to try something more adventurous. After selling Hadapt in July, he took his proposal for the new CPSC 112-113 program to department chair Joan Feigenbaum and to James Aspnes, the DUS. Both liked the idea — “there wasn’t any kind of battle or anything,” Abadi says — and the administration approved the new course design in only two days.

Abadi took the quick turnaround as a sign of enthusiasm from Woodbridge Hall, as did Feigenbaum.

“In general, the administration has been very eager for shaking things up a bit in computer science,” she says. “This, they see as a very good example of shaking things up, and I do too.” *** According to Feigenbaum, Yale’s Computer Science Department is in the midst of a sea change, one that’s also being felt around the Ivies and the country.

Soaring enrollment in Yale’s Computer Science courses is well documented; Feigenbaum says her department is the “biggest of the small majors,” and its enrollment numbers could begin to rival those of academic mainstays like English or Econonomics during her tenure as chair.

Less obvious is the change not just in the numbers but the nature of Yale’s computer science students.

Feigenbaum says that while the traditional CS major had learned to program before arriving at Yale and planned to continue doing so, the department now has to grapple with widely varying skill levels, backgrounds and intentions among its students.

“We have been, traditionally, a very narrow and deep major,” but now, she says, “We may want to broaden.” One possibility would be separate tracks for career computer scientists — what Feigenbaum calls the “geekus maximus” track — and those who want to learn computer science but do something else as a career.

Abadi’s course is the first step towards a broader focus, as the department adjusts to new demographics and new sources of interest.

Abadi points out that the department’s last three hires, including himself, have all been “more on the applied side of things.” He attributes this to a deliberate strategy, and Aspnes agrees, saying that the new faculty addressed Yale’s traditional weakness in applied teaching rather than fundamentals.

As novel as the recent surge in interest might appear, computer science has been here before. It happened in the 1980s, when personal computers were still a novelty, and then again in the late 1990s during the dot-com boom. Yale students’ interest in the discipline has tracked those trends: Enrollment in “Intro to Programming” fell from 143 in the spring 2000 to 67 in spring 2002, after the dot-com bubble popped .

Feigenbaum thinks that this time, the increase in interest will be more sustained: Computers are a bigger part of everyday life than ever before. But the pitch for this new course isn’t technological literacy — it’s marketability. Computer Science has always presented a clearer career path than other majors — “We are educating people who are prepared to be professional computer scientists,” Feigenbaum says — and with the job market slow but

the tech industry booming, students are looking to the discipline to learn marketable skills.

But professors and students alike are adamant that the immediate applicability of computer science, and specifically of hands-on classes like CPSC 112, isn’t at odds with a traditional liberal arts education.

“There has long been at Harvard, and I presume at Yale as well, this assumption that a liberal arts education is by definition not practical,” says David Malan, who teaches Harvard’s famous CS50 course, a handson introduction to computer science and programming. But he doesn’t think that’s necessarily true.

Feigenbaum agrees, questioning the notion that practical knowledge and lofty theory are even distinct from each other. Knowledge with real-world implications, she says, can be intellectually engaging.

Rafi Khan ’15, HackYale’s codirector, adds that computer science fits that description because “it’s exposing you to a new way of thinking, and expanding your mind in that way.”

Malan is careful to specify that his course isn’t just about practicality, though. Because while practicality itself isn’t at odds with the liberal arts, a course prioritizing technical skills over theoretical understanding might be. So while CS50 aims to teach students concrete skills, it also aims at understanding, according to Malan.

“The reality,” he says, “is that you can use a tool without knowing how it works.” *** But that’s not why you go to Yale or Harvard. And while practical computer science classes teach realworld skills, teaching students how to monetize those skills is something else entirely. Those involved with the course acknowledge the potential tension.

“The real question is not, ‘Is there something wrong with acquiring knowledge that has practical value?’” says Feigenbaum. “The real potential controversy here is that we’re deliberately describing the course in terms of startup companies and venture capital and pitching a business plan.” One could ask, she says, “Why would you say any of that in an undergraduate course?”

For one thing, Feigenbaum says, that’s what students want to hear.

Tech startups feature prominently on social media and in popular culture, and with CPSC 112, she hopes the department can tap into that.

Aspnes says he didn’t consider the role of money in the course when approving it, while Jensen, the professor for 113, says he doesn’t worry that the business aspect of the class will conflict with academic values.

“The ventures people work on will embody their values,” he says, adding that a liberal arts education can actually be a competitive advantage for startups facing competition from tech-first schools like MIT. Abadi says he will make sure to say “fake money” and “fake stock” when discussing that part of the syllabus. Even so, “It may be a little stressful for some of the students; the social pressure may get intense.

I don’t know what’s going to happen — obviously, it’s an experiment.

If bad things happen, we can change the rules on the fly if need be.”

But entrepreneurial spirit is part of the classes’ new identities, try as

Abadi might to model a benign version of the business world.

Marc Bielas ’18, for one, says he wouldn’t have taken the class if not for the new angle. The business potential of learning computer science has always intrigued him, he says. But, he continues, “I’ve never had the technical skills to create any of the applications I had thought of.”

Bielas says he likes the focus on turning ideas into profit. Undergrads will be in the workforce soon, he explains, and exposure to the business world can’t hurt. Like its designers, he sees CPSC 112 as a step towards Zuckerberg-like billionaire tech dropouts — something he thinks Yale lacks.

And despite her own reservations and others’, Feigenbaum is at peace with the focus on money and business.

“Whether there’s something inherently wrong with thinking about pitching or selling or the economic and business aspect of it, in an undergraduate course — I don’t think so,” she says, pointing out that Yale alumni in tech and other fields often go on to start businesses. But, she qualifies, “I guess the danger might be that some kids actually think there’s a good chance that they can go directly from writing one app to having a successful business. That might be a bit unrealistic.”

That thought, however, is part of what’s driving Yalies’ new enthusiasm for computer science. While the new 112 course will still focus on fundamentals despite its new structure, some students want immediate results.

Those sorts of students make up much of HackYale’s enrollment, and Khan acknowledges that HackYale’s courses “skip over” some fundamentals in order to get students’ ideas online as fast as possible. The group’s founders didn’t plan to launch students towards multi-million dollar IPOs, but some nonetheless see the program as the first step along the way.

“Oftentimes people come to us with startup ideas that they’re not able to implement themselves,” says Reinking. “That’s a really common reason.”

And according to Khan, that ordering of priorities contributed to the department’s initial hesitation to implement a more practical, HackYale-type course. Bay Gross ’13, HackYale’s founder, said in an email that while the department was receptive to the idea, he added that they were “perhaps overly cautious” in embracing what they thought might be a trend lacking in educational value and rigor. And even if the addition of a class like Abadi’s is a step towards a more practical education, Feigenbaum says the department will never teach students how to use computers without understanding how they work.

“The particular languages, they come and go,” says Abadi. “But the fundamentals, they’ve been around for 30, 40 years, and they’re not going anywhere.”

If all anyone did was think about commercializing their inventions, says Feigenbaum, no one would be able to invent anything. “I hope they understand,” she adds, “that they’re not going to get rich quick without putting in work.”

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

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B5

WEEKEND ARTS

BRAVE NEW URBAN WORLD // BY CAROLINE HART

I do not know anything about architecture. I do live in a building, and often observe and go into other buildings, but that’s basically the extent of how often I think about it. After visiting the Yale School of Architecture’s “Infra Eco Logi Urbanism” exhibit, I sat in my room and Googled the term “architecture,” which the Internet defines as “the art or practice of designing and constructing buildings.” This alone encapsulated a mere fraction of what I saw in the exhibit.

“Infra Eco Logi Urbanism” displays the design research of RVTR, an experimental architecture practice based in Toronto that combines academic and experimental research platforms, in the words of their website, to “continually evolve ecologies,” The firm completely reimagines the urban environment as we know it, replacing cities with “Megaregions” that encompass enormous areas

of land, people and resources. The exhibit is framed around the “Great Lakes Megaregion” of their construction, a network defined as the most populous and geographically vast in a post-metropolitan world.

The ideas behind “Infra Eco Logi Urbanism,” while at times highly theoretical and difficult to grasp, have the potential to impact even the least architecture-savvy among us with its sleek coherence. A detailed description of the project greets visitors at the entrance, where the neatly-organized, medium-sized room takes the appearance of a vast landscape.

Detailed charts, maps and pictures on wires hang from the high ceilings.

To get from one end of the exhibit to the other, you must walk across a large map of the GLM plastered to the ground.

This configuration invites visitors to stop and admire the detailed, color-

ful networks sprawling across it. And the exhibit not only depicts plans for the new future, but also the concrete visage of GLM centers, presented as scaled building models with impressive, imaginative designs. In the case of one model, the designers chose to make use of existing water instead of land, presenting an apartment-like complex resting alongside a boat.

The key at the bottom of the chart delineates symbols for infrastructure and logistics, politics and food. This alone gives visitors a sense of how intertwined all of these systems are.

To an extent previously unimaginable, “Infra Eco Logi Urbanism” envisions how life could be if these systems worked in accordance with one another (better, I think).

Not only is this exhibit a spectacle — beautiful and striking to the observer — it is also a calculated, potential reality crafted by architects.

It’s not necessarily the sort of exhibit that makes for a fun, afternoon trip to “go check out some art.” We are instead confronted with the disturbing reminder that we, the humans, are messing up tons of stuff here on Earth — to such an extent that a group of people planned a completely alternative urban ecosystem.

The exhibit tells us that “the urban landscape’s whole image no longer corresponds to the activities carried out within it,” a notion that virtually abandons the part-to-whole governance that shapes our modern government and lives. “Infra Eco Logi Urbanism” acknowledges energy as a collective resource — in people, in culture, in natural resources. This makes for a most efficient and most orderly place, one that bears little semblance to the places we inhabit today.

Call it art, call it architec-

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

Challenging the standard definition. ture, call me crazy, but I think this exhibit challenges us to reconsider how we organize and conduct our everyday lives. Although it suggests a radical reconfiguration of every aspect of life as we know it, the basic idea that people have the potential to organize themselves and their future world is empowering. At a time when there is more conflict in the world than I can possibly know or grasp, utopian visions of the future can help direct our expectations towards the positive.

And it’s always nicer to think of what we can do than what we cannot.

Contact CAROLINE HART at caroline.hart@yale.edu .

Art Across the Divide // BY EMILY XIAO

Visiting “East of the Wallace Line: Monumental Art from Indonesia and New Guinea” requires something of a trek and directional know-how (in my case, supplied by a friendly Yale University Art Gallery security guard). The exhibit is tucked away into a little fourth-floor gallery; it feels almost like an intrusion to stumble into the intimate, teal-colored room after strolling through breezy white hallways and riding an elevator far too large for one person. Once inside, I am overwhelmed by over 120 objects from the 17th to 19th centuries, ranging from textile to brass to wood so old it no longer looks like wood; they are scattered along the walls and clustered in islands in the open space of the room, much like the scattered East Indies islands depicted in the map at the entrance to

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 19

the exhibit.

“East of the Wallace Line” takes its title from the 19th-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who identified a divide — the Wallace Line — between the flora and fauna on two groups of islands in the East Indies.

Although Wallace was concerned primarily with the natural world, the exhibit uses his ecological divide as a framework for presenting the artistic culture of peoples who lived in eastern Indonesia and western New Guinea.

I almost wish there were examples of art from the other side, a counterpart exhibit called “West of the Wallace Line,” if only to serve as a point of comparison.

As I shuffle through the gallery, however, it nevertheless becomes apparent that there are plenty of contrasts to work with here — that we have, after all, an exhibit of distinctions within otherwise indistinguishable pairs, and networks of incongruities that perhaps aren’t so incongruous after all. There is, of course, Wallace himself, who independently developed the theory of evolution at the same time as Darwin, though it is Darwin whom we know better. There’s the underlying con-

sciousness of the ecological mechanisms that preoccupied both men, of the diversity of traits individually propagated by the same core laws of evolution — and there is the distinction (and comparison) to be made between ecological and cultural diversity. There are, for the exhibit’s titular emphasis on monumental art — and its examples are captivating, don’t get me wrong — an awful lot of tiny and seemingly mundane (but no less aesthetic, and, in many cases, spiritually resonant) everyday objects ranging from combs to spoons to a woman’s hat. And then there is the exhibit’s assertion that the hodgepodge of cultures represented are somehow united by a single “shared sense of iconography and design.”

The exhibit does a subtle job of illustrating that our initial perception of these peoples as both physically and culturally isolated is not entirely accurate. It’s true that in the ecological world, physical separation gives rise to divergence, and this would have been the mental framework of Westerners like Wallace who arrived in the region believing it to be cut off from the outside world. We are presented, however, with healthy evidence of

trade and exchange. For example, in one corner of the room hangs a particularly vivid shroud, used among the Rongkong Toraja exclusively for wrapping the dead. But when traded off to neighboring peoples, such shrouds took on ceremonial and decorative uses. This is how we start to see a justification for the wide range of objects on display and the coherence in design among different artistic traditions, how huge festival banners of Sulawesi can share the same sense of intricacy as canoe prow ornaments from Cenderawasih Bay. In a pleasantly surprising intersection of ecology and culture, one of the exhibit placards informs the viewer of how bird-of-paradise feathers from the region became a highly sought-after luxury in places as far away as Vietnam. The arrangement of objects themselves about the room is almost haphazard, and the island clusters into which they are seemingly compartmentalized turn out to represent mixes of cultures — masks from Timor are placed near ancestor figures from Flores, curation defined more by aesthetic relationships than by geography. Such adaptations were not only material; we learn also of tribes’ con-

MAHLER: “RESURRECTION” SYMPHONY

versions to Christianity and Islam, tribes that still exist to this day. So here we come to perhaps the biggest paradox of all: the relationship between cultural exchange on one hand, and survival or the preservation of identity on the other.

A friend who accompanied me comments on the pristine condition of the objects on display, despite their age. In the same way, “East of the Wallace Line” reminds us of how cultures and communities can endure after centuries of history; while these objects left behind are now considered relics, their creators shouldn’t be.

Before I arrived at “East of the Wallace Line,” I had to walk through another gallery in which a different exhibit was in the process of being taken down; I passed by a workman who was scraping painted letters off the wall into a garbage bag. For me, it was in this context, in a museum and a world in flux, that these objects of wood and textile and age and gravitas took on a strange sense of permanence.

Contact EMILY XIAO at emily.xiao@yale.edu .

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Woolsey Hall // 7:30 p.m.

Check back in three days to see if it worked.

// ELIZABETH MILES

The Dao De Jing

The ticker that can be written is not the eternal ticker.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND ROMANCES

Inarticulate Longings // BY STEPHANIE ADDENBROOKE “You’re a fake and a phoney and I wish I’d never laid eyes on you…” That line might have worked for Sandy in “Grease,” but I doubt it’ll work its magic outside Rydell High. Everyone at Yale seems to be faking it: No one uses the word phoney anymore, and, with everyone knowing everyone, there’s no chance you won’t see that someone again.

But Sandy got her the one that she wanted, so what am I doing wrong?

Well, I’m not living in a 1960s high school musical, and I’ve progressed away from massive skirts and innocent ponytails. There are worse things than those poor fashion choices, but I am sure that I definitely, most certainly, would not reinvent myself for a guy who wore a leather jacket.

Now, I’m the first to scream, “F*** the patriarchy,” and I’ll get in line to take “shots for feminism” as part of a questionable evening, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t dreamt of being hopelessly devoted to someone. I’d take an evening of being disgustingly adorable, mocking a terrible movie with someone special over any an evening spent “soul-searching” on the dance floor of Toad’s on a Wednesday night.

My childhood of romance movies and Jane Austen novels led me to believe that my true love would let me know by telling me he liked me just the way I am after he had picked up the books I would have inevitably dropped (as the geeky girl who would eventually take off her glasses to become instantaneously prettier) walking dreamily out of Sterling Library. I would have him at “Hello” and that would be that.

But when the ability to articulate emotion and “take a hint” seems to be in short supply on this campus, it looks like I’m going to be hopelessly devoted to Netflix for the semester. Nothing phoney about that.

Love. Sex. Hookups. Makeouts. Relationships. Emotions.

Do we have your attention yet?

Our campus, it seems, is constantly under the microscope for that vague thing we call “hookup culture.” We’re scrutinized by media outlets across the nation for rampant sex, shifty (maybe nonexistent?) morals and little to no experience with matters of the heart. But with all our discourse, only one truth has surfaced: People want different things. Your suitemate wants a consistent friends-with-benefits. You kind-of-maybe-probably want to meet your soulmate, like, tomorrow. And that girl you always pass on Cross Campus just really wants someone to flext with. (WEEKEND, personally, wants a polygamous partnership with Wenzels, peach Andre and Sailor Mars, but that’s another story).

This week, we had a few of our writers pen their takes on romance at Yale. Read on to find out about the ideal long-distance relationship, the inevitable sorrows of freshman love and both the joys and horrors of dating within your college.

Contact STEPHANIE ADDENBROOKE at stephanie.addenbrooke@yale.edu . // ALLIE KRAUSE

Frustrations of an Anonymous Froco

Expiration Date

Embracing a Lightness of Being

// BY AN ANONYMOUS FROCO

// BY AUDREY LUO

// BY JOEL ABRAHAM

I told you it was a bad idea.

Just a few weeks ago, back when Toad’s glittered with promise, rather than the drunken sweat of drunks.

The Master and the Dean told you our college is your home, your closest circle of friends and acquaintances. I told you it can get too close. My children, you were warned.

Stay out of your own residential college. Don’t do it. Collegecest is like raising a tiny illegal alligator in a bathtub. It’s fun at the beginning, but goddamn, will it rise from the depths and bite

you when you’re not looking. Or show up in your dining hall. Or your library. Or outside your door at 3 a.m., plastered.

The Dean already asked me why the freshmen have this strange new habit of climbing out windows. She says it seems like you’re all avoiding each other. FLEEING THE SCENE OF THE CRIME, MORE LIKELY. You all are like rabbits. Lazy rabbits! You don’t even leave your dorm! THOSE FIRE DOORS CONNECTING THE ENTRYWAYS?! THOSE ARE FOR EMERGENCIES. Your “needs” are NOT EMERGEN-

S A T U R D AY SEPTEMBER 20

CIES. You don’t get Yale Alerts saying “Time to Hook Up!” I worry about you. Seriously.

When will you find the time to do your econ pset? Don’t give me this “marry rich” crap. That Kennedy guy is NOT IN OUR COLLEGE. Besides, I know you aren’t even getting that much action. The candy/condom jar is still full of Trojans and you’re all still knocking on my door asking when I’ll refill it with Snickers. And I had to restrain myself from posting your latest conversational gems of loneliness on Overheard:

“Did you know they have cat wine now?”

“Which part of the cat is fermented … ?”

“No, no, wine your cat can drink too. You know, for when you’re alone with your cat and the Netflix.”

What’s that you say? No Netflix tonight? You’ve made it out of L-Dub? To Durfee?

Those’re the damn neighbors.

I’ll be proud of you when you make it off Old Campus.

Contact ELIZABETH MILES at elizabeth.miles@yale.edu .

THE TROJAN WOMEN

ditionally forgives you when you’re having a crappy day and offers hugs, tea and advice.

All is dandy except for one thing: graduation. With his graduation next May and two more years at Yale for me, questions we’d rather do without demand to be asked.

Are we staying together? And if so, is he thinking about … possibly marrying me?! Or do we want to date other fish in the sea? Why not break up right now so we can get on it?

It boils down to this: What do

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We LOVE Hecuba.

Dating someone in my residential college is a privilege I’m constantly thankful for. Nothing beats stopping by his room after work in the morning and snuggling next to him while he finishes his reading. Or always receiving a good-night-I-love-you text sent from less than 100 meters away. He’s the one who drops off a GHeav sandwich for me when I’m up studying at 2 a.m., the one who consistently appreciates my cringe-worthy humor and ceaseless singing. Indeed, it’s a privilege to have someone who uncon-

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we want out of our relationship?

Having a potential expiration date on our relationship makes today feel painfully bittersweet.

If his ambitions send him back to California, there will be many miles and people between us.

We’ve been conditioned to sacrifice for practicality and ambitions because for most of us, we trust our goals more than we do a romantic relationship that may or may not be the one. Then how do I reconcile all the time and experiences we’ve shared with the possibility of becoming strangers in

the future?

A close friend once asked what my greatest human need was.

I knew immediately that it was progress. Growth. Perhaps I can tell myself that no matter what happens, we’ve both learned a lot about ourselves. And, maybe more importantly, how to care deeply for another person. Or perhaps I will simply rest content knowing that, when we had it good, we were blissfully, blissfully happy.

S A T U R D AY SEPTEMBER 20

Contact AUDREY LUO at audrey.luo@yale.edu .

“It’ll be fine. We can do this,” we said as we both left to our respective colleges.

But it soon became quite clear that it would not be easy. We were both attending schools where the gay male population virtually outnumbered the straight guys, so being in a committed relationship proved more work than expected.

At Yale, especially, Woads and the various frat parties were virtually handing me guys to hook up with. Considering the fact that one of my good girlfriends goes home with a different guy almost every night, the pressure to add names to my book of conquests was very visceral. And at Yale, every guy you’ll meet has some-

LOOK UP, SPEAK NICELY, AND DON’T TWIDDLE YOUR FINGERS ALL THE TIME Yale Cabaret // 8 p.m.

Words to live by.

thing interesting about him, something that enabled him to get into Yale in the first place. This made it very difficult to not imagine dating someone else.

So after both of us had been in college for a few weeks, we decided it was time to talk. “What are going to do about this?”

The most important thing, we decided, was to ensure that if we lasted (or even if we didn’t) that we didn’t feel resentful at having been barred from the full college experience.

We decided to turn our relationship into an open one. We’d met each other in our senior English class and, therefore had both read Milan Kundera’s “The Unbear-

able Lightness of Being.” We therefore decided to adapt the Rule of Threes for our purposes. Essentially, we determined that both of us were allowed to hook up with the same person either three times in quick succession and then never again, or once every three weeks. This seemed the best way to ensure that we were emotionally secure about our relationship.

So far, it’s been working. We’ve both had our fun, and yet we both have each other to return to. And I’m still confident we can do this.

Contact JOEL ABRAHAM at joel.abraham@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: “The Wars” by Timothy Findley

The historiographic metafiction CanLit to end all historiographic metafiction CanLit.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

FREE SPEECH FROM PAGE 3 alyzed,” either because they are worried about not getting a job with a black mark on their record, or because they believe they aren’t informed enough to insert themselves into the dialogue.

While Chauncey seems more worried about a lack of outrage with social and policy issues, Donald Kagan, Sterling Professor of Classics and History, who has also spoken at several Buckley events, worries about a lack of concern for upholding free speech principles themselves.

“In the earlier time,” he says, “there was a division of opinion among the students, but there was a pretty strong sense of the opinion of [the importance of] freedom of speech.”

Today, Kagan thinks there are more student groups willing to suppress the speech they don’t like.

“And my feeling is that the great mass of students are prepared to accept that,” he says. *** The tipping point came in 1974, just one year before the Woodward Report was released. The Conservative Party of the YPU asked William Shockley — co-inventor of the transistor radio, for which he won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics, and a believer in eugenics — to speak in front of the Union Unlike Westmoreland, Shockley made it into the building. But he was never able to speak. For over an hour, shouting students drowned out his words. Shockley walked out of the building, defeated.

Strike three. *** Placed side by side, the Shockley and Westmoreland events pose an important question: Is there a difference between those who simply espouse beliefs — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for instance — and those who have participated in acts that some members of the community find reprehensible, like Westmoreland?

Shockley had made his proeugenics beliefs known to the world, but he wasn’t implementing any eugenics policies. Meanwhile, Westmoreland had served as commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, making decisions that impacted the lives of U.S. soldiers and Vietnamese civilians every day. Shockley was a speaker, but Westmoreland was a doer.

When members of the Rutgers and Smith communities made clear to former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde that they were unwelcome on their respective campuses, they were operating on the “doer” principle. Rice, they said, was responsible for the War in Iraq, and Lagarde for the “strengthening of imperialist and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.”

I n November 2013, Brown University students invoked the same principle. New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who had implemented the city’s highly controversial stop-and-frisk policy, came to speak, but student protesters shut him down, standing up inside the lecture hall and heckling him.

Signs outside the event read, “Stop police brutality,” “Brown is complicit,” and “Ray(cist) Kelly.”

I asked Salovey: For the purposes of honoring free speech on campus, should we differentiate between the Shockleys and the Westmorelands, the speakers and the doers?

Not in University policy, he said.

To Salovey, the distinction isn’t meaningful enough to merit different administrative responses.

Asked how he would respond if Bashar al-Assad, responsible for the deaths of thousands of Syrians, were invited to campus, he demurred from the extreme example, but reinforced his position.

“Let’s say a group on campus wants to invite a mass murderer to speak,” he explained, sitting in his office on the first floor of Woodbridge Hall. “I might question that group’s judgment. I might even question why they would like to dignify that person by giving them a platform. But if they invite that person, and they do it in a way that the event would be safe for all involved … it would be inappropriate for me to try to pressure the group to disinvite a speaker.”

According to William F. Buckley Jr. Program President Rich Lizardo ’15 and the Program’s founder and executive director Lauren Noble ’11, pressuring another group to disinvite a speaker is exactly what the Muslim Students Association did.

“The MSA asked me if the Buckley Program would reconsider our invitation,” Lizardo said.

From the outset, Lizardo said, he made clear that revoking the invitation was a non-starter. The MSA then presented other options, he said: The first that Hirsi Ali be limited to speaking about personal experiences, and the second that other guests — who they deemed more qualified — be invited to speak alongside her.

To Lizardo, the second request was downright disrespectful.

“If the initial invitation is for a lecture [and not a debate], you have to stick with that,” he said.

Lizardo was also bothered by the very premise of their requests.

“It was somewhat uncalled for,” he said, “for another organization to be making demands of us.”

But MSA President Ahmad Aljobeh ’16 denies ever asking the Program to disinvite Hirsi Ali. As to asking the Buckley Program to invite

other speakers, and limit Hirsi Ali’s comments to her personal experience, Aljobeh said, “The MSA is exercising our own freedom of speech.” *** To many Yale students, the same is true of The Reverend Bruce Shipman, former priest-in-charge of the Episcopal Church at Yale who made headlines with his response to an Aug. 20 op-ed in The New York Times.

A month ago, Deborah E. Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, wrote a piece about rising anti-semitism in Europe. The crux of her opinion: People who worry we are on the “cusp of another Holocaust” are wrong. But people who aren’t worried at all about anti-semitism are also wrong.

“This is not another Holocaust, but it’s bad enough,” she concludes.

In response to the op-ed, Rev. Shipman, who did not respond to requests for comment for this story, wrote a letter to the editor stating that there is a relationship between increased anti-semitism in Europe and Israel’s policies in Gaza. In what would become his most controversial point, he wrote, “the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel’s patrons abroad to press the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question.”

Two weeks later, Rev. Shipman resigned from his post because, as he told the Yale Herald, his board simply wouldn’t stand behind him throughout the onslaught of criticism. (Ian Douglas, bishop of Connecticut and president of the board of governors for the Episcopal Church at Yale, counters that it had more to do with “institutional dynamics” within the Church.)

Feelings ran high on both sides.

Some students said the comments justified anti-semitism. Others said they showed a complete inability to separate the policies of the Israeli government from the lives of millions of diasporic Jews.

But other students felt Rev. Shipman was simply speaking up for the plight of Palestinians, broaching a taboo that others have been too reticent to touch. They didn’t believe the letter condoned anti-semitism.

Two days after the Times letter, on Aug. 28, Shipman followed up with another one, this time to the Yale Daily News.

“If I seemed to suggest in my letter that only Jews, who actively oppose present Israeli policies have a right to feel safe, that was not my intention nor is it my belief,” he wrote. “Personal safety and protection by the rule

of law is a fundamental right. Nothing done in Israel or Palestine justified the disturbing rise in anti-semitism in Europe or elsewhere.”

Exactly a week after the second letter ran, Rev. Shipman resigned.

For Chauncey, the Shipman incident called up memories of the late ’60s and early ’70s. At that time, Chauncey was leading the charge on co-education and increasing the number of minority students at Yale. Yale’s affiliated organizations — what Chauncey calls “parasitic organizations” because they wouldn’t exist if Yale did not — Mory’s, the Yale Club of New York City, and secret societies, refused to let women and African-Americans within their folds.

Chauncey literally laid down the law, recruiting Yale Law School faculty to sue Mory’s, which had thus far refused to even talk about admitting women. If these organizations wanted to maintain any affiliation with the University, they had to abide by its principles, he said. (After being threatened with losing its liquor license, Mory’s began admitting women in 1972, three years after the University had gone co-ed.)

He views the Shipman controversy as analogous.

“Here’s the Episcopal Church, apparently letting a man go because he said something they didn’t like,” he said, emphasizing that, because of conflicting accounts, he doesn’t know the real reason why Rev. Shipman resigned.

“From my point of view, there can be no distinction: If a person is part of Yale University, they have a right to free speech.”

In a follow-up conversation, he clarified. “I’m not saying that the Episcopal Church shouldn’t fire a priest that says something that’s inconsistent with their values,” he said. “But if the organization’s values are inconsistent with Yale’s values, then there’s a question.”

To Deborah Lipstadt, the Emory professor who wrote the op-ed, free speech is a “smokescreen” in this case. “[Shipman] is the representative of a major organization associated with one of the major universities in the U.S.,” she said. “It’s not that he’s not allowed to say [what he said]; it’s that you take responsibility for it.”

She offered another example: If someone said that rape on college campuses simply wouldn’t happen if “‘those girls [that’s usually the language that’s used] didn’t wear those short skirts, or go to frat houses, or get drunk,’” or that Michael Brown wouldn’t have been murdered if “‘black people

didn’t wear their pants around their ankles, and if they would just shape up and behave,’ we wouldn’t think twice about firing them.”

To her, along with focusing on whether a person had the right to say what they said, we can’t forget to ask ourselves: “Do you want someone ministering or counseling to students who makes these kinds of simplistic and glib comparisons?”

She tied her thoughts back to former Harvard President Larry Summers’s comments on women in the sciences. (In 2005, Summers suggested that the underrepresentation of women in the sciences could be due to a “different availability of aptitude at the high end.”

After a no-confidence vote from the Harvard Board of Trustees, he resigned.)

“If you choose to be the President of Harvard or the Episcopal Chaplain at Yale, you’ve got to be a little more careful about what you say,” Lipstadt said.

Leaning back in a swivel chair on the second floor of the Slifka Center, where she has been invited to give a talk on rising anti-semitism in Europe, and flashing colored polka dot socks (“I need some happiness for an otherwise dour topic,” she said), she concluded by quoting the Talmud.

“Wise people, be careful with your words.” *** In the stifling humidity of Woolsey Hall, Salovey, looking out on the faces of 1,361 new students, drew to a close.

He had acknowledged the difficulty of fostering “friendship, solidarity, harmony, civility, or mutual respect” while listening to views we find deplorable. But, he said, if we value the former over the unfettered exchange of words, we risk sacrificing the very purpose of a university.

Programs with “Bright College Years” lyrics doubled as fans, and a colorful cadre of robes speckled the stage. Veteran administrators, along with a slew of the president’s newest hires — freshmen in their own right — stood immediately behind Salovey.

The president — his voice at once exuberant and earnest — concluded.

“Isn’t the opportunity to engage with [life-changing ideas, ideas that rock our worlds] — whether to embrace them or dispute them — the reason why you chose Yale?”

Contact HANNAH SCHWARZ at hannah.schwarz@yale.edu .

Deborah L i

pstadt

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 20

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WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: The closed captions on Netflix’s “Grey’s Anatomy” Slightly #problematic, but still worthy of a read.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND GETS

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GROCERIES

OFF THE MARKET // BY ANDREW KOENIG When I lived in New Haven for a month after my freshman year, I decided I would live as an adult. That meant no Yale housing, and no meal plan. Despite my covert attempts to cadge pizza from the Morse dining hall during lunch (“I’m just here with some of my classmates”), when I got home, I had to cook for myself.

I was presented with the insoluble problem that faces many Yalies roughing it in the off-campus universe: Where do I buy my groceries?

Although this was before shopping at Gourmet Heaven became an ethical dilemma, I still didn’t think a latenight convenience store suited my alimentary needs. So I opted for a different market that I had heard people talking about: Elm City Market.

Elm City Market was unexpectedly hippie-dippie, with a bougie streak to boot: rows of raw milk from regional dairies; dispensers full of raw pecans and roasted pecans, walnuts, oatmeal, muesli and grains with other, obscurer names. You had to pay a pretty penny — I once bought a small bag of mini-biscotti for over five dollars — which is why I was surprised to learn that the market’s model was cooperative.

According to this model, anyone is welcome to become a member after applying and paying a $200 fee.

Applicants with demonstrated financial need may also be “eligible to have part of [their] ownership paid by the Membership Fund,” according to the membership application. Perks of membership include discounts, deals, and a small stake in the company.

Since its opening in 2011, over 2,200 people have joined Elm City Market as members, which is itself a member of the National Cooperative Grocers’ Association.

This democratic approach hasn’t stopped students like Emma Soneson ’16 from identifying the store with upscale organic markets. Soneson, who lives off campus, says: “[Elm City Market] is kind of like a mini-Whole Foods, which is good in the sense that it has a lot of organic and fresh produce, but it also comes with similar prices … It’s not really feasible on a student budget.” Several other offcampus students I interviewed shared these sentiments; only two of the dozen students and New Haven residents I spoke with said they shopped primarily or exclusively at Elm City Market.

Maybe it’s this shortage of consistent customers; maybe it’s the pricey offerings; whatever the reasons, Elm City Market is facing liquidation in the upcoming weeks. The market is looking to switch to an employeeowned model after the cooperative dissolves. Between its uncertain financial future and Gourmet Heaven’s projected closure in 2015, markets are becoming scarce in downtown New Haven. *** When I went to Elm City Market this week, it had the signs of a healthy market. Shoppers were milling around — some for the first time, others who had been members from the beginning. Some of the employees said they had just started working there.

Then I noticed some things I hadn’t noticed when I shopped there in the summer of 2013. At least half of the dispensers full of grains, nuts and other dry goods were empty. An entire Dasani refrigerator was being used to preserve three corsages. The rotisserie chicken heating station was empty — either a sign of popularity or neglect, I wasn’t sure.

Cordalie Benoit, a Wooster Square resident, is quick to point out other structural flaws of the market: a check-out line that spills into the store’s busier areas; unpriced or double-priced items; understocked staples like bread. So I’m surprised to learn that she’s a member — #359, in fact — and that she has no regrets about joining. Even though she needs to supplement her purchases with trips to other neighborhood markets like Stop and Shop, she considers it a “privilege” to have the market in her community.

She and five other shoppers cited the mismatch between the market’s prices and its demographic as Elm City Market’s biggest problem. The store sells expensive organic, local and slow food in a poor neighborhood. Ana Keusch ’16 puts it matterof-factly: “I think the only reason I haven’t gone to [Elm City Market] is I heard it was overpriced.” Keusch opts instead to go by car to Stop and Shop.

Shari Hoffman, an occasional

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 20

shopper at Elm City Market and New Haven native, used to do the same thing. She previously had access to a car, which allowed her to go to Stop and Shop and other markets more within her price range. Recently, however, she hasn’t had access to a personal vehicle and depends on New Haven’s public transit. She says she has now resorted to Elm City Market more out of necessity than desire.

“I’m buying certain things that I really can’t afford,” Hoffman says, “because they’re convenient.” For a person like her, dependent on disability benefits and without reliable access to private transportation, Elm City Market becomes the only viable option.

The viability is self-evident: the store is near a heavily frequented bus stop on Chapel Street, and the even busier central zone along the New Haven Green. Other than Edge of the Woods and Stop and Shop, there aren’t many comparable alternatives within walking distance downtown.

occurrence. Lerch, director of business and cooperative programs for Southern New England with World Development (the branch of the USDA that deals with loan guarantees for new businesses and cooperatives) says, “Nothing that’s being done now is unique. It’s all being done in conformity to U.S. standards for a government guarantee.”

In spite of the Board’s dissatisfaction with the course of action taken, parties on all sides have expressed a shared desire to keep the market open. Nedra Rutherford, a Bridgeport commuter-shopper unaware of the new developments, says she plans on becoming a member in the future. None of the members I spoke to expressed regret at having joined.

They all point to the value the market brings to a community that is sorely lacking in supermarkets. *** When I was 16, our neighborhood market, Hows, announced that it was closing. Part of me knew the mar-

I DON’T THINK IT’S APPROPRIATE THAT THEY PLOP THEMSELVES IN AN AREA WHERE MOST PEOPLE CAN’T EVEN TOUCH THE PRODUCTS BECAUSE OF THE PRICES. CORDALIE BENOIT

In spite of these advantages, Elm City Market has failed to resolve its persistent financial struggles. The co-op defaulted on its $3.6 million loan from Webster Bank in May. Benoit chalks up the market’s financial woes to an identity crisis: “They’re trying to be everything to everybody, and that’s always a recipe for failure.”

Hoffman agrees: “They don’t know who they want to be.” She adds, “We can’t afford to shop in a store like this, so I don’t think it’s appropriate that they plop themselves in an area where most people can’t even touch the products because of the prices.”

The precise future of the market’s structure remains unclear. In an email sent Aug. 23, the Board of Elm City Market notified its members that imminent liquidation (“friendly foreclosure”) was a strong possibility, but that there was an alternative of “restructuring” debt. The National Cooperative Grocers Association would “loan [Elm City Market] an additional $700,000, and a group of member-owners and others [would] put up an additional $300,000.” This $1 million in capital would be used to pay off the market’s immediate creditors. Then, once it got back on its feet, it would have to pay off the NCGA and the secondary creditors.

But this alternative was not compelling to the immediate creditors, Webster Bank and Multi-Employer Pension Trust (the landlord), who ultimately had control over the market’s future. The plan recommended by the Board depended on the optimistic notion that, after another loan and some assistance from the NCGA, the market would go from being in the red to in the black, despite years of financial insolvency.

The market’s creditors opted instead for a plan of their own devising, which involved the United States Department of Agriculture. The Elm City Market Board of member-owners was given no advance notice of the plan, which they said had “deeply disappointed” them. In short, the market and its assets will be liquidated under what’s colloquially known as a “friendly foreclosure.”

The money recouped from liquidation will be deducted from the $3.6 million loss and apportioned to the creditors; 80 percent of the remaining loss will be paid off by the United States Department of Agriculture at taxpayers’ expense.

According to the Board’s email, under this plan “the market will then be sold, debt-free and without members, to a private investor, a nonprofit foundation that plans to continue operating it as a grocery store to preserve jobs.” Once this plan was finalized, the Board issued another statement Sept. 11 bemoaning the move: “Member-owners, other investors and creditors,” read the email, “all will lose.” American taxpayers will also lose by this plan, in which whatever of the $3.6 million isn’t recovered will be paid for by the USDA, a federally funded (and therefore taxdependent) department.

Jennifer Lerch of the USDA explains that this is no extraordinary

ket was simply not doing enough to attract and keep customers. Its prices were middle-range, its produce mediocre, its selection limited. Part of me felt a sick sense of justice knowing that an overpriced establishment wouldn’t be making a sucker out of me anymore. But then I thought of the people who were losing their jobs. I thought of the enchilada sauce we could only get at Hows.

I remembered the time we found out Michael Jackson had died and all of us in the checkout lane looked at each other and said, “Can you believe it?” And although I’m not native to downtown New Haven or partial to Elm City Market, I know exactly what Caroline Sydney ’16 (a columnist for the News) means when she says, “It’s nice when you’re going through checkout and you see your professor’s face on the wall, and there’s this maybe real, maybe not real sense of community. “ Sydney, who lives off campus and generally cooks for herself, prepares farro niçoise while I talk to her — in layman’s terms, a grain-based salad.

Although it’s a simple dish, the ingredients have come from all over. The lemons Sydney bought in bulk from Elm City Market; the farro online from nuts.com; the tomatoes from a local farm called Waldenfield; the eggs from the New Haven Farmers’ Market; the canned tuna from New York.

Rumors have been circulating that Whole Foods has its sights set on New Haven, with plans to move into the construction site on Howe and Chapel Street, next to Miya’s Sushi. Work on the over 6,000-square foot construction site is underway, but the status of the future building is unclear, and it is unknown whether Whole Foods will build there. A sign posted in front of the site has the following suggestive, tantalizing tag line: “Preserving New Haven’s past for a sustainable future.”

The job-listing aggregator Simply Hired includes multiple entries under “Whole Foods Market, New Haven” on its website, including cashier, cashier assistant and meat production team member, all of them posted within the past nine days.

But Public Relations and Public Affairs Officer for Whole Foods in the Northeast region Michael Sinatra denies any immediate plans for Whole Foods to enter the area. “While we are a growing company and are consistently looking at additional opportunities throughout the country,” Sinatra said over email, “there are no plans to open up a store in New Haven at this time.”

Although she says a nearby Whole Foods would prove convenient, Sydney concedes that it may not be the best thing for New Haven. “I have mixed feelings, [as] with all the upscale chains that are coming to New Haven,” she says. “For me, personally, yeah a Whole Foods would be great.”

She pauses. “Is it what New Haven needs? I don’t know.”

COASTAL CLEANUP DAY

Lighthouse Point Park // 8 a.m.

If you have your own gardening gloves please bring them.

Contact ANDREW KOENIG at andrew.koenig@yale.edu .

// BRIANNA LOO

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”

Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night…

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

FORCING THE REVOLUTION, OR NOT On June 26, 2013, I took a very early lunch. I was working in D.C. for the summer, and my fellow interns and I decided to take a train to the Supreme Court on that blistering June day. We arrived outside the Court at about 11:00 a.m., and we stayed for as long as we could withstand the heat — about an hour, as it turned out. All around us was jubilation. People were laughing, chanting, kissing, crying and holding up signs. So many signs. It was awesome.

June 26, as we knew, was no ordinary day to congregate outside the Supreme Court. That was the day that the Court announced two major gay rights cases — United States v.

Windsor, which struck down the bigoted Defense of Marriage Act, and Hollingsworth v. Perry, a case I’ll discuss in more detail in just a moment.

I’d been following both cases sort of closely. Recently, however, journalist Jo Becker raised the bar for following a case closely, with her engaging and profoundly flawed “Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality.”

Becker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter now affiliated with the New York Times, made a decision sometime in 2008 or early 2009. She bet on a horse. She decided to follow around the lawyers, plaintiffs, witnesses and advisors related to the Perry case. Becker clearly believed

SCOTT STERN READING BETWEEN THE LINES that Perry could become a Brown v.

Board of Education-level civil rights landmark — the case that would guarantee the freedom to marry to every American.

In fluid and almost novelistic prose, Becker ushers her readers behind the scenes. She begins by detailing California Proposition 8, the ballot initiative for which 7 million Californians voted and that amended the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Becker’s hero, Chad Griffin, a gay 30-something political consultant, was so distressed by Prop 8 that it made even the election of Barack Obama a bittersweet moment. Griffin was so distressed, in fact, that he decided, along with a colleague and the director Rob Reiner, to challenge the constitutionality of Prop 8. In so doing, Griffin hoped, they could force the Supreme Court to rule that there was a constitutional right to gay marriage.

In order to challenge Prop 8, Griffin and his partners, under the guise of a newly formed organization called Americans for Equal Rights, needed

Sculpting perspectives

to find plaintiffs — people actually harmed by Prop 8. After some distasteful screening, they settled on two same-sex couples (among them, the eponymous Perry). Even before finding Perry, though, Griffin needed to find lawyers. After similarly convoluted machinations, he and his organization settled on David Boies and Ted Olson — two of the most famous lawyers in the country. Boies, a liberal, and Olson, a conservative, were on opposite sides in the infamous Bush v. Gore case that allowed George Bush to avoid a recount and slink into the White House. They were chosen, in large part, for the excellent PR that could be generated by their odd-couple effort.

Becker traces the Perry case’s progression with exceptional attention to detail. She follows its players through planes and trains and fancy dinners, through exhilaration and despair, through self-doubt and self-congratulation, through a state trial and the Supreme Court. We meet the opposition — a former Reagan Justice Department lawyer and a unhinged California reverend — and the witnesses — from survivors of reparative therapy to Yale’s own George Chauncey. We witness the resistance the Perry team encountered from many prominent activists and the embraces they received from others.

Finally, we watch the case unfold

in the Supreme Court. The two sides present, questions are asked, sweat rolls. And on June 26, 2013, the Court issues its ruling. Or lack of a ruling. Perry would not become the landmark ruling its supporters had hoped; rather, on procedural grounds, it would be reverted back to the lower court ruling. Since the lower court ruling had been a favorable one, this meant that Prop 8 was unconstitutional and the plaintiffs could get married, but that no national right to same-sex marriage had been established. The Windsor case — announced on the same day — overturned DOMA and represented significant progress for gay rights activists.

So Becker penned her book — not a thrilling tale of absolute victory, but still an interesting, well-documented story about one small part of the broader movement for equal rights. Except she went too far.

“This is how a revolution begins,” Becker opens her book. “It begins when someone grows tired of standing idly by, waiting for history’s arc to bend toward justice … in this story, it begins with a handsome, bespectacled 35-year-old political consultant named Chad Griffin, in a spacious suite in the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco on election night 2008.”

Of course, the revolution didn’t begin in 2008. It didn’t begin with

Chad Griffin or with Prop 8. But Becker seems not to get this.

By subtitling her story “the” fight for marriage equality and by acting as if it begun the revolution, Becker does an extreme disservice to so many of the activists she omits from her narrative: Evan Wolfson, Dan Foley, Mary Bonauto and so many others. Even worse, “Forcing the Spring” overlooks the centuries of resistance by gay rights activists and the violence they bore. It forgets the years of legal challenges and political organizing that led to the marriage movement. It neglects the countless other players that made the recent sea change in public opinion regarding the marriage question — and only the marriage question — possible to tentatively answer. It even fails to adequately tell the story of Windsor, arguably the more important case.

Instead, Becker either ignores these moments and leaders or she outright attacks their importance and intelligence (as she did with Wolfson).

“Forcing the Spring” is a wellwritten and helpfully detailed account of one important case, but just one. If you can read every page with that in mind, it will serve you well. But it is not “the” whole story.

And, in many ways, it misses the point.

Contact SCOTT STERN at scott.stern@yale.edu .

That Was Then, This Is Now

// BY STEPHANIE TOMASSON Beginning on Sept. 18, New York City will be seeing all new “Walks of Life.” Madison Square Park, formed by the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway at 23rd Street, provides a comforting patch of green in the midst of the bustling Flatiron district on which Mad. Sq. Art, the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s free contemporary art program has displayed thirty installations by various contemporary artists over the past 10 years.

This fall, the lively 6.2-acre plot is home to British sculptor Tony Cragg’s “Walks of Life,” three monumental bronze sculptures scattered across the park’s three lawns.

Cragg, a self-described “absolute materialist,” is fascinated by an artist’s ability to challenge materials and push them beyond their conventional uses. Most of his works distort and bend heavy bronze to form dynamic, winding sculptures.

“Caldera,” the widest of the three installations, finds its home in the Western gravel section of the park. The sculpture’s name likens it to both the natural, as the term is used to describe the cauldronlike depression formed by the collapse of land after volcanic eruption, and the domestic, as caldera is the Spanish word for a cooking pot. By its volcanic definition, a caldera oscillates between demolition and attraction. A destructive explosion creates a beautiful formation that draws admiration and even provides artistic inspiration.

By titling his sculpture “Caldera,” Cragg comments on the power of transformation in nature and art, including his own, which aims at transforming bulky bronze material into sculptural formations that are both malleable and graceful. From ugliness or crass material emerges pulchritude, Cragg’s “Caldera” claims.

The sculpture’s deep bronze coloring and rippled texture reflect the heat associated with the title’s volcanic and kitchenware etymologies. “Caldera” is also an impressive betrayal of its bronze material as its three elements balance on small points, the heaviest parts of the sculpture resting on top.

If “Caldera”’s three sculptural components appear on the verge of merging, “Mixed Feelings,” located on the northern lawn, looks like the product of a recent tumultuous fusion. This second work, bearing a blue color resulting from oxidization, undulates and spirals upwards, resembling both a precar-

STEPHANIE TOMASSON PUSHING THE PALETTE KNIFE ious rock formation and a mechanical byproduct.

In “Mixed Feelings,” Cragg has provided the greatest conquering of his bronze material: Upon closer examination, the sculpture looks almost immaterial, a tornado-like gust of wind climbing eternally upwards towards the sky beyond what the sculpture itself presents.

The work’s title injects this windy dynamism with emotional significance — viewers bare witness to a sculptural incarnation of a whirlwind of emotion.

The final three sculptures, collectively titled “Points of View,” are located on the Park’s Oval Lawn.

The towers twist and turn their way upwards, both futuristic and organic.

Another version of “Points of View” is currently on display at the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg, Austria through Sept. 29. Our visual understanding of the three towers, far more than the other two sculptural installations of “Walks of Life,” is deeply shaped by their geographic setting. At the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, the “Points of View” statue blends into the pastoral backdrop of green trees and tall mountains, making them seem like natural formations. Darkened to a deep brown, they almost entirely lose their industrial twist. By contrast, in their Flatiron district context, their mechanized material overtakes their earthiness. They look like distortions of the skyscrapers of New York that have, on 23rd Street, replaced the mountains of Salzburg.

“Caldera,” “Mixed Feelings,” and “Points of View” stand as individual works of art, but also engage in a greater conversation regarding the artist’s ability to conquer his materials and the multiplicity of meanings that viewers can subsequently assign. Cragg’s sculptures celebrate not only the walks of life he has generated, but also those that walk between them, each adding their own perspective and value to his sculptures.

Contact STEPHANIE TOMASSON at stephanie.tomasson@yale.edu .

S U N D AY

CITYSEED FARMERS MARKETS

SEPTEMBER 21

In case you didn’t register in time for a Yale Farm Tour.

ALLIE KRAUSE HER GRACE’S TASTE This was the soundtrack to your youth. Every time one of these comes on, you are morally required to sing/scream along in honor of your not-so-glorious youth.

1. All The Small Things — blink-182 Then: You held hands with your sixth grade crush while this played.

Now: You dance to this in the basement at SAE Late Night.

2. In Da Club — 50 Cent Then: You were effing gangstah.

Now: You are ironically gangster.

3. Wannabe — Spice Girls Then: Dancing with your gal pals.

Now: Dancing drunk with your gal pals.

4. I Want It That Way — Backstreet Boys Then: This was the song you were ashamed to be caught listening to.

Now: A staple of drunken karaoke with da boyz.

5. A Thousand Miles — Vanessa Carlton Then: The reason you asked for piano lessons. Also the reason you quit.

Now: When that piano hook comes on though…

You also can’t stop picturing Terry Crews singing this in White Chicks, and you’re a little scarred.

6. Ignition (Remix) — R Kelly Then: Just a catchy tune.

Now: The official theme song of dartying. This is still the best song ever and makes every one of my party playlists. Totally still counts as a throwback.

7. Crazy In Love — Beyoncé Then: “If Beyoncé and Jay-Z got together, they would be the most AWESOME power couple!!!”

Now: Bow down, bitches.

8. Hot in Herre — Nelly Then: You thought you were really sexy. You definitely hadn’t gone through puberty yet.

Now: You think you are really sexy. You are definitely just sweaty.

9. I Want Candy — Aaron Carter Then: Aaron Carter was hot shit. You could not touch that.

Now: You can now touch that at Toad’s. You elect not to.

10. Oops!…I Did It Again — Britney Spears Then: This was the first song you memorized all the words to. You also wanted a man to get the Titanic necklace from the bottom of the ocean for you.

Now: You still want that necklace. You do not want that man to be K-Fed. Contact ALLIE KRAUSE at alexandra.krause@yale.edu.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Edgewood Park // 10:00 a.m.

“Speak, Memory”

Nabokov is most lauded for his fiction, but if we had to pick, his memoir stands above them all.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND THEATER

DISCUSSING POLITICS, WOONG TALKS MUSIC // BY PHOEBE KIMMELMAN

When North Korean defector and pianist Kim Cheol Woong was asked to play his favorite piece, he hesitated.

“There is a song in North Korea called the Song of Joy — it sings of independence from Japan,” he said, via a translator.

“But,” he added, with a twinkle in his eye, “The reason I like it is because when I played it in school it was the only time I got an A+.”

Woong’s playful attitude permeated his talk Wednesday night, which was intermingled with piano performance.

He started off his presentation by discussing how, in addition to Western training, North Korean musical students are taught to play North Korean folk songs adapted for piano, a few of which he introduced us to.

I had never heard North Korean music before. As Woong put down his microphone, adjusted his seat and rested his foot above the right pedal, I was preparing myself for sterile melodies that imitated the coun-

try’s attitude toward freedom of expression. Instead, I was surprised to hear similar sounds to the classical music I had heard and played on piano growing up.

The grandiose chords you might here in a Beethoven concerto, the unbelievably fast finger dance required by a Chopin etude, even common European piano techniques, like trills, all made their appearances in this music from a completely different geographical and cultural context.

And yet, something in these pieces differed from the classical music I had grown up with: a facet that required not listening to the notes, but pondering the meaning behind them.

These pieces, though played in Woong’s characteristically beautiful and purposeful form, were overwhelmingly written in major keys, the musical messengers of bold, bombastic declarations. There was hardly any hint of the elegant vulnerability that makes up, in my opinion, the most integral part of musical emotionality.

In telling us about his life, Woong said that out of thousands of North Korean children, he was selected with only eight other students to pursue music at the university level. After studying piano for 14 years, he won North Korea’s most prestigious piano competition and was selected to study abroad in Moscow. Upon his return, he reconnected with a girl from his university, and they began dating.

After the couple had been together for about a year, Woong began planning his marriage proposal. Because both he and his fiancé-to-be were pianists, Woong felt that music, and piano in particular, needed to be central to the proposal. In preparation, he began looking through all of the Western music the North Korean government had banned, and he ultimately decided on a French piece, which he went on to play for us. It was slow, elegant and romantic — in sharp contrast with the style of North Korean music he played earlier in the program and that

he had studied during the beginning of his musical career.

But Woong’s romantic plans went awry when he was overheard practicing the piece in his home and was subsequently reported to the North Korean National Security Agency. There, he faced interrogation and the possibility of being sent to one of North Korea’s notoriously brutal prison camps.

“The moment I realized I was playing music that was controlled by someone else I felt like there was no hope in this world,” Woong said. “I believe everyone has freedom of expression and for me, the piano is like my mouth.”

Woong is publicly a strong promoter of the reunification of the Korean peninsula, and when probed, he revealed that his reasoning behind this position is closely intertwined with his own personal story.

“I don’t want reunification for political reasons,” he said. “But I think it is the only way I will be able to see my closest friends

again.”

The moment of this reveal was, to put it mildly, heartbreaking — for me, and, as evidenced from the ensuing silence, every other audience member in Sudler Hall.

Woong is an undeniably charismatic and passionate artist. Throughout the night he was cracking jokes, and he even mocked the audience for asking questions that were too serious. His lively and cheerful disposition makes it difficult to remember the immense struggles he endured to defect from North Korea and that continued to plague him during his escape through China to South Korea.

Though Woong said that playing North Korean music brings back a lot of sad memories, he feels it is necessary to plant the seeds for his goal of unification.

“I believe the word music is the true meaning of peace,” Woong said. “Wherever there is music, there is always peace.”

And then it hit me. To Woong, music, narration and political

// LAKSHMAN SOMASUNDARAM

Pianist Kim Cheol Woong defected from North Korea.

storytelling are all inextricably linked. This might be a common sentiment, but I think Woong goes beyond seeing music as a political or storytelling tool.

He has a vision of the world as a place where music, narration and politics are all one and the same — noises and voices trying to modulate to a key that is unified, bright and, most importantly, hopeful.

At the very beginning of his talk, Woong joked that in order to transcend the daunting language barrier between himself and the audience, he was going to “talk music.”

And though he spoke not one word of English, he left the auditorium with a resounding standing ovation.

Contact PHOEBE KIMMELMAN at phoebe.kimmelman@yale.edu .

Alice in Pageantland // BY JACOB POTASH

“Look up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers all the Time” runs twice tonight and twice tomorrow night. If you’re thinking of seeing the show, and you’ve read whatever headline is up there or seen the photo they ran, then you already know too much! Stop while you’re behind, and see the thing. I recommend it. That’s all you need to know.

And besides, it’s only one hour. One hour in which you get about 45 seconds of normality — a girl playing innocently with a doll. Then her redwig-wearing mother barges in and you should take a hint that something is seriously off, because two minutes after that, you’re plunged into the surreal, campy world of the Little Miss Teacup pageant, where contestants have split personalities, mothers have names like “The Ice Queen,” and men are hilarious — and sexually predatory.

Looking at the set before the show started — at the miniature door, the colorful, ugly 1970s-style clothes rack, the images of eerily made-up young girls being projected onto the wall, the hand-painted flourishes on the floor — I began to wonder how odd a production I was in for. It suddenly occurred to me that it would be about drag queens. It wasn’t. But my premonition was not far off.

The show is half “Alice in Wonderland,” half “Cabaret” — a combination that should give you shudders but unquestionably won the audience over. The plot centers on a 9-year-old girl, Liddy (Sarah Williams DRA ’15), whose mother declares she must take her older sister Alice’s place in the Teacup pageant. Where is Alice? Mom (Celeste Williams DRA ‘15) won’t say.

Now in the world of the pageant, Liddy encounters a parade of outrageous characters. Everything is as new to her as to the people watching her, and so she acts as a tour guide and a sort of stand-in for the audience. She speaks for everyone when, for example, she exclaims, rather 9-year-oldly, “Everything is very strange and there’s so much happening here.”

Equal parts domineering and desperate, Liddy’s mother is fantastic.

The pageant contestant (Shaunette Renée Wilson DRA ’16) with the split personality and yellow overalls — you

S U N D AY

“NOTHING BUT A MAN” SCREENING

SEPTEMBER 21

A proud black man and his schoolteacher wife face discriminatory challenges in 1960s America.

Whitney Humanities Center // 7:00 p.m.

// STEPHANIE ADDENBROOKE

Gasp! The Yale Cabaret!

know, her? She’s singularly hilarious, if mildly disturbing. The pageant’s MC (Aubie Merrylees DRA ’16), whose creepiness and androgyny are surely modeled on “Cabaret’”s famous MC, gives an appropriately affected performance. The alternate MC, MC Hattah (MC Hammer meets the Mad Hatter, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II DRA ’15), is a whirlwind of charm. He puts on as bravura a performance as anyone in the show, which is saying a great deal.

“Look up” does have a heart. The janitor (Andrej Visky DRA ’15) emerges as the only sane adult around, and his scene (and a few others!) is fairly moving. But one of the strengths of “Look Up” is that once you’ve settled on an interpretation that suits you, the play subverts your expectations. Just as the show reaches its most fantastical, a reference to Bruce Jenner or a snippet of “Boss Ass Bitch” brings it back to the world of contemporary pop culture. “Look Up” rejects the premise that pop and American culture are mundane, preferring to tease out all the terrible, hilarious strangeness.

Really, the show itself rejects the mundane as a category. It weaves in and out of surreal moments: Music and lights change from sentence to sentence. The mother screams at her daughter to pose, saying, “Off with your head! I mean, hand on your head!”

The way time is handled adds to the pile of contradictions: Liddy has half an hour to prepare for the pageant, though “Look Up” has an hourlong running time. While this discrepancy could create the effect of drowsy slow-motion, “Look Up” feels like what theater should feel like — fast, absorbing, dazzling. You have to be in the right mood — and probably of the right disposition — to enjoy this type of farce. I guess I was, because as the show ended, I thought, “I want to hug whoever created this.”

Contact JACOB POTASH at jacob.potash@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: “The Company She Keeps”

Mary McCarthy is a genius in the art of storytelling. “How the FUCK did she do that?”

WEEKEND found ourselves exclaiming while reading.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

TELLTALE: STORIES, VOICES AND CAMPFIRES WITHOUT THE FIRE // BY SARA JONES

W

ith roots in “The Moth” (a coterie of New York-based professional and amateur storytellers) and “This American Life” (the radio-show-turned-Showtimeprogram-turned-podcast that allegedly garners a million downloads a week), “Telltale” is out to create a new kind of storytelling forum on campus. WEEKEND sat down with board members Alex Simon ’17, Sophie Haigney ’17 and Devon Geyelin ’16 to talk tales; events that involve “campfire stories without the fire,” a faithful BYOPB — Bring Your Own Picnic Blanket — policy and seasonally appropriate treats (apple cider in autumn; cheese always); and the sort of community only storytelling can create. Read on for stories of first love in Peru, advice for budding raconteurs and why spending 15 minutes auditioning is (maybe) the best thing you’ll do all semester.

//MICHELLE CHAN

Alex: I started thinking about stuff like this when I was a senior in high school, and I went to the Middlebury “pre-days” and they had something called “The Moth.” I was blown away — they told five stories, and each one was better than the next … just amazing. And so I wanted to start something like that when I went to Yale. Our aim is to create a community around storytelling; we envision it as being more relaxed and casual, but also powerful, as well as a space for something that doesn’t exist already on campus.

We focus on two things: events and workshops. Workshops will start next week, and will be every week, hopefully. We didn’t want a clunky 10-person board, so we decided to host workshops as a way that people could be more involved. Basically, we do storytelling games and improv games, and then have two people tell stories they’re thinking about auditioning with for the next event. And then, as a group of about 15, we workshop those stories. So [the workshop is] a chance to both give and receive feedback and be involved in the process of auditioning in more of a hands-on way. And then events are basically storytelling nights, and they’re every month or five weeks, normally [featuring] 6-8 student storytellers, telling stories anywhere from 6-15 minutes long … the average is probably 10 minutes. There are only two rules: the stories have to be true — they’re not a creative writing type thing — and you can’t read off a piece of paper — they all have to be from memory.

Everything else is up to you: tone, content, length. Sometimes the stories are kind of funny or lighthearted or silly and make you laugh; other times [they’re] really emotional and powerful and resonate with you and

make you think. In terms of content, sometimes we try to have a theme, but that doesn’t always work. So our first event is Friday the 26th [of September], and we have seven people telling stories.

All are phenomenal. We have one story about a trip to Uzbekistan … well, actually, about being arrested in Central Asia.

We have one story about a gunshot wound, and another about a rabbi in Israel and then one about a football player doing ballet.

[The event] will be in the little part of the Davenport courtyard and we’re hopefully going to have hot apple cider and blankets and people just gathering and listening.

Sophie: These are really like campfire stories, but without the fire. Because that’s not allowed in the Davenport courtyard … and I think also illegal in the state of Connecticut.

Alex: And then the broader idea is bringing people together in a cool way. These are people from all different walks of Yale.

Sophie: The thing I like most is that this is more geared towards people who aren’t necessarily performers. If you don’t act, you’re not necessarily inclined to audition for a play, or for an improv group. But almost everyone in [Telltale] isn’t in another performing group.

Q: How did you get into storytelling?

Devon: My grandmother was actually a professional storyteller, but that wasn’t exactly why I came to the group initially.

Sophie and Alex were both really interested, and I like them, and I thought that this would be a very cool thing to do together.

Alex: I think when I went to The Moth event [at Middlebury], I sort of understood for the first

time the power of a story to put you into a different place. And it was just really nice to hear from people who you didn’t know, but somehow their experiences could be so like your own, or how even an experience you had no connection to could become such a fascinating thing in its own right.

Sophie: My dad is, like, the best storyteller in the world, and I’ve always been really envious and appreciative of that ability. I’ve always thought about the power of stories, and I’ve always been into writing stories. I really like that it’s an art form that everyone can partake in.

Devon: I think even when we try not to, you kind of form judgments about people based on what they’re wearing, or who they’re friends with, or whatever. Almost every story that I’ve heard I’ve been surprised in a really great way and I feel so much closer to that individual person and just closer to the community as a whole.

It’s a really in-your-face way of realizing how much everyone has behind him or her that you wouldn’t guess at, and it’s nice to hear people articulate those things in a really personal way … exactly how they want them to be articulated. And it’s also just nice to see that so many people really want to be open about what’s going on. To do this really is a choice: to come share something personal or meaningful to you.

Alex: It’s really moving and incredible how many people come to an event — people with no concept of what we are, and are willing to just show up and give it a shot and audition.

Devon: Those are my favorites, actually, when the person doesn’t have any acting experience, or turns that off, and is just trying to express the story in a way that makes sense to them.

Q: How do you transform something that happens to you into a “tellable” story? What’s your process?

Sophie: Well, I think different people have different approaches. Writing is sort of my medium, so I would probably start there and then sort of see where it goes. I don’t think that’s the best method because you kind of end up memorizing what you’ve written. But I guess more generally, you just have to find a point of entry that’s funny or interesting … you have to grab people from the beginning in some way.

Devon: Some people naturally process things in terms that they could express it to other people; for others, I think it’s more of a process. But basically, you want to come away with something that sets [this story] apart from other stories. Why did this story make an impression?

Alex: As the directing team of Telltale, we want to make sure that we have a combination of stories that leave you with a message, and also leave you thinking about what that message is. We don’t always want to wrap it up and put a bow on it and present it to the audience on a silver platter. We want you to think about it and interpret it yourself.

Devon: Sometimes seeing someone else’s storytelling and thinking process is as interesting as hearing that person’s story itself.

The way that people interpret stories is different, and the way you can start to understand how one thing can affect another person that’s so different from how it affects you is really interesting.

Q: Do you have a favorite story to tell? Why?

Devon: Don’t practice too much.

Devon: Well, I was running yesterday and I went by the Yale Farm, where last year I was a Seed-to-Salad volunteer. I was really happy because I didn’t think I had any cool stories, and then I remembered this one, and I went and wrote it down immediately after my run.

Alex: But also think about it.

And even though it’s no time commitment — 15 minutes in audition, and then a 20-minute workshop, very simple, very straightforward — it can have a huge impact. Being able to go up there and tell something that’s important to you in front of so many people who are interested in hearing it is really powerful.

Alex: My story is about this one day with Sophie, and we were doing this pilgrimage — the Camino de Santiago — in Spain.

Sophie: I tell this story about going to Peru and living with my high school boyfriend there for three months. It’s kind of a story about first love, and the disillusion of first love, and ideas about marriage and just life … It’s a story about first love, basically, and my first love.

Q: Any advice for beginner storytellers?

Devon: And also that there’s really not one thing we’re looking for; basically, we want a really diverse group of people from diverse areas and with diverse tones. We’re not looking for this collection of incredibly charismatic, well-spoken, funny people — we’re just looking for people who are really honest and ready to speak about something that they care about.

Contact SARA JONES at sara.l.jones@yale.edu .

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SOMETIMES THE STORIES ARE KIND OF FUNNY OR LIGHTHEARTED OR SILLY AND MAKE YOU LAUGH.

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Q: Tell us a little bit about Telltale.