Weekend

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2014

Keeping

the Faith

// By Andrew Koenig, page 3 CHANGE

B4

CLUB

B6,7

CAMP

B10

EXPLORING STRANGE LANDS

#RUSHWKND

A COMMON COMMUNITY

Sophie Mendelson finds beauty in studying abroad.

Our writers try to get into clubs both new and old, secret and superior!

Lillian Childress reports on Camp Kesem’s first year.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

HOLDERNESS

WEEKEND VIEWS

The Places I Carry // BY MARY HOWARD HOLDERNESS

// AUBE REYLESCURE

inked labels — that my skin collects like passport stamps. I have exactly one for each place I’ve lived.

And when I glimpse them in passing mirrors, rub fingertips along their ridges, I go back. Tattoos may whisper, give me a faint notion of who I was when I got them. But my scars all speak — in voices scratchy and slender and loud and high pitched — and they all tell stories. *** Belews Lake, N.C.: I’ve lived in North Carolina for over 20 years, so it’s surprising that its waters have only stamped me once. A faint white trace. I was 8. Water skiing behind my cousin Chuck’s boat. He motioned for me to cross in and out of the wake; my first time. Too timid to commit, I ended up with one ski on each side of the lip in a split. The outside ski tip caught under the water. I went down, skis went up.

When I bobbed to the surface, I hit my mouth against one of the skis.

My iPhone, My Precious // BY KAROLINA KSIAZEK I fantasize about chucking my iPhone off a cliff. Sharp rocks split its screen as it tumbles into oblivion. I’m certain that I would feel better without it. But when my fantasy came true and my phone fell in a toilet I’d just pooped in, I frantically fished it out, cleaned it off and rushed it to the Apple Store for a replacement.

I am disturbed by the attachment I have to my phone. If I am in its proximity, I feel like Frodo carrying the One Ring around his neck, consumed in its power. My phone is not mine; rather, I belong to it. It is the first thing I look at in the morning and the last thing I look at before I fall asleep.

I can’t make it through an hour-long class without checking my alerts at least once. As the day wears on, I develop an anxiety about my battery percentage. I go home just to charge it, or at the very least, I bum a charger off a friend like a cigarette.

Smart phones are supposed to be tools that make our lives easier. I do use my phone to look up facts, check train times and find biking directions. But that’s not where my battery goes. It goes to the moments where I post an Instagram photo and refresh six times in the next three minutes to check for likes. It goes to the eight times I toggle mindlessly between the hourly and daily forecast on my weather app. It goes to the articles I skim and the time I spend rearranging the icons on my home screen.

My battery goes to Facebook.

How does Facebook get to me to spend so much time reading updates from people whose daily activities I don’t give a shit about? Why do I know so much about the job search of that guy I met at Borders in 2008, or about my high school friend’s exboyfriend’s cat? The most shameful part is how much time I spend

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 5

staring at my own profile. I become obsessed with the timeline of my own life, and what it looks like to my 1,000 friends. But to what end?

When I’m in my phone, I’m not in the world anymore. Yes, I learn things from my constant connection to the Internet. But I don’t experience anything. Sometimes when I become depressed, all I need to do to feel better is leave my phone in the house and go a day without it.

So I do try to resist. If I can’t leave my phone at home, I uninstall my Facebook app, or change the password to something impossible to remember, and log out. I let my battery die. I bury it in the bottom of my backpack. I hide it in the living room while I sleep.

It sucks that I need it so much.

Certain services like Uber are only available on smartphone apps.

Without a cell phone, I’d never be the first to claim tickets to see a famous person speak on campus, and I’ll never have the Fastest//Fingers//First when the YDN sends out pitches. I can’t even fathom how people made plans before cell phones. If I didn’t have a cell phone, how would I find someone to go with me to Woad’s?

I’m worried for myself, and I’m worried for us. It’s untenable to think that our attachment to smartphones will ever loosen. I do have faith that people are bigger than these mere inventions, but when we stare at a sunset through a Mayfair filter, or zone out from a party to send a Snapchat, we’re only getting smaller.

Sometimes when I look up from my phone it feels like I’m seeing the world for the first time. Seeing it the way it’s supposed to be seen. But I always look back down.

Contact KAROLINA KSIAZEK at karolina.ksiazek@yale.edu .

Split my lip. If you don’t commit, you always fall.

Woods behind the Academy in Exeter, N.H.: I told my friends I’d fought a bear. But the truth is it was a high school cross-country practice. I was exhausted from a sleepless night, and I tripped over a giant tree root. My hand got caught on some sharp rocks. My team ran on while I pedaled my coach’s bike back to the nurse’s office, hand held out to the side, leaving a trail of blood in the miles of dirt. I got six stitches and an extension on my lifeline. Fortune tellers are particularly vague when reading my palm. I leave a lot up to the stars but when I’m unsatisfied with the answers, I look to my scarred hand. Even ripped, it pulled me out of childhood.

Yale lacrosse frat, New Haven, Ct.: I watched a girl, drunk in heels, stumble and almost fall on her way out of the backyard. In her stupor she barely showed sur-

WRAY

KSIAZEK

I almost got a tattoo this summer.

But the place wasn’t right. I don’t mean placement — that’s all fine — but the physical setting. The city where you get printed. The decision for the place of a tattoo is as important as the design. The setting of the tattoo’s story dictates the life it will lead. Getting inked in New York on Doyers and Bowery, after you’ve eaten dumplings from Joe’s, is a different story from walking out Hard Rock Tattoos in Tennessee, your spur-of-the-moment decision in the midst of Bonnaroo. This is the tattoo’s birthplace.

But Paris was all wrong. Paris was gray and hot and lonely and starving. Paris was a broken washing machine and the spider that never left the bathroom. Paris was blisters and long lines and the lady with the red nails smoking in the café.

Paris was wrong because I have no scar from Paris. It’s these pink and slippery accidental lines — not

prise. Onlookers laughed; I shook my head. I was sober and not having much fun. The friends I’d come with wanted to leave, so I decided to go with them. Suddenly, I found myself on my knees — one knee. My left leg had plunged into a hole in the ground, lined with open pipe.

Onlookers laughed and I was surprised that there was any blood left to drip down my leg — the whole supply had to be circulating in my cheeks. I hobbled home. When you understand what it was that knocked the drunk girl to her knees, you’re not so quick to judge.

Rocks on a beach, Marseille, France: My mom thinks I did it on purpose. Or that I’d been drinking. But who puts a shard of glass in their pants and grinds it up in their knee on purpose? I was not drinking — the glass was sharp, it was dark and my legs were numb after skinny-dipping. But she is right in that this is the ugliest of my scars,

Contact MARY HOWARD HOLDERNESS at mary.holderness@yale.edu .

Toad’s in France // BY CAROLINE WRAY

It is Friday night here at La Plage, a Bordeaux nightclub boasting five separate dance floors. Clutching the hands of my travel companions, I squeeze through the thudding labyrinth.

We press on into the Third Room (the Third Circle of Hell, perhaps), a cube that backs into a massive shrine to our god, the DJ. This deity chants “LADIES!” for reasons unknown, every seven seconds. Soon enough it blends into the background thump of his 2009 remixes, whose beats reverberate off the concrete walls and all the way through my fingertips.

A birthday girl cradling a bottle of Grey Goose has hoisted herself atop the table in the “lounge” area. LADIES! A cluster of people is stationed directly in front of the DJ. Their ages range from 15 to 55; some bodies are wiry and spritely, others full and sumptuous. They do not speak. They have nothing in common; nothing, that is, but a true talent for line dancing. Together they bunch and spread, hips gesticulating. They do not smile. This is a Serious Matter. They close their eyes, grimace from the exertion.

LADIES! Drawing from my wealth of international clubbing experience, I compare La Plage to a more familiar haunt: Toad’s Place. La Plage is in ~*Europe*~.

La Plage offers us the choice of no less than five bars and five DJs, rather than “Stage, or sticky floor?” The good-looking Frenchman I’ve just met offers me a cigarette, rather than groping blindly at my hips. He invites me to an after-party at 5 a.m., when La Plage closes, a full four hours after the Woad’s DJ graces guests with “Livin’ on a Prayer.”

Right now it’s 1:30, past Toads’ and my bedtime, and my ankles, perched precariously atop high

ART MUSEUM RECEPTIONS

heels, are starting to give way. I grasp the sweatered arm of the Frenchman. I admire his scruff and his clove-tinted scent. I’m starting to hate my dancing. I apologize. He’s starting to hate his non-fluent English. He apologizes.

“Oh my God, no way,” I encourage him. “You are so good!”

I hate my hollow response, an octave higher than my normal register, even more than my dancing. I’m tired of talking to him. I scan the room for my friends.

And, just like that, La Plage may as well be Toad’s.

There are a few clumps of males who aren’t yet intoxicated enough to approach the girls they want to approach. Their full cups touch their lips with twitching anxiety, emptying fast. There are several stiletto-girls. They move their hips, eyes darting all around, trying to meet someone else’s. There’s that one short old guy who’s alone. He slithers around the room, grabbing at everyone, spawning equal parts laughter and revulsion.

And there’s me, somewhere in between the periphery and the vortex, searching for my security blanket — my friends — who have dispersed to pursue their own fleeting flirtations.

It doesn’t matter whether the men smell like cigarettes or Natty Lite, or whether that drunk girl is draining Grey Goose or Dubra.

It doesn’t matter if we’re in a five-room megaplex on a foreign continent or in a pregame in our common rooms. All of us — the dancers, the drinkers, the floaters, the clusterers, that old guy and me — we’re all here for the same reason.

We’re at Toad’s and we’re at La Plage for that moment when

our groping eyes meet another’s groping eyes and, for just that second, we’re assured that, yes, we are wanted. We’re there for that one song that plays halfway through the night; when, for three and a half minutes, our friends are all dancing at the same time and with the same abandon.

For those three and a half minutes when we don’t doubt that we are someone who has friends. Best friends.

I have one rule when it comes to places like Toad’s: Leave before the end of the last song. When I hear Bon Jovi start up, I roll out.

Fast. I know that it’s superstitious and arbitrary. But I also know you won’t reach that transient euphoria during the last song (especially when that song is literally about clinging to a shred of hope). And you don’t want to be the one whose search was fruitless, who drilled the hope into the ground.

Tonight, at La Plage, it’s not an issue. There’s no way I’ll make it to 5 a.m. I can’t even stand in heels anymore. So my friends and I leave behind all five pounding dance rooms and the sweatered Frenchman. We decided we did not love each other. As we walk out, our eyelids droop. Our makeup is muddled with sweat.

Our hair is frazzled. I am barefoot. My feet try to stretch out, padding against concrete.

It’s not the corner of Broadway and Elm, but it could be.

The empty streets echo with our laughter. I am relieved because I do have my security blanket. It’s not love tonight, but I did find my friends and we are linking arms and I am not alone. “It was a good night.” We move like blood through a grey vein.

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

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

YUAG and YCBA // 7 - 8:30 p.m.

This is mostly for freshmen, but if you grab a lanyard and look confused…

and also the one I’m most proud of.

An inch-long ridge of purple tissue, it splays across the bend of my right knee. I look at that raw crease and close my eyes and I’m taken by a sudden rush of wind, the back of a motorcycle winding down roads to a dark and empty coast, laughter and waves echoing off rocks, salty midnight kisses. Love doesn’t hurt so much when you’re numb. *** Getting a tattoo suddenly seems silly. How do you earn the right to choose which places and stories color your life? I drink my coffee and look at the blank skin where I wanted to get my tattoo. I am halfrelieved, half-wanting. Tattoos are perhaps a way of trying to write the body into a piece of fiction. But scars, raw and ugly, can’t be anything but honest.

Sleep

5/5 stars. Would do again.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

CHURCH IN THE ELM CITY // BY ANDREW KOENIG

Jewish Unaffiliated

7%

CITY OF GOD

Justin Kendrick, 31, founder of City Church, grew up in Connecticut as a non-practicing Catholic, which,

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 5

3%

Presbyterian

27%

6%

T

Muslim

Catholic

Christian unaffiliated

he long and arid strip of land we live in isn’t what it used to be.

Once home to the Puritans, the Pilgrims and two Great Awakenings, New England is now commonly regarded as one of the least religious regions of the United States — according to Gallup polling, it holds the distinction of lowest church attendance. Many of the once-proud Gothic churches and cathedrals stand empty, often struggling to maintain a stable population.

Still, Yellow Pages lists 815 names under “Churches in New Haven, CT.” I had seen dozens of these locations in and around the downtown area my freshman fall, but it wasn’t until I went to Toad’s Place that I felt like a part of a church. As a Christian, I had been floating around among various churches, looking for one that was right. A few months into the semester, I visited the notorious nightclub to attend a service of City Church, a nondenominational congregation which I had heard about from some friends. There, in the place where I had first borne witness to dance floor make outs and the spectacle of collegiate carousing, I saw people being baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

A young and growing church was congregating in New Haven’s most garish meeting place. That day, I watched as people clad in Walmart V-necks and synthetic flip-flops professed their faith onstage, before being submerged in a makeshift washbasin in the middle of the dance hall.

I later learned I was just one of 153 Yale students who have passed through City Church’s doors since its opening in 2011. (This number is based on yale.edu email addresses in City Church’s system; there may well be more.) Around 50 of us regular attendees are also members of Yale Faith and Action (YFA), a nondenominational, on-campus ministry that hosts Bible courses and prayer meetings for Christian students.

YFA and City Church of New Haven, both just shy of four years old, have emerged to move the region’s young people, a group statistically known to be irreligious and spiritually detached.

Ketlie Guerrin, 27, has attended Connecticut churches her entire life, but none like City Church. “I’ve visited lots of different churches,” she says. “They’re all really similar — lovely people who love Jesus — but they’re just not growing … the ones that I’ve been to are just dead.”

Guerrin says City Church is on to something different: “I’ve never been to a church like this — [one] that’s growing because of people getting saved. Ever.”

17%

Most common faiths of incoming freshmen 2013-2017

4%

Nondenominational

Episcopalian

5%

4%

Atheist

4%

he says, “ f o r New Englanders makes sense.” He embodied the stereotype of the cultural Christian, going to Mass on Christmas and Easter, but otherwise receiving little in the way of spiritual teaching.

At age 13, Kendrick’s dad took him to New Haven’s Church on the Rock of the Apostolic Faith. He describes the non-denominational church as “charismatic” — referring to a Christian movement that embraces gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as speaking in tongues and prophesying.

I went to Church on the Rock on the first Sunday of my freshman year. There, I saw women dancing around the church with their eyes closed and choristers onstage belting the same words over and over in elation. Everyone was standing up. The preacher bellowed.

“It was at Church on the Rock,” Kendrick recalls, “that I experienced the power of Jesus, his forgiveness and salvation. Until then I didn’t really have any spiritual attentiveness.”

Kendrick’s faith deepened from there. As a teenager, he helped start Frontline Christian Church in Hamden, Conn., which later became the home base of an itinerant music ministry called Holyfire Ministries.

The group of young musicians traveled across the country and Europe singing, testifying and evangelizing.

Kendrick and his bandmates played all sorts of venues, performing their own music and covering popular Christian songs. They had long hours. They were on the road most of the time. Their lives were a blur of fatigue, worship and sharing the gospel with non-Christians.

While on tour in June of 2007, the band’s RV was acting up. They pulled over at a pit stop and got out of the vehicle. It turned out the engine had caught fire, and soon the band trailer went up in flames. They lost everything — instruments, musical equipment, clothes, personal belongings.

Kendrick prayed. He said he heard God tell him that this was a “promotion” to bigger and better things.

Within a month, money had come in from donors and their band was able to buy back everything. They acquired Bon Jovi’s old tour bus and got back to work.

But the band’s tenure was to be short-lived. Holyfire Ministries, for all intents and purposes now defunct, only toured for a few more years. By 2010, Kendrick and his

YALE-CHINA ASSOCIATION OPEN HOUSE 442 Temple St. // 3 – 6 p.m.

Do you wanna go to China? (Yeah, you wanna.)

crew had their sights set on a different form of evangelism. They wanted to found a church.

THE SAME DAY THERE WERE ADDED TO THEIR NUMBER ABOUT 200

On a summer afternoon I take a cab to City Church’s office in the Amity neighborhood of New Haven, a residential area that is home to parks, waterways and a CVS. The path there is anything but straight and narrow — winding suburban roads clogged with traffic eventually bring me to a house little different from its neighbors.

Inside, the place’s look is more startup than church office. The oldest person working there, Jon Wisecarver, is 31 years old. (Kendrick, also 31, is a close second.) A volunteer sits at a makeshift workspace in the kitchen, while Kendrick kills a wasp by the fridge. The living room upstairs functions as a recording studio and a lounge for composing music.

Kendrick’s office is more traditional — desk, telephone, armchair.

Pinned to a bulletin board by his desk is a list of cities, next to each of them a number. “Boston — 539K … New Haven — 126K”: the populations of various New England cities. It serves as a reminder and an exhortation of their mission: to plant a City Church in the 10 most populous cities of New England, so that 50 percent of New Englanders are within a 15-minute drive of a City Church. Guerrin describes this to me as “a 25–year goal to see thriving churches in every city in New England.”

What came to be known as City Church of New Haven grew out of a fledgling network of houses affiliated with Holyfire Ministries. In 2010, a group of 20, led by Justin and his wife Chrisy, decided to open a church proper.

The way Kendrick tells it, God spoke to him, saying, “You want to change the world, but you don’t know your neighbors’ names.” He felt a calling to convene the church “right in the middle of the city, right where students could walk to, [in] the hub of the life of the city.”

The idea for a church in downtown New Haven soon took shape. On Easter Sunday in 2011, City Church held

its first official service at Toad’s Place. The venue didn’t faze the launch team, which was used to playing nightclubs and bars back in Europe.

Some of the musicians were friends with the sound technician at Toad’s, and its location made it accessible to students and residents alike. Things fell into place.

On that morning a troupe of traveling musicians, short on money and experience, opened the doors of Toad’s to hundreds of people waiting outside. The spectacle might have brought to mind the words of an original City Church worship song, adapted from the Psalms: “Lift up your heads, O ye gates / Open up, ye ancient doors / Yeah.”

Reporters had shown up. The New Haven Register ran a cover story on City Church the next day. Christian Broadcasting Network picked up the story, then CNN, then USA Today.

Everyone was spreading the word.

“That was a moment when we realized that God was doing something,” Kendrick says. “God was breathing on our meager efforts, and He was doing something profound, that was far beyond what we could’ve orchestrated or planned.”

“IF GOD’S GONNA SHOW UP IN TOAD’S, HE’S GONNA SHOW UP IN TOAD’S, AND HE DEFINITELY DID THAT DAY.” SINCLAIR WILLIAMS ’17

City Church, which usually meets at Co-Op Arts and Humanities High School just a few blocks from Old Campus, has seen hundreds of members join since then.

Last year, they opened a new location in Bridgeport, Conn. On Oct. 5, they will hold a launch service for City Church of Meriden, a town just 20 minutes away by car. City Church plans to open two new congregations next year. The pace of growth shows no signs of abating.

Kendrick’s something of a Christian Johnny Appleseed. “I’m more optimistic than ever,” he says. “I think this region is primed for a real move of God’s spirit.”

The spirit moved Sinclair Williams ’17 to be baptized at Toad’s

three days after first arriving on campus. He had been putting it off and never got around to it over the summer, which he had been “kind of bummed about.”

That day, Kendrick explained to the congregation that many people were signed up to be baptized, although everyone was invited to take the literal plunge, whether they were prepared to or not.

Williams was unfazed by the baptismal venue. “People feel like God doesn’t belong in certain places,” he says, “But that’s just not true. God doesn’t care where we decide to put Him; He doesn’t care where we decide to keep him out of. He does what He wants. If God’s gonna show up in Toad’s, He’s gonna show up in Toad’s, and He definitely did that day.”

STAYING THE COURSE

“What’s up guys! We’re going to stand up and worship God in all of His glory.” Ryan Campbell ’16, dressed in jeans and a tee, begins strumming a guitar and singing into the mic.

Around a 100 people rise to their feet inside of LC 101, the pedestrian lecture room transformed into a place of worship. A band plays onstage, backlit by golden Christmas lights. Song lyrics are projected onto a screen with a sunset background: “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain / Worthy is the King who conquered the grave.” The music ceases and Campbell says a prayer.

People mumble amens as his voice becomes excited; some snap in affirmation. When Campbell closes, the lights come on, and the Yale students who have assembled are invited to stay afterwards for refreshments and schmoozing.

I have come to Rooted, Yale Faith and Action’s weekly prayer meeting. Once held in a seminar room, it’s since moved to a lecture hall to accommodate the growing number of attendees. More people than usual have shown up to their first meeting of the year, many of them freshmen having their first taste of religious life at Yale. The message delivered by YFA ministry fellow Chris Matthews doesn’t beat around the bush.

“Odds are,” he tells the freshmen, “You’ve encountered something in the past few days that was a compromise of what you knew to be right.”

He refers students to the example of Daniel, who never deviated from Jewish custom in spite of Babylonian captivity, extracting seven points from the famous Old Testament story. “Point #6: We must labor to impact the culture around us.”

That may as well be an abbreviated mission statement for YFA. The organization’s tag line is “Developing Christian leaders to transform culture.” The group, one of eight Ivy League iterations of parent organization Christian Union, aims not only to forge Christian community but also to encourage students to SEE FAITH PAGE 8

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Becoming conscious of your breath

Inhale and exhale ten times. All the stress will fade.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND DISORIENTATION

LEARNING TO PLAY THE FOOL // BY SOPHIE MENDELSON

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

Last August, I stepped out of the airport in Chiang Mai and realized that through all my preparations to study abroad — all the required readings and mandatory pre-departure meetings, vaccinations and State Department registrations, the shopping and the packing—I had forgotten to think about what it would feel like to actually be in Thailand.

The thick, humid night made me feel drunk. Exhausted from 25 sleepless hours of travel, I walked off the plane on autopilot. Past the blushing customs officer who called me “my angel,” through baggage claim, and into a waiting room where a woman from the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute (my study abroad program) greeted me with a necklace of fresh flowers. Woozy and numb, I followed her out of the airport and into the back of a converted red pickup truck with benches welded into the bed.

The woman spoke to the driver.

Through the static in my brain I registered that this was what Thai sounded like. As the truck shuddered into motion, the woman told me how to find a bank the next morning, where to buy water, and at what point in the next few days I would be delivered to my host family. I nodded and smiled — and forgot everything she said. She dropped me off at the Mountain View Guesthouse and, alone in my room, I felt the magnitude of this place’s foreignness wash over me.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and admitted to myself for the first time that I was scared.

Throughout my time at Yale, I have attended numerous “orientations” — for classes, for jobs, for campus sexual climate, for leading a student organization. The University takes great care to ensure that its

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 5

students know how to navigate the many resources and potential pitfalls that accompany the college experience. This is what you need to do to meet your distributional requirements. This is what sexual consent means. This is how to register with the Student Employment Office, or contact your personal librarian, or locate KBT. Yale supplies us with endless maps and teaches us how to read them.

But there is no map for studying abroad. In his essay “Why We Travel,” Pico Iyer writes that travel “whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head.” When I first arrived in Thailand, I didn’t know how to cross the street. I didn’t know what any of the food for sale at any of the street carts might be, or how likely or unlikely it was to make me sick. I didn’t know about lèse majesté laws or how to tell if something was expensive.

In an email home, I wrote, “I feel like a giant pair of eyeballs, looking and looking and looking. I wish I could open my eyes wider so that I could take in more at once.”

In Thailand, I was a child again. I showered when my host family told me to (at least twice a day), wore the clothes they instructed me to wear (never skirts when it’s raining), and ate when and what and how much they thought I should (if you don’t eat rice, it doesn’t count as a meal). On weekends, I would pile into the family car with my host parents and sister, not knowing where we were going or how long we’d be gone. I learned to trust that my host family would take care of my needs, which I came to realize were far more basic than I’d ever thought. I let myself float along in the current of their lives, all pretense of steering and navigation

HAMDEN FARMERS MARKET

Town Center Park // 11 a.m.–3 p.m.

Get into that seminar by bribing your professor with fresh produce.

abandoned.

While relinquishing control was often frustrating, I found that not having it was, in a way, liberating.

Not only did I feel like a child, but I was free to act like one. I asked question after question, like a child, in my child’s vocabulary. My host parents sat with me each evening and helped me with my Thai homework.

My naïve mistakes were forgiven.

I ate what my host parents chose for me, letting me try foods that I never would have known to sample. “We travel … to become young fools again,” Iyer writes. Disoriented and decontextualized, bumbling and eager, that is just what I was.

WHEN YOU ARE STUDYING ABROAD, YOU ARE LEARNING WITH EVERY CELL IN YOUR BODY. In college, we don’t often let ourselves be fools. To apply for internships, to get into seminars, to take on leadership roles in extracurricular activities, we sell ourselves as capable, expert and assured — anything but foolish. There is a lot to be gained from a confident bluff. Faking it ’til you make it can sometimes help you make it. But there is also something lost. You don’t get to ask questions like a child when you have to present yourself as someone who knows how things work. You don’t get to learn like a child, either.

This is one of the unparalleled values of studying abroad. In a foreign country, you can try something

new and fail, and try something else new and fail, and try something else new and fail again. And that is okay.

Nobody expects anything else from you, because you are a foreigner and don’t know how things work. For Yalies, steeped as we are in expectations of success, this can be freeing. For me, it meant that when a village farmer walked out of the kitchen with a bowl of steamed crickets and offered me one, I said yes, and washed it down with the swig of rice whisky he offered me next. It meant that when my host mother asked me to sing a Thai folk song in front of all of my classmates, I practiced with her every night until the performance. I forgot the words halfway through and she teased me for days afterward.

I became comfortable with these risks, and the more I was willing to risk, the more — in terms of learning, relationships and experience — I stood to gain.

My study abroad program billed itself as an “experiential learning” program, and so my classes were designed to encourage this kind of nurtured risk-taking, prioritizing cultural and interpersonal interactions over classroom learning. In addition to reading about political and environmental challenges faced by people throughout Thailand, we held community meetings in different villages and asked them about their experiences. We lived with them in their houses and worked with them in their fields. If we didn’t play the fool and ask the most basic questions, we didn’t learn anything.

There was no textbook to fall back on, no Wikipedia entry. So I learned to inhabit my own cluelessness, to bear my own blundering and laugh at my ineptitude. I stopped trying to tell people about things and learned,

instead, how to ask, and how to listen.

While my particular program emphasized this kind of skill, I don’t think you need to study with an experiential learning program to access it. As Iyer says, travel — any travel — puts us in “a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed.” Rather than orientation, travel provides us with the lesson of disorientation.

I’ve had people tell me that they’d love to study abroad but won’t because they can’t imagine giving up a whole semester at Yale. I try to be patient with this perspective. Yale is a unique institution, with incredible resources on offer. It is hard to be away from extracurriculars that you find rewarding and friends that you love. But in comparison to the opportunity for learning and growth that studying abroad offers, one semester at Yale feels insignificant. When you study abroad, you are learning with every cell in your body — because you want to, and you have to. There is no amount of pressure or incentive that can create a parallel situation back in New Haven. As for those extracurriculars, they will be there when you get back. And if those friends of yours are worth loving, they will encourage you to go, support you while you’re gone and welcome you back with all the warmth and enthusiasm they can muster.

That first night in Chiang Mai, I was scared. I was exhausted. I was alone. I was disoriented. But that’s the thing about disorientation. It removes the filter, changes the angle.

For the first time, I saw the world through open eyes.

Contact SOPHIE MENDELSON at sophia.mendelson@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Binging Battlestar Galactica

All your worries seem insignificant when compared to possible extinction of humanity.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND ARTS

ROAMING THE ROMAN EMPIRE // BY GAYATRI SABHARWAL

//KATHRYN CRANDALL

Showcased in a spacious room with orange-tinged red walls, “Roman in the Provinces: Art on the Periphery of Empire” has a pristine aura to it. Organizationally precise and self-explanatory, the exhibit has different sections, each telling the story of Ancient Rome. The neat structure of the exhibit warmly introduced me, the uninitiated observer, to the complex society of the Roman Empire. But “Roman in the Provinces” avoids the typical narrative of the Empire, describing Rome’s dining and hospitality culture, popular furniture styles, technology, politics and religion, but emphasizing the subtle but distinct cultural nuances of the different regions that made up

the Empire.

The exhibit cleverly employed textural and chromatic elements to give the viewers both a broad and a close-up look at Ancient Rome. “Mosaic with Personifications of Wealth and Pleasure,” a piece depicting Romans at leisure, along with other paintings on plaster and on limestone, gives a bohemian touch to the description of Rome’s society. The unfinished texture of the items invokes ideas of a potentially great Empire still in development.

Other sections of the exhibit showcase Roman dining and seating areas. Aside from flaunting the at once elegant and flamboyant nature of Roman taste, these

areas offered a commentary on the socio-economic structures within the Empire. For instance, the description accompanying the seating area informed the viewers that women usually “sat or reclined on benches below those of their male companions.”

Further, the quality of hospitality offered to guests was an indicator of the particular household’s social standing. The more refined the meat served and the more lavish the dining room setup, the higher the household’s position on the ladder.

“Roman in the Provinces,” while depicting trade and transport, attempts to offer the viewer a broader perspective. A map with the Empire’s major trade routes is

on display. The well-connected networks suggest an advanced transport system, which facilitated what seemed to be a burgeoning trade market. Adding to the sense of cosmopolitanism, the exhibit also features several depictions of Julia Domna — a beautiful Syrian-born empress.

These depictions took the form of Greek inscriptions about her and a doll head. Her importance, despite her foreign identity, was made clear by the space and the veneration dedicated to her in the exhibit.

The smaller items on display give more intricate and specific depictions of the Empire. These include coins, stones, vases, candlesticks, tumblers, cups, double

headed bowls and jewelry items such as bead necklaces. Walking through this section of the exhibit was akin to exploring a presentday flee market in a small town; I felt almost felt an urge to negotiate a price for some of the pieces.

“ROMAN IN THE PROVINCES” AVOIDS THE TYPICAL NARRATIVE OF THE EMPIRE. The center of the exhibit dis-

plays heads — a portrait of a woman, a portrait bust of a man in a toga, a portrait of an intellectual, and a portrait of an official, among others. The faces of the “Humans of the Roman Empire” — if you will — add a sense of completion to “Roman in the Provinces.” These people — not of the highest or the lowest classes — were those involved in the large-scale trade of these sorts of goods across the Empire.

The Roman Empire, though great and mostly remembered for those on the highest rungs, was really made up by common men and women.

Contact GAYATRI SABHARWAL at gayatri.sabharwal@yale.edu .

// BY JANE BALKOSKI I sold all my DS books. I knocked them from my shelves, put them in a box, and then sweated and gallumphed my way from Farnam to the bookstore.

This was May of my freshman year. New Haven was already sticky and sunny and I thought to myself — I will never read these books again. I am not some bourgeois brat who wants to build a library. The books would burden me, I knew. They’d remind me of myself, my needs and wants and bad decisions. Already, they hissed in the hot, night air — you’re like us, Jane: You occupy space. And you’re accountable for the space that you occupy. I was 19, ready to be free of freshman year, and so I sold them.

In the Beinecke this morning, books did indeed remind me of myself and of my body. “Reading English: An Exhibition Celebrating the James Marshall & MarieLouise Osborn Collection” is an exhibit of tomes and missives and memos that James Marshall Osborn accumulated over the course of his career. The exhibit marks the Osborn Collection’s 80th anniversary.

It’s a scattered, expansive affair, and it dances around a tricky central question — why do we collect these things? Why did Osborn want Victorian cookbooks and Edwardian contracts?

(Also — Why did I sell my DS books?)

On the ground floor, things start off simple. In two large glass display boxes, James Marshall Osborn’s life is laid bare, reduced to some letters and doodles and portraits. An investment advisor from Cleveland,

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 5

Osborn turned to English Literature at 26, when he enrolled in Columbia’s graduate program.

At Columbia (and later, at Oxford and Yale), he befriended a bevy of big-name writers and theorists, from Robert Penn Warren to Maynard Mack. These fragments of Osborn’s life — captioned and neatly arranged — are astounding. They’re shards of a mirror, reflecting the smallest, private slices. (“Dear Jim — Your cheery letters […] arrived just in time the other day to deflect me from a suicide attempt,” in an unsigned letter from a friend) Just a few inches from Robert Penn Warren’s letters, the pamphlet “How to Look at a Cow” is particularly poetic. (When he died in 1976, Osborn was also a respected dairy farmer.) While no exhibit can sum up a life, sure, “Reading English” gets pretty close.

THE LABELS ARE USELESS AND REDUCTIVE - HASHTAGS WHEN HASHTAGS WEREN’T FUNNY. But on the second floor, where the marble glows orange, Osborn disappears. Instead, his collection stands alone, and it falters a bit. The books and manuscripts on display don’t fit a discernible narrative. They’re not grouped by chronology or geography, materials or acquisition dates. In theory, I suppose, they’re clustered

by theme, but the themes range from “annotated books” to “violence” to “Sir Thomas More.”

The labels are useless and reductive — hashtags when hashtags weren’t funny.

Of course, when a collection itself runs the gamut, the curatorial work is especially tricky.

Osborn didn’t seem to have had a goal. (I tried a six-degreesof-separation exercise with the Venerable Bede’s Expositio in Lucae and hunting horn music from the 17th century. I failed.)

In other words, the curation is shoddy but necessarily so. The question, then, remains — why did Osborn piece together this amazing collection? Why did he collect vellum folios and journals and prayer books?

“The books which I happened to buy were simply to read and use, so I was never tempted to collect as an act of acquisition,” Osborn once wrote. I like that distinction. Osborn used books — he did not acquire them.

“Acquisition” is ugly and static but “usage” is a lovely word, full of toil and sweat. “Usage” means my hands get dirty and grow calloused.

Of all the glass cases on the second floor, three are somehow distinct, apart from the rest.

“New Scientific Technologies” and “Inks and Pigments” and “William Butt’s Dye Book.” In these glass cases, books become objects. They’re not just texts, replicable in a Project Gutenberg Web page, some pixels on a screen. The Dye Book, for one, is a hefty tome, a Pantone color chart of yore. (William Butt glued felt medallions along the mar-

//ANNALISA LEINBACH

gins. They’re bright and small as candies.) And in “New Scientific Technologies,” manuscript photos glow in gold and pink and blue, under various spectra of seen and unseen light. In these few artifacts, “Reading English” reveals textual physicality and imperfection, no matter how antiseptic the library feels.

Still, my favorite is neither the Dye Book nor the horn music nor

the short, crumpled letter. My favorite is a book of hours. In it, a bug-sized Saint Erasmus writhes in pain. An ugly, brown machine pulls his intestines from his torso. On the second floor, where the marble glows orange, I look at the little man, squint and press my brow to the glass, and think of my myself and my body. My needs and wants and bad decisions. I think — these books have

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

Contact JANE BALKOSKI at jane.balkoski@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Goodspeed Opera House, East Haddam // 7:30 p.m.

It’s a long way to go for a show, but hey, tradition!

been used. They’re not acquisitions or burdens. They’re objects to touch and to mark and to rip and to soil.

I don’t miss my DS books. I know they’re up on some shelf or in someone’s bag. They’re gathering rips and stains and marginalia.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work It’s on Netflix. RIP.

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND RUSHES

Rush the Tangled Up in Blue Styling Team!

$

// BY ELENA SAAVEDRA BUCKLEY We all know that you can’t be Tangled Up In Blue without being tangled up in blue — denim, we mean, usually overalls. Want to contribute to everyone’s favorite visual phenomenon on campus? Sign up to rush the TUIB styling team!

Make our musicians look as good as they sound!

Rush for these coveted positions will take place in patches of overgrown grass around campus. You will need to prepare an extensive portfolio of your grandparents’ childhood photos, which you should deliver prior to your audition in a 40-year-oldmanila envelope, to assure that your style instincts are partially hereditary. Coffee rings are,

while not mandatory, a welcome addition.

Once you arrive, your audition will start with warm-ups.

Bring a shit ton of wool sweaters you found at Goodwill.

Our senior stylists will then guide you through a typical before-show styling session.

This usually involves: zero planning, floral patterns, “throwing something together” and lots of vibes.

Finally, you’ll take the (wagon) wheel! Wander through abandoned houses of Connecticut to find leather boots worn by time and lingering memories.

Gather accessories, such as bottles of craft beer that will be visible from stage or old belts to be

fashioned into banjo straps. Sit in a room with us while our male members’ facial hair extends to the proper length. This part of the audition can last anywhere from one week to three months.

It’s all good.

Tapping will commence after you knit each member a pair of socks by the light of a campfire and fully understand the lyrics of an Irish folk song, which will be delivered to you by either human or bird. We will mail you our decision, so set up that P.O. box!

Happy tangling, TUIB Styling Team

^Q $ $ Q ^ $ Q

Contact ELENA SAAVEDRA BUCKLEY at elena.saavedrabuckley@yale.edu .

^

Rush the Yale Corporation! // BY MARISSA MEDANSKY Forget those High Street houses — the hottest fraternity on campus rages in Woodbridge Hall. They’re a different (read: better, more exclusive) kind of Greek organization: the Animal House Upon A Hill. Come Friday night, when those other Yale boys down warm glugs of Dubra in basements God-knows-where, the men of Upsilon Kappa pop $129 champagne magnums at a walnut table on Wall.

They swap stories of their conquests, financial and otherwise, and host the same theme party, The Great Fratsby, again and again like in “Groundhog Day.” The brotherhood of the Yale Corporation is strange and exclusive, but Groucho Marx was right. This semester, I intend to do the impossible. My senior year, I’m finally rushing YK. Monday: Headed to J. Press to pick up some new rush looks. For the first round of recruitment, a current member will lead me and the other PCFs (“Potential Corporation Fellows”) through the house. I buy some pants

with a pattern of small frogs.

Tuesday: I wake up beaming. Her Honor the Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut (ex officio) loved the frogs. (She thought they were lizards; I didn’t correct her.) Tonight, I’m supposed to meet someone outside Tomatillo at precisely 8:32.

Wednesday: Last night, at 8:33 p.m., senior Fellow Margaret Hilary Marshall LAW ’76 blindfolded me. I was then led to a basement where Charles Waterhouse Goodyear IV ’80 asked me what character from “Harry Potter” I would be if, like, I could be one. I said Molly Weasley; Margaret Marshall smiled. This morning, I received a letter under my door — sealed with wax, embossed “YK.” Thursday: Mandatory drug test.

Friday: I eat the vomlet for God and for Country but mostly for Upisilon Kappa. That’s brotherhood.

Contact MARISSA MEDANSKY at marissa.medansky@yale.edu .

Rush Rice & Beans! // BY WILL ADAMS

Rush the Silliman Gym!

SAT URDAY SEPTEMBER 6

somewhat better at securing legitimate membership in the Get Fit Club. This is due to the fact that I finally added myself to the Silliman Gym’s panlist. And the panlist was run by the very powerful Silliman Gym President, who has spent his whole life warring against the seductive freshmen fifteen.

These days, when I feel even the slightest urges to exercise, I no longer ignore them. In fact, I rather look forward to entering the Silliman gym. My grip on the door handle as I prepare to enter the gym is now firm and willing instead of loose and reluctant. With a slight smile and a tinge of excitement, I welcome the smell of iron and sweat that greets me when I enter. I come to a conclusion as I feel the weights in my hand and push my hermitic muscles to action: I believe I will stay on the panlist.

15

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0

Edgerton Park // 11 a.m.

Enliven your Saturday with folk music and a commitment to “earth-friendly practices.”

Contact WILL ADAMS at william. adams@yale.edu .

Rush Free Time!

15 0

0

Contact PETER HUANG at peter.huang@yale.edu .

CONNECTICUT FOLK FESTIVAL & GREEN EXPO

? ?

and Call of Duty: Black Ops Appreciation Group (West Chapter).

What I like most about societies is that, unlike so many other clubs, they don’t bombard you with emails all of the time. In fact, I haven’t gotten any emails from any of them at all. So mysterious! Even better are the rush meals: for the past few weeks I’ve been told (not outright, it’s more like a vision I had) to go to Atticus, get some day-old bread, and eat it a crumb at a time as I walk up East Rock. Super mysterious! I don’t want to jinx anything, but I’d go so far as to say that I’ve already made it in a secret society! But secretly. Don’t tell anyone!

// BY HANNAH SCHWARZ

// BY PETER HUANG

While my fellow freshmen have been eagerly and confidently diving into extracurricular activities, I for the life of me could not find the panlist for the Silliman Gym. Coming to college, I had promised myself that I would rush the Silliman Gym and feel proud of becoming a card-carrying member of the Get Fit Club, which numbers among its illustrious enrollment Rocky Balboa, Richard Simmons and sometimes Leonardo DiCaprio.

I wanted to become part of the club’s successful track record. Plus, I had heard that the club was very receptive to members with little exercise experience. My promise to rush the Silliman gym, however, quickly dissipated when I discovered Yale’s smorgasbord of latenight activities (that homework is not going to procrastinate itself) following which I would descend into deep slumber, unwilling to crawl out of my warm bed and waddle into the gym.

Thankfully, I have recently been getting

?

?

?

As a senior, I’m running out of time to get the most of out Yale. That’s why I’m dedicating myself to getting involved in quintessential extracurricular activities. And what could be more quintessential than secret societies? My beginning-of-semester has been jam-packed with rushing these storied groups.

Since I’ve got a lot of gusto, I’m rushing as many societies as I can! But I’m not going for those lofty, historical ones like Skull and Bones or Wolf’s Head.

Instead, I’m opting for the lesserknown societies. Some of these include Spork & Spade, Posh & Scary, Rice & Beans, Snuffleupagus, Age & Disappointment, Wonderland, The Baha Men, Halliburton (West Chapter), Halliburton (East Chapter), Guarini & Clarkson, Moth & Ball, Matzo & Ball

The extracurricular bazaar is like SAE late night. No one wants to go, but most people end up there anyway. Giddy freshmen frolic their way there. The rest of us dread the inevitable and wonder why we do this to ourselves.

For three hours, you and I, freshman and upperclassman, enter into a mutually miserable contract. You surrender all personal space and I ask you questions like, “Do you support women’s rights?” “Do you want to leave your grandchildren a world without polar bears?” “Do you want candy?”

You tell me you’ll come back to my booth to sign up, and say I’m excited to chat more. You’re gone for good, and I don’t even know you, but, here, we major in pleasantries. At its heart, the bazaar is a circus of transactions.

You begin your fulfilling extracurricular journey, and I ensure that my organizational lineage doesn’t die with my graduation.

So went my Sunday afternoon when

// MADELEINE WITT

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Kim Kardashian: Hollywood

There’s no better way to live your life than watch Kim K live hers.

SAT U RDAY SEPTEMBER 6

NORTH HAVEN FAIR

Washington Avenue, North Haven // 10 a.m.

The fair promises that “it’s better than ever with lots to do...” Ominous ellipses included.

my friend, bored of approaching gaggles of freshmen, entered Payne Whitney to putz around, and came out to announce a new extracurricular.

“I saw the Free Time booth,” he said.

“Oh, what’s that?”

He stared at me.

“Hannah, free time.”

Pause. Gears shifting.

“Ohhhhh.”

Free Time doesn’t have a sign-up sheet. It doesn’t spam your inbox with multi-color font emails (WKND: guilty as charged) or “Can’t wait to see everyone in 5 minutes in WLH for our meeting!!!!!” messages. And, most importantly, Free Time understands that you have other commitments. So when you don’t show, don’t worry. Unlike other groups, you won’t pick up your phone to the saccharine text: “We missed you at the meeting tonight.”

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

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Being all about that bass

Destress by imagining yourself at Woad’s being all about that bass, as it were.

PAGE B8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

BORROWING FROM THE BIBLE

//

FAITH FROM PAGE 3 impact culture at large.

Matthews describes YFA’s approach as “strategic.” The placement of the ministry strictly within the Ivy League is strategic. The messages delivered to YFA members are strategic. For example, students in Bible courses divided by class year and gender receive a course packet outlining Christian views of sex and sexuality freshman year and another on vocation senior year to help them adjust to and prepare to leave college respectively. Tori Campbell ’16, Ryan’s sister and a member of YFA, points out that these more practical studies are “the exception rather than the rule.” The lifeblood of the Bible course program are comprehensive analyses of individual books of the Bible.

YFA’s approach is tailored to the presumed intellectualism and hunger for rigor among Yale students.

There’s homework and a hefty amount of theology. “They call them Bible courses,” says Jessica Hernandez ’16, a student leader in YFA. “You’re studying at a high level of intellectual rigor — why not take the same approach to the Bible? You’re no less smart when reading the Bible than when you’re reading your Orgo textbook.”

GOD AND MEN AT YALE

According to the Yale Chaplain’s Office, roughly 25 percent of incoming Yale freshmen from 2013 to 2017 self-report as Catholic, another 25 percent as Protestant of some sort, and 5 percent as “Other” (including Pentecostal, Charismatic, Orthodox, Mormon, among others). But before YFA arrived on campus, Matthews says, only 5 percent of all students were actively involved in any Christian ministry on campus. Now that number is closer to 7 to 8 percent. He adds that these are rough estimates: To be exact, YFA has grown from eight members in Fall 2010 to over 150 currently.

These numbers can’t capture the full nuance of students’ religious persuasions or track any changes of heart they experience midway through college.

University Chaplain Sharon

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 6

Kugler, after conferring with Senior Associate Chaplain for Protestant Life Ian Oliver, commented on these statistics. “The numbers gathered by the Chaplain’s Office about Yale College include a wide range of students,” she told me over email, “From those who are very active in high school in a religious group to those whose affiliation is purely nominal.

It would be interesting to know how many were religiously active through their high school years — it might be much smaller.” She raises a good point: It may not be that so many Christians drop off in college — some of them may never have been all that involved to begin with.

Additional problems beset the gathering of quantified stats.

According to Kugler, the current survey of student religious affiliations is completely voluntary, and just 50 percent of incoming students respond.

Raised in a Methodist household, Cathy Brock ’16 is inclined to list her religious affiliation as Methodist.

But if you asked her what religion she currently practices, her answer would be “none.” Save for church services she attends back in Cobb County, Ga. — often nicknamed “the buckle of the Bible belt,” she says — Brock is no longer involved with Christian life.

“It’s not like I’m too lazy or too busy or I haven’t found a church. I have made the conscious decision that I do not want to be a part of the church anymore,” she says.

She adds that her case is the exception to the rule. Many students may not necessarily have made a conscious decision like her to stop practicing Christianity, citing the demands of the college environment instead.

Some of them, like Hall Rockefeller ’16, may still be religious without seeking involvement in on-campus ministries. She attends Compline, a brief time of chant, worship and meditation housed in a church near campus. While Rockefeller is actively religious in anyone’s book, she doesn’t fall into the 7 or 8 percent that Matthews talks about.

Outside of YFA, Christian life in general appears to be thriving at Yale. “Currently, there are about

19 Christian ministries on campus, with probably more than 30 full-time (or near full-time) staff,” Kugler says. “Yale probably has more resources in Christian group staff and organizations than most other private non-religiously affiliated colleges or universities of similar size and composition.”

“YOU’RE NO LESS SMART WHEN READING THE BIBLE THAN WHEN YOU’RE READING YOUR ORGO TEXTBOOK.” JESSICA HERNANDEZ ’16

Tori Campbell shares Kugler’s opinion and feels a great deal of excitement. “I’ve looked a little bit at this for a paper I wrote on Christianity at Yale last year,” she says.

“This is unprecedented, to have this many Christians at Yale, since the ’30s — people who actively make faith a part of their life.”

But YFA had only a handful of members in its inaugural year.

Four years ago, eight Yale freshmen enrolled in the first Bible study taught by YFA ministry fellows.

Seminary-trained fellows Chad Warren and Chris Matthews systematically led the eight men (there were no women that year) through weekly Bible courses that tackled everything from theology to relationships.

Matthews believes that YFA’s structure and approach have resonated with Christian students at Yale. “How we grew?” he asks. “We have a different model.” He explains: “The Bible course is a new thing. The fact that you could come and have effectively a seminar with a seminary-trained Bible teacher was a new opportunity for people, [which] many students were drawn to.”

Matthews estimates that around 150 Yalies will enroll in YFA Bible courses this semester. This number has not arisen from a vacuum — there’s precedent.

Before Yale Faith and Action there was Harvard College Faith and

Action, before that Princeton Faith and Action. YFA’s parent organization, Christian Union, was started in 2002 by Matt Bennett, who was at the time working at Princeton for Campus Crusade for Christ, now known as Cru. (The Yale chapter is called Yale Students for Christ).

Bennett saw the need for a ministry more specifically tailored to the Ivy League atmosphere and student.

After pitching the idea to Campus Crusade, Bennett struck out on his own. (The specificity of his ministry did not align with Campus Crusade’s national model, according to Matthews.)

From a handful of undergrads at Princeton in 2002, Christian Union has gone on to enroll hundreds of students across the Ivy League in Bible courses. Bennett has dispatched ministry fellows to every Ivy League campus, reaching Yale third in 2010 and culminating with Brown in 2014.

Outside of YFA, there are older student-led ministries on campus, such as Yale Students for Christ, Yale Christian Fellowship, Athletes in Action and Black Church at Yale, among others. Matthews stresses that YFA is not competing with these ministries, but merely enriching spiritual life on campus.

City Church has done much the same thing, reaching a region considered to be irreligious and targeting a specific cohort within it. The plan for a multi-site church is new to the region. Although similar church brands have arisen elsewhere, none has set down roots and flourished in New England the way City Church has. Just like YFA, it has devised a model that is thriving in just the place it shouldn’t be.

DOING IT DIFFERENT

City Church and YFA, one in downtown New Haven and the other at Yale, are tapping into underreached populations: the modern university and the Northeast. Matthews and Kendrick both stress that they have not come to barren regions, that they are not the first, that there is a vibrant array of spiritual options that long preceded them. They are simply bringing in people who otherwise wouldn’t be.

THE BIRTH OF PIPPA MIDDLETON

The groups complement each other. “[The] Sunday morning experience City Church provides is part of the reason it grew so much among students,” Matthews says.

“It’s vibrant. They have amazing musicians, a passionate pastor.” City Church provides something like a counterbalance to the intellectual intensity of YFA. Two ministries show signs of life late in 2010. Since then, both have grown far faster than they had reason to expect. Behind the dimmed lights and dulcet strains of Christian pop rock is a message uniting them both: that a man named Jesus who lived and died 2,000 ago can matter to young people today.

Two ministries diverge. One uses loud music, snappy videos and social media to reach out to the 18–35 yearold cohort. The other offers a dose of rigor and self-discipline; it demands academic investment, encourages fasting, holds morning prayers, promotes the study of theology.

There is much talk of “revival” in and around these two ministries. One month ago, I received an email from Christian Union’s Matt Bennett inviting me to join him in a 40-day fast to promote revivalist efforts across the nation (I will not be joining him.)

I hesitate to use the word; it’s loaded. Tori Campbell rightly tells me that it has “baggage.” Revival means something definitively dead is now coming back to life. A better word might be “awakening” — stripped of any historical connotations, the capital A’s of the First and Second Great Awakenings. These two ministries are part of an effort not to bring back to life what was dead; rather, they are part of a movement that is touching what lay dormant, rousing what was half-asleep.

If what has been happening in and around Yale’s campus is not a Great Awakening, perhaps it is a stirring from half-consciousness — a fluttering of just-closed eyes, a crossing of the hands in prayer, a population of students swaying, singing and studying the Bible on the floors of lecture halls and dance clubs.

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

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Who cares if we’re not in England? // all day Praise be unto her.

IAN CHRISTMANN,YALE FAITH AND ACTION

Peach Andre

It works for WKND, and it will work for you too.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 9

WEEKEND COLUMNS

DENEUVE THE DEMY GODDESS // BY ALLIE KRAUSE

// AMRA SARIC

“What is it like to be hailed as the most beautiful woman in the world?”

“It’s not something I live with, you know. I think it’s something that’s a nice compliment.”

These are the charming words of my most fervent girl crush, Catherine Deneuve. Graceful, elegant and timeless, French actress Deneuve has successfully navigated the waters of the film industry for decades, avoiding the scandal or obscurity that so many others fall prey to.

One of the Nouvelle Vague movement’s shining icons, Deneuve is celebrated for her beauty and versatility. She has starred in everything, from Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour” as a married housewife who turns tricks in the afternoon, to François Truffaut’s “Le Dernier Métro [The Last Metro]” as the wife of a theater director protecting her Jewish husband during the Nazi occupation of Paris.

My personal favorites are her collaborations with director Jacques Demy and composer Michel Legrand, and in particular “Les Parapluies de Cherbourg [The Umbrellas of Cherbourg].”

The film is a grand musical experiment.

Every line is sung in the manner of an opera, with all the music composed

by Legrand. Though the style might imply silly romanticism, “Parapluies” is a bittersweet reflection on when love isn’t, in fact, able to conquer all. It’s sad, wise and completely beautiful.

[Warning: spoilers ahead!] In “Parapluies,” Deneuve stars as Geneviève, a young woman deeply in love with a local garage mechanic, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo). Her mother, Mme. Emery (Anne Vernon), owns the local umbrella shop and is desperately in need of money.

Wealthy diamond merchant Roland Cassard (Marc Michel) walks into their lives and promptly falls for the beautiful Geneviève. Still, Geneviève only

ALLIE KRAUSE HER GRACE’S TASTE has eyes for Guy, but with the conflict in Algeria, he is drafted into the army for two years. Though they promise to love each other forever, she is disheartened when Guy only writes to her once in two months. She then discovers that she is pregnant with Guy’s child. Several months later, Cassard proposes to Geneviève, offering to marry her anyway and raise the child as his own when he learns of her pregnancy.

Guy eventually returns to the town and learns of Geneviève’s marriage and departure from Cherbourg. In his depression, he turns to drink, a habit that gets him fired from the garage.

Eventually he is rescued by Madeleine, a woman who cared for his late aunt and who had secretly harbored a love for Guy for many years. The last scene of the film, a chance encounter between Guy and Geneviève, is incredibly poignant and masterfully executed. [Spoilers over.]

Though it can take a little time to accept the lack of spoken dialogue in “Parapluies,” you quickly accept the conceit and embrace the visual and musical splendor of the film. The opening credits, which feature a bird’s eye view of perfectly choreographed pastel bikes and the titular umbrellas on a rainy day in Cherbourg, are frequently acclaimed as some of the best of all time. Brilliantly, title designer Jean Fouchet uses the cobbles of the street as a grid that guides the typography. The main theme, a duet sung by Guy and Geneviève, is among the most beautiful I’ve ever heard. It’s no sur-

prise that “Parapluies” was awarded the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Deneuve, Demy, Legrand and Fouchet were reunited in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, which also starred Gene Kelly as a lost American composer and Deneuve’s superbly talented, illfated older sister Françoise Dorléac as her twin. Though less well-known, and a drastic change in tone from “Parapluies,” the film is an effervescent confection of sherbet colors, accompanied by a spectacular score and choreography.

In “Demoiselles,” Demy evokes a new world elevated far above the mundane, charming in its absolute romanticism.

Deneuve’s most peculiarly odd, yet delightful, role in a Demy-Legrand production, however, is her titular turn in “Peau D’Âne [Donkey Skin].” To better understand what I mean, I suggest watching “Le Cake D’Amour.” It’s the best-known sequence from the film, in which Peau D’Âne — who is a princess in disguise escaping her father who seeks an incestuous marriage — bakes Love’s Cake for a Prince who has fallen in love with her, and she him. The film is about as strange as it sounds, but with the willful abandonment of reality, it really is rather enjoyable. Charles Perrault’s fairy tale princess might seem too light a role for Deneuve, but she brings an adult sensibility with her sweetness.

Whether playing a donkey skin-clad escapee or a woman in Nazi-occupied France, Deneuve is undeniably dazzling. Now, at 70, she is absolute proof that it is possible to age beautifully even while continuing to churn out new material every year.

“You were blessed then?”

“Quite.”

Contact ALLIE KRAUSE at alexandra. krause@yale.edu .

A Tsunami of Tanks Sweeps New York STEPHANIE TOMASSON PUSHING THE PALETTE KNIFE New Yorkers have a new reason to look up. The American artist, filmmaker and activist Mary Jordan, has commissioned 57 acclaimed artists and innumerable New York City public school children to transform water tanks, fixtures of the city’s skyline, into works of art.

The project aims to use art as a form of social intervention to draw awareness to the global water crisis. The installation will be accompanied by a variety of street-level events ranging from educational programs and public tours, to social media activities and a symposium for fresh views on global water issues. The Project is a product of Jordan’s Word Above the Street, a non-profit organization that combines art and advocacy with a special focus on environmental awareness.

Jordan was inspired to launch the Water Tank Project while making a documentary in Ethiopia in 2007, where she noticed the extent of the country’s water shortage.

The project uses waterthemed graphics to convert symbols of an abundance that is often taken for granted into powerful reminders of the the shortage that affects one-fifth of the world’s population (1.6 billion people). Each American uses about 100 gallons of water per day, while the average sub-Saharan African uses two to five gallons. This dichotomy makes New York City, a place insulated from the crisis itself, the perfect location for a reminder. What’s more, Jordan reminds the Project’s viewership that water scarcity is a universal issue affecting people from all seven continents, many who may now find themselves in New York.

The project’s artistic cohort boasts household names including pop-artist Ed Ruscha, multimedia artists Jeff Koons and Lau-

// AMRA SARIC

rie Simmons, sculptor Maya Lin and photographer Terry Richardson. But the project also calls attention to emerging artists, including public school children whose work was selected by competition. All of the tanks, standing 12 feet tall by 13 feet wide on top of some of the city’s tallest buildings, provide massive threedimensional canvas space across which the printed vinyl works are stretched. Whether you’re on

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 6

the sidewalk or 42 floors up, the pieces are impossible to ignore. In planning, Jordan referred to the large and ominipresent tanks as “a museum waiting to happen.”

The first four works are already on display in SoHo and Chelsea with the promise of 96 more to be installed throughout the following months. On August 21st, Laurie Simmons’s “The Love Doll/Day 24 (Diving),” an image of a young woman plunging into

PILGRIMAGE

England to America // The depths of the night On this day in 1620, the Pilgrims came to AMeRiCa #bless

a pool with eyes open and pale skin, appeared on West 28th Street and 10th Avenue. The canvas features a figure that oscillates between human and doll — the real and the imaginary. She seems to throw her body deeper into the water, but expresses discomfort and even pain from it.

Simmons offers a poignant commentary on water as both a necessary and under-appreciated resource. Too much water, not

too little, is this figure’s downfall. Blocks away, Sigrid Calon’s graphic tank boasts bright red water droplets that seem to fall with venom as they wrap their way around a structure on West 25th Street in the heart of Chelsea. These droplets’ implied force and aggressive color call to mind the potentially disastrous repercussions of heavy or acidic rain.

Lorenzo Petrantoni’s SoHo tank, “Water Means Life,” a patterned

reinterpretation of a conch shell, provides a whimsical take on water’s aesthetic history.

The Water Tank Project lies at the intersection of art and advocacy. I look forward to seeing the tangible outcomes that arise from the combination of Jordan’s museum in the sky and activism on the sidewalk.

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

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Doing you and being you

“And that’s what it’s all about!”

PAGE 10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND CAMPS

FOR CHILDREN, KESEM BRINGS MAGIC // BY LILLIAN CHILDRESS

I’ve never heard someone tease out a single week and identify it as the most meaningful week of their life. So this week, when not one but four people told me unanimously that working at Camp Kesem was the most special, most fulfilling week they had ever lived, I began to discover that this camp is, well — more than a camp.

Jayne Flynn ’15 waves her arms and raises her eyebrows up and down as she enthusiastically tells me about working at Kesem. “It consumes my life now and makes me happier than anything in the world,” Flynn says.

Camp Kesem was founded in 2000 at Stanford University to give kids who have a parent who either has, is in remission from or has been killed by cancer the opportunity to “just be kids,” explains Cortney Lebeda, Camp Kesem Program Director for Yale.

Over 3 million children in America have a parent who has struggled or is still struggling with cancer, and, according to Lebeda, Kesem has expanded into 63 chapters since its founding.

In the past summer, over 4,000 kids attended various branches of Camp Kesem throughout the country.

Flynn initially developed an interest in Kesem after her sister worked at the Stanford branch of the camp as an undergraduate. When Flynn contacted the Camp Kesem national office her sophomore year, she was surprised to learn that two Yale seniors, Amanda Murray ’14 and Danna Moustafa ’14 had already begun applying for funding to start a Camp Kesem at Yale.

By spring of 2013, Flynn, Murray and Moustafa had gotten the organization approved, sent out applications to create a board and received a Livestrong grant to start funding. This summer, Yale hosted its first camp.

Kesem means magic in

S U N D AY SEPTEMBER 7

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

H e b r e w, explains Flynn.

“The whole point of the week for us is to make magic.

To kind of forget your reality at home and go into this camp reality where you’re singing and dancing and laughing the whole entire time. We never explicitly say the word ‘cancer’ at camp.” *** Flynn, Murray and Moustafa, started recruiting board members and counselors in the spring of 2013. They ended up recruiting 22 counselors — whom Flynn describes as people who would never be friends with each other in Yale culture otherwise — from varsity baseball players to members of children’s theater. “We are all each other’s best friends at this point,” Flynn gushes. “The 22 of us had the best time with each other and with these 40 kids.”

In fact, there were so many applications to be counselors that some had to be turned away, and there has been even more interest expressed this year. Flynn says that she’s already had juniors and seniors coming up to her with news that they’ve heard of Kesem and want to know if there’s any way they can get involved.

But while enthusiasm has spread, some of the group’s older members started working for Kesem for personal reasons.

I sit on the lawn of cross campus with Erin Alexander ’15 and Duane Bean ’17, the public relations and marketing coordinators for Kesem at Yale. Bean and Alexander also served as counselors this summer — Alexander for 13-16 year old girls, and Bean

for 6-8 year old boys. I ask if either of them has had experience with cancer in their family.

There’s a moment’s pause.

“My mom has cancer,” Alexander answers, breaking the silence.

“My dad had cancer when I was 10,” says Bean.

Bean says that experience was the real reason he joined Kesem: He would have loved to have something like the camp around at that age. Bean and Alexander say that they had not even known how some of their peers’ lives had been affected by cancer until the “empowerment” ceremony, which took place on the Wednesday night of camp.

Empowerment is the only time during the week where cancer is deliberately brought up — a night where campers pass around a ball of yarn, and, as it unravels, each has the opportunity to share their story.

“It was an emotionally moving experience, but it was something that I’ll take away with me — hearing all the counselors’ stories, the kids’ stories, being supported by everyone around you — it was one of the greatest feelings I’ve ever experienced,” Alexander said.

Although Alexander initially thought that the kids would be reluctant to open up, she says around three quarters of them shared their stories that night.

Laura Brink ’15, co-director of the camp with Flynn, said she was surprised how much the

children were able to share, despite some of them being of a young age — Kesem’s youngest campers are six years old.

She describes being taken aback by one preteen boy — a kid who was always running around and cracking jokes — who showed a deeply reflective side at the ceremony as he spoke about dealing with his father’s cancer.

“This boy was 10 times more mature than I’ll ever be,” says Brink. *** Flynn stresses that the main focus of the camp is not necessarily “helping” kids but rather providing them companionship and a loving support network. Besides the Wednesday empowerment ceremony, the atmosphere resembles any other camp, with singing, dancing, laughing and games. In the mornings, campers choose between a shifting schedule of dance and drama, sports, arts and crafts, and outdoor activities. In the afternoon, there are campwide events like a carnival, a lake day, and slip and slide. At night, people gather for a campfire or talent show.

Each camper — and counselor — chooses a “camp name” to further facilitate the “escape from their home reality,” as Flynn describes it. Flynn’s own camp name is “Trex” — a name she received due to her brother’s comments that she runs in the fashion of a T-rex. The counsel-

ors a n d c a m p e rs go by the imagined names throughout the week, ranging from “Spike” and “Attack” to “Airplane” and “Little Rascal.” In fact, Yale students involved with Camp Kesem use the camp names throughout the year — when I told Flynn that I was interviewing Alexander and Bean later in the day, she asked me if I meant to say Cedar and Jade.

“WE NEVER EXPLICITLY SAY THE WORD ‘CANCER’ AT CAMP.” Brink says that Yale’s Camp Kesem has no problem finding counselors or campers — there were 10 kids on the wait-list this past summer who weren’t able to attend — the real problem is finding funding. The camp is offered free of cost to every child, but, as a result, there are around $40,000 in operating expenses that the student-organizers have to cover. The national organization does not provide any funding, so other than the original Livestrong grant, the students are left to fundraise on their own. Efforts have included letter-writing drives, donations from local businesses and even jars set outside of Family Weekend a capella concerts. Flynn says she hopes that they will be able to solicit more funding now that they have established themselves with a successful summer.

But that funding is also impor-

THE MID-AUTUMN (MOON) FESTIVAL

Contact LILLIAN CHILDRESS at lillian.g.childress@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Moonday // Mostly after dark

A time to offer much-deserved praise to the glowing Cyclops of the sky.

tant for Yale’s program to establish itself among those at other colleges. Flynn pointed out that other schools that organize Kesem branches — such as MIT and Duke — have so many campers that they have two sessions of per summer. At Stanford, there are over 120 campers who regularly attend.

Yale’s members aren’t yet aiming for that number — they only planned host to 40 kids this year — but their current goal for the next year is to double the number of campers. Flynn has dreams for many more.

“To only be one year new and already have the campus presence that we do is so exciting for us and hopefully makes our reach more widespread and more influential,” he says, “We want as many people who want to get involved. It’s amazing. and I can’t wait to see how this year goes.” *** At 4:00 a.m. on Wednesday, the loud peal of a telephone ring awakened Brink. She was told that the guardians of one of the eight-year-old girls would be coming to pick her up and bring her to the hospital — the girl’s mother was in critical condition.

“Her mom died that afternoon,” Brink says.

Later in the day, Brink received yet another phone call — the girl was coming back to camp.

“We were all at dinner. We put her stuff away, I’m walking her into dinner, and one of the counselors comes up and picks her up and gives her a huge hug, her whole table comes up and gives her a huge hug, and she’s just happy, happy, happy, a huge smile on her face.”

Brink says she thinks it’s the biggest testament to what Kesem does — that the girl wanted to come back to camp.

“Whale Trail”

Just set sail / with heavy tail, to the bo-oo-tt-om of the clouds!

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 11

WEEKEND MUSIC

SOMETHING TO TELL YOU ABOUT TROYE SIVAN’S “TRXYE”

Soaking Up the End of Summer with Jenny Lewis // BY RACHEL PAUL

// BY CHLOE TSANG Two months ago, actor-turnedYouTube personality Troye Sivan — famous for clips such as “Waxing My Legs with Zoella” and “HOW TO BE COOL” — released a video on his channel called “I Have Something To Tell You…” Given the video’s staggering 1.9 million views, I was immediately interested in just what it was that he had to tell us.

At first glance, I assumed it was a coming out video. YouTube has become a popular forum for Internet celebrities and ordinary people alike to express their innermost secrets to the world. But of course, any true Sivan fan would know he already released his coming out video in August 2013.

After having a minor existential crisis about my devotion to Troye, I pressed play. Sivan, with his signature cheekiness and charm, revealed he had signed his first record deal for an EP that would come out in August.

Just when I thought the actor, YouTuber and recent Teen Choice Award recipient could accomplish no more, Sivan, only 19, showcases his musical prowess through his debut EP, TRXYE. Since he previewed “Happy Little Pill,” the EP’s first track, TRXYE has been highly anticipated. And it doesn’t disappoint.

Sivan’s boyish voice and the album’s heavy synth/electronic influence led me to expect a teenybopper, boy-band vibe. But TRXYE is brimming with deeply mature and dark lyrics, a divergence from the summer anthems normally associated with synth pop. TRXYE succeeded in upending my conceptions of electronic pop music.

The five-track EP begins with “Happy Little Pill,” a melancholic pop anthem, setting the tone for

the entire album. Likening love to an addiction, “Happy Little Pill” demonstrates Sivan’s mature take on the themes of love and loneliness. He sings with a sense of numbness, criticizing the fastpaced and indulgent city lifestyle (“Glazed eyes, empty hearts / Buying happy from shopping carts”), all while entrancing the listener with introspection on the high associated with love.

Next up, “Touch” is a ballad about taking risks. Though slow-moving in the beginning, the song gives way to a dubstepheavy chorus reminiscent of Flume’s remix of Lorde’s “Tennis Court.” “Touch” is about losing inhibitions and doing everything with a sense of conviction.

The music and lyrics of “Touch” combine to reflect the worldliness of a seasoned philosopher with the nervousness of an inexperienced teenager. My favorite song from the EP, “Touch” leaves us with the same takeaway as YOLO, but does so with more poetic flair: “And I need you to trust the lust / We must get past all these rules/ We must choose to reach out and touch.”

A quintessential road trip jam, “Fun” is a more lighthearted song that breaks from Sivan’s introspective lyrics and reminds us that the album was, indeed, written by a 19-year-old. With an up-tempo trajectory, “Fun” evokes the wideeyed youthfulness of a teenage rebel who is looking to let loose, break the rules and enjoy the ride.

In his most personal track, Sivan’s “Gasoline” is a breakup song that possesses all the pain, sadness and longing associated with heartbreak. Here, Sivan flexes his songwriting muscles while making himself vulnerable to the listener.

His voice rings with honesty and

The candidly personal, the retro and the acoustic have dominated music for about a year.

You could say it started with the massive and simultaneous hits “Blurred Lines” and “Get Lucky,” two songs that harkened back to an earlier era with their disco beats and gentle falsettos. Pharrell Williams, mastermind behind both songs, returned to the formula to create “Happy,” which predictably became the most ubiquitous song of early 2014.

Finding the real source of pop’s current obsession with low-fi and low-key requires that we travel even further back: to the deluge of glitzy, futuristic, synth-pop ushered in by Lady Gaga and the Black Eyed Peas and nurtured by the likes of Ke$ha, Flo-Rida and Katy Perry. The reign of techno was so relentless, that somewhere in the long expanses of 2012, I propose, the novelty wore off. People got Auto-Tuned out.

The ensuing pendulum-swing has had a few major themes. Stylistically, hit songs have tended toward the acoustic, the folksy, the funky, the disco-ish and the Reggae-esque. In their lyrics and packaging, stars have chased after a stripped-down, vulnerable image. What the post-Gaga pushback has sought is entertainment that feels organic.

We’re still living in the aftermath. Glance at the top 10 songs in this week’s Billboard Hot 100 and you’ll find that Pharrell’s minimalist funk is enlivened with comic candor in Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” and Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.” Lis-

ten to the Afro-Carribean lilt permeating Magic’s “Rude” and Nico & Vinz’s “Am I Wrong.” Think of Sam Smith’s acoustic smash “Stay With Me” or the flavors of neosoul running through superstar collaboration “Bang Bang.” Left by the wayside are those who refused to evolve — the Britney Spearses and Lady Gagas, clinging to their icy club bangers as current tastes drift away.

It is in this climate that we get “Anaconda,” a song that jumped 37 spots last week, landing at number two and becoming Nicki Minaj’s highest charting single ever. Critics immediately called it an unlikely hit, and, it’s true — Minaj does seem like a holdover from inaccessible, turn-of-theteens excess. But is she really so out of place? “Anaconda” is built around a sample from Sir-Mix-aLot’s 1992 classic “Baby Got Back,” which makes it precisely the sort of nod-to-a-bygone-era that has prompted so many downloads and spins for Robin Thicke and others. Insofar as Minaj candidly and playfully boasts of her impressive derriere, “Anaconda” is precisely the sort of quirky, brazen self-empowerment anthem that vaulted Swift and Trainor to the charts’ upper ranks.

“Anaconda” speaks to the playful throwback jams that currently permeate the charts. But it remains to be seen whether the marketing of Minaj’s upcoming album will also follow larger industry trends: Justin Bieber tried to pitch his last collection as an intimate exchange with fans by naming it “Journals;” Taylor Swift’s new album includes

maturity, bringing out the song’s redemptive quality and emotional value: “Please bathe me now, wash me clean / Just set my heart on fire like gasoline.”

I also commend Sivan for his use of male pronouns in “Gasoline.” Today, few openly gay artists reference the nature of their sexual preference, opting instead for gender-neutral pronouns and ambiguous lyrics. As such, Sivan reveals an openness that resonates deeply in his music.

The EP ends with a remastered version of “The Fault in Our Stars (MMXIV),” a song Sivan wrote in honor of John Green’s eponymous novel. The track’s first line (“The weight of a simple human emotion / Weighs me down / More than the tank ever did.”) beautifully summarizes the emotional and poignant aesthetic of the entire album.

TRXYE is a testament to its artist’s versatility and talent. Sivan masterfully combines his boyish youth and modern touch with a haunting — and, at times, painful — sense of maturity. Sivan’s EP is likely just the beginning of a long and successful venture into the music industry.

// WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

insomnia that, at one point, I didn’t sleep for five straight nights. Many of the songs on ‘The Voyager’ came out of the need to occupy my mind in the moments when I just couldn’t shut down.”

At times Jenny Lewis conjures Carol King with her folksy, wavering voice and storytelling, particularly in track five, “Late Bloomer.”

However, her songs are about the changing and lonely time that is modern young adult life, and her electric guitar riffs lean more toward a grungy angst similar to alternative artists like The Kooks, Weezer and Oasis.

Lewis definitely has a style all her own.

The undeniable shining star of the album is the single “Just One of the Guys.” This song not only rocks in the chillest way possible, but also bares Lewis’s troubled soul. After listening to the subtle, swaying harmonies of the verse, Lewis’s chorus floats to the top and demands attention from the listener.

“No matter how hard I try to be just one of the guys / There’s a little something inside that won’t let me. / No matter how hard I try to have an open mind / There’s a little clock inside that keeps tickin’.”

In “Just One of the Guys,” Lewis speaks to one of the most interesting gender issues of our time. She reveals her feelings in a sincere and non-confrontational way. The idea that a woman feels she needs to become more masculine or deny her feelings to fit in is something I’ve seen in my own life. She then lowers her voice to almost a whisper as she sings a bridge that undoubtedly resonates with many women: “There’s only one difference between you and me: / When I look at myself all I can see, / I’m just another lady without a baby.”

“Just One of the Guys” will be stuck in your head for days and leave you contemplating the challenges of young adult life in unexpected and genuine ways. The star-studded music video (Anne Hathaway and Kristen Stewart make appearances as Adidas-wearing, facial hair-bearing men) is a highly recommended watch. Sit back, relax and imagine you’re lying on an inflatable blue raft in the middle of a pool in California as you soak in “The Voyager.”

Contact RACHEL PAUL at rachel.paul@yale.edu .

// WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Polaroids taken by Swift and a title scrawled in Sharpie; last year, Beyonce released her eponymous album without any promotion and gave a statement which read, in part, “I feel like I am able to speak directly to my fans. There’s so much that gets between music, the artist and the fans.” If you’re wondering whether these marketing techniques relate to pop music’s rootsier sound, consider this: Katy Perry’s “Prism” came with literal seed packets. Albums are now framed as your chance for authentic connection with a celebrity.

We’ll soon see whether Minaj packages her album as a revealing glimpse into the woman behind the constructed persona. Whether she follows the trend or, as she so often has, sets her own.

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

// BY JACOB POTASH

SEPTEMBER 7

// WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Contact CHLOE TSANG at chloe.tsang@yale.edu .

A Discourse on Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” S U N D AY

Jenny Lewis will blow your head out of the water with her new album “The Voyager.”

The first time I heard Jenny Lewis’s muchtalked-about single, “Just One of the Guys,” it was August and I was lying on an inflatable blue raft in the middle of my pool. The California sun beat down on me as the California sounds of this carefree plea wafted from my laptop, which was dangerously close to the edge of the pool. A friend from work had given me a mix of the newest and coolest songs of the summer.

“The Voyager,” the album on which “Just One of the Guys” is track three, leaves listeners tapping their feet, swaying and reflecting.

Lewis comes on strong with the upbeat and punchy chorus of “Head Underwater.” The melody shifts from an unassuming softness to a belted and catchy refrain. Lyrically Lewis revels in uncertainty until she and the music break down, and we are given hope with the lyric, “there’s a little bit of magic, everybody has it.”

Lewis’s lyrics reveal her confidence in her feelings, even when those feelings are that she’s completely lost. Part of this comes from the personal issues Lewis worked through during the making of this album. Rilo Kiley, her band before she went solo, had just broken up. Lewis said in a statement, “After Rilo Kiley broke up and a few really intense personal things happened, I completely melted down.

It nearly destroyed me. I had such severe

// WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

“My lover’s got humor / She’s the giggle at a funeral,” are the opening lines of Hozier’s hit song, “Take Me to Church,” the first song on his eponymous debut album coming out on Sep. 22. The combination of whimsical lyrics composed with a melancholic undertone is shaping up to be Hozier’s musical aesthetic.

This unexpected convergence of themes even has New York Magazine “playing [Hozier] over and over.”

Andrew Hozier-Byrne, known as Hozier, is an Irish-born singer-songwriter who broke into the international music scene in 2013, with the release of “Take Me to Church.” The powerful yet somber song was accompanied by an even more memorable music video that protested the institutionalized anti-gay sentiment in Russia. Over the last year, the video has garnered over eight million views as Hozier’s fan base has spilled over Ireland’s borders onto an international stage.

Because seven of the 15 tracks in his debut album have already been released in two different EPs, Hozier has provided a blueprint of sorts for the songs to come. But he has also given us a glimpse into some of his new

tracks through YouTube or other recording sessions, and the result is not as predictable as one might think. Notable is the third track, “Jackie and Wilson,” which he recorded for a National Public Radio segment earlier this month. “No better version of me I can pretend to be tonight,” he sings accompanied by drums, keyboard, electric guitar and bass. But it is the introduction of two soprano background singers on the chorus that adds a brighter note to the track, deviating from the darker sound we’ve come to expect.

Earlier this summer, Hozier also released a live recording and video for the seventh track entitled “In a Week.” Unlike the more dynamic and controversial video for “Take Me to Church” he keeps it clean and simple for “In a Week,” reflecting the nature of the song itself. This song echoes the more demure tone of Hozier’s previous work, but the addition of another Irish singer, Karen Cowley, softens his moodier vocals. In the video you simply see the silhouettes of Cowley and Hozier as they serenade a single microphone.

While the tune of the song remains acoustic and serene, they sing about a couple dying together, crooning “they’ll find us in a week / when the buzzards get loud … I’d be home with you.” The juxtaposition of the tune and the lyrics is surprising, but it is this unexpectedness that has caused audiences to gravitate toward Hozier.

His upcoming tour through Europe and the United States will run through November, and many of the concerts have already sold out.

He has received praise from acts like Stephen Fry and OneRepublic. And just as recently as this August, Taylor Swift and Victoria Secret model Lily Aldridge exchanged tweets about their love for the new artist.

Hozier’s fame so far has been slow burning, but it’s been steady. From the heavy drumbeat on “Sedated” to the strong base line on “It Will Come Back,” it’s clear that Hozier is playing with many familiar tactics on the new album. The more intriguing question, then, is what he’ll create next.

Contact TRESA JOSEPH at tresa.joseph@yale.edu .

Hozier Goes International // BY TRESA JOSEPH

GRANDPARENT’S DAY

In a loving embrace // All day They had fun before fun had to be verified by Facebook.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Your Friendly Neighborhood Choom Gang To inhale or not to inhale?

PAGE 12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

// JONATHAN RING

AMINATTA FORNA: The Worldly Wordsmith // BY PHOEBE KIMMELMAN

A

writer whose childhood was spent variously in Scotland, Sierra Leone, Great Britain, Iran, Thailand and Zambia, Aminatta Forna truly embodies what it means to be a global author. Though she spent a significant portion of her formative years in Sierra Leone, she was educated in England, first attending boarding school there and then acquiring her law degree from University College London. She has written three novels, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, a memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water, and short stories published in magazines like The Observer and Vogue. She is a professor at England’s Bath Spa University and has served as Williams College’s Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor. Forna’s works, which vary in time and place but consistently focus on the struggles of war and its aftermath, have received many accolades, including features on the New York Times list of Editor’s Choice books. Equally as impressive, her books have been translated into fifteen languages worldwide. Since Forna was awarded Yale’s Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize in March, her professional journey has also brought her to New Haven. WEEKEND gave her a call to talk about her influences and inspirations, the story behind her famous memoir, and the challenges of the writing process. catastrophes, Sierra Leone is much less safe than the UK.

A. I think the most simple and straightforward way that it’s influenced my writing is because it has influenced my world outlook, which is that I have grown up knowing that there are multiple different ways of looking at the same thing and there is no one way of looking at anything.

Q. Do you think that experiencing and witnessing struggle is necessary for good writing?

Q. What has been the greatest source of inspiration from your life on your work?

A. I think there’s the event that triggered most of my writing and thinking, which was the civil war in Sierra Leone. I applied an understanding of the world to a conflict in an African country and it has come out of that and my father, who was a political prisoner in the 1970s. I’ve applied that understanding to all kinds of other subject matter — my last novel was set in Croatia, [so] I looked closely at that war. I think sometimes we’re having world conversations and I try to understand what those different places are. Some people live in a place of safety and some don’t.

I live in both worlds: I live in a place of extreme safety in central London and I spend a lot of time in an unsafe place. I feel safer as a woman wandering around Sierra Leone than wandering around Britain, but when we talk about national level

A. No, I don’t. I think it’s a sensibility. There’s a wonderful essay on witness literature by Nadine Gordimer from which I have drawn lots of inspiration over the years. She has said you do not need to witness these things. If you’re not a writer, no amount of witnessing or experiencing is going to change that.

You might find different avenues, but writing is an act of imagination and that’s the way one should think about it. My experience channels my imagination in various directions.

Q. Why did you decide to write a memoir?

A. I wrote it for my family and my country, really. That’s the short answer. Writing is the way to understand things and I think both memoir and fiction are different forms of literature. We had a civil conflict and [Sierra Leone] was reeling because we’d seen ourselves as a very peaceful nation.

My father had been a political prisoner because he had foreseen what would happen and opposed the dictatorship, and he had the foresight to write it down in a letter to the nation. I wrote my first book,

“The Devil that Danced on the Water,” as a memoir for my country and family so that they could come to [understand] what I had come to understand. Why [did I choose memoir]? Because I am a writer and because I thought it was an accessible form to tell the story. I’m the narrator, but it’s my father’s story.

I’m glad to say it has had an impact in Sierra Leone, and it did open the way to understanding what had happened.

Q. Which themes play the most prominent role across your various works?

A. The main theme in my writing is causality: themes of connectedness of things.

Sometimes when I’m giving a talk, I say the ideas for my book come from a single question, and certainly a question that has occurred throughout all of them is ‘Where do things start?’. Everything starts somewhere, and the overarching theme is causality and interconnectedness, and beyond that trauma and resilience and the idea of resilience as a catalyst of greater emotional empathy.

Q. What do you find to be the hardest part of the writing process in general?

A. Well, it’s all difficult! If it

was easy something would be going wrong (laughs). I think probably the most difficult part is the admission that a piece is not working.

I was having a conversation with another novelist today at the London Library and I told her I had just junked 30,000 words, and she said she once junked 60,000. My stu-

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dents definitely find it hardest to let go of a piece of writing that isn’t working. The moment when you decide to do it is extremely painful, but then you wake up the next morning feeling liberated.

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

SOMETIMES WHEN I’M GIVING A TALK, I SAY THE IDEAS FOR MY BOOK COME FROM A SINGLE QUESTION ...

‘WHERE DO THINGS START?’.

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Q. How has your global perspective influenced your writing?