WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2015

BY KYLE TRAMONTE //PAGE 3

WOOLF

B2

WHITAKER

B9

WEINER

B12

A VIEW OF ONE’S OWN

WHIT AND WISDOM

SCHNITZEL

WKND’s former editors on fond farewells, fried chicken and Woolf.

A Fair Haven ballet teacher gives her pupils lessons in resilience — inside the studio and out.

He’s made madmen of television viewers the whole nation over. Now he talks to us.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

PLOTT

WEEKEND VIEWS

YALE GOES LIKE THIS // BY ELAINA PLOTT “What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it is perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”

Michael Cunningham, “The Hours”

WANG

MCHENRY

I’m not sure when I became obsessed with singular perfects, those moments that the whole world seems bottled within. I collect them, catalogue them with the precision of the girl who used to be me, the seven year old with the hundreds of stamps set in the laminated pages of a blue binder.

My singular perfects tell me everything I need to know about that girl and likely tell you nothing. Ask me about her at 15 and I will flip to the page that shows a black sky and a yellow dress with the inscription “If Jamie can do it, so can I,” but what could that possibly mean to you?

This makes senior year all the more difficult, of course, as grandmothers and those few high school friends, the ones who somehow clung to a wearing thread, ask: Who did you become in these four years? How did Yale change you?

I can never answer the way they want me to. I can’t say that I came here looking to become Someone — maybe a girl with quiet confidence and aesthetic sensibilities and better taste in music — and am graduating having become that Someone. Maybe I am that girl now but maybe I’m not

and maybe I never will be. Here is my point: to talk to me about Yale is to talk about the binder of singular perfects, the moments that said everything and nothing all at once and ended as quickly as they started. Maybe a connection threads the first one to the last one, creating a cohesive portrait of the girl today, but then again maybe it doesn’t.

All I can say, really, is that Yale goes like this: Freshman year is the Silliman courtyard at dusk and counting yellow lights in windows. It is the walk home from Chinese tutoring on Temple Street to the fall’s first rain with a Guster song pulsing through broken earbuds.

It is posing for a photograph on Easter outside of a yellow brick church in a white dress that was never worn again with a boy who doesn’t

show up much after that.

I turn to sophomore year and find nothing in its laminated pages. No singular perfects, no trace of that girl.

That’s the problem with remembering through singular perfects: there is no guarantee that you’ll find them. There is no promise that a year will stay with you.

Luckily, junior year is a flurry, padding barefoot at midnight into the president’s room in Commons and “falling in love” with two coeditors every Thursday in a room with red

couches. It is a bar called Pianos on Ludlow Street and a plaid dress that no longer fits. (I always seem to remember the dresses.) And then an unthinkable series of three: meeting a forever kind of person in a French village, sitting on a windowsill with her and talking about mothers and God. It is a left cheek pressed against the window of a 4am train from Toulouse as a swimming pool fades from view. It is finally the sound of gold heels clicking down an empty Paris street.

For a while, those gold heels were all I heard, that Paris street the last page of the blue binder. For much of senior year I’ve battled the fear that if my someday daughter asks about my last year at Yale, I’ll have nothing to give her. No walk around a pond as mosquitoes drone in the darkening air, no singular perfect for my last year in wonderland.

Four weekends before the end of it all, I found it.

We woke up around 8:30 to the sun because we had forgotten to close the blinds the night before. The white light pressed against our eyelids and then we looked up and out and all of Manhattan seemed still. Midtown is nice from the 35th floor of a hotel. The height blurs the black gum spots and Ripley’s actors and bus tours and coupons and tourists whose paste-white skin folds over their knees. You look out the window and see a canvas blue sky framed by important buildings and convince yourself that, just for now, you are above it all. The gum spots and coupons.

We tried to linger in the white light for as long as we could. Wrapped the white duvet around our bodies and combed through the haze of the night before. The black walls of a jazz bar downtown. Taxis, dancing in silence and the momentary threat of rain. And then here, now, tightly wrapped in the white duvet because any looser and everything would be gone.

“That was the moment, right then.

There has been no other.”

What Clarissa meant is this: It is the first warm day in April in New York.

Seven days before, a boy told you he loved you and you said it back. It is the moment in which you both realize that love is not always enough, but that it is enough right then, there, suspended in white light. And then the unraveling of it all, the next moment, a knock and a soft female voice: “Housekeeping.”

Contact ELAINA PLOTT at elaina.plott@yale.edu .

Goodbye to All This // BY JACKSON MCHENRY On Fridays, I have lunch with two of my best friends. I can’t remember exactly what we talk about: weekend plans, mostly; homework, sometimes.

We have a series of inside jokes that involve speaking in British accents.

Occasionally, there is news: a fling, a breakup, a funny story. We chew over the details. If the story’s worth telling again, we repeat it the next week. “Do you remember that time when…?” Yes, usually. We laugh just as hard the second time.

I also have regular dinners with my former suitemates in Silliman. The references are different, but the patterns are the same. I have been ranking everyone in our Groupme, goes one running joke, but I refuse to tell anyone where they fall.

My text history is full of messages I expected to receive and messages my friends expected me to send. (“You’ve probably read this article, but…” “Have you seen this video?” Of course I have, I sent it to you yesterday.)

This is what Virginia Woolf might call “the cotton wool of daily life”: a collection of small sympathies, condolences and commiserations, a para-

sympathetic nervous system of friendships at rest.

We tend to spend a lot of time talking about the big moments in college because those moments make sense. There are the victories: finding love, solidifying a friendship, finishing a project; the crises: losing love, messing up a friendship, falling into a rut; and then there’s simply grace: the moments you remember for no reason at all. It’s impossible not to describe grace in spiritual terms: It appears in times of inner peace, bringing that upward trending, utter sense of belonging. In these big moments, Woolf argues, something tears through the cotton wool of our experience, “a token of some real thing behind appearances.”

I’ve found that most people spend time trying to make sense of these experiences. Everyone tries to communicate. Over lunch, at drinks or dinner, we polish events into stories, stories into anecdotes, and anecdotes, finally, into the sorts of things you can hold in a sentence: That time when I went to a naked party, when you lost your screw date, that article we wrote.

That Valentine’s Day. The more I think about it, the more the big and small moments come together. I can’t think of a story (a night spent playing drinking games, for instance) without also thinking of the way I told that story (exaggerating my drunkenness, faking embarrassment, hiding the things that really bothered me). We give such credence to the big moments, but they’re inseparable from the ways we come to know them. So much diffuses through the wool.

It’s dreary, sometimes, listening to everyone tell the same stories, working through the same dull preoccupations, revealing the same anxieties. It’s frustrating, other times, going through that same process, thinking about what you’ve revealed of your own limitations — because you can’t escape your own patterns. And it’s terrifying, realizing that your patterns also depend on bigger patterns. We float on currents beyond our control, whether economic, social and historical, in bubbles that we don’t fully understand.

But still, we talk. We try to escape our bubbles, and failing that, to mea-

sure their dimensions. We collide with each other. We have lunches, drinks, times before and after section, the lazy, pointless gatherings in apartments and common rooms late at night while the radiator buzzes on and off.

Until, of course, we don’t. The day this article goes to print will be my last day of classes (curse you, Friday computer science lecture). Many big moments approach us graduating seniors, but we have less time to process them. The scaffolding of predictable experience drops off, as life turns Evel Knievel and backflips over a succession of endings: finals, Myrtle, senior week, Class Day, commencement.

I feel weightless. What will I do without that routine, without those friendships, without that certainty?

Where will I land?

Here is my only comfort: Eventually, after the parties and ceremonies, after packing up all my books and my clothes, after the last dinners and the last drinks, after the goodbyes and the promises never to forget each other, I’ll land in the cotton wool. I have to. A schedule will form, in some new apart-

ment, in some different city. Once I’ve found new restaurants, a laundromat, a park down the street. Once I’ve built a new set of friends (some old, some new). Once I’ve started to forget the patterns of Yale — when the dining hall serves chicken tenders, the best use of a Durfee’s swipe, how long it takes to walk from Silliman to the YDN (in fair weather, snow and rain).

Then, there will be new big moments and new epiphanies, of a different kind than the college ones, colored more by responsibility and age.

Then, we’ll tell different stories and, occasionally, pull out the old ones — though in new circumstances they will reveal new meanings, like dusty pebbles polished in a stream.

The stories from graduation too, will be stories that we tell. In that next apartment, in the city after that. Until we’ve found a routine so remote that we only feel the reverberations of our college anxieties at distance.

And this too will seem calming and stifling, ordinary and beautiful.

I stay up late and rush assignments and finish all my fries, expecting few consequences and getting mixed results. We Yalies love to tempt fate, as if striking gold once meant we’ve got all the world’s luck on lock.

deserves this. When you get an extra packet of barbecue sauce for free, the proper response, after examining the expiration date, is gratitude.

Imagine if every time you headed towards the exit, somebody asked you, “What are you going to order next time?” What are you going to do next year? It used to be that when I reached the last tender of my order, I felt dread. The food would soon be gone, the fatty bits of joy so quickly consumed and the container flung into a trashcan. But as a senior, I’ve learned to separate my anticipation of loss from the singular joy of a full combo before me. In these remaining weeks, I won’t think about closing time: midnight on weekdays, 2:30 a.m. on weekends, May on my college life. I’m just going to indulge.

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

My Popeye’s Order, My Heart // BY YANAN WANG

When I moved off-campus junior year, I was excited by the prospect of frequenting New Haven’s diverse eateries. I imagined the city as my tasting platter, though in fact my budget limited me to Mamoun’s and Basil and attempts to light my gas stove.

Each feebly cobbled-together meal came to represent my march towards a nebulous adulthood, causing me to slow down and savor the caloric bites all the more.

Indulgence! is how I will remember college. Yale itself was a guilty pleasure. My parents had reluctantly allowed it, and they sensed, rightly, that I would choose all the indulgent paths: the English major, an extracurricular that doubled as my steadfast academic scapegoat, a career for energetic masochists — ahem, if The News Industry is a burning building (and it is), I’m giddily running into the fire.

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On a clear night last October, I found another deplorable passion, one that required less energy but offered almost equal satisfaction. In short, I found Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen™. The glowing white and red sign on Whalley Ave. at once whetted my easy appetite and stirred my Canadian pride. I have been to the restaurant over a dozen times, and my order is always the same.

Chicken Tenders I crave things that make me feel like I’m somehow cheating; wanting to be a journalist makes me feel like I’m skipping past a generation in the immigrant narrative. I imagine that, when my parents brought my five-year-old self to Canada, they expected me to be “practical,” to choose the healthier option. The salad on the menu taunts: You were

SPRING PLANTING Yale Farm // 3 p.m.

Join all the hippest bearded guys and maxi-dressed gals for a “spring planting” and lamb roast. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros will play as you (literally) get back to your roots.

supposed to be the moneymaker, a lawyer or doctor. Let your kids be the dumb artists with no stable future in sight. But no one goes to Popeye’s for salad, and I guess I didn’t come to Yale to fit into some racial myth. As Eddie Huang, renowned glutton and the model to my minority, writes: “Asians like myself ate our hopes and dreams by the grain burnt at the bottom of a seasonal stone bowl,” or in this case, perennial Popeye’s takeout box.

Cajun Fries Good metabolism is a cheater’s tool. My dad, who is as slender as a plank, will eat entire bags of Lay’s chips without glancing down at his girth. He also inadvertently tested into the most prestigious university in China. I’ve inherited only half of this genetic power, which means that

Barbecue Sauce Sometimes we really did feel like nothing could contaminate our dining hall spa waters. I walked with friends through Gothic courtyards at all hours, stayed long past closing time in the JE buttery. We humored each other’s absurdities — classes and friendships alike were a stumbling race towards our closest approximations of truth. Sometimes, like on the first real day of spring, Yale is exactly what we were sold as precocious high school seniors. We have lain in hammocks, met personal heroes, put out student newspapers. Nobody

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

WKND RECOMMENDS: Spring fling gear. First up: daisy dukes and ponchos.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

OUR HIV CRISIS? // BY KYLE TRAMONTE

// ZISHI LI

he minute he placed the wooden phallus on the table, giggles erupted and eyes widened. “Let’s talk about condom usage,” announced the seminar leader to a roomful of freshmen last August. “Remember when you’re putting it on, you want it to look like a sombrero, not a beanie.”

His co-leader chimed in.

“Gently roll it down and pinch the tip of the condom. If air gets in, you risk breakage.”

When the momentary entertainment subsided, the phallus quickly disappeared to avoid distracting the freshmen, and the two student leaders moved on to a different topic: “What are some methods of birth control?”

This scene has become a hallmark of the opening days of the academic year. Amid nightly meetings with freshman counselors, far too many extracurricular introductions and countless workshops, a laugh is always guaranteed at one point during final, fast-paced days of August: when the mock penis appears.

However, at a school where 28 percent of male students report having had same-sex romantic or sexual interactions, the scene above takes on a different tone when accounting for a morbid fact: From 2001 to 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention observed a nearly 133 percent increase in HIV incidence among gay men aged 13 to 24.

Many of these young men contracted the virus due to lax condom usage or the failure to take similar precautions with respect to their sexual health.

When informed of these trends, the workshop leader, who wished to remain anonymous, responded: “I suppose the laughter would stop if you prefaced the condom demonstration with that statistic.”

T

*** An individual’s risk of contracting a sexually transmitted infection is largely a function of his or her sexual network — essentially a social network defined by the sexual relationships in a given population — and his or her own behavior.

One might expect such networks to be relatively insular at a school that calls its campus a “bubble.” But Michael Rigsby,

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Ya l e Health’s medical d i re c to r, is quick to acknowledge that Yale’s sex u a l n e t work extends far beyond the edge of campus.

Rigsby says the average student overlooks certain groups that nevertheless comprise an integral part of Yale College’s sexual network. These include students in the graduate and professional schools, some of whom have a decade of sexual experience over their undergraduate partners and are more comfortable with risk-taking behavior; citizens of New Haven, brought closer by anonymous hookup apps like Grindr and Tinder; young alumni who return to campus from metropolitan areas for various events; and even New York residents, as students tired of the local scene might train in to the city for a night of fun.

As a network stretches to include more at-risk members and becomes more connected, the chance of STI transmission increases. This is especially true for gay and bisexual men, who are limited to a much smaller population of potential sexual partners. A simple dorm room fling one night might not be as innocuous at second glance.

Misunderstandings of Yale’s own sexual network certainly raise eyebrows, but health providers like Rigsby express greater concern over the cohort of young gay men who take up residence in New York City full-time after graduation. Their anxiety is not unfounded, as one Yale College 2014 graduate, who wished to remain anonymous to share a personal experience, knows firsthand.

“It’s actually difficult to talk about Yale College and HIV education because I recently needed to begin a round of PEP [postexposure prophylaxis, a course of drugs taken to prevent HIV contraction after potential exposure] and will start Truvada when the drug course is over,” he says.

“At Yale we live in such a pristine version of what the real world is.

You’ll never encounter on campus the man who says he’s slipped on a condom but really never did, only to tell you that he is HIVpositive but undetectable as he leaves.”

L u c k ily for the recent graduate, who is currently without health insurance, he was able to start a round of PEP through a makeshift support network and Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Their resources put him in contact with a team at Mount Sinai Hospital studying the treatment.

When he went to the pharmacy to pick up his prescription, he remembers very clearly the pharmacist asking for insurance information. When he told her he didn’t have any but presented a voucher, she sighed, saying, “Thank God — this just got picked up to $1,700 a course.”

“The conversation around gay men’s sexual health was lacking on campus, and I was honestly surprised how unprepared I was to have conversations about HIV when I needed to,” he continues.

“Everyone is on PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) and everyone is neg in New York City according to common wisdom — it’s crazy the amnesia we’ve thrown ourselves into for the sake of comfort.”

Conversations about sexual health are difficult enough to have with peers. And, as this recent graduate knows, they are sometimes impossible to have in an honest, open way with new sexual partners without a tactful strategy in mind. He admits that his experience is not ubiquitous, but he feels it is nevertheless representative of a reality check that awaits many as they transition from a sheltered place like Yale to the real world. *** Thirty years after doctors first observed AIDS in the United States, Yale continues to play two roles in the fight against the disease: As a research university, it

APPALACHIAN SPRING (FLING) Stiles // 6 p.m.

“O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge; / Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends.”

m u s t search for more effective treatments and eventually a cure. As a home to young, sexually active students, including a sizable gay population, it must care for its own. Although the University plays the former role as well as any other institution, how to best achieve the latter remains unclear.

“We’ve all been trying to figure this out since the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic,” says Rigsby. “Of course universities will continue to do research. But we should also always be open to doing more.”

According to Rigsby, at the peak of the crisis, the University viewed itself as the primary diagnostic and treatment facility in New Haven, then a hotspot for HIV/AIDS among intravenous drug users. And in 1997, Yale took a huge step in combating the crisis by establishing the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. CIRA’s mission statement is inspiring: “To support innovative, interdisciplinary research that combines behavioral, social and biomedical approaches, focused on the implementation of HIV prevention and treatment and the elimination of HIV disparities.” But Gregg Gonsalves ’11 GRD ’18, an AIDS activist and current lecturer at Yale Law School, feels that the University’s research efforts to eradicate HIV/ AIDS aren’t necessarily paralleled in the resources it provides students. This has become particularly problematic as HIV incidence continues to rise among young gay men.

Gonsalves isn’t the only faculty member who worries about HIV awareness among the college’s young men. History professor George Chauncey ’89 tackles the

subj e c t c a n didly in his course “U.S. Gay and Lesbian History.”

“At some point I realized my wstudents knew almost nothing about HIV/AIDS,” he says. “It was hard to believe because any gay man or lesbian woman my age lost friends, former partners or partners” during the first wave of the epidemic.

Chauncey says conversations with students over the years revealed a startling ignorance of how much damage the disease caused and can still cause. “I had a sense that people were beginning to think, ‘Oh, it’s not that big of a deal if I get infected,’” he says.

“Of course, I have HIV-positive friends who are now living long, healthy and fulfilling lives, but that comes at a significant cost. A good number of young men don’t understand that.”

Every fall, Chauncey gives a lecture chronicling the AIDS crisis, paying special attention to Yale and the young men who died in the epidemic. At the close, after a notice that he is shifting from the role of professor to that of “gay uncle,” Chauncey urges a packed auditorium to always practice safe sex, no matter what urges arise.

“In the midst of the crisis, there was an incredible self-discipline and collective decision that we had to take care of one another,” he reminisces. His lecture on AIDS, other than serving its academic purpose, is the latest iteration of that same self-discipline, but this time he directs it at a student population he feels is in need of guidance. *** Students arrive at Yale from a wide variety of backgrounds and with equally variable knowledge of sexual health. Some benefited from comprehensive sexual education programs in their time prior to Yale, while others received abstinence-only sexual education or none at all.

Given this disparity in baseline knowledge, professor Kristina Talbert-Slagle, lecturer in epidemiology at the Yale School of

Public Health, feels colleges like Yale can help loosen HIV’s grip on the gay community. “Universities need to provide appropriate, thorough sexual education to all students,” she says. “All students should have ready and ongoing access to accurate, supportive, nonjudgmental, easily accessible information to help them have healthy sexual lives and reduce the risk of HIV transmission.”

Dr. Andrew Gotlin, chief of student health at Yale Health, says Yale considers its students’ sexual health a top priority, regardless of their orientation. While students might be more familiar with some services, like providing birth control and other contraceptive options for women, the University also offers services targeted toward its MSM (men who have sex with men) community.

In addition to providing free HIV testing for all students, Yale offers consultations and prescriptions for Truvada as PrEP, a pill taken daily to prevent the contraction of HIV. Those who have potentially been exposed to the virus through sexual contact, like the recent alumnus, are treated with the same urgency as someone experiencing a heart attack.

Information on Yale’s HIV prevention resources, though, isn’t broadcast regularly to the public.

Although not an official arm of Yale Health or the Yale administration, the student-run organization Community Health Educators conducts mandatory sexual health seminars for freshmen when they arrive on campus each fall. These seminars, scheduled by the Yale College Dean’s Office, try to shrink the information gap about sex — according to Talbert-Slagle, this is a key step in any STI prevention regime.

CHEs make an effort to include healthy living tips for MSM: the seminar begins with a segment on sexual diversity and ends with a warning against heterosexism, the tendency to view sexual relationships through a solely heterosexual lens.

However, the community workshop leader, who volunteered with CHE this past year, feels that the group falls into the same trap it warns against.

CHE presentations emphasize the contraceptive uses of condoms rather than their diseaseprevention uses. For example, the SEE HIV PAGE 8

WKND RECOMMENDS: Flowers in your hair. Magnolias are in bloom, tulips are blushing, leaves are sprouting. O Appalachian Spring!

PAGE 4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND WRITES

ARE YOU DOWN? // BY SKYLER INMAN

On Wednesday evening around half past nine, students began to arrive at the Native American Cultural Center. As they settled into place — shaking off the rain, dropping their bags and taking their seats around the long conference table — the group began to catch up on the usual things: the events of the week, how (not) prepared they were finals, events they were excited about.

In many ways, this was just a routine meeting of a Yale student group. But judging from the handful of students who had arrived early, it was clear this was a particularly active crowd. Those who weren’t wearing shirts from other student organizations had political stickers embellishing their laptops, or orange badges pinned to their backpacks in support of Fossil Free Yale. Despite their extensive involvement in other movements, the students present did have one thing in common: They were all DOWN. DOWN, short for “Defining Our World Now,” is at once a publication and a movement of its own. As an online weekly written by and for students of color at Yale, it covers many topics — from police brutality to the need for an Asian American Studies department at Yale. But beyond that, it brings together activists and journalists in a forum that, prior to this year, never existed.

With her back to the table, Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth Spenst ’18 wrote the unifying title on the board in big dry-erase letters: DOWN, with a downwardpointing arrow traveling through the “O.” “That’s our new logo,” she said, satisfied.

Defining Yale Differently DOWN has a multifaceted mission, but according to Eshe Sherley ’16, co-managing editor and one of the magazine’s creators, it addresses a need that has long existed in Yale’s communities of color.

“Students were saying, ‘We don’t have a space to talk about our issues, we don’t have a space to discuss what it’s like to be a person of color at Yale,’” Sherley told me. “It was really born from listening to that and saying, ‘Well, maybe we should create that space.’”

For that reason, Sherley said, she sees herself as a facilitator,

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rather than a founder, of DOWN. Still, despite her efforts to minimize her role in the magazine’s creation, it was Sherley’s vision for a publication like DOWN that encouraged her former English professor, Briallen Hopper, to connect her with other writers on campus.

“When she mentioned she was applying for funding to start a magazine by and for students of color, I was thrilled,” Hopper said.

“This forum is one that has been needed for a very long time, and it’s been marvelous to see it come to fruition.”

Hopper, who taught both Sherley and Spenst in different years, said she knew Spenst would be a good match for Sherley’s publication, and, after reading Spenst’s essays on race, knew she needed to connect the two.

All it took was one meeting for Sherley to offer Spenst the position of editor in chief.

“It just made sense,” said Sherley. “Our model is much more collaborative than the usual topdown structure. And kind of by accident, having a freshman as editor in chief makes that more true.”

Building Bridges When Karléh Wilson ’16 came to Yale as a freshman, she decided not to attend Cultural Connections, the pre-orientation program available for freshman students of color. Concerned that she might have to choose between her racial identities as both an African American and Creek Indian , Wilson felt uncomfortable, and unsure whether anyone would understand her mixed racial identity.

“I didn’t know who would accept the fact that I was black Creek and not just black,” Wilson said.

Upon her arrival at Yale, Wilson mostly stuck to the friendships she had formed within the varsity track team. It was only later, when she overheard two students talking about being Native American, that she discovered the community of the NACC. For Wilson, who now writes for DOWN, the publication’s most important function is bringing together different cultural communities within Yale. She sees the necessity of a publication that extends beyond the bounds of any

one cultural house.

“Whenever I speak about my experiences [within DOWN], people are giving weight to everything I say,” Wilson said. “It’s not taken as a stereotype — it’s taken as Karléh’s experiences.”

For DOWN’s other writers and editors, the magazine’s intersectionality — its willingness to address issues at the intersection of race, class and gender, rather than treating those identifiers separately — is one of its biggest strengths.

Sebastian Medina-Tayac ’16, who serves alongside Sherley as a managing editor of DOWN, pointed to the diversity of the magazine’s staff as proof of its commitment to connecting communities of color at Yale.

“You can’t get anywhere without that unity,” said MedinaTayac. “If we put our voices together, we allow ourselves not to identify just as black or Latino or Native, but as DOWN. You can be white and ‘DOWN with it.’ It’s deeply tied to the recognition of how all of our issues are similar.”

A part of DOWN’s desire for unity, Medina-Tayac said, is born from a similar movement among campus activists: to amplify student voices by bridging gaps that separate marginalized groups.

Unite Yale, the organization this movement gave rise to, is, according to its Facebook page, “a coalition of student groups organizing to build student power and solidarity.” Many of DOWN’s board members, including Medina-Tayac, were involved in the formation of Unite Yale.

They point to it as one sign of an increasingly intersectional and cooperative activist community on campus.

“This year, a lot of people who care about activism really came together, became friends and started inviting each other every time there’s an activist thing to go to,” said Wilson. “We all have different political ideologies, but any activist movement needs publication to tell people why they should care about it. Now we have that platform to write about why we care, and why others should, too.”

Making a Statement DOWN intends to be a forum for articles of several genres, including opinion pieces, personal essays and reported jour-

nalism. By bringing together disparate styles and topics, the magazine will not only be a place for discussion and sharing, but will also become a source for local social justice news.

Establishing this common ground — somewhere between activism and hard journalism — has been an organic process, even though DOWN is still finding its balance.

“We’re still sort of trying to figure out what it means to occupy that space,” Sherley said.

“We don’t want to be preachy.

No one wants to read that, and we all actually have very different views.”

In fact, the desire for an alternative news source on campus, especially one that pays attention to race issues at Yale and in New Haven, was one of the major motivations for starting DOWN. Members of DOWN’s staff perceived a gap in the coverage of issues that matter to them.

“Unfortunately, because a lot of publications on campus are primarily white, the people who decide the publications’ content aren’t attuned to issues that affect people of color,” said Sarah Bruley ’17.

DOWN attempts to address the whiteness of Yale’s publications scene in its statement of purpose.

Due to “the lack of inclusivity and respect for writers of color and the issues about which they are passionate,” Sherley and MedinaTayac write, “many students of color [at Yale] choose not to write at all.”

Beyond the desire for a publication that covers the topics students of color care about, Medina-Tayac emphasized the role of DOWN in removing the barriers that currently discourage students of color from engaging in campus journalism.

Medina-Tayac, who wrote for the News as a sophomore, said that, as is the case with many older Yale institutions, publications like the News tend to lack diversity — racial and otherwise. Socioeconomic status, for example, often determines which extracurricular activities a student is able to pursue.

From personal experience, said Medina-Tayac, the commitment that an organization like the News demands of its members can deter students who need to carve out time for a student job.

“I don’t blame writers of color

for not being able to write as much for the existing publications,” he said. “What DOWN really came out of is the need for students of color to write. And now we’re writing by our own effort.”

A New Generation of Student Writers For DOWN, the future depends heavily on the magazine’s ability to encourage and teach its writers.

More than just ensuring that students of color have a forum where their voices can be heard, Medina-Tayac said that DOWN’s biggest job is mentorship.

“A lot of these students come from more difficult public school backgrounds, where writing might not be emphasized. So by saying we accept anything, we really do a huge service to aspiring writers on our campus,” said Medina-Tayac. “When I edit, I’m teaching. The privilege I have of coming from the [News] is that I can share that with our writers.”

DOWN’s young leaders stand to gain the most from this emphasis on mentorship. Of the dozen members of the Executive Board, half are freshmen.

“A week ago, I would have said I want to see more contributors, more articles, building our audience, that kind of stuff,” said Sherley. “But right now, I want us to become the editing resource our students of color need us to be. That’s the resource I hope DOWN becomes, and I hope it’s sustainable, so we can come back five years from now and see it’s still working.”

As for its freshmen leadership, editors like Oscar Garcia-Ruiz ’18 are optimistic about the future of the magazine, but emphasize that the magazine should stay true to its roots.

In addition to wanting the magazine to become a recognized presence, Garcia-Ruiz “[wants] to see it stay a close, tight-knit group of people.”

DOWN is also a third thing. In addition to being both a publication and an integral part of the activist movements on campus, it is a society of friends.

The project has taken a lot of work, but for Medina-Tayac it’s well worth it. “There are lots of late nights editing,” he said, smiling. “It’s been a big year.”

Contact SKYLER INMAN at skyler.inman@yale.edu .

YALE POP-UP OPENING Davenport Dive // 6 p.m.

The opening of the Yale Pop-Up’s newest culinary project: Menlo. Break up the dining hall routine and hit up the Dive for some good eats.

Lining your stomach. Bread, cheese, biscuits, pizza.

Whatever it takes.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 5

WEEKEND ARTS

GREEN SPORES, BLOOD ORANGE BLOBS // BY MICHELLE LIU

Prior to walking into Euphoria Salon, I am a little nervous. Think about it: you are trying to study a bunch of traditional Chinese nature paintings, but they’re sandwiched between mirrors that face salon chairs. What if there are women in the chairs, getting highlights and blowouts, while you try to navigate around busy stylists and blasts of hair spray?

Fortunately, at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday, I can see the works of Xiaoxing Cao, a local Chinese artist who heads the Yale Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Group, without being in the way: the receptionist is the only other person in the salon. “This definitely brought spring early into Euphoria,” she tells me.

The exhibit contains blooms of all sorts — peonies, lotus flowers, wisteria. Cao renders these flowers with vigorous brushstrokes, and I can almost see her pulling paint across paper. The colors are vibrant: sunset pinks and reds meld with cooler blues and purples. A peony hanging behind the receptionist’s desk is distinct against swaths of bruised blacks and blues, all of it flecked with gold dots. It reminds me of Whistler’s “Nocturne in Black and Gold,” fitting given that Whistler himself drew inspiration from East Asia.

Cao tends to have an aversion to white space.

She decorates backgrounds with amorphous splashes

of heavily applied color. A smoky butterfly fits awkwardly into the negative space next to a few blooms.

The birds wear worn-out expressions, as if resigned to their fates within vertical frames. The specks of gold scattered across the paintings seem like grains of pollen rubbed into my palm.

Green spores, blood orange blobs populate many of the works, as if growing in a petri dish.

Despite each painting’s busy composition, the mirrors still distract me. Every time I try to look at a detail, I catch sight of my messy hair, the acne constellation on my right cheek. If I am so easily caught up in my own appearance right now, would I really contemplate Cao’s exhibit instead of my reflection during a haircut?

Would the flowers framing my face assuage my worry that the hairdresser will cut off my ear? I consider sitting in one of the chairs, but I’m concerned that the receptionist will ask what I’m doing.

For the price of $400, I can take home a painted peony of my own. Or, for a little more, I can acquire one of the two landscapes on view! (They’re relegated to the back of the salon.)

One features two men and some very large birds gently drifting down a body of water, to the tune — I mean caption — of “Fresh breeze and green water, here with me, getting tipsy” ($780).

At Euphoria, fifty bucks gets me a haircut. One of

these babies is, like, 15 and a half haircuts— what’s the price of beauty, anyway?

I’m used to museums and discrete object labels, so I can’t help but zero in on the price tags.

Though I might not be within the confines of a white-walled gallery, at least the exhibit is upfront: Cao needs to make a living too. It’s nice to hear a little jazz while perusing the works, seeing eye to eye with a rooster or examining a leaf.

And neither mirrors nor price tags distract from the overall calm of flowers at slight angles, leaning to the side in unseen wind. I’d hang one in my dorm room.

Or my house. I confess, I might be a little bit biased.

I recognize the “Xiao” in the artist’s signature as the same “Xiao” in my Chinese name, and I feel a weird kinship to her. My grandfather taught me how to paint shrimp with fat, thick brushes and sharp flicks of the wrist the summer I was in Xi’an. I now lead a tour at the Art Gallery that’s all about flowers.

All in all, Euphoria is still worth a visit on some spring morning, even though you might not experience the same weird combination of nostalgia and fascination that I did. These flowers are less ephemeral than the actual blooms, but only by a little: the paintings go down on June 26.

// LORENZO LIGATO

Contact MICHELLE LIU at michelle.liu@yale.edu .

(Concentrators’) Ball so Hard // BY MATTHEW STONE

“It is a great responsibility,” said Cynthia Zarin, the coordinator of the Writing Concentration, “to know what you mean and mean what you say — and then to sit down and do it.”

These were her opening remarks at The Concentrators’ Ball, an annual event celebrating the work of seniors who completed the English Department’s Writing Concentration. Mentored by English faculty members, students in the program take additional creative writing courses and create a single sustained work or portfolio of smaller works for their senior project.

Last Wednesday, 15 students read excerpts from their completed novels, raunchy plays, collections of poetry and other proj-

ects to a packed audience in St. Anthony’s Hall.

Many of the poets and storytellers told fragile and solemn stories. Abigail Carney ’15 read about a young girl’s funeral, an excerpt from her novel “The Honey Grotto” — “Everyone always wants to be friends with the dead girl,” she read. “Carmen always wanted to have a friend die, to have license for real sorrow.”

Next, in the wake of Carney’s story, death and memory were the focus of “The Inheritance of Jawbone Brown,” a novel by Nimal Eames-Scott ’15. EamesScott had one of the strongest presences at the Ball, and he shared his story with a clear confidence that energized his prose.

As he described a dead charac-

ter’s possessions, his performance soared: “They remained piled there, on the floor, like a little mound of offerings at a memorial — too small, too few, a little random and somehow uneven.”

David Gore ’15 read about a certain Grandmother Harrison, a mysterious grandmother in an island community, and Joy Shan described the map of Cape Town commuter trains for her audience. This was from her nonfiction project “Telling Time,” the story of a city divided by rails.

“This city was built to maintain distances between people,” she read.

As the night went on, the students began to read from more comical pieces.

Reading with a mock south-

ern accent, Gareth Imparato ’15 entertained the audience with a rowdy scene from his novel “Stay, Illusion.” The excerpt involved a submarine expedition, a few doses of LSD and a fecal explosion of “layer after layer of pressure-packed-poo.” Imparato embodied a drugged-up Hunter S. Thompson speaking through an angry drill sergeant — he boggled and intrigued his audience.

Humor shifted from raunchy to charming when Alonzo Page ’15 took the podium and read from his collection of poems, “Other & Unruly.” Though he opened with a passionate poem about love, faith and alcohol — “Each breath was short, a prayer and a slur” — he then went on to recite “Soft Negro Loop,” a story of love and loss told through a

playlist. (The audience laughed when Page admitted that the title was originally the name of a friend’s Spotify playlist.)

Then, he took it all home with hilarious poems like “Oprah Teaches Acting Lessons” and “Rihanna Leaves a Voicemail.”

The humor peaked when Wilfredo Ramos ’15 transported his audience from the warm embrace of St. Anthony’s Hall to the confines of an ISIL dungeon in Iraq.

The scene from his play “Blindfolded into the Dark” reached a climax as three prisoners moaned in unison with their captor — for a good 30 seconds. “The soul is in the breath,” the protagonist explained. “It’s in the moan.”

In the penultimate reading, a scene from “Anoush” by Eric Sirakian ’15, a brother asked

his adopted Armenian sister to teach him some language pointers. While the encounter started as a lesson in swear words, it became sexually charged. Tension aside, the scene had its comical moments, winning laughter from the other concentrators.

The audience saw only a brief segment of “Anoush,” just as they had only engaged with excerpts from other projects, and was left wondering what would come next. As Zarin mentioned in her opening remarks, though the concentrators read from “final projects,” after graduation these students often begin a whole new process of creation and revision.

the mirror, the projections took on a holographic quality, rapidly distorting and reappearing in varying shades and shadowy forms. The mirror did not show my heart’s true desire, as J.K. Rowling’s Erised would have, but it did serve to “unmask” the statues, revealing a history and emotional context I would otherwise not have discerned.

The next installation, “Hearing Rothko”, in the Modern Design and Contemporary Gallery, featured two large paintings

by Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko. Two iPads and a set of headphones allowed the viewer/ listener/wearer to “experience a personalized soundscape and

enter the color-dipped, transformative world of Rothko.” The tablets prompted me to select a number of adjectives describing my initial sensory perceptions of the art. Descriptors like pomegranate, sunset, sunrise and fiery appeared on the screens, each matched with its own music. The two paintings, canvasses bright as the sanguine heat of a passionate blush, came alive with the emotive music flowing into my headphones.

After the squeaky clean brightness of the Rothko paintings, the “Alphabet City” installation was startling and refreshingly gritty. An exploration of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in

the late 1980’s, “Alphabet City” included a projection spiraling on the floor in front of the painting. I stepped on the projection and the “funky” beat, inspired by classic hip hop from the streets of the Bronx, changed and pulsed.

I had trouble finding the final Jackson Pollock installation, “What does a painting sound like?” I wandered around the third floor before discovering the black gaffer tape arrows on the floor. The arrows led to an elevator leaking an eerie red light, and when opened, an intense crimson wash flooded the hallway. Otherworldly music surrounded me as I entered, and strange sounds slithered around me as the eleva-

tor descended. This installation was the most outlandish of them all and I’m still not sure how it related to the tangled, chaotic mass of gray skeins in Pollock’s “Arabesque.”

Gallery+Drama was an extremely satisfying exhibit. It fit with the existing art seamlessly and provided a refreshing sensory experience. As millennials, we are no longer content with just one artistic medium at a time — we want the music, the video and the motion all at once, and that’s precisely what Gallery+ delivered.

Contact MATTHEW STONE at matthew.stone@yale.edu .

Art+Projects // BY PATRICK PEOPLES

For the eighth year in a row, Yale School of Drama students have displayed their art in the Yale University Art Gallery. And this year, the exhibit Gallery+Drama brought bright lights, music and vibrant projections to the gallery, to halls full of Greek statues and Dutch paintings.

Gallery+ was a series of four installations reinterpreting some of the YUAG’s existing works through interactive technologies.

The exhibit sought to explore what it means to really engage with art using all of your senses.

All four moments worked with pieces from the collection, layering sights and sounds, some sub-

FRI D AY APRIL

24

tle and some quite startling, on Rothkos and Pollocks.

The exhibit began in the Ancient Gallery with “Behind the Whites,” an installation responding to questions like “What’s behind the statues?” and “What happens far away?” A large, twosided mirror reflected the somber ambiance, standing among ancient Greek pottery, Byzantine mosaics, Egyptian burial masks and grand Roman statues. From a cleverly concealed projector, images of statues in the room and from around the world sprung up, mixing with video footage of gardens and ancients sites where, no doubt, many of the works originated. As I leaned towards

SWAMPLANDIA!

Calhoun Cabaret // 8 p.m.

A musical based on Karen Russel’s (man) groovy Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about alligators, everglades and the nefariously-named “Dredgeman.”

Contact PATRICK PEOPLES at patrick.peoples@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: Crocs. Functionality > all other considerations.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 7

WEEKEND REMINISCENCE

Jame Is With You All Ways // BY JAME CUNNINGHAM Well, these are it. Yes, it has come to that time we all knew it would be at last. Even in our jibbliest of days everyone could have told you, yes, it does happen that it will end, but the future was so many from then, and how could you count? It has been so good to be your little Jame all of these years, but even the things of the world we love must come to end. My fellow folks, it is time for even me to bid a doo to the little boys and girls of Yale and bid a hello to the big boys and girls of Rest of Life.

Gradulation is almost here, and in it it means that I will never be a writer of pages like these in the Yale “Daily” News again.

But even though I have filled of my bucket with tears, you, my fellow folks, should only smile at your bucket, for we have here in these very words below one more time together– and this time is to be the time of all! I am to give you now one last words– all of the advises I have learned– so that even as I am to gradulate and say goodbye to these times as I enter Rest of Life, you, my little pudgles, can never have to say goodbye to Jame.

And these they are:

Be kind of creatures. Once I was going upon the field, and I came upon a little anamal. These anamal, though they may be the teeniest or tiniest, make up all our world and, dare I say, are even just like us.

Treat them as you would a close pal or fire man to save your life of a fire.

You never know if one of them might even save to yours, like hero dog.

Fall in love to a woman. As Wise Man said, “You are never to be, if you are not love to me.” That is a word to live by, my friend! If you see of one beautiful flower of them to love, take of her in the arms and do sweet nothing to her ear. Though this has not ever once happen to me, I am recommend it to all of my friends. I am trying.

Remember a glass is only half empty when it is run out of what makes it to make it full. Always, dear fellow folks, there may find a faucet near by you, and it could be a faucet of friendships, or one hundred dances, or even of life itself. Take of it, put it in your glass or pocket, and drink it up like the biddle boy you maybe were once before at his proverbial mother’s teeps.

D N K W r e n Ban

N

othing can sum up Yale as well as the immortal couplet from our college song: "Bright college years, with pleasure rife / what the hell did I drink last night."

But if that isn't enough for you, there's the Yale Banner, an annual yearbook in which seniors can preserve a little bit of their alma mater. WKND, as an ageless being, will never graduate, but that doesn't mean we don't get nostalgic for days gone by. So, without further ado: the WKND Banner.

George W. Bush

JESUS

Senior Quote: “Hey, pass the [redacted].”

Senior Quote: “And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” — Matthew 28:20”

Extracurriculars: None Superlative: Most Likely to Succeed

S.A. Bones

Have of no egrets. Do NOT, as it was, look into your passed as if it were a monster that had chased you all of the days. I myself even have looked into my passed, thinking of things I might had did, or if I had did them, if I had did them too much or wrong or in the wrong orders, or if they hadn’t have been done at all, what may have been done instead? I myself have had egret– I once did see of a little dog and it bited of my hand. But later of the day, as I was healing my wombs, I realized that my greatest egret was egretting too much.

Anderson Cooper Senior Quote: (In a dramatic voice): “This … is YTV.”

Extracurriculars: Yale Faith and Action, Yale Surf Team

Extracurriculars: Not inhaling, not having sexual intercourse with that woman.

Superlative: Most holier-than-thou

Superlative: Most Perfectly Coiffed Hair

Walter Camp

Elmo

Senior Quote: “I have nothing to say to you.”

Senior Quote: “Fuck baseball.”

Senior Quote: “Please stop tickling me. I mean it this time.”

Extracurriculars: [Redacted]

Extracurriculars: Not inhaling, not having sexual intercourse with that woman.

Extracurriculars: Smiling, learning to spell, being jealous of Burt and Ernie’s relationship, YHHAP.

Superlative: [Redacted]

Superlative: Best Accent

Superlative: Cuddliest

But most important of every advise I know, it is to be together on the people that you love to you, to hug on to them all of the day and every night. Every single one of us is a person to be seen and heard, just as you would your own mother. Give piece a chance to your enemy and friend and birds of the sky a like. They don’t know what they did to you when they did, and neither even did you! To air is human, and to fly away home with all of friends is the vine. Take them in your body and take of them your own. For, if one isn’t to be laughing and dancing in a field, where are you?

Truly, that is of it, the morls of life, to be and be and be again with each other and with the world. If you see a hand in need, then a hand indeed.

I am to go now. Its time to gradulate. To Rest of Life. But don’t you worry about little Jame, I am to be fine. Just know to this: wherever you go, even if it is in the smallest bushes of the land, Jame is there.

If you climb to the tallest mountain or boat on the sea, Jame is there. Even in the midnight of the darkest night, where there is to seem no hopes or dreams, and no man or woman will love to you, and each creature of the land will crawl away from you and you feel that you are not right at all, Jame, little Jame, is still with you. Because Jame loves you. All ways.

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Bill Clinton

Mark Zuckerberg

Senior Quote: “I’m also not a senior, I go to… Why hello darlin’, what college are you in? Pierson? No way, Davenport! Walk you back to you suite? Of course, darlin’. ” Extracurriculars: Not inhaling, not having sexual intercourse with that woman.

Superlative: Best Accent

FAWKES AND FIREWHISKEY Trumbull // 8 p.m.

These Fawkesy performers are on fire (figuratively).

Jodie Foster

Senior Quote: “I don’t go to this school.”

Senior Quote: “What a long, strange journey it’s been.”

Senior Quote: “*chewing sound*

Extracurriculars: Helping establish Yale’s thriving tech culture! Please?

Extracurriculars: Casting piercing stares at unsuspecting freshmen, catching serial killers, UOC Chair.

Superlative: Most beloved, welcomed, and adored.

Superlative: Whatever.

Extracurriculars: Eating, basking in his privilege, snacking, making anagrams of his own name (Best: “I, Will, Am Hot Wart Fad”).

WKND RECOMMENDS:

FRI D AY APRIL

Firewhiskey. Stay warm when it (inevitably) rains during the main act.

William Howard Taft

24

BEES N CHEER

SSS 114 // 9:15 p.m.

Beets n Chard — the vegetable complement of TUIB’s annual concert — will tragically not be taking place this year.

(But fingers crossed. Yale Farm: take note.)

Superlative: Most Anagram-Amenable Name

WKND RECOMMENDS: Theta fanny packs. To keep your effects on you. To keep your sisters close.

PAGE 8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 25, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

WHAT YALE CAN DO // BY KYLE TRAMONTE

HIV FROM PAGE 3 transition between the “STIs” section and the “Protection/ Contraception” section reads: “We just talked about STIs, one risk of sexual activity. What’s another physical risk of sex — some heterosexual sex in particular? (Unwanted pregnancy!)

Now let’s talk about how to protect ourselves against STIs and unwanted pregnancy. Though this might seem irrelevant to those of you who are abstinent or who have same-sex encounters, this information can still be useful sooner or later.”

And the portion on what to do if a condom breaks reads: Q: “People can find themselves in situations where a condom wasn’t used or breaks. Then what?”

A: “Emergency contraception or Plan B helps prevent unwanted pregnancy.”

As the workshop leader notes, key facts about the spread of HIV are conspicuously absent from the script — in fact, the acronym HIV appears only once in the entire document. And strategies for how to respond to condom breakage during anal sex, where there is no risk of pregnancy, are nowhere to be found.

Corinne Ruth ’15, a CHE during her first three years at Yale, feels that the focus on pregnancy and the simplicity of the seminars is perhaps a product of mission creep. CHE was not founded to educate the Yale students, she says, but rather middle- and high-school aged students in New Haven.

As Ruth notes, a group formerly existed under the official Yale College banner — the Peer Health Educators — to tackle issues of sexual health, consent and substance abuse among Yale students. But when the college formally introduced Communication and Consent Educators to help reform the campus sexual climate after a Title IX investigation, the group went defunct.

No peer-led organization as intimately linked to the University has filled the void left by its disappearance.

Equipped with a modified script crafted in conjunction with the YCDO, the CHEs step up once a year to educate Yale’s freshmen.

But this year, due to a shortage in facilitators, several CCEs had to help guide 20 of these seminars after receiving only two hours of training.

It should surprise few, then, that a group created to educate New Haven adolescents sometimes struggles to offer comprehensive sexual education suitable to the needs of college freshmen, particularly at a school known as the “Gay Ivy.” If any advanced information on HIV prevention for MSM makes its way into a CHE seminar, the workshop leader and Ruth say, it would likely be because a freshman counselor interjects to comment on it.

There is no directed discussion on Truvada for PrEP, nor is there any advice on whether to seek emergency medical care after condom breakage with a partner of unknown HIV status.

Other University resources similarly fail to address MSMspecific health issues adequately.

In a pamphlet passed out to

freshmen counselors titled “Man to Man: Tips for Healthy Living for Men Who Have Sex with Men,” HIV makes two appearances, under the headings “Discussing Sexual History” and “Know Your Status.” Both times the term appears in parentheses, seemingly as an afterthought, and in neither instance does the pamphlet offer recommendations on how frequently to get tested or how exactly to discuss one’s sexual history with a partner. *** If, as some believe, Yale does a subpar job at preparing its young gay students to tackle issues of sexual health head-on, it probably doesn’t result from a dearth of clinical resources. Yale just doesn’t make a concerted effort to communicate LGBT-specific risks and resources to the student body when it mandates their attention. Other would-be educators suffer from different problems.

Founded in 1980, the LGBT Co-op at Yale defines itself as a community-building and politically-minded organization intended to represent queer and LGBT-identifying students on campus.

According to former co-coordinator Alex Borsa ’16, the Co-op tackles numerous issues in any given year. While student leaders recently have adopted a politically-inflected agenda, fighting for mixed-gender housing and promoting trans rights on campus and elsewhere, the Co-op itself is many different things to many people — a necessity given the diversity of its membership.

Unfortunately, Borsa says,

even the recognized mouthpiece for LGBT issues on Yale’s campus struggles to communicate with the larger student population. The primary mechanisms for spreading information are posters and the group’s panlist, which consists of 450 students and is annually purged of graduating seniors.

Relying on an opt-in email list and flyers is less than ideal, Borsa admits, particularly when it comes to issues relating to gender identity, sexual identity and sexual health. “There are a significant number of people on this campus who, if we were to advertise an HIV-testing drive like we did a few weeks ago, would greatly benefit from the service,” he says.

“But because the flyer has a big rainbow on it, some people won’t pay attention. A lot of students don’t think they need it or don’t readily identify as LGBT.” Borsa adds that this group of people naturally includes MSM. Maria Trumpler, director of Yale’s Office of LGBT Resources, acknowledges a similar problem in getting information to those who could use it: Are there people on this campus who should utilize the office’s resources but will never walk through the doors?

“Of course,” she says. “It’s hard to accept, but we won’t reach everyone.”

Trumpler explained that, like the Co-op’s mission, the resource office’s job is complicated by the diversity of needs among Yale’s LGBT population.

“For some people, if HIV happens they might not think it’s the biggest deal,” she says. Others might feel inhibited sexually out of fear. Conversations on

*** Any medical professional will tell you that behavior change is the hardest thing to inspire in an individual. Smoking, drinking, eating, sex — they’re all similar in this respect. In 2015, the behavior many young gay men find hardest to change is their failure to adequately protect themselves from HIV. Some know better and simply don’t care. Others haven’t the slightest clue of the threat that HIV continues to pose. Some simply make careless mistakes.

But they all risk the same fate.

The AIDS epidemic shook an entire generation of gay and bisexual men. Unfortunately this cultural history — this gay cul-

tural history — cannot be transferred like that of other groups, in stories of shared experience from father to son, from mother to daughter.

Strategies of survival in the past and resilience in the present — informed by cold, hard statistics and health strategies — find no home in the traditional forum for educating youth: our own public schools. So many young men arrive at Yale, either clueless or careless, and the vast majority are left alone, continuing on the trajectory they began when they first walked onto Old Campus.

Must each of these men confront the virus alone, in the most personal way?

The answer is a firm “No.” Many people want to help, but they need support and direction from the Yale administration.

Avenues to communicate knowledge and promote resources are in place, and a student body capable of engaging with them is waiting. We must adapt our current introductory health programming to include LGBT-specific issues like HIV. But we cannot stop there.

Given Yale’s unique familiarity with HIV/AIDS, we must remake ourselves into a model for the rest of the country, tackling difficult issues like discussing sexual history and HIV status with partners, regardless of orientation.

We must empower young men and women to carry these skills and this knowledge into their communities when they leave campus as Yale College graduates.

We must recognize that this is our HIV crisis.

Contact KYLE TRAMONTE at kyle.tramonte@yale.edu .

Percentage of Men at Yale Who Will Have a Sexual or Romantic Encounter with Another Man

AIDs Related Mortality per 100 people infected 0.144

11

the topic, she believes, are most effective one-on-one, rather than in the form of community guidelines that might reach people at different stages of their sexual lives. For an intervention targeting risky behavior — whether for unsafe sexual practices, substance abuse, or any number of issues — to be successful, it must be tailored to the individual.

Borsa’s and Trumpler’s experiences highlight two challenges in communicating effectively to queer students about sexual health: Not only must any effort effectively target a population that is not readily identifiable (and, at times, purposefully eschews a non-heterosexual identity); it must also present the information in a way that makes the recipient feel it is relevant to them. If, like Chauncey and others worry, students don’t grasp the risks and challenges of HIV, there is little chance of inspiring healthy habits among them.

28%

2006

1992

30000

Number of HIV Diagnoses Among Males with Infection Attributed to Male-to Male Sexual Contact

25000

Total % Change: 0

20000

15000

10000

5000

% Change among 13-24 year-old males: 132.5 0

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

No. of HIV diagnoses among males with infection attributed to male-to-male sexual contact

No. of HIV diagnoses among 13-24 year old males with infection attributed to male-to-male sexual contact

FRI D AY APRIL

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YDN INDUCTIONS 202 York // 9 p.m

We literally have no idea why you would come. Also, you’re not invited.

WKND RECOMMENDS: Klingon Masks (for listening to Klingande) — if you know the language, get your Star Rrek on.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 9

WEEKEND BALLET

THE NECESSARY DISCIPLINE AND DEDICATION // BY CAROLINE WRAY

The school day has just ended at Fair Haven PreK-8, a New Haven public school two miles from campus. Rowdy children waiting for their buses home fill the auditorium. It is easy to pick out the BalletHaven girls in the front of the room. Dressed in matching white tights and black leotards, they hover by the stage, putting their hair up in buns.

Mnikesa Whitaker, Kesa for short, enters the auditorium, armed with coffee and several tote bags stuffed with supplies. She rolls her oxygen tank behind her like a suitcase. A flurry of ballerinas approaches her.

She has brought a new leotard for one dancer. She congratulates another on turning 13 over the break. A third comes up, just for a hug, before darting away.

“There are some people here with messy buns,” Kesa announces. “I will lose my mind.

Do your hair the right way.” Girls scramble to help one another pin back flyaways.

One small student can’t find her bobby pins. “Well, be a problem solver,” Kesa says, stern. “That pouty look isn’t being a problem solver. I love you; figure it out.”

The girls finally congregate on stage. Kesa sits, cross-legged, among them. Suddenly, she succumbs to an aggressive coughing fit, and seventh grader Ursele Mirindi rubs her back.

“Breathe, Ms. Whitaker,” she says. “Breathe.” *** At the ballet bar 15 years ago, Kesa realized something was terribly wrong. A recent college graduate, she had been dancing semiprofessionally — she had even

started her own dance company with friends in Dallas. Despite her aspirations to teach English, she could not shake her passion for ballet.

So it was troubling that, on this particular day, no matter how hard she pushed, Kesa could not lift her foot from the ground. “Tears were mixing with sweat, and I just had to stop for a minute,” she remembers. She struggled to catch her breath. She was terrified.

Doctors eventually discovered that Kesa suffers from systemic scleroderma, a disease that attacks muscles and connective tissue. She describes her smooth muscle and flexible muscle tissues as being “turned to stone,” adding that, every day, she feels intense pain and fatigue, as if she has just run a marathon.

And scleroderma does not actually encompass all of her grave health concerns. In 2004, for instance, doctors determined that she had severe lung disease — today, her lungs function at just 34 percent of their capacity — and she began aggressive treatments.

Since then, Kesa has undergone chemotherapy three separate times.

One day, she will need a double lung transplant, which will put her on a feeding tube “indefinitely.” If she qualifies for the procedure, she has about a one in two chance of survival after five years.

Kesa’s illness has forced her to relinquish essential parts of her identity. A career in dance went out the door almost immediately.

Today, any physical activity lasting more than a few minutes is an almost insurmountable challenge.

Melissa Kane, one of Kesa’s closest friends of more than 10 years, who is also creating a feature-length

documentary about Kesa and BalletHaven, says that Kesa feels “like she’s got an elephant sitting on her chest and she can’t get out from under” it while dancing.

And yet, the only immediate marker of Kesa’s illness is her petite oxygen tank, which she started using in 2014 after years of resisting doctor’s recommendations. She looks like any other 36-year-old, albeit a particularly cool one. Her body is lean and toned, her hair cropped short and dyed blonde, and her outfits consistently tailored and trendy. She likes to eat pancakes at the Pantry, where she asks the waitresses for extra butter.

But despite appearances, Kesa has been suffering more and more. She recently gave up her job teaching English at Fair Haven, and thinks this might be the most painful loss yet. Working full-time was nearly impossible, due to her daily (often, twice or three times daily) doctor’s appointments and physical therapy sessions. She dealt with an almost perpetual stream of acute illnesses.

Kesa realized that she had to make a choice. She could quit and prolong her life, or she could continue to do what she loves: teach.

Inspired by Caribbean writer and activist Audrey Lorde, who called self-care an act of revolution, she decided to give up teaching English.

“Who am I without teaching?

I don’t have an answer yet,” she admits. “[But] there is a quiet revolution in relentlessly saying yes to what your body needs, and in this case, acceptance is giving up the one thing I knew how to do.”

Still, she holds on to BalletHaven.

*** It was in 2011, following “bad news from the doctor, more bad news from the doctor and a heartshattering breakup” that Kesa says she realized — “It was time.” Recognizing that her health was not improving, she did not want to wait any longer to pursue BalletHaven, a long-harbored dream.

She had been teaching English at Fair Haven for several years, but she envisioned running an extracurricular ballet program. She hoped to instill in girls “the discipline and dedication necessary to succeed in any academic or artistic endeavor in high school, college and beyond,” and she made this BalletHaven’s mission statement.

Kesa prides herself on the way she runs BalletHaven: like a traditional, classical ballet ensemble. She places a high premium on attendance, timeliness and perfect hair, all serving the “discipline and dedication” outlined in her mission statement. Initially uncertain as to whether or not students would be drawn to something so openly rigorous, Kesa was floored when more than 50 girls applied. Since then, close to 75 girls have competed for 35 spots every year.

“You can just see the craving for something that pushes them and gives them a place to belong,” Melissa said about the numbers of Fair Haven girls who turn out, year after year, to audition for BalletHaven.

Kesa herself did not start dancing until age 12, after she saw one particular group of ballerinas — “all brown girls like me.”

Only then, she says, did she realize that it was not just a discipline

// CAROLINE WRAY

FRI D AY APRIL

24

PUMP & SLIPPER

St. Anthony’s Hall // 9:30 p.m.

We have some idea of why you would want to come. But you’re still not invited.

for white girls. Awestruck by their beauty and strength, she decided to take up the discipline herself.

Linaidy Gonzalez, a ninth grader and a BalletHaven alum who volunteers with dance classes each week, expressed a similar sentiment. Before she auditioned for Kesa’s group, she says, she “was really hesitant about ballet.”

“All I thought I would see was white people dancing,” she remembers. “Ms. Whitaker made me realize that all people can do it.”

Linaidy says that Kesa shaped her entire character. She joined BalletHaven as a reticent seventh grader, and credits the program with teaching her how to express herself, set goals and create plans in order to achieve them.

Seventh grader Ursele Mirindi, a current BalletHaven dancer, says that she has learned how to organize and schedule her time, and working through frustrations to improve as a dancer has made her a more confident person. She finds that BalletHaven has been carrying her through middle school. In a few years, she hopes to attend Juilliard.

Ursele added that she considers Kesa to be “like a mother” to her. She is not alone: At the end of Tuesday’s recital, one of the dancers shouted “Bye, Mom!” to Kesa on her way out. Kesa laughed for a moment, pointing out that students at Fair Haven accidentally slip and call their teachers their parents with relative frequency.

“Well, it makes some sense,” she shrugged. “Sometimes they do spend more time with us than their parents.” *** A sober tone marked the beginning of Tuesday’s class.

One dancer, Janine, took a seat in the circle. Kesa asked if she was okay and Janine shook her head.

She gave Kesa permission to tell the group what was wrong. Kesa explained, in a slow and even tone, that a close friend of Janine’s — 16-year-old Jericho Scott — was killed in a drive-by shooting last Sunday.

“So she’s hurting right now,” Kesa told the ensemble. “We all need to remember to be gentle with her. I’d also like to point out that she showed up for class today, even though she’s hurting, and that’s very strong.”

Several BalletHaven girls call the group their second family, praising the support network it creates. Melissa remembers interviewing one particular BalletHaven alumna for her documentary: She told her that Kesa and BalletHaven almost single-handedly prevented her from dropping out of school in sixth grade to help support her family. The student told Melissa that she looks at a gift from Kesa, a sticker printed with the words “From homeless to Harvard,” each day for motivation.

Most of the students at Fair Haven come from poor, minority families, and many have expe-

rienced hardships and trauma at home. Kesa remembers her initial reactions to the Fair Haven environment, and her subsequent motivation to instill in her students more general skills beyond the disciplines she was teaching.

“It became clear to me that we have so much work to do in terms of literacy, and that I can’t teach them all of that in the two hours per week that I might see them,” she said. “But what I can do is prepare their minds: so that they’re pliable, so that they’re able to think for themselves.”

The greater New Haven community has noticed BalletHaven.

Melinda Marquez, who runs a flamenco dance center in New York and New Haven, found out about BalletHaven when the Independent awarded Kesa “New Havener of the Year” in 2013. She reached out, and has begun teaching some BalletHaven classes over the last few months.

Marquez called BalletHaven “powerful and inspiring,” adding, “The kind of solidarity I see there amongst young women is, I think, unique.”

Thanks to funds from private donors and local organizations like the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven and the Mayor’s Community Arts Grant, no member of the group has to pay for leotards, tights, shoes, matching duffle bags, hoodies or warm-up jackets, the goods that they earn by committing to BalletHaven.

At Tuesday’s rehearsal, Whitaker showed the group the new duffle bags that some students had earned. She pointed out that the design includes the name “Fair Haven.”

“Because people always say ‘Oh, Fair Haven?’” she imitated distaste. “And we’re like ‘Yeah, Fair Haven!’ We want people to know that good things come from this neighborhood.”

The girls nodded, bursting into applause. *** Twelve years ago, heading to her Fair Haven job interview, a 23-year-old Mnikesa Whitaker saw two girls crossing the neighborhood’s landmark bridge.

Dressed in blue warm-up suits, hair tied in high buns and armed with tote bags and books, they immediately stood out to Whitaker as a pair of young ballerinas.

Watching them, she felt an acute intuition — something her grandmother would have called her “first mind.”

At this point, Kesa knew that she wanted to be an English teacher. She knew that the burgeoning symptoms of some vague and very serious illness were beginning to spin her life out of control. And because of this, she says, she knew that she needed to make a decision just for herself. At that moment, from a slew of offers and interviews, she chose Fair Haven School.

Contact CAROLINE WRAY at caroline.wray@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: Wearing one pump and one slipper to Spring Fling. Comfort meets chic!

PAGE 10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

“OUR MODERN LIVES” IS MY BOYFRIEND // BY MADELINE KAPLAN Yale University likes to be in the vanguard. We pride ourselves on doing things creatively, in new and unexpected ways. We conduct important research on important topics of importance.

And, just last week, we experienced one of those watershed moments: A Yale student produced a real senior project consisting of a fake Kickstarter for a fake musical.

“Our Modern Lives,” which premiered last week, is the web series Caleb Madison ’15 made as his American Studies capstone project. Unlike the usual textbased senior thesis, “Our Modern Lives” has entertainment value for people who aren’t its creator, adviser or creator’s mother. In addition to being smartly writ-

MADELINE KAPLAN MAD TV ten, well produced, and full of things to say about contemporary America and the human condition, “Our Modern Lives” is seriously funny.

Madison’s project, available on ourmodernlives.com, includes a Kickstarter intro video from the cast and crew of “Our Modern Lives,” a musical about the dangers of the technological world.

The musical itself, glimpsed in clips in some of the videos, is deliciously terrible. Its premise is simple: A young woman

addicted to contemporary technology is transported back to the Elizabethan era and learns the true meaning of interpersonal relationships. (“Just as it was in Shakespeare times,” the cast sings, “So is it now, in our modern lives.”)

In addition to an appeal for donations to send a production of “Our Modern Lives” to “the Great White Way itself, Broadway, the theater district of New York City,” the project also features five documentary-style videos, each focusing on a different character involved in the musical. The videos incorporate cutaways and “found footage” that allow for plenty of unexpected comedy (my personal favorite was an intro sequence

for “Dragon & Me,” a fake Disney Channel Original Series). Jacob Osbourne (Jacob Osborne ’16) is the earnest, intense writer and conceiver of the production. His starring episode includes, among other things, bizarre recordings of his acting and directing process.

Though each character has a distinct (and outrageous) personality, all of the videos brilliantly satirize the way people edit themselves in order to project a certain identity. Tanya Richkine (Anya Richkind ’16), the actress starring in the “Our Modern Lives” musical, promotes herself as the consummate free spirit.

As she says, “It’s just like, modern culture doesn’t really appeal to me. I’m very wistful of the era

of my parents, or their parents — I’m not totally sure.”

The rest of the “Our Modern Lives” crew is equally affected.

Jillian Siegel-Gertz (Ruby Spiegel ’15), the director, is a Type-A go-getter who always speaks her mind (and constantly repeats her mantra/fallback joke: “Netflix is my boyfriend!”). Jack Shaw (Jake Dawe ’15), the producer, is a parody of a well-known Yale archetype: the overachiever who is seemingly involved in everything and friends with everyone. The fifth member of the “Our Modern Lives” quintet, musical director Paul Packer (Paul Hinkes ’15), is a frat bro with a sensitive side.

On top of its clever writing and performances, the deep metaness of “Our Modern Lives” lends

it a particular relevance. It’s performance art about performance art, with actors who play characters bearing (nearly) their own names. The series bursts with awareness — of popular culture, of creative processes, of the strange egotism of young people. Madison’s choice to use the web series/Kickstarter format feels uniquely contemporary.

“Our Modern Lives” stands out as an academic thesis worthy of a real and nonacademic audience.

Unlike the overwrought musical at its heart, the series doesn’t have to strive to say something meaningful about our modern lives — it just does.

Contact MADELINE KAPLAN at madeline.kaplan@yale.edu .

“Everything Must Go,” Everything Must Stay

Top 10 Books of the Year

// BY NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH

For the past four years, I have been a staff book reviewer for WEEKEND, and for the past three years, I have written a “Top Ten Books of the Year” column as the school year comes to a close. This will be my third such list, and I’m only mentioning this because it is my final book review for the News. After this, on to the “real world.”

Size matters. I’ve long believed that you can tell much about a person by the size of the stack of books on her bedside table. And so, in the interest of helping you pick a few additions to your stack, I will discuss a few from mine. These are my super subjective top ten books of the last year (in alphabetical order):

If you gave me the name of a song and asked me to recount the first time I heard it, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell you. That’s the case for nearly every song I know, even those that I identify as most integral to my development.

But there’s one I remember distinctly.

Sometime at the beginning of 10th grade, I put Manic Street Preachers’ “Australia” on my iPod — I liked the band’s distinctive name and the possibilities that the song’s title offered. The track first came up on shuffle while I sat on the train home from school, staring out a dirty Metro-North window at the marshes of Milford, Connecticut, swaying in the wind, growing golden in the halflight of the setting sun. I remember hearing it all: the wobbly, distorted opening chords; the tautness of the lead singer’s strained voice; and the slightly madcap chorus, full of grand visions of escape, of flying and running and hopping on the next freight ship across the Indian Ocean.

“Australia” was the first song I heard from “Everything Must Go,” Manic Street Preachers’ fourth album. The Manics released the record in 1996, only a year after guitarist and lyricist Richey Edwards disappeared. It was the peak of a movement, but also the beginning of its decline: Oasis played to a quarter million people at Knebworth that year, but shortly thereafter descended into a cocainefueled rut of mediocrity and constant infighting between the Gallagher brothers.

Britpop had its impact across the Atlantic, too: “What’s the Story (Morning Glory)?” did break into the top five on the Billboard charts, after all.

But somehow we’ve all remained unexposed to Manic Street Preachers, the band that swept the United Kingdom throughout the 1990s with its brash, uncontrollable form of rock ’n’ roll, drawing on the wild legacies of the Sex Pistols as much as the literary depth of the Smiths and the punk ambience of the Stone Roses. Nobody I’ve spoken to has ever heard of the Manics. And maybe that makes sense, that the popularity of a band of Red Labour stalwarts from South Wales would remain confined to their native country. “Everything Must Go,” though, is a deep, heavy work, worthy of renewed consideration.

Britpop spoke the language of optimism.

Sure, Oasis and Blur and the lot knew that Britain had no real future and the working class might as well disappear, so insignificant was its cultural standing. But Britpop remained unfazed: How else can you explain the blindingly clear vision of Oasis’ “Live Forever” or the sheer fuck-all of Blur’s “Girls and Boys”? The entire genre was one of hope — it found flashy exuberance in the stultifying routine of daily life and expressed it all in the liberating joy of rock ’n’ roll.

“Everything Must Go” expresses none of that optimism. This is an album of defeat — triumphant defeat, perhaps, but defeat nonetheless. And whereas Britpop reveled in its defeat, the Manics recorded an entire album devoted to the never-ending search for meaning in a world in which people like them feel they have no agency. The Manics fall on the wrong side of Thatcherism, the side that saw its mines closed and its interests subordinated to those of the Oxfordgoing upper-middle class. As they see it, the entire system has failed them: “The libraries gave us power / Then work came and made us free,” sings James Dean Bradfield on “A Design For Life,” referring to the gates of Auschwitz in an opening line which inspires terror from its lightness of touch. Later the song becomes a maddening portrait of a conquered class: “We don’t talk about love

FRI D AY APRIL

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NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH CRITIC OF NOTES / We only want to get drunk,” Bradfield yells as his band thunders in the background. On the album’s opening track, Bradfield sings with disconcerting urgency about a miserable middle-aged man who spends his days impersonating Elvis on Blackpool’s quintessentially British seaside pier. Bradfield’s lines come quickly, delivered in a highpitched monotone. Paranoia slowly creeps in, and the song fades away to the haunting, barely audible strains of “Dixie.”

The record’s one flaw, if it has any at all, is that it reaches its emotional peak with its fifth track, only about sixteen minutes in.

Coming right after the longing desperation of “Enola/Alone,” the title track, “Everything Must Go,” is massive, cinematic on a level that most other bands of the era never even bothered attempting. The percussion takes on a brutal industrial character; the confrontational guitar sounds bigger than it has any right to sound; and a regiment of violins backs the ensemble, lending the song a necessary element of grandiosity. In its ominous aura, its overwhelming sense of impending doom, this might be the soundtrack to a fascist rally, or perhaps the first salvos of the class war the song itself prophesies. Space becomes constrained as the song progresses, and Bradfield’s lyrics come off as deliberately pointless attempts to flee. “Freed from the memory / Escape from our history,” he sings early in the song.

Later, he modifies the line: “Freed from the century / With nothing but memory.” The song’s expanse, so hopefully vast at first, becomes claustrophobic, constraining, leaving you with the uncomfortable feeling that escape never had a chance at success to begin with.

“Everything Must Go,” both the album and the song, reflect the twentieth century’s tortured history. The Manics’ music inhabits a 1930s world, starkly divided between good and evil, in which right-wing totalitarianism seems a constant threat and workingclass socialism a legitimate political agenda.

It’s the world of the Cambridge Apostles, of British spy rings in Soviet employ; the Manics share the attitude of the historian Eric Hobsbawm in his younger days, when he joined the Communist Party because nobody else actively opposed the Fascists. That’s the universe in which the Manics live — where the Right is winning, class conflict is a bitter reality and only radicalism can combat the forces of oppression. And in the grand 1930s tradition, this group once released a dark parable concerning the Spanish Civil War: they named that song “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next.”

As far as politics, I doubt the Manics are right. But I can understand where they’re coming from: disillusionment with the suffering of the silent working class, caused by the neoliberalism of their youth, has turned into seething middle-aged anger, and they see the apparently oppressive system they live under as an unequivocal evil. Merely listening to Manic Street Preachers is not enough: We must confront and consider the perspective these three Welshmen offer, as unpleasant as the truths they suggest might be.

Contact NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH at noah.daponte-smith@yale.edu .

JAW SENIOR SHOW LC 101 // 8 p.m.

We’re gonna need a bigger showboat. Because this is sure to draw (JrAW?) everyone who’s anyone, i.e. everyone who likes musical comedic improvisational theatuh.

// BY SCOTT STERN

1. “The Age of Acquiescence,”

by Steve Fraser: In this searing fusion of history and criticism, Fraser — an accomplished muckraker — tells the story of America’s two “Gilded Ages,” times when there was an immense divide between the rich and the poor. The first spanned the end of the Civil War to the Great Depression; we are living through the second one today.

Yet, as Fraser argues, in the first Gilded Age, Americans were not afraid to critique robber barons — and even capitalism itself.

Today, the working class and bourgeois almost completely fail to call out the rich. For Fraser, there are few signs that we will emerge from our modern, gilded prison.

2. “All the Light We Cannot See,” by Anthony Doerr: One of only two repeats from “Summer Reading Roundup” this past August, “All the Light” tells the dual tale of Marie-Laure, a blind, brilliant Parisian girl, and Werner, a German orphan with hair so blonde the Nazis call it “snow.” Across pages of beautiful, lyrical prose, Doerr chronicles Marie-Laure and Werner’s attempt to live through World War II — she from the exploding French countryside, and he from the unforgiving barracks of an elite Nazi military camp.

For years, the two protagonists’ paths seem as if they will never cross, but, of course, they do — in an ending as cathartic as it is tragic.

3. “Big Little Lies,” by Liane Moriarty: This charming novel paints a cynical and loving portrait of modern parenting, bourgeois society and murder in Australia. “Big Little Lies” tells the story of Madeline, Celeste and Jane, three mothers with children in kindergarten. It is an often a hilarious and jaded book, but it also delivers a nuanced, sensitive and important commentary on the realities of domestic abuse.

4. “Days of Rage,” by Bryan Burrough: In this profoundly necessary book, Burrough weaves together the stories of groups like the Weathermen, the

// ASHLYN OAKES

SCOTT STERN READING BETWEEN THE LINES Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army, among others, to explain the forgotten history of underground leftist revolutionary groups in the 1970s, and the FBI’s unrelenting war against them. Burrough explains how the FBI both enforced and subverted justice.

5. “Go Set a Watchman,” by Harper Lee: This is the only book on this list that I haven’t actually read, but I promise I have good reasons to have neglected it and still to have included it. “Go Set a Watchman” has not yet been released, but it is a long-lost work by arguably the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century, the beloved and reclusive author of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Long assumed to have been lost, “Watchman” will (apparently) tell the story of Jean Louise “Scout” Finch and friends, many of whom return to the town of Maycomb, Alabama, some twenty years after “Mockingbird” ended. “Watchman” promises to be a distinctly American experience — one that weaves together race, age, nostalgia and humor.

6. “The Good Lord Bird,” by James McBride: This brilliant and hilarious novel tells the story of Henry “Little Onion” Shackleford, a cross-dressing former slave who travels around with the legendary freedom fighter John Brown for a few years in the antebellum Midwest. Little Onion gives his own humorous spin to Brown’s iconic, and ultimately fatal, quest to destroy the institution of slavery.

7. “The Invisible Bridge,”

by Rick Perlstein: The second repeat from my summer list, this long-awaited third volume in Perlstein’s epic story of the rise of American conservatism does not disappoint. Though it is an unwieldy 880 pages and almost mind-numbingly comprehensive, critics have described it as “engrossing” and “ultimately irresistible” — perhaps much like Ronald Reagan himself.

“The Invisible Bridge” doubles

as a political biography, that of a nation in malaise, and an actual biography, that of the strange B-list movie actor who rose unstoppably to national prominence.

8. “The Monopolists,” by Mary Pilon: I grew up playing Monopoly, and I always vaguely believed the old story that it had been invented by an unemployed Depression-era huckster who sold it to Parker Brothers and struck gold. In real life, apparently, Monopoly was intended to be a radical feminist, leftist critique, and it was invented by a fascinating woman named Lizzie Magie. “The Monopolists” tells her story, and that of the man who discovered her.

9. “One Nation Under God,”

by Kevin Kruse: In this authoritative history of mid-20th-century America, Kruse reveals that the whole concept of a “Christian America” is a pretty recent invention. Through breathtaking historical research, Kruse shows that this concept was packaged, promoted and sold by corporations like General Motors in order to convince the nation to embrace a bastardized version of the “Christian” idea of individual salvation and to reject “pagan statism.” It’s a disturbing tale that tells us quite a lot about the nation we may think we understand.

10. “The Secret History of Wonder Woman,” by Jill Lepore: I heard Lepore speak about this book a few weeks ago in an auditorium at the law school. And it struck me: she is the most exciting historian writing today. In “The Secret History,” Lepore does not disappoint. She tells three stories: one of first-wave American feminism, one of the superhero who played a small but crucial role in secondwave American feminism, and one of William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman’s creator.

Marston, the inventor of the lie detector, had a fascinating plural marriage and a close association with Margaret Sanger. The tale of how his life, and his interactions with founding feminists, influenced Wonder Woman is necessary and highly entertaining.

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

WKND RECOMMENDS: Staying conscious through at least the second act.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 11

WEEKEND THEATER

FAR FROM BLACK AND WHITE // BY JACOB POTASH

When two black women stood up and left in the middle of the first act of “Twilight: Los Angeles 1992,” Anna Deavere Smith’s fascinating work of documentary theater about the Rodney King race riots, I entertained the possibility that they truly had somewhere to be.

Then another pair of black women walked out. Most of the audience waited till intermission to escape: At the start of the second act, only five or six people remained in the audience who weren’t obviously associated with the play. The audience wrote their own review, it seems, and they weren’t very kind.

What went wrong?

Nine actors portrayed almost 40 characters in a series of loosely connected monologues, directed

by Michaela Johnson ’17 and playing tonight at the Underbrook. Each monologue addressed race, violence, identity, family and politics, and each person is introduced by name, occupation and ethnicity. Actors were largely cast against their ethnicity and gender. A black man played a white woman, a white woman played a black woman, a black woman played a Korean man, and so on.

These casting choices are undeniably distracting. Of course, that is the point: to challenge our expectations of what bodies should play what roles. But it also feels like the wrong point. Isn’t the lesson of 1992 — and of 2015 — that race still overwhelmingly matters? That we need to let people speak for themselves, if we’re to understand their point of view?

And besides, the accents! White

characters sounded like Southerners, or Brooklynites. One Latino character sounded Irish, while another veered into Eastern European mixed with Britishized Indian English. Korean accents were just as variable. I don’t think there’s any way of getting around it: The ethnic accents will be offensive to most people’s taste.

The brilliant conceit of the original production was that Anna Deavere Smith played all the parts.

In the absence of an obvious plot, some of the drama must have resided in watching the virtuosity of Smith’s instantaneous character switches. And besides being a masterful actress, she had intimate knowledge of each character, having personally conducted the interviews that became the basis for the play’s monologues.

Johnson’s production does not compensate for the plotlessness.

The show wanders, then drags. It lasts two and a half hours, and the bizarre second act dissipates whatever momentum the first builds.

Admittedly, the monologueinterview format is hard to pull off, since it presents the vexed task of sounding off-the-cuff without coming across as aimless. In their attempt to mime spontaneity, the actors wind up talking too fast, and still the monologues often fail to hold attention, or they hold it for the wrong reasons.

The cast is talented, and enthusiastically took up on the unenviable job of constantly switching roles.

But too many characterizations were off-base or half-baked. Hershel Holiday ’18 provided a galvanizing bit of

// HOLLY ZHOU

comic relief as Elaine Young, but at the price of turning a complex character into a ditz. Maxine Dillon ’17, too, is a compelling performer, but spoke each character’s lines in the same register. I was especially dismayed to watch Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a great orator, played like a narcotized Mariah Carey, breathy and incoherent.

Sensitive subjects shouldn’t be avoided in theater at Yale. Race still forms a deep and contentious rift in American life, and it’s admirable for this group of students to have confronted it. But to the extent that theater seeks to bring people together in conversation, it shouldn’t alienate people to the point of walking out. Johnson, in an email, wrote of

the play that “in light of the atrocities of the past year, our team believes it is urgent.” She put on an earnest, bold, deeply flawed play — which seems far more worthwhile than shying away from the challenge altogether.

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

Getting Lost in “The Last of the Maple Leaves” // BY STEPHANIE ADDENBROOKE AND STEPHANIE ROGERS It is rare to attend a dramatic production at Yale and see people leave before the end. But, at Thursday night’s production of “The Last of the Maple Leaves,” the audience dwindled by half at intermission. If you see the show — and manage to stay until the end — you may begin to understand why.

“The Last of the Maple Leaves” is an original piece of work written and directed by Alcindor Leadon ’17. The advertisement warns prospective viewers that “This production contains vulgar language, unpatriotic dialogue, and material relating to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.” The warning would seem to make an audience member cautious, but the content does not provoke the emotional upheaval its PR suggests. Rather, the play’s confus-

SATURDAY APRIL

25

ing structure and underdeveloped characters should give the viewer pause.

The play opens with a New York family leaving their city apartment for Ontario, Canada, after 9/11. Secluded in a cabin, 14-year-old Holy (Sean Sullivan ’17) wishes to embrace adulthood. Instead, he is constrained by his responsibilities for his 7-year-old brother, Saber (played by Jay Majumdar ’18), and his father’s apparent psychosis.

We learn that, before the play has begun, Holy’s father Ashton (played by Noah Konkus ’18) has had a vision in which he foresees the Twin Towers falling. Alongside his repeating visions, Ashton’s wide eyes, paranoia and drastic mood swings suggest that he may be suffering from some form of mental illness.

But his character isn’t fleshed out enough for the audience to have any certainty about it. He dishes out harassing remarks one moment and endearing dialogue the next — a flat, one-dimensional and inexplicable character.

This is a shame, since Konkus is the most talented member of the cast. He best elucidated the overly complex plot with a performance that is nuanced throughout, even during his intense visions.

Some of the plot points seem dramatically age-inappropriate. Holy begins an illicit sexual relationship with an engaged 20-year-old woman (and then her fiancé). In one scene, Holy talks with his father about sex: a perfectly normal conversation between father and son.

But then we are reminded

SPRANG FLANG

Old Campus // 2 p.m.

Sprang flang. Sprang flannng. Spring flannnnnnnnnng 4everrrrrrr. B) -> :D -> (-_-) zzzz

that Holy is 14 years old and his partner(s) engaged. It’s just a little awkward.

These awkward moments are made even more uncomfortable because the actors all look the same age (admittedly an unavoidable fact of college productions). When the ages of the characters are explicitly mentioned, the viewer experiences a moment of cognitive dissonance.

While Majumdar tried to evoke the physicality and vocal tones of a young child, no six-foot-tall college-aged male can effectively play a seven-year-old.

The plot and performances aside, the writing does have moments of luster. An intimate moment between the father and Saber’s grandmother (Dana Smooke ’18) is a nuanced conversation about the right to parenthood. In this scene, Leadon’s

writing demonstrates maturity, and the actors’ portrayal provides a rare moment of sincere compassion.

Saber’s distress over his mother’s recent death showed that Leadon’s good writing did not mesh with the characters he had created, nor with the plot he was trying to foster. Had the audience been able to witness Saber interact with, say, his late mother, Leadon’s powerful words would have translated better. In addition to Saber’s mother, the audience hears of a number of intriguing characters that never actually enter the small space of the Ontario cabin.

These references to absent characters made it difficult to keep up with the multiple storylines, and left many questions unanswered.

More importantly, the show felt like a disservice to families

who suffered losses in 9/11. The production used the attack on the Twin Towers as a dramatic crutch, at one moment inappropriately comparing it to the events of Hurricane Sandy.

Leadon clearly has potential as a writer. This show was not quite ready for its premiere, and was not suited to an undergraduate cast. But there is something to be respected in his ambition.

There was nothing simple about the task he undertook, and the cast had to tackle complicated, difficult and brand-new material. Perhaps one day Leadon will make this production work.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t this week.

Contact STEPHANIE ADDENBROOKE and STEPHANIE ROGERS at stephanie.addenbrooke@yale.edu and stephanie.rogers@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: Mountain spring (fling) water. Seriously. Gotta hydrate.

PAGE 12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

// ELIZABETH MILES

REAL LIFE IS VERY EXCITING: MATTHEW WEINER // BY JACKSON MCHENRY

Now in the second half of its seventh season, “Mad Men,” which premiered in 2007, has set the standard for TV drama. As it followed the life of Don Draper, a Madison Avenue advertising executive, the show probed everything from the social tumult of the 1960s to our relationship with the past. This Wednesday, WEEKEND sat down with “Mad Men” creator and showrunner Matthew Weiner to talk about wrapping the show, ’70s fashion, and why he loves “Broad City.” [Warning for who haven’t yet seen the latest episode: spoilers ahead.]

Q. What has been your experience after wrapping the show and now,w watching the episodes air?

A. We wrapped shooting in July, but I had another few months after that so I didn’t finish until October and I didn’t move out of my office until December. So I really haven’t had that much downtime. It’s probably the longest I’ve gone without writing. I’ve been working out a bunch of things, because you get itchy. But knowing what the actual experience of the show ending will be will take the last episode airing, and I am terrible at anticipating what it will be like. It’s going to be serious, emotionally. Everyone I know who’s gone through it has said, “It’s rough.”

That’s the text. The subtext had to do with retirement and the futility of planning and what you do when your needs are met. What are Don’s needs? It’s not just the same, but he’s sort of being forced into the future, which I think has been some people’s philosophy of the show the whole time, not mine. But if you’re in a position of success and somebody asks you what next year is going to be like, that’s a profound metaphysical question, because your gut instinct is “worse.” Who is Don Draper — or anybody for that matter who is lucky enough to have what he has — who are they to ask about the future? What more do they need?

Q. It does seem that this half of the season feels a little like an epilogue.

Q. I found it interesting that Don, and also Joan, are at this place where they’ve achieved so much and they don’t know what they want, while Peggy still has all these plans.

A. You’ll have to wait until you see the whole thing. We made it all at once, from the very first episode [of the season]. But I was consciously aware of the fact that there would be a break.

I needed two premieres and two finales. But for these last seven, I really tried to channel the emotions we were having. I write from my feelings anyway, so I thought, “What, am I going to fight them?”

All the stories are informed with the concept of ending.

Every episode feels like the finale. A lot of last week’s episode [“The Forecast”] is a about your perception of the future.

A. That’s what Don was saying [in the most recent episode].

There’s a line at the end of the first season when Peggy gets her promotion and moves into her first office, right before she goes into labor [laughs] and Joan says, “Sometimes when people get what they want, they realize how limited their goals were.” And that’s always been an interesting thing to me. There are things in my life right now where, if you told me about them, I would have said, “You’re lying,” “I don’t deserve that,” “That’ll never happen,” and then they become normal. You don’t have to be Trudy Campbell to under-

“

I’ve learned the major lesson of life, which is that I don’t know anything.

I’ve learned to trust other people, quite honestly.”

stand that certain people’s dissatisfaction is what’s motivating them. And that’s sort of a comment on capitalism, but maybe that’s because capitalism plays into that part of the human condition.

Q. And propagating those desires, spending so much time in advertising, surely feeds into that sense?

A. Don believes in an aspirational sense of advertising. Even if he’s talking dog food, he’s talking about what it is about your life that could be fixed with this product. That is always based on a concept of need. You’re not creating a need, you’re identifying a need. He’s always offering, even if it’s a false construction, that if you have these things you will feel like the person you want to be. And that concept in itself is kind of beautiful, right? Every priest is helping people be what they want to be.

Q. One of the things that impressed me about the show was its ability to bring back this treasure trove of characters, especially Rachel Menken [Don’s love interest in Season 1].

A. You’ll see where the show’s going, but I felt like [Rachel’s return] was a great thing to wake Don up to where he is in his life and to see that door close. And I also think that when people talk about their life, a lot of the time, you get to a point where people start to give you excuses for their bad luck, and for the opportunities they didn’t get. My experience is that they do get opportunities and they choose not to do them. As much as Don missed out on Rachel Menken, Ken is going to tell his kids that he couldn’t be a writer because he had to provide for them. We know that’s not true. Peggy’s going to say, “I couldn’t meet the right guy.” And as far as we can tell, she did.

I wanted to examine that, and Rachel was the best way to think about a door that had been closed permanently. I know that was an important relationship for him.

Q. The other thing, looking at this most recent episode, was bringing in Sally and Glen, and a kid’s perspective, or at least a maturing perspective, on the show.

A. They are really kids, and they are entering into life problems based on their ideology, and based on the limited freedom they have. [Glen’s story in this last episode] was an anecdote we heard several times. If you flunked out of school, you went to Vietnam. In fact, teachers used to cut people slack sometimes for that. Lying to your parents about your reason for going to Vietnam was more acceptable than failing school. I also thought there was an emotional harvest to have there, because that kid we knew at the beginning of the show, a very short time ago in our lives, is old enough to go and serve.

A. Those styles get to the power center pretty quickly.

You just wait and see, everyone my age is about to have a really, really ridiculous looking beard so they can look like a hipster.

Q. As much as characters come back, you’ve also had certain lines and phrases repeat throughout the show. The characters spend so much time thinking about language, and reusing lines.

A. Exactly, we can show who’s still dressed like the olden days.

Joan is definitely set in 1959 or 1960. That’s when she looked her best — maybe even 1955 or ’56, sometimes. Peggy has had a makeover but she’s still conservative most of the time. She’s not a hippy. Eventually, I suppose, she’ll be wearing turtlenecks and shells and have a funky amulet.

A. I just entered back into the culture, in a weird way. It was hard for me to watch things during the show. I kept up with “Breaking Bad” because I have a close relationship with Vince [Gilligan, the show’s creator].

And I kept up with “Boardwalk Empire” so that I could talk to my friends, and so no one would ruin it in the writers’ room, because they all watch a lot more TV than I do.

I love “Broad City.” I cannot get enough of it. I think they’re hilarious, and they’re doing something new. It’s very interesting to me how sophisticated the relationship is between them. In all the time I worked in comedy in network TV, there was always this desire to have an emotional core underneath it all and to have a moment to show that, even if people were insulting each other and being horrible to each other all the time, they loved each other. Somehow, they are pulling it off without any sentimentality or being maudlin.

Those women are really friends.

I watch “The Knick,” because I heard it was good and because I really enjoyed it. I watched a couple episodes of “Empire.”

[The show’s creator] Danny Strong is a friend. I’m behind on “House of Cards.” I’m in the middle of the second season. I watch what I can.

I’ve also been watching a lot of movies that inspire me. Things I haven’t seen in a long time. I watched “Angels in America” again. I forgot how free your imagination can be. There’s no rules in that thing, visually or verbally. The talking is so good.

It’s pretty impressive.

Q. And Roger’s still clinging to youth with his mustache.

Q. And now, because there’s so much variety on TV, there’s so

A. We’ve tried to tell a linguistic story over the course of the show. We don’t always get it right, but we try. I’ve noticed that it just gets cruder, and less symbolic and more direct.

There’s a drama to the language, that still is there, in a form, in polite society. From 1960 on, depending on people’s age and their location, there’s a slow decay of manners. People start swearing in social situations.

Slang comes in. In between 1969 and now a lot has happened to the language, but people are talking, at that point, so much more like they are talking now.

The crudeness keeps coming. It will come to Peggy; it will come to everyone. And to have the consistency to show that change in the social mores has been a gift.

Q. And it comes through in the fashion and the visual style of the show as well.

Q. The Stan-style beard is coming back.

A. Exactly.

Q. Being a college senior, I know the “What’s next?” question is pretty terrible, but I do want to know what shows you’re watching now, and what you’re thinking about.

much more freedom than there used to be.

A. Yeah, I watch “Orange is the New Black.” Jenji [Kohan, the show’s creator] is so talented. I saw the second season and she pulled it off again. It’s such a good idea, because I don’t think anybody knew how you could expand that story that way. And I love Taylor Schilling. She’s fascinating to me. She’s playing the whole thing.

Q. And finally, what sort of lessons do you think you’ll carry out of “Mad Men,” after working on the show for all this time?

A. I’ve learned the major lesson of life, which is that I don’t know anything. I’ve learned to trust other people, quite honestly. I know I have a reputation for being a control freak, but the people I have, I’m their audience. I’m not their puppet master. I watch not just my writers but every aspect of it. I let people do their thing and they’ve shined.

I’ve learned about our relationship with history. We’re in it, right now, and we don’t have any idea what’s important and what’s not. That was a meaningful concept. You’re trying to recreate a period and what you’re learning is that we do not know what will end up in the history books. It’s one of the reasons why, when people ask me about the legacy of the show, I think, “That’s so stupid, how would I know?”

I do know that, in the immediate past, it was so rewarding that you could do something this personal, and without any guns, without any detective story, no emergency room — not that I don’t love that stuff — that you could do something that’s really on the scale of most of our lives and people would be interested in it.

I had a deep suspicion that was confirmed, that people don’t just care about entertainment that is directly related to them. You don’t have to make a show about 18-year-old boys for 18-year-old boys to watch it.

It’s always been my theory that human beings are human beings and lots of stories are interesting to us. Real life is very exciting.

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

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