WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2014

The LESBIAN

“GAY” BISEXUAL TRANSEXUAL QUEER

Ivy?

//By Andrew Koenig, page 3

CRIME

B5

HOW YALE STAFF ARE AFFECTED Marek Ramilo explores beyond the student perspective.

CHANCE

B6, 7

CUISINE

B9

THE BLINDEST DATE

DO YOU WANT TO START A BUSINESS?

WEEKEND read your submissions. Now it’s time for you to play Cupid.

J.R. Reed and Hannah Schwarz see if Yalies really can serve it up.

PAGE B2

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

fLeXtInG ;) // BY LUCIE LEDBETTER

There’s flirting, and there’s texting, and there’s flexing, and then, there’s flexting. Flexting, not unlike flexing, in that it is a display of muscle power (finger muscles, naturally), is the love child of flirting and texting.

In the simplest possible definition: flirty texting. The term flexting entered my vocabulary the other day as my friend anxiously checked the time stamp of his most recently sent text to a potential romantic interest. 8:35, fuck. My friend had, he dejectedly explained, sent his last “flext” at 7:52, 40 minutes after he had received a flext (7:12, post-meridiem), which meant that it had been 43 minutes with nothing. No banterladen retort, no emoji, no hope.

However, we deemed this duration acceptable for the following reason: My friend himself had waited only three minutes less than his flexting partner had thus far waited before replying, and so, perhaps this potential romantic interest

was feeling the need to surpass my friend’s response-resistance time. This theory, however, would be blown if a text were not received in the next halfhour. That exorbitant amount of time would be beyond reason, and there would be no hope at romance, friendship or, perhaps ever flexting again.

Unfortunately, he sighed, these are the realities of flexting (now officially coined). It also came up over the course of our conversation that my friend was not entirely sure his flexting partner was “available.” How many people was he flexting?

Was my friend one of many?

Filled with self-doubt and emojis on the tips of his fingers, my friend shoved his uncracked iPhone five into his pocket and groaned. You’d be a fool to think that flexting is easy.

And there is not simply one kind of flexting. Oh, no. There are three. Flexting with someone old, flexting with someone new and flexting with someone

borrowed (N.B., no one likes to flext with someone blue). To complicate his situation even further, my friend did not know with whom he was flexting and thus what category his flexting relationship fell into. Yes, someone new, but someone borrowed too? Someone off the official dating market, but on the flexting game? It was unclear, and thus my friend, a self-proclaimed pro-flexter, was thrown off, anxious, and lacking his usual flexting confidence.

WHEN IS IT APPROPRIATE TO SEND THE FIRST FLEXT? Flexting with someone borrowed is complicated, and really just not acceptable. But, because our phones aren’t our lips, or our

Yale Sucks—I Miss Madrid // BY SEBASTIAN MENDEZ

“Was it incredible?” “Did it change your life?” “Did you find yourself?”

Sure! My semester abroad experience was unforgettable, but I certainly didn’t “find myself” in the way that pop culture dictates. Maybe I didn’t change much because I’ve been lucky enough to have traveled since early childhood, but in reality, it was probably due to my newfound madrileño lifestyle. The gamut of Amsterdam City tours, lazy nature walks with Spanish families and endless nights on the dance floor of Teatro Barceló did not make for a “new me.”

Actually, I only came back to Yale more lost than before.

Returning to Yale was like being drenched in ice-cold water: It was a return to a workcentered life, a wake-up call after an extended night’s haze.

But, much like the shock of shivering after such an experience, I had trouble re-adjusting. My work ethic was lost. Bad habits that I had acquired abroad lingered longer than usual (long cigarette drags go here). In the end, UCS and the study abroad advisors were quick to highlight how to adjust to life in a new country. They left out the part of how you re-adjust when you come back.

Most people assume the hard part of coming back is being confronted with all that you missed out on when you were away: “Do you feel left out?” they ask, or “Aren’t you mad that you missed X?” (Insert glorified Yale spring 2013 moment here). It was something I hadn’t necessarily prepared for while in Madrid, because I was constantly creating my own experiences to take the place of Yale ones.

During midterms, I stayed up for 24 hours during a street festival in Valencia. The same day as Spring Fling, I was surfing off the coast of Lisbon. However, these substitutive experiences were meaningful only as long as I was removed from the Yale bubble. Once I returned, those moments were reduced to merely funny anecdotes that I shared with others, their original luster fading as my friends could

F R I D AY JA N UA RY 1 4

appreciate, but could never fully understand.

This disconnect only widens as time passes at a place like Yale.

Regardless of my experiences, the Yale frame of mind staunchly remained the same. The familiar ruminations of classes, summer plans, who is dating whom, etc. returned and took the forefront, but I was different. As much as I cared about Yale issues while I was here, I felt myself grow less and less attached while abroad, even as I kept up with others on Facebook. It was ultimately alienating — leaving the community I identified with so strongly for an entirely new culture, only to have to return and attempt to embrace that community once again.

So at this point, you the reader might be wondering: Why is it so difficult? Why do people struggle? To give a succinct answer, as one family friend and alumnus put it, “You get off the track.”

By swapping in a dose of worldly perspective for another semester at Yale, you break the continuity of four years, the mindset essential for success in this environment. That shift, combined with the time spent in cultures where “being busy” is not applauded, produces anxiety, loss of purpose and, particularly in my case, isolation. The lack of a shared experience, a common narrative, isolated me from even my closest friends. I sunk into a dark hole that took a semester for me to climb out of, all the while maintaining the façade that everything was fine.

This is not to say that you should rethink your decision to go abroad; on the contrary, I think it injects a healthy dose of reality that can be lacking in the Yale experience. But it’s important to not get lost in the romance of the stereotype.

More often than not, you will not magically find yourself, and returning to Yale will be a challenge. UCS and our study abroad advisers might do well to realize, then, that it’s not the going away, but the coming home part that hurts.

Contact SEBASTIAN MENDEZ at sebastian.mendez@yale.edu .

LA BOHÈME

Schubert Theater // 8 - 11 p.m.

It’s so romantic. It’s like Rent, but in French.

tongues, or … you know … flexting with someone borrowed is, somehow, not considered cheating in our college world. But let your girlfriend catch a glimpse of that smirking emoji you just sent to the chick you sit next to in “The Structure of Networks?”

You’re outta here.

We love to flext, we hate to flext, we love to hate to flext, we hate to love to flext. Last week, I was out to dinner with a friend who had just acquired a new flexting acquaintance. Jumpy and excited to be flexting with someone brand-new, my friend discussed with me proper flexting protocol, which is especially difficult when with someone new; you have yet to gauge their standard response time and banter aesthetic. During our conversation, my friend mentioned a recent piece of advice she had been given on the matter of flexting: When it is appropriate to send the first flext, or the first text for that matter?

The advice she received on the

HARRINGTON

MENDEZ

LEDBETTER

WEEKEND VIEWS

matter was the following: If your happiness is contingent upon whether or not you get a reply to a text, do not send it.

Sometimes a flext is successful, sometimes it isn’t. But if sending a text message (emoji or not) is going to shape the outcome of your day, distract you from your friends, your work or your procrastinating, the appropriate movie is probably to catapult your phone across the room. Valuing your textual flirting success rate over your selfrespect? Let’s not. So the next time you’re debating whether or not to send a flext, ask yourself, would not getting a reply have the potential to ruin your Woad’s? If the answer is yes, leave your phone in your room and get your ass to penny drinks.

Hey, maybe you’ll get some new flexting digitz … Or better yet?

Try having a conversation with someone in person.

Contact LUCIE LEDBETTER at lucie.ledbetter@yale.edu .

For a New StudentAthlete // BY BRENDAN HARRINGTON

Growing up in suburban Long Island, athletics have held a central place in my life for as long as I can remember.

In my hometown of Garden City — the breeding ground for over 100 state and national titles in lacrosse, soccer, field hockey, swimming, football, track and field — the successful student-athlete was viewed a near deity by others.

“Smart and athletic” was one of the best compliments one could receive. It was almost a given that my friends and I would continue to aspire to this ideal beyond high school.

As such, recruiters flock to Garden City each year to craft their Division I and Division III rosters. Many of those chosen attend Ivy League or peer institutions, wearing their team colors passionately for four years both at school and back at home. I remember recognizing high school legends in Riesterer’s Bakery, their new varsity status displayed prominently on their sweatshirts.

It was then a huge point of pride for me when I came to Yale as a member of the lightweight crew team. The opportunity to carry on this hometown ethos seemed perfectly in line with Yale’s core values — the Yale Man (and Yale Woman) pushes himself to be the best person he can intellectually, spiritually and physically, right? Perhaps, but my years here have often taught me otherwise.

What I have found instead is a pronounced lack of respect for the Yale athlete. I know that many on campus are supportive of their athlete peers, especially now that President Salovey — much more friendly to the Yale athletic program than his predecessor — has taken the helm. Nevertheless, the inflated stereotype of the intellectually disinterested, socially segregated student-athlete persists.

Of course, these stereotypes aren’t completely unfounded. They arise not just from the dismissive attitudes of some non-athletes — they’re cultivated, in large part, by students like me.

The attitudes of many varsity athletes on campus only fuel this harmful and disconcerting caricature, and it’s high time that we dismantle it.

Despite this culpability, it is important to address the unfair treatment of student-athletes by their non-athletic counterparts. As someone who participates extensively in both athletics and other extracurricular activities at Yale, I

struggle to understand why the latter is uniformly seen as more honorable than the former.

When I’m rowing on the Housatonic, I’m experiencing the very fulfillment and accomplishment you do when you hit thathigh C in your a cappella solo.

Just as you beam with pride when your Model UN team seals Best Large Delegation, so do I when my crew slides past Princeton to win on their own turf. In both spheres, the hours of disciplined and endless attempts at perfection are suddenly well worth it, and you feel your “reflex of purpose,” as John Tunis puts it, realized.

In the end, we both are putting in the time — the emotionally and physically taxing time — to give us the edge, fulfillment and growth that will remind us why we came to Yale. It’s why, when my teammates and I regrettably but reliably leave Wednesday and Friday night pregames early to prepare for a 6:00 a.m. practice, we hope this similarity isn’t lost on our friends.

But it’s time for the other half to pull its weight. We varsity athletes often blindly play into the very roles against which we protest. It’s true that many of us restrict ourselves socially, congregating in “athlete suites” and the same corner table at Commons. We’re often all too eager to pad our schedules with “Natural Disasters,” “Vikings!” and the like, those time-tested study guides floating around our panlists too attractive to pass up. And, from time to time, we do disparage students at Yale who prefer to spend their weekends in Bass, or who find their excitement in their assigned Nabokov reading.

Ultimately, for the damaging student-athlete stereotype to disappear, we, the athletes, need to be aware of the ways in which we affirm it.

So to all Yale athletes, step up. Strive for the student-athlete ideal, the one you came here to represent, the one I aspired to growing up. Don’t be afraid to wax rhapsodic about your Machiavelli seminar, remembering the “student” in the demanding student-athlete part you came here to play. In doing so, you will remind not only your teammates of this special balance, but also the Yale community as a whole. Let’s hope they take note.

Contact BRENDAN HARRINGTON at brendan.harrington@yale.edu .

WEEKEND ROMANCE TIP: Learn the rules of ice dancing

Nothing’s sexier than knowing how to judge a twizzle.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B3

WEEKEND COVER

A QUEER REPUTATION

// BRIANNA LOO

Her first week at Yale, Rianna Johnson-Levy ’17 was invited to have the “boyfriend talk.” Sitting in the unfamiliar common room of her Farnam Hall suite, she listened on as her suitemates gushed over summer romances and budding crushes, spilling the details of their love lives to one another.

Now it was her turn. Feeling hesitant, Johnson-Levy mulled over her options: She could either satisfy their curiosity and speak candidly, or she could dance around what was, for her, a very sensitive topic. She opted for the latter. When pressed about her romantic history, Johnson-Levy simply replied, “Uh, I was in a relationship over the summer,” and left it at that.

She had reason to be reticent. A queer woman of color, JohnsonLevy didn’t feel ready to divulge her romantic history. Coming into college, she wanted “to do things on her own terms, on her own timeline.”

But Yale wouldn’t wait. The flurry of intimate conversations, dances and freshman traditions accompanying fall semester took Johnson-Levy by surprise, forcing her to make choices about what to share, when to share it and how to share it, with people she hadn’t known for much longer than a month.

When the Jonathan Edwards College Screw took place in October, Johnson-Levy felt the pressure to deviate from the timeline she had envisioned. When her suitemates asked her what kind of person she was looking for, she felt torn between keeping quiet and having an uncomfortable conversation. In the end, she told her suitemates that she didn’t like dances and wanted to go with someone as a friend, again skirting the subject of her queerness.

Johnson-Levy’s queerness only made it that much harder for her to tackle the perennial problem of freshman year: finding an identity and defining yourself for others, while at the same time navigating a foreign environment.

She carefully considered what impression her fashion choices might give off. If she wore a v-neck, she reasoned, people might assume she was queer, which would relieve the burden of coming out to a brand-new set of people outright.

The hardest part, however, was not the pressure to define herself right away and fit the contours of Yale tradition. It was finding others like her.

Even after Johnson-Levy came out to her suitemates, they struggled to find her a date to Freshman Screw in the spring. “Do you want us to find you a queer girl?” she recalls them asking her.

“I can’t find me a queer girl,” she

said in reply.

A native of Ann Arbor, MI., Johnson-Levy grew up with lesbian moms “entrenched in a very liberal community.” In her public high school class of 120, numerous students identified as genderqueer (outside of the gender binary — gender identities other than man and woman) or transgender.

But on Yale’s campus, JohnsonLevy said, she “just [didn’t] see the kind of spectrum of gender expressions that [she] used to see at home.”

The “invisibility” of queer women in particular, she said, stuck out to her. “Lesbians and bisexual queer women are much less visible on campus,” she said. “And it’s not necessarily because they aren’t out.”

Johnson-Levy isn’t alone in her assessment. Taylor Dalton ’14 linked this invisibility to student and institutional forms of recognition.

“I think Yale is accepting of a certain type of gay culture,” she said.

“Gay male cisgender culture. That’s something we’re comfortable recognizing.”

The point resonated with several queer students interviewed for this article, who said the elevated visibility of cisgender gay men — and, more specifically, white cisgender gay men — comes at the expense of other LGBTQ groups at Yale. The “G” looms so large over Yale’s sexual landscape that lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer students are often overlooked.

Alex Borsa ’16, president of the LGBT Co-op at Yale, put the matter concisely: “Yale is the ‘gay ivy’ — but it’s not necessarily the ‘queer ivy.’” *** Every Monday evening, 14 suited men assemble at Mory’s Temple Bar. For three hours, they serenade club members with the familiar harmonies of Yale’s oldest all-male a cappella group. The Whiffenpoofs have upheld this tradition for over a century, and their brand of chummy collegiate polish has become iconic worldwide.

Of the group’s 14 members, a majority are white; around half identify as gay.

The Whiffs present “a very quintessential image … of the white gay Yale man,” Anjali Balakrishna ’14 said. This matters, she explained, because they “are the most visible representation of Yale traveling around the world.”

For many students, Yale’s a cappella scene represents a stereotypical but nevertheless pervasive form of LGBTQ culture on campus. Hilary O’Connell ’14, former president of the Co-op, observed, “I just hear trope after trope about the a cappella gays.”

They (O’Connell prefers the pronouns “they,” “them” and “their”) consider the “a cappella gay” an exclusionary typecast. “When people say a cappella gays they mean men, specifically,” said O’Connell.

“They don’t mean a cappella lesbians, or a cappella bisexuals, or a cappella trans people. It’s a cappella gays and they mean gay men.”

Six LGBTQ students interviewed said the disproportionate visibility of gay men — and the consequent invisibility of other queer groups — stands in the way of recognition.

O’Connell links this problem to an ingrained tendency among students to assign each other labels: “There’s a huge imperative for naming, being named, for being knowable — people are uncomfortable if you are not knowable to them.”

But some acquaintance with the more common of these names is essential to understanding the concerns of the LGBTQ community. For those less familiar with terminology used by the movement, the distinction between “queer” and “gay” may seem fine, but it’s an important one to make: “queer” is at once more political and all-encompassing than “gay,” which describes only same-sex, cisgender tendencies.

Javier Cienfuegos ’15, who was one of only two openly gay males in his high school, said Yale taught him to embrace the term “queer,” even though he used to be very uncomfortable with it.

Commenting on its history, Cienfuegos said, “Queer began as a label of Otherness, and now it’s been flipped on its head.” It carries a political charge. “When people embrace the queer label,” he said, “it’s saying that they reject classification,” whether sexual, social or historical.

Naming, then, which O’Connell said is often used to pigeonhole people, also has the potential to foment political change. A term such as “genderqueer,” for instance, serves as both an identity and a way to question rigid standards, Johnson-Levy pointed out.

But students can be eager to label others based on witnessed behavior rather than verbalized self-identification.

“Sometimes people hold you to a thing that you said or a relationship you’re in, or they saw you hooking up with a person at a party,” Dalton said. “People here are very surprised that [others] can be fluid” about gender and sexuality.

Consequently, students who profess greater fluidity of sexual preference or gender receive diminished recognition, or even outright denial.

According to several students interviewed, “bi-erasure” provides a case in point. “If people see a dude making out with a dude, everyone

presumes to know he’s gay,” Cienfuegos explained. “He might say he’s bi, but people will actively not believe him.”

Though that’s less true of bisexual women, according to Cienfuegos, he believes that other pernicious attitudes are at play. He noted that if people see two girls making out at a party, they might be construed as a “Katy Perry ‘I Kissed a Girl’” scenario — “that, in and of itself, is an erasure.”

The static nature of what Dalton calls “uncomplicated gayness,” which does not oscillate between or go beyond binary sexual preferences and genders, allows for an ease of formal recognition unavailable to more fluid groups like genderqueers. In other words, Yalies may know how to respond to a gay male friend who comes out to them, but for many of them it gets more complicated when it comes to understanding those who, like O’Connell, reject gender designations altogether.

This partly stems from

unfamiliarity.

“I don’t think [Yalies] are uncomfortable so much as unfamiliar,” Keith Washington ’14, a black gay man, said of these less fixed designations. It may also stem in part from a difference in predictability: If someone identifies as gay, he or she will always like hims or hers, respectively. If someone is queer, genderqueer or bisexual, by contrast, that comfortable predictability dissolves. *** The Yale LGBT Co-op facilitates activism, both directly and through 16 affiliated groups, in support of the University’s queer communities. But not all students feel at home in the politically-driven activist culture of Yale’s LGBTQ organizations.

“My freshman year, when we were talking about queer issues, conversations that were not usually had were what it’s like to grow up as a queer person of color,” Cienfuegos recalled.

Born in El Salvador, Cienfuegos moved to the States quite young, where he was brought up in a Catholic home. He came out at the beginning of high school to an open environment — his family was accepting of his identity, he said, as was his largely affluent private high SEE LGBTQ PAGE 8

// BRIANNA LOO

F R I D AY F E B RUA RY 1 4

VALENTINE’S DAY DATE NIGHT

WEEKEND ROMANCE TIP:

Silliman Dining Hall // 5 - 7 p.m.

We’re not saying that we have crushes on specific members of the YCC. We’re not saying that we don’t.

Get over your ex

If they’re still listed as a “close friend” on Facebook, you’re doing something wrong.

PAGE B4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND ARTS

A TALE OF MAGNIFICENCE AND MODESTY // BY ELEANOR RUNDE

// A

Japanese folding screens, or byobu, are some of the most storied and traditional pieces of Japanese art. Used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to enclose and define private spaces in the interiors of Japanese homes, these screens served both functional and decorative purposes. Most of the screens currently on display at the Yale University Art Gallery are from the early seventeenth century, the Edo period of Japanese art.

The current exhibit is one in a three-part series called “The Grandeur of Japanese Screens.”

The show, called “Tales and Poems,” open from now until March 23, is centered on both Japanese storytelling and poetry.

“Tales and Poems” is split into two halves, with one side focusing primarily on two Japanese fables: “The Tale of Genji” and “The Tale of Heike.” The flat ink and color depictions of the characters, both men and women, who would have been intimately familiar to their Japanese audience, spring to life against a sand-colored background. Their stories appear as separate episodes, each floating in isolation, but connected by themes like filial piety and unrequited love. It seems that, walking past these screens, one would have felt that he or she was peering into rooms within rooms, giving the illusion of multiple layers of space.

The introduction to the exhibit reveals the collection’s central motto: mono no aware, loosely translated as a sensitivity to the ephemeral things in life. It suggests a nostalgia for the impermanence of life, a sense comple-

mented by the small snapshots of the every day depicted on each screen, such as familial, military and travel scenes.

The materials in the Japanese screens reflect both opulence and modesty. During the Edo period, gold leaf indicated a luxurious lifestyle while also serving a functional purpose: to reflect light into the ill-lit Japanese homes. In these screens, the leaf is used to create cloud shapes, defining the boundaries of the various scenes. The clouds’ opacity and reflective quality is striking next to the understated coloring of the rest of the screen.

The depictions on the screens themselves blur the distinction between man and nature.

Sprawling trees overlap with rooftops, and it is often difficult to tell where the clouds end and the ground begins. In Kano Mitsunoba’s “Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety,” two episodes detail a man confronting nature: on opposite sides of the screen, there is a menacing tiger and a quaking elephant, both in conflict with humans.

The other side of the exhibit finds its inspiration not in folk tales, but in poetry. These screens are more cohesive in color and pattern, not separated into distinct scenes like the others. The most colorful screens in the exhibit are two paired screens called “Flowering Cherry and Autumn Maple with Poem Slips,” predominantly colored coral, jade and gold. The viewer is afforded the vantage point of a treetop, and gazes down at the vivid blossoms along the tree’s branches. Tied to each branch is

NNE

LISA

LEIN

BAC H

a short poem, reflective of Japanese tradition.

The least colorful screen, “Waka Byobu” by Konoe Nobutada, is also the most elegant. A waka byobu, or poetry screen, is composed simply of black ink brushstrokes on a dun-colored background. The black brush strokes float through the space, interlacing curves with loops and lines, evoking a feeling of eternity, a direct contrast to the mono no aware theme defining the rest of the exhibit. This screen stands out among the others by virtue of its simplicity — the viewer can almost sense the artist’s presence from the rawness of the brush strokes. Whereas the other works display various, at times distracting, competing elements, “Waka Byobu” allows one to appreciate the singular beauty of the characters.

The myriad elements displayed throughout the show — an abundance of characters and conversations — are at times overwhelming, but ultimately make sense. Indeed, recalling that these screens formed the walls of Japanese homes, it follows that many of the artists sought to convey various forms of entertainment all in a single work. The tension between the competing Japanese values of discipline and extravagance holds ”Tales and Poems” together; despite each screen’s unique features, all of them enliven and beautify the space they occupy, while still refraining from ostentation.

Contact ELEANOR RUNDE at eleanor.runde@yale.edu .

Appreciating Artists at Work // BY LEAH MOTZKIN

// YALE UNIVERSITY

F R I D AY F E B RUA RY 1 4

Coffee in hand, I walked with a friend past TDHeav and took a right. A little off the beaten path for most Yalies and across from Koffee? with a K, a photography public art installation lines the windows of an empty building. Located in New Haven’s Audubon Arts District, the exhibit, “Artists at Work,” features photos by Chris Randall of local New Haven artists practicing their craft. The installation aims to show artists as integral parts of the workforce and inspire young artists to “pursue their dreams” and a career rooted in their creative passions.

The first picture is of dancer Adele Meyers. The image is the size of a poster, and her leg is gracefully kicked back.

She appears confident and at ease in her motion. In an accompanying blurb in the window, she answers a series of questions. “I have been an artist as long as I have been alive. I do not differentiate who I am from what I do,” she says, responding to the question of how long she has been an artist.

The next window reveals a photo of historian and biographer Debby Apple-

gate, a woman armed with a pen and a smile. The following images show a violinist, a spoken word poet, a graphic designer and a flamenco dancer. A singer holds a microphone to his lips. A painter stands proudly in front of his exhibition, arms behind his back. An actor practices lines while pointing at his reflection in the window. Behind each photograph, the empty rooms of the vacant building loom.

The conversation that the window installation explores — the role of the arts in our community and economy — is particularly relevant at a time in which the arts are being criticized as unimportant more than ever. An exhibit of this nature has a lot to offer in way of countering this marginalization. Indeed, the exhibit’s greatest asset is that it provides fledgling creators with the images of role models in their industry. Ultimately, these hopeful artists can envision the value of their creative talents within the marketplace, as it speaks to a variety of different, profitable paths, such as graphic design and trade book illustrating.

The execution of the space, however, is ineffective. The location — an empty storefront — makes the installation feel more like a promotion for the building than an ambitious artistic

ART CLUB: SWEETHEARTS’ TEA

Contact LEAH MOTZKIN at leah.motzkin@yale.edu .

WEEKEND ROMANCE TIP:

Yale Center for British Art // 3 - 4:30 p.m.

As we know from British novels, all great romances start with tea.

endeavor. The photos and text themselves come across more as an ad campaign than an exhibition. Each photograph is not particularly aesthetically interesting. Each seems to portray the career more than a portrait of the individual.

They are not remarkable for their composition. This lack of intrinsic beauty of the pieces, coupled with the installation’s clear agenda, challenges the importance of the art itself.

The actual timing of the exhibit is also puzzling. An installation that can only be viewed while outdoors is inane in the winter. The average passerby is thinking only of reaching the next heated location, not about stopping to admire a poster in the window.

Because the spirit of the exhibit is valuable — its construction simply subpar — the series of photographs would likely fare better online. As the project’s goal is to generate conversation among viewers and extol the work of local artists, an online ad campaign would project these goals to a much larger audience.

Perhaps a forum for discussion and even mentorship could emerge from a website. The exhibition as it is, however, fails to pique the interest of the casual New Haven onlooker.

Respond to your texts

Real attraction will survive the fact that you didn’t wait 30 minutes before texting back.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND THE

PAGE B5

OTHER SIDE

“WHEN THE STREETS TALK, THEY TALK” // BY MAREK RAMILO

On Oct. 26, six people were shot at the Key Club Cabaret, a Hamilton Street strip club less than one mile east of Old Campus. The shooting left five wounded and one — 26-year-old Erika Robinson — dead.

She was New Haven’s 16th homicide victim of the year. For former Mayor John DeStefano Jr., Robinson’s death was the last straw.

“To not see the connection with the clubs [and violence in New Haven] is to misunderstand what is happening,” DeStefano said at a press conference soon after. “With these clubs … there’s an environment that contributes to the risk of the people who are in it or near it.”

But as DeStefano and current Mayor Toni Harp continue their fight for a safer nightlife culture, pain still lingers in the hearts of those connected to the victims of local crime.

Some of those affected, like Jahmal Monk, are closer to us than we might realize.

Monk, a lifelong New Haven resident, currently works a variety of jobs in Commons, Monday to Friday until 4 p.m. “My friend called me and said ‘Yo, E got popped — Erika got shot.’” he said. Erika Robinson was his cousin.

“And, even though it was a bad moment, I was just grateful,” he added. “If I was there, it could’ve been me.”

Monk and his other cousin, ChyQuaan Adams from the Davenport dining hall staff, are living proof that the impact of New Haven violence permeates even the Yale bubble. The two of them represent a distinct separation from the larger Yale community, which Monk says “[doesn’t] know the actual truth” about crime outside of Yale’s gates.

For the University staffers who float between both worlds, news of a shooting is more than a headline, more than an obligatory notice from Chief Ronnell Higgins that New Haven extends beyond the intersection of College and Crown.

Both Monk and Adams have come to accept violence as part of their lives in this city. At the same time, they acknowledge the inherent sadness in having to constantly scan the names in crime reports, just to make sure the victim isn’t someone they know.

When students swipe in to find

F R I D AY F E B RUA RY 1 4

hot food and clean dishes, they are often unaware that many on staff are able, through a developed toughness and positive outlook, to press on despite hardship that cuts deeply and frequently.

“It’s really felt [in the staff community] when something happens,” Monk said. “It’s not just me and ChyQuaan. It affects everybody.” *** Adams’ phone buzzed, but everything else was quiet in the woodpaneled Davenport Fellows’ Lounge as he thought back to that October night.

“Before anybody told me, I had a bad feeling,” he said, shaking his head. “I ended up staying in the house that night for some reason.

When you’re spiritually connected, you get a sense. I was gonna go out that night, and I said ‘Nah, I’ma stay home.’ I just got an eerie feeling.”

He added that, though he wasn’t planning on going to the Key Club, he probably would’ve ended up at the scene of his cousin’s death: Much as all roads lead to Toad’s, he and his friends find themselves in nightclubs on most weekends, he said.

Monk experienced a similar feeling of eeriness. He was already en route to the Hamilton Street venue, only to turn around when things just didn’t feel right.

“I called my best friend and I was like ‘I’m not coming,’” he remembered.

Though both men admitted to being profoundly affected by the loss of their cousin, they spoke with composure. Time has helped heal some of the wounds, they said, but the regularity of it all, ironically, seems to make the next one sting a little less.

In fact, just hours before Monk sat down to talk about Robinson’s death, he heard the news that his friend, Kyle Edwards, the city’s fourth and most recent homicide victim of 2014, had been shot and killed the night before.

“I came into work [on Tuesday], and I just found out that one of my little homeboys got killed last night,” he said with an air of calmness. “It hits hard because I was just with him last week.”

But he soldiered on, just as he had done many times before.

Monk added that he has attended

YALE BASKETBALL VS. PENN Payne Whitney Gym // 7 p.m.

We are winners now. Being a winner is more important than being in love.

“at least 35 funerals” in the six years since he graduated from high school, burying close friends, classmates and relatives in that stretch. After a while, he said, you learn to roll with the punches and stay grateful that things have managed to work out for you.

His cousin agreed, saying he makes a conscious effort to stay upbeat, rather than dwell on hard times.

“It’s sad to say, but I feel numb to a lot of it — not that I don’t have sympathy, but it just happens so much,” Adams said. *** After starting out in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Adams’ family moved up north to join Monk and his other relatives in New Haven — in fact, many members of Monk’s family work for Yale’s dining hall, facilities and hospital staffs. Now, after more than a decade in the Elm City, Adams has been able to reflect on how he managed to stay out of trouble during his time here.

“BEFORE ANYBODY TOLD ME, I HAD A BAD FEELING.” CHYQUAAN ADAMS, DAVENPORT DINING HALL STAFF

“It depends on how you were raised. I was raised in Thomas Chapel Church on White Street,” he said.

“I was raised to be spiritual … if you have faith, a lot of the outer stuff won’t affect you as much”.

He described fondly how a Christian home environment helped him overcome the sometimes-overbearing street culture that pervades New Haven. Having grown up under a similar roof, Monk agreed that his faith has been an important guiding force.

They said that belief, in addition to the savvy that comes with years of life in “the ’hood,” helped them develop the intuition that likely saved their lives last October.

Adams also spoke to the importance of centers like the old Q House

on Dixwell Avenue in keeping his path straight. The mission of such places is to give kids an alternative to the after-school idleness that could develop into gang activity over time.

Having spent time in the Q House growing up, Adams adamantly believes in its positive impact, lamenting its closing in 2003.

“There aren’t a lot of opportunities in this day and age, as far as programs for the younger youth to get into,” he said. “When they get out of school, they got nothin’ to do but chill in these streets.”

He added that it’s important for people to surround themselves with positive influences in an environment rife with bad ones. Though kids are typically the most susceptible, he also challenged those who want to improve themselves to actively work for the change they want in their lives, rather than waiting for “handme-downs.”

Talks of reopening the Q House have advanced in the past few months. This comes as a relief to those sharing Adams’ view, but he still feels that there is much to be done. As a result, Adams is constantly looking for opportunities to positively influence the city that shaped who he is today — opportunities that he hopes will only continue to grow in scale.

For now, those windows come through his role as a kind of medium for Yale students looking for a real, down-to-earth peek into the city around them. Their curiosity, he said, keeps him hopeful for the future of New Haven. *** “Over time, I get to know the students, the employees. By me having the opportunity to network and meet people of all walks of life — that helps out right there. Y’all come to do work, but when someone asks about my day, that’s when the other topics come out. We definitely appreciate that.”

Adams mainly works in the dish disposal area of the Davenport dining hall, where people spend just enough time to clean off their plates and rack their cups.

Those that take the time to engage the staff in small talk, however, show both a gratitude and an interest that Adams and Monk appreciate. They view such encounters as their chance

// ANNELISA LEINBACH, KATHRYN CRANDALL

After a while, it is possible to become numb to the violence.

to enlighten the enlightened on a subject they know intimately: life in New Haven.

“When [students] really want to learn about New Haven, and they come here to ask us, it feels great,” Monk said. “You’re getting the Godhonest truth, because we’re keeping it real.”

And as much as they feel they have to provide students in terms of perspective, the partnership is mutually beneficial. Monk — now a father living in Hamden — said he has been able to move on from his difficult past largely due to the support he receives from the University.

“Even if I hit the lotto tomorrow, I’d still work for Yale,” he said. “A lot of us thank God for this job, because if it wasn’t for Yale, I’d probably still be hard on the streets. I got into Yale, and I never left.”

Adams, who still lives near campus, also said that he’s happy with his station in life. But he has longterm goals that end in his being able to give back to the city.

“I’m working on going to school for radiology,” said Adams, who also has a presence in the local music community, having performed as a DJ on Old Campus under the name “Chyquaan Doe.” “Yeah, that’s my stage name. My old boxing coach gave it to me,” he said with a smile. *** Soon enough, the next shooting will unfold, claiming yet another life.

The next morning, students will walk into the dining hall, and the food will still be hot and the dishes will still be clean. But before they read about it in the newspaper left behind on their table, the guys behind them wearing the blue shirts will have already heard, reflected and moved on.

But the pain will always be real.

“It affects a whole lot of people when something tragic like a killing happens,” Monk said. “New Haven is really not a bad place. It’s just that, when the streets talk, they talk.”

Contact MAREK RAMILO at marek.ramilo@yale.edu .

WEEKEND ROMANCE TIP: Give conversation a chance

Shouting at each other during Toad’s doesn’t count.

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND MATCHMAKER

BACHELOR #1 Major: How would you define a biology major who also believes in divine creation?

Interests: What would you say about someone who has as much fun baking cookies as he does doing competitive online Pokemon battling?

Hidden Talent(s): Does reciting an entire book of Jack Prelutsky poems from memory qualify as a talent?

Looking for: Would it be so wrong for a selfdesignated Idris Elba to ask for a woman with a robust sense of humor and a love of NBC mockumentaries? Or that she be willing to watch me sample every flavor at Ashley’s before getting a waffle cone with two scoops of Butter Crunch once a week for the rest of my life? Am I just looking for someone to answer all my questions?

BACHELORETTE #1

WEEKEND PLAYS CUPID: The Blindest Date

BACHELOR #2 Major: Economics Interests: I like football. I play football. Sleeping and scratching my body.

Hidden Talent(s): Pastry chef since age 15.

Looking for: When it comes to dating, I look for women who are athletic, down-to-earth and smaller than me. That’s it. And somebody who can scratch me. In fact, even writing this is really hard because I have to scratch myself for five minutes after every word. So this is 150 words x 5 minutes per word = 150 x 5 = 150150150150150 minutes. Anyways, I will close with this short rhyme: Psych.

I ain’t gonna rhyme.

// BY WEEKEND

This year, WEEKEND received a record number of applications (or at least we think so — we’re not good with numbers) for our Valentine’s Day Blindest Date contest. There were many qualified candidates for very few — 20! — available spots. Without further ado, we present a set of guys and gals for your judging. They are charming, witty, potato-loving!

At the end of our online voting session, the top Bachelor and Bachelorette will be paired together in a rendezvouz for the ages.

Get yo’ love guru on at yaledailynews.com/weekend.

BACHELOR #3 Major: Economics Interests: Despite being a natural at rowing, he is a true gentleman, and it has been said that [Bachelor #3]’s wit makes lesser men tremble. He’s currently on the varsity crew team and on the Canadian national team at home. He likes to think of himself as an outgoing individual who loves to please other people. He would love to take you on a nice quiet walk or chat with you over a candlelit dinner.

Hidden Talent(s): Unfortunately, his hidden talents will remain a secret.

Celebrity Spirit Animal: Seabiscuit, because of his determination to achieve.

Looking for: His ideal woman would be one who is athletic, outgoing and likes to have fun but who also wouldn’t mind spending a romantic night at home.

BACHELOR #4 Major: Engineering Interests: Cycling, music, robotics, traveling Hidden Talent(s): I can drive stick shift, Greek dancing Celebrity Spirit Animal: John Stamos Looking for: Someone easy to talk to, fun, genuine. And someone who can tolerate my love for bad puns.

BACHELOR #5 Major: Mathematics Interests: Nature, piano, basketball, wakeboarding (back in the day) Hidden Talent(s): I can wiggle my ears and hair at the same time. Also, I’m really good at certain video games.

Celebrity Spirit Animal: Billy Crudup Looking for: Hopefully a human being. After that, it’s pretty much gravy, but someone who listens well would be nice.

Major: Cognitive science with a concentration on decision-making and morality Interests: I am a man. I have the potential to grow a beard, but rarely do. I see myself going into something creative and entrepreneurial — likely a vegan restaurant or bakery. I am a man. Or maybe I’ll go into radio journalism.

Hidden Talent(s): I am a man. I can juggle apples and eat one of them at the same time. I can also make a pun out of anything. How you like dem apples? I look forward to eating your (vegan friendly) food.

Celebrity Spirit Animal: Baloo from the Jungle Book.

Looking for: I’m looking for someone who can make me laugh and who I can be totally at ease with.

Preferably someone who likes folk and jazz music; if they can sing, all the better.

BACHELOR #8 Major: Astronomy and physics Interests: Dancing (with the Yale Ballet Company and Sabrosura), Gogol, helping others, and star-gazing (duh :) ) Hidden Talent(s): 8+ years of playing acoustic and electric guitar leads to an occasional serenade :) Celebrity Spirit Animal: None other than my most passionate man crush — Ryan Gosling!

Looking for: A down-to-earth personality not averse to a romantic relationship and affection, open-mindedness, a sense of humor and honesty.

BACHELOR #10 Major: Economics Interests: Urban development … but like taking classes from a variety of disciplines like philosophy and political science.

Hidden Talent(s): I was going to say cooking … but I think it is more like eating! I guess it is not a talent per say, but I love eating food, eating food with people, sharing food with people, making food with people.

Celebrity Spirit Animal: Tom Hanks. I have been told that my spirit animal in general is either a St. Bernard or St. Bernese Mountain Dog. Looking for: I am looking for someone who is introspective yet outgoing, someone who will challenge me yet be able to compromise and someone who is dependable and independent.

BACHELORETTE #2 Major: Happiness Interests: Night runs; blowing soap bubbles; dancing in heels; going on adventures with Hercule Poirot.

Hidden Talent(s): Predicting relationships before they happen; reciting Friends dialogues verbatim; doing that thing with your tongue where it looks like a clover; cooking minute mac & cheese in 57 seconds (bam!)

Celebrity Spirit Animal: Emma Stone Looking for: Someone who can microwave popcorn without burning it; can convince my suitemates to let me adopt a lab; will wear a bowtie; can decipher what Sean Paul is saying in “Temperature” because let’s face it, that man is utterly incomprehensible.

BACHELORETTE #3 Major: Psychology so I can basically learn to read people’s minds.

Interests: Eating the chocolate brownie pudding dessert thing from the dining hall with ice cream, procrastinating on anything and everything, watching How I Met Your Mother and admittedly, the Bachelor, getting annoyed when people mistake cross-country skiing for downhill, and listening to One Direction, which is what I’m during currently.

Hidden Talents: Being able to hold my breath for a grand total of 47 seconds, making things awkward for myself and running kind of fast.

Celebrity Spirit Animal: Diego from “Ice Age,” because he’s sassy.

What I’m looking for in a Significant Other: Someone who is really, really ridiculously good looking, thinks I’m funny, eats as much ice cream as me, can deal with my sarcasm and loves cats. The loving cats qualification is probably the most important. Meow.

BACHELOR #7 Major: Lazer Interests: Pinteresting, scrapbooking, race walking Hidden Talent(s): I am like a tiger.

Celebrity Spirit Animal: Mike Tyson Looking for: ~//~*L0V3*~//~

BACHELOR #6

Major: I’m an architecture major, but I’m not artsy. Or hipster.

Interests: I enjoy running, reading, drawing and cooking – and by cooking I mean eating (especially trying new restaurants).

Hidden Talent(s): Unfortunately, I don’t have any hidden talents, but I’m pretty competent at the oboe and organizing plans. Oh! I also love traveling and will go anywhere on a whim, so I suppose I’m spontaneous.

Celebrity Spirit Animal: My spirit animal would probably be a polar bear because they’re aggressive fighters and gentle lovers.

Looking for: I’m not really sure what I’m looking for.

If I could condense it to one statement: Natalie Portman in male form. Obviously someone who would make me laugh and bring snacks and coffee to the arch studio at three am would be ideal.

BACHELORETTE #4 Major: idk Interests:eating dancing singing potatoes Hidden Talents: N/A Celebrity spirit animal: Scrat from “Ice Age.” Looking for: potatoes

BACHELORETTE #6 Major: I’m an Anthropology and Biology (intensive) double major, so basically I’m a super nerd.

Interests: I’m interested in evolutionary medicine, and hiking, and camping, and hanging with friends, and drinking (woooo 21!), and turning all activities into nude activities.

Hidden Talent(s): I’m not very good at hiding anything, so I wouldn’t say any of my talents are hidden, but I’m super awesome at finding people apartments (which I do to avoid thinking about finding myself an apartment).

Celebrity Spirit Animal: Ellen Page Looking for: Someone to join me for a free meal I guess.

I guess that somebody cool would be cool too.

BACHELORETTE #5 Major: Get back to me in a year Interests: Eating bagels, listening to Australian radio, talking about people, making puns, taking really long showers Hidden Talent(s): All my talents are pretty overt Celebrity Spirit Animal: Chris Lilley Looking for: Someone who can still understand me when I’m at a party and the music is loud (or just moderately loud. or no music. its the accent). Or really just anything with a heartbeat, lets be honest.

BACHELORETTE #7 Major: Architecture Interests: Cycling, froyo, building and designing sets, froyo, my bike, architecture, froyo—and I’d like to let everyone know Amy made me do this.

Hidden Talent(s): German Pictionary (somehow I’m better at illustrating words in German).

Celebrity Spirit Animal: Jennifer Lawrence? Or is this supposed to be an animal that is a celebrity? The Taco Bell Dog? Looking for: That they know how and when to not give a fuck (I’m still figuring that out).

BACHELOR #9 Major: Philosophy Interests: Music, theater, musical theater, the Art Gallery, critical thought, spirited argument, witty repartee, tea, comparative mythology, archetypal quest stories Hidden Talent(s): Playing songs by ear, voice acting/ vocal impressions, really good at remembering names Celebrity Spirit Animal: Mark Hamill Looking for: Someone to share the view at the top of the world (or at least the top of East Rock) with, and to have a deep conversation with during the climb.

BACHELORETTE #9 Major: Economics and Theatre Studies Interests: I love to sing, dance, horseback ride, hike, run, color, travel, zip-line, and eat. Oh and I love stories.

Hidden Talent(s): I can lick my elbow, stand on top of my toes, and have a twisted vertebra in my back!

Celebrity Spirit Animal: My celebrity spirit animal would probably be a mix of Natalie Portman and Zooey Deschanel if you can imagine that…a bit of smart class with a whole lot of quirk.

Looking for: I guess I just want someone who’s obsessed with all music, and love to just try everything.

Optimism is essential because I think that anything is possible, and I want someone who encourages that mindset not someone who will shoot me down. However I need someone comfortable in their own skin with their own opinion… I have to be with someone who’s interesting and curious about the simplest things.

BACHELORETTE #8 Major: English Interests: I’m a human of the female variety. By that I mean I’m a girl. I have a tendency, which some people find annoying but which you (significant other) might find endearing, of clarifying myself constantly. Some things I like are koalas, the Yankees, ice-skating, my three dogs and two younger brothers, and World War II history.

Hidden Talent(s): I am secretly good at sailing and spiraling a football. I am also good at Pictionary and I love camping.

Celebrity Spirit Animal: I have no celebrity spirit animal.

Looking for: Someone who is honest and direct at all times, funny most of the time and who will accompany me on snowy adventures. He also must enjoy looking at paintings (not all kinds of paintings, but some paintings) and talking about them.

// BRIANNA LOO // BRIANNA LOO

S A T U R D AY

“SLAVS, KLEZ, AND FRIENDS!”

F E B RUA RY 1 5

“We are not responsible for the dancing you will feel inclined to do.”

WEEKEND ROMANCE TIP:

Slifka Center // 7:30–9:00 p.m.

Eye contact

Also remember to blink, you know, occasionally.

S A T U R D AY F E B RUA RY 1 5

// BRIANNA LOO

MEN’S SKELETON

WEEKEND ROMANCE TIP:

Sochi, Russia // 9:45 a.m.

Recover from your hangover with the most intense winter sport.

Learn to bake

The way to WEEKEND’s heart, at least, is through strawberry rhubarb pie.

PAGE B8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

LEARNING NEW VOCABULARY

// BRIANNA LOO

LGBTQ FROM PAGE 3 school. He found himself drawn to Yale and its reputation as the “gay ivy” when choosing colleges.

But on campus, Cienfuegos struggled to find the community he craved.

“To never have my concerns and my cultural context addressed — it just made me uninterested in queer activism,” he said. “I don’t think queer activism at Yale has ever damaged me, but it’s definitely excluded me.” For Cienfuegos, this sense of exclusion stemmed from a single-issue approach to activism. The upperclassmen involved in queer activism at the time were not focused on notions of intersectionality, he said.

Intersection, as Cienfuegos defines it, means not “compartmentalizing” activism into single issues; in other words, encouraging women, queers, blacks, and other marginalized to band together rather than fighting separate fights.

“People of color, queer people, people from working-class backgrounds need to build coalitions, because building coalitions is the only way to advance conversation that is productive for all people,” he explained.

Hailing O’Connell, as one among other exemplars of intersectionality on campus, Cienfuegos noted that queer activists have moved in the right direction since his freshman year.

O’Connell laid an emphasis on intersectionality when asked about the nature of their activist work.

“How do you not do single-issue activism?” they asked. “You build coalitions. You listen to people who know better than you do about their experiences. You use your privilege to amplify the voices of people whose voices are often silenced, instead of talking over them.” *** When asked to assess Yale’s performance in regard to LGBTQ issues

compared to peer institutions, nearly all interviewees said Yale is neither lagging behind nor ahead of the curve.

As Yonadav Greenwood ’16 put it, “Yale is a little bit better than Princeton is, or a little bit worse than Brown is, but I think at the end of the day they’re pretty much the same.”

Besides working with each other across lines of race and gender, some queer groups on campus have turned their attention to confronting the administration with their requests.

After pressure mounted by RAGE (Resource Alliance for Gender Equity), the University altered its student health-care policy last April to allow for “medically necessary sex-reassignment surgery.”

Recently, the Yale College Council announced that it is considering a proposal to alter the policy of exclusively same-sex sophomore year housing. Although no decision has been reached, several students interviewed heralded this motion as a step in the right direction for LGBTQ life at Yale.

For O’Connell, the university’s role in facilitating such change represents “a critical dialogue.”

“That dialogue sometimes looks like shouting from one end to another,” they said, but it matters all the same.

But several queer students interviewed believe that there are other institutional biases against some subsets of the LGBTQ community at Yale, and particularly against transgender students. Transgender students, Johnson-Levy reasoned, may not be coming to Yale because they find the institution unwelcoming. Along with four other students interviewed, she cites the lack of gender-neutral housing freshman and sophomore year as a deterrent for prospective transgender and genderqueer applicants.

“I talked to a [genderqueer] friend this weekend who said, ‘I’m definitely not applying to Yale because there’s no gender-neutral fresh-

man housing,’” Johnson-Levy recounted.

Several students interviewed said it’s hard to fall down solely on the side of or against the University because its track record is mixed, and Yale’s agenda varies widely across the administrative topography. *** While Borsa considers the Co-op a community open to all who want to join, he said it isn’t for everyone.

“Some people choose not to affiliate with the Co-op at all, which is totally cool,” he said. “I think there’s a perceived conflict of interests between those who choose to be involved with organized or political queer life on campus and those who don’t.”

For some students, the conflict of interests is more than perceived — it’s lived out.

Mason Shefa ’15, who calls himself a “fervent Christian,” said it has been difficult integrating himself into Yale’s LGBTQ community. While he felt a need to be a part of the community in order to meet people, Shefa found that the campus’s LGBTQ groups do not plan events catered to his needs. “[LGBTQ] groups don’t really put on events that are focused on people like me — for instance, a group of gay Christians who don’t like going to parties,” Shefa said. “I feel like I might not be the only one — they aren’t planning enough events that are not focused on extremely political debates or wild parties.”

Former Co-op president Marija Kamceva ’15 said the Co-op has been attempting to solve this problem by offering alternatives. Recently, the organization has been hosting more dinners and movie nights, she said, acknowledging that “not everyone is comfortable being in huge

dark rooms full of people.

While Balakrishna has felt a desire to become more involved with LGBTQ groups on campus, she said that at first she was afraid of alienating her friends with explicit political or activist involvement.

“I’d heard the way my friends perceived kids who were activists,” she said. “I think the way that my friends had perceived those other students made me not want to align myself with that because I didn’t want to alienate my friends.”

When she finally did come around to the idea as a junior, she said she felt the time had passed for her to join.

“Sometimes it can be hard to penetrate a small community that relies on friendship and relationships, that has been brought together by adversity and is therefore close-knit,” Johnson-Levy said in response — and especially if you don’t do so right away.

But if Johnson-Levy’s experience is any indicator, the pressures that students feel to plug themselves into a community as soon as they arrive at Yale — to map the contours of their identity prematurely — are unfounded and unfair.

Johnson-Levy attended last weekend’s IvyQ conference at Princeton. The friendships she made there have helped her to navigate Yale, she said. Although she knows that Yale “wasn’t built” for someone like her — a queer woman of color — she said she won’t let that inform how she feels about herself or her time here.

“I’ve come back from that experience reminded that not fitting into certain expectations here doesn’t make me wrong or inadequate,” she said.

// BRIANNA LOO

S AT U R D AY F E B RUA RY 1 5

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

// BRIANNA LOO

YALE MEN’S HOCKEY VS. PRINCETON

WEEKEND ROMANCE TIP:

Ingalls Rink // 7:00 p.m.

Don’t pay too much attention to Russia, there’s a battle to be fought here.

*** At Dalton’s all-girls Catholic high school in Rhode Island, no one was openly gay. She developed her conceptions of queerness on the basis of what she gleaned from “a startling number of young adult fiction novels,” which she read under the covers as a middle-schooler.

“In retrospect,” Dalton said, “The girl who was letting me borrow them from her was trying to tell me something by saying, ‘Look, I like this book about teenage lesbians!’”

While she recalled the memory with a laugh, the incident was also a reminder of the vocabulary that she then lacked. Growing up in New England, her family’s attitudes towards queerness were mixed. She didn’t come out until she arrived at college.

Finding a queer community at Yale, she said, “completely blew that wide open.” She discovered a spectrum of queerness, which allowed her to dissolve some of the clichés that she used to associate with LGBTQ culture. Balakrishna agreed that the exposure to a new language helped her grapple with her identity.

Dalton is grateful for the vocabulary that she has learned.

As an incoming freshman, she thought that the women’s rugby team was the hub of queer life for women.

Leaving, she has found a firmly ensconced place in Yale’s queer community, and feels comfortable correcting others’ conceptions of her.

“When I was younger I was definitely trying to explore that gender and sexuality were more fluid,” she said. “But I didn’t even have the language to talk about it until I met some people here.”

Have 10,000 a year

Hey, it worked for Mr. Darcy.

PAGE B9

WEEKEND MASTER

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

CHEFS

A GROWING TASTE ON CAMPUS // BY HANNAH SCHWARZ AND J.R. REED

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

Last semester, if you happened to pass by the Davenport buttery on a Friday night, you would’ve found the space transformed into an Izakaya, a drinking and snack den common in Japan. “IrashaiMashei!” A group of dedicated student cooks would’ve greeted you from the kitchen as they served up Miso Stews and Tom Yung Tacos.

This was Nom, the second kitchen studio started by the student organization Yale Pop-up.

The brainchild of Lucas Sin ’15 and Kay Teo ’16, Yale Pop-up is a culinary project aimed at bringing together a community of chefs, bakers and gourmets to open one kitchen per semester. So far, they have introduced both Nom and last spring’s Underground Noodle Collective, which specialized in ramen. This semester, Yale Pop-up is back with Fortnight, which offers a more refined take than its predecessor and will serve a new fivecourse menu every two weeks. The operation, from interior design to kitchen-duty, is entirely studentrun.

“We want to focus on developing a chef’s culinary curiosity and being able to experiment and test out things that you wouldn’t be able to do in a professional or student kitchen,” said Carolina Rivera ’16, who will be running Fortnight alongside Sin this semester.

The opportunity to try on a chef’s hat is a boon to many interested in exploring the culinary arts at Yale, as there is both wide student interest and administrative support. The goal for many food entrepreneurs, therefore, often lies in honing that experimental energy, while resisting getting lost in complexity. *** Students interviewed consider Yale’s campus a more than ideal environment for a food start-up to thrive, given the copious resources offered by the University and a student body with a wide variety of culinary and entrepreneurial skills.

But, like any business venture, location comes first. Yale Pop-up was given permission to use the Davenport Dive, a crucial factor in their success.

“Without the Dive, we would not have been able to function,” Rivera said. “Not having to pay rent puts us on an entirely different playing field.” Property taxes and utility bills do not factor into the restaurateurs’ concerns.

Barriers to entry are low. Unlike in the competitive Elm City restaurant scene, Pop-up does not need to stake its own territory. There will

always be students who are enthusiastic about food.

The members of the Pop-up team represent a wide and diverse range of interests and backgrounds.

Pastry chef Abigail Reisner ’14, a psychology major, iced cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery in New York, attended cooking school and worked on a farm in Greece and tested recipes for “Cooks Illustrated.” Business manager Angeline Wang ’16 is a literature major, who “reads books almost as voraciously as she reads menus.”

It is the interdisciplinary nature of the food industry that makes it so accessible and versatile. “Food is such an interdisciplinary domain,” Sin said, “you can apply your expertise into the food world, it’s so open-ended.” *** Just as there are multiple ways into Yale’s food scene, there is no single career path out of it and into the culinary world.

Rivera, a pre-med history major, was never a self-proclaimed foodie, but after three summer months waiting tables at her hometown Olive Garden, she unexpectedly stumbled upon Nom and loved it.

WE WANT TO FOCUS ON DEVELOPING A CHEF’S CULINARY CURIOSITY. CAROLINA RIVERA ’16

“I get this thrill, this rush from people coming in, having to solve a million problems,” she said. “It’s super stressful but incredible.”

Now she is seriously considering business school and culinary management, potentially fusing her experiences with her broader public health interests.

Many successful foodies have followed a similar trajectory — those who have achieved success have found the intersection between food and other disciplines, Sin said.

Sin pointed to Rene Redzepi, a Danish chef whose food combines traditional scavenging techniques with scientific innovation; David Chang, a chef and entrepreneur who aims to reinvent how Americans experience Asian cuisine and Michael Pollan, an expert in food politics.

“Most people who follow the traditional approach to the food industry — starting as a dish-

S AT U R D AY F E B RUA RY 1 5

washer, moving their way up to be a head chef, get up to a certain paper ceiling,” Sin said. “You need to have a creative approach to an area that people have been messing around with since the beginning of time.”

Many of the pathways into and through the food industry will remain uncharted, but Yale’s administration has shown interest in supporting students in their endeavors. The Yale Sustainable Food Project first partnered with Undergraduate Career Services three years ago, when YSFP brought the founders of Good Food Jobs to campus. The large turnout proved that they could segment these sessions by job sectors, and, since then, UCS and YSFP have developed resource guides for each sector related to food.

The two organizations now cohost a series of career workshops providing advice for Yalies wanting to convert their passion for food into jobs in the field after graduation. These workshops are geared toward specific interests related to food and not just the restaurant industry, such as food writing and food justice and education.

According to the YSFP’s Events

and Outreach Manager and Programs Manager for International and Professional Experience Jacqueline Lewin, these sessions have been growing in popularity. While Lewin could not give exact statistics as to the number of Yalies entering food-related jobs, she did say that the number has steadily increased over the past few years.

“In part, I think the increase has to do with the visibility of problems in our food system right now,” Lewin said.

She noted that the food system is a “complicated beast,” and solving its problems requires collaboration across several disciplines.

“You can’t get a tomato to a plate without addressing soil ecology, immigration, labor, transportation, communications, marketing, engineering, design, even physics,” Lewin said. “Students see the myriad ways in which our system is broken — failing communities, human health, and the environment — and

CANDLEMAS

If you are Eastern Orthodox // all day Occasionally, you gotta respect the Julian calendar.

they want to fix it.”

But there is also the opportunity to create for a living, rare among jobs Yalies often pursue.

Sin noted that there is something incredibly appealing about the productive nature of making food — the idea that you are creating an end product that is tangible, “rolling up your sleeves and just doing things.”

When you need ingredients, for example, somebody has to go to the grocery store and buy it.

“It’s not like a consulting club where you sit around and move chess pieces around a board,” Sin said. *** While Yale Pop-Up has moved from start-up to established, another Yale culinary venture is still in its nascent phase, and its recent arrival not only indicates an expanding culinary presence on campus, but also how students must grapple with the organizational and business side in the process.

Every Saturday at 7:30 a.m, a small group of students labor over baked goods in the Jonathan Edwards basement. A couple of hours layer, as the JE chefs continue baking, students across campus slowly begin waking up to the realization that it is not yet 11 a.m.

— and dining halls aren’t open for brunch.

“We saw a gap,” said the founder of JE Room Service Hall Rockefeller, referring to the time gap between waking and eating. “We thought we could fill that gap with food.”

With that goal in mind, JE Room Service delivers baked goods on Saturday mornings to those who place orders through a Google document on their website. The menu includes carrot cupcakes, cinnamon scones, banana bread, a weekly special and coffee, and its logo is an apt modification of the JE crest: the dragon holds a spatula and a rolling pin.

Starting at 5:30 p.m. every Friday evening and ending at around 8:30 p.m., the Room Service chefs whip up batter in the JE basement, said Margaret Shultz ’16, the business’s sous-chef. Fewer than 12 hours later, they’re back in the kitchen, pouring the scone and cupcake batter, baking all orders in a single oven and navigating the complicated business of making sure everything is still hot when it makes it into the customers’ hands.

“We have a strategy every week,” said Jenna Kainic ’16, who is in charge of web design and programming. “We have to figure out tim-

ing, do a bit of finagling, and work on the division of labor.”

So far, the number of weekly orders has averaged in the midteens, with a business record of eighteen orders placed last week.

Rockefeller echoed Sin’s sentiments about a growing culinary presence on campus. “This food network is something that’s emerging and emerging quickly,” she said, rattling off names like Northern Greening, a baking and catering service run by two students, and The Reading List, a former service that delivered boxes of gourmet pancakes, complete with glaze and sliced fruit as well as Alice in Wonderland quotes perched on the box straight to students’ doors.

Still, things connect back to Sin, and to Yale Pop-up.

Sin has played an integral role in expanding the network of food entrepreneurs on campus, Rockefeller said. He has been extremely encouraging to students who are considering their own ventures, she added.

In fact, JE Room Service was spawned from a simple comment from Sin. “You should really do something with this,” Sin said after tasting one of Rockefeller’s concoctions. From there the wheels started turning.

Room Service now has it sights set on expanding. The business lacks swipe access to many other colleges, so they cannot deliver to rooms outside of JE, or bake in their kitchens. But if demand grows, and people from other colleges sign on to help with delivery or baking, JE Room Service may no longer be based solely out of JE. “But we’d have to change the logo if that happened,” Rockefeller said.

Ultimately, the key to their model is simplicity. Rockefeller mentioned that The Reading List offered orders that were incredibly complex — chocolate ganache and candied walnuts — hand delivered all over campus. “That’s something we aim not to do,” she said, adding that this kind of strategy felt “ambitious.”

For now, the group is settling into its niche, feeding Yalies before the doors to brunch open and adding to students’ expanding culinary entrepreneurship on campus.

Yi-Ling Liu contributed reporting.

Contact HANNAH SCHWARZ at hannah.schwarz@yale.edu and J.R. REED at robert.reed@yale.edu .

WEEKEND ROMANCE TIP: Don’t quote poetry you learned in class

It’s been Donne. Keep the words(worth) to yourself.

PAGE B10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

LOVE ON 35MM // BY MICHAEL LOMAX Valentine’s Day is the loneliest day of the year for no real reason. Most of us are going to spend it without a significant other, and that’s fine, but we still won’t be able to make it 10 steps outside before spotting at least half a dozen couples holding hands — couples we conveniently never see except on February 14th.

Because even if we don’t admit it, nobody really wants to be alone tonight. We’d much rather be at some restaurant with some beautiful face, cuddling beneath the sheets or something else to that effect. Spending the evening inside with your buddies is a lot of fun, but it’s far removed from the storybook romance most of us wish we could have. In fact, the sad reality is that fantastic tales of love are better left for the movies.

It’s not like the cinema is the end all be all of vivid romances brought to life. But it is pretty

MICHAEL LOMAX CINEMA TO THE MAX good at it. A shot of eyes here. A shot of lips there. A close-up of two lovers kissing as music swells in the background. A dreamy, languid editing pace that sweeps you away or a frenetic chaos that substitutes cleverness for droll depictions of affection. Basically, it’s hard to do love wrong with the powers of cutting and camera angles behind you, which is why so many of the greatest films are enamored with the topic.

Hollywood mined this material throughout the 30s and 40s — between Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Humphrey Bogart

and Lauren Bacall, Clark Gable and, well, anybody — and man, was Hollywood successful. The popular rom-coms of the last few decades have followed this model. A guy meets a girl. They fall in love despite themselves.

And at the end of the day, they find a way to make it work. The book is closed. The story is over.

Love is here to stay, and we walk out the theaters, smiling and satisfied.

BECAUSE EVEN IF WE DON’T ADMIT IT, NOBODY REALLY WANTS TO BE ALONE TONIGHT. These are the kinds of mov-

Because We Didn’t Watch True Detective

S U N D AY F E B RUA RY 1 6

S. NGUYEN AND G. CLARY SPLIT SCREEN when it ignores the highbrow cultural preference for multiepisode arcs (Broadly speaking, when complexity goes up, reviews get better and ratings get worse). It brings an imaginative sci-fi magic to the case-ofthe-week format that I haven’t seen since “Fringe” and in which “Fringe” was never particularly invested, preferring to spend its energies on ambitious season-long schemes. Admittedly, not all the wisdom here belongs to the showrunners of “Almost Human”; Fox strategically aired its episodes out of order, and to positive effect.

THE MOST COMPELLING OVERARCHING THREAD IS THE DEEPENING BOND BETWEEN URBAN AND EALY, PARTNERS IN CRIME, LIFE AND ONE VARIETY OR ANOTHER OF LOVE. It’s also at its best when it ignores the temptation to make Karl Urban and Minka Kelly a thing. The most compelling overarching thread is the deepening bond between Urban and Ealy, partners in crime, life and one variety or another of love. The show’s heart is probably its winning affection for the glancing eroticism of its central relationship. Ealy does most of the heavy lifting here; that smile, man. This in contrast with “Helix,” several of whose characters I would struggle to identify by name (it’s uncomfortably easy to refer to them by race: Heroic White Guy, Mysterious Asian, Dangerously Sensual Hispanic. The writers might want to think on that). The schema I would cobble together from the above goes something like this: “Helix,” for all of its enclosure, is all about opening on to grim, chthonic infi-

starring any actor, made in any decade.

Be a good person; Open yourself to new experiences; Never let something go that you care passionately about; Put in the time and effort to make the relationship work, but never get carried away. These are lessons I can get behind. These are the counterpoints to those storybook situations we find in the otherwise crazy, anarchic arena of romantic love.

So this Valentine’s Day, if you’re lonely, remember that you are indeed not actually alone.

Pick up a book, cook a meal, see some friends, go to the movies. Find a way to divert yourself, then wake up February 15th ready to jump back on that horse. The best films wouldn’t have it any other way.

Contact MICHAEL LOMAX at michael.lomax@yale.edu .

// BY STEPHANIE TOMASSON

nites beyond the human. “Almost Human,” by contrast, is a subtly inward looking show. The point of its futuristic surfaces is that they’re reflective.

SN: Right, I’d noticed this as well: the barest of glimmers in “Almost Human” that makes me much more likely to stick with it.

It’s a show that leaves the heavy thinking to the movies: If you’re really disturbed by the idea of a “Synthetic Soul,” watch A.I.; if genetically-enhanced humans freak you out, go to Gattaca.

Instead, it uses its little postulates to inflect character. I’m glad to see that Minka Kelly, who was often goddamn luminous in “Friday Night Lights,” might have a backstory behind her bland affect in this show. I might be getting ahead of myself, but it reminds me of the way that “Firefly” gestured at Shepherd’s g-man career, or Inara’s unspoken reasons for leaving the Companion House. I hope that “Almost Human” gets to live to see even better days.

But I’d stop before calling “Helix” chthonic. We get some great, disturbing scenes — a white rat crawling out of a corpse’s mouth? A troop of frozen infected monkeys, all set on fire? — but it doesn’t cohere. The storytelling is so sloppy that the thing turns back on itself and becomes almost magnificently opaque. Not every sci-fi offering has to have a deep, serious observation about humanity at its core, but I like for my speculative fiction to at least speculate. (And I definitely want my body horror to be specific.)

Generously: “Helix” seems to operate on a haunted house model, in which each episode is a separate room with its own scare: we’ve got rabid zombie plague victims, a creepy Thanksgiving dinner, attacks in the shower.

If the sunny theme song is any indication, this show definitely has a sense of humor. But I also get the feeling that it’s laughing at me, not with me. It’s mocking me for my efforts to follow along! With the most recent episode frolicking in one character’s fever dream, I honestly don’t know what genre we’re in anymore — but while fanboy games are fun, I can’t help but think that this show just doesn’t have very much to say.

Contact SOPHIA NGUYEN at sophia. nguyen@yale.edu and GRAYSON CLARY at grayson.clary@yale.edu .

“TINY TITANS: DINOSAUR EGGS AND BABIES” Yale Peabody Museum // all day

WKND loves babies <3

pass the time.

I learned, among other things, that you should never invest yourself in the kinds of visions you see on the screen — visions in which every love affair inevitably works out. It’s just not worth it. Stories, after all, are attempts to make rational and plain what is incredibly irrational. They are artistic diversions, and when confronted by a romance that, for all intents and purposes, should never come to fruition, we have to remember that they are potentially as superficial and flammable as the 35mm film stock on which they are printed.

Instead, we should invest in what these movies can teach us about ourselves. “Don Jon” and “Her” are two recent examples. Here, the major points are simple: only bother with someone who will accept you for you.

And you can find similarly positive messages across any movie,

(Sound)suit Up!

// BY SOPHIA NGUYEN AND GRAYSON CLARY SN: It’s been a long, cold winter — all my staple dramas are on hiatus, thanks to Sochi. On your recommendation, I turned to FOX’s “Almost Human” and Syfy’s “Helix”: reliable sandbags, stop-gap measures that shore us up against boredom. Just exactly what it says on the tin.

Especially compared to its loony sibling, “Sleepy Hollow,” “Almost Human” struck me as a decidedly middle-of-theroad show, a somewhat-stylish buddy-cop procedural. Would it be any fun to watch two guys solve crimes when one of them is endowed with virtual omnipotence thanks to his robot powers?

Answer: yes — when he’s played

by Michael Ealy, whose eyes seem to have been the sole inspiration for the blue-tinted set design.

Nine episodes in, I realize that the concept of androids policing mankind is not actually the show’s central premise (though Ealy and Urban are absolutely the central source of sexual tension). The show isn’t built around a singular, dystopic problem that it will pursue to its endpoint.

Instead, it excels at small-scale speculation: Imagine if there was a chemical printer in every home! Imagine if organ traffickers could trigger heart attacks to make people pay up! This universe is fundamentally stable, and familiarly flawed: The bad guys still steal, smuggle, and kill one another; they just have cooler, scarier tools to do it with.

As for “Helix,” SyFy knows its audience. Anything that Ronald D. Moore (formerly of “Battlestar Galactica”) breathes on gets my attention. But while its premise seems tighter, the story feels simultaneously weirder and duller. Six episodes in, these mushily indistinguishable characters already feel scattered to the harsh, Arctic winds. They all face different threats, and have different objectives. We feel removed from the original Big Bad: the virus that is going to ravage mankind, make us all turn against each other etc. etc.

GC: I’m inclined to say that one of the strongest elements of “Helix” is its momentum; the episodes cover an unbroken sequence of days, and each day gets weirder, more grotesquely charming, the darkness more totalizing. The narrative is thoroughly serialized, which is a nicely suffocating match for the claustrophobia of its setting. “Almost Human,” though, is consistently at its best

ies we turn to on Valentine’s Day to help us get over how lonely we actually are. We take solace in their storybook romances and get caught up in the fantasies that, if just for a lucky break here and there, could all be ours. But as many people can attest, if you’re gonna fall in love with a dream, be prepared to wake up.

A few months ago, I fell in love with somebody, and it was a wonderful whirlwind while it lasted. But just as I was getting truly caught up, the whole thing was over, and I didn’t know what to do with myself except wallow and be generally pathetic until such time as I could eventually get over it. A couple weeks ago, I leapt at the chance to catch a drink with this girl — if only to find out why things had dissolved the way they had so many months ago. Turns out, I had led myself to believe in a cinematic fantasy. To her, this was just something to

Artist-dancer Nick Cave’s wild creations have found their newest home at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, where they will remain until May 4. The Chicago-based artist rose to fame with his Soundsuits, full-body costumes made up of castoff objects from antique shops and flea markets. The suits overtake the body with their metallic, furry, flowery, sparkly materials, and transform humans into something unrecognizable. They are somewhere between beast and machine, but certainly not anything you have seen before. They are displayed as individual pieces and, in video recordings as well as in live performances, dancers animate them to a variety of musical genres. By reintroducing the human element, the artists reveal new properties of the materials in their movements.

You may recognize Nick Cave’s work from his HEARD NY installation at Grand Central Station last spring.

There, he installed 30 wildly colored horses that broke into choreographed dance twice a day. Cave is both an accomplished dancer — trained at the prestigious Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre — and a student of fashion and art. Since 1990, he has been a professor and the chair of fashion design at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. And Cave’s background reflects the nature of his creations: Much of his work lies at the intersection of movement and material.

His show at the ICA, Boston pushes the boundaries of art even further — if imaginable — beyond his radically restructured suits. The Soundsuits still do appear, but he has added new assemblage pieces to his repertoire. These freestanding structures highlight Cave’s shift in focus to a new type of form, one that is liberated from the confines of molding to the human body. Here, he employs the same techniques as for his Soundsuits, but plays even more on the history of his materials. He uses dog figurines in one sculpture, claiming to have rescued them from a flea market, just as discarded dogs are rescued from shelters. However, Cave’s use of “rescued” is an understatement, and the verb “coronated” better describes these pieces. The life-sized dogs are each enthroned on a plush couch, surrounded by a delicate floral canopy.

Interested in blending time periods and cultures, Cave says these sculptural pieces merge the dogs in Renaissance painting with the “dawgs” in hip hop culture.

The show also features large basrelief sculptures that Cave calls paintings. These works, though devoid of the Soundsuit human motion element, still jump off the wall. Each large relief is framed, but the contents, composed of the same materials as his other work, spill out over all four edges. They refuse to obey the barriers imposed upon them, and channel Rodin’s Gates of Hell. The subjects of Rodin’s massive bronze relief climb from one panel to another and, when the piece was created, it revolutionized

STEPHANIE TOMASSON PUSHING THE PALETTE KNIFE relief style by breaking through neatly partitioned barriers.

Like Rodin, Cave charges immobile art with movement. These “paintings” are a return to his earlier work, before Soundsuits. However, these new creations are visibly informed by his experience with performance art.

They appear alive, growing and slithering beyond their allotted space.

One massive eight by 24 foot triptych is a garden plot — a landscape. But a layer of found crystals spreads across the garden’s surface, representing the frost that hinders growth in early spring. Though spring is a time of rebirth, these crystals are an almost sinister reminder of the obstacles that hamper any sort of renewal.

THOUGH CAVE’S LOUD AND BRIGHT CREATIONS PROVOKE HAPPINESS AND EXCITEMENT, THEIR ORIGINS ARE RATHER GLOOMY. Though Cave’s loud and bright creations provoke happiness and excitement, their origins are rather gloomy.

He created his first Soundsuit in response to the Rodney King beating in 1992. He describes this first piece as armor. The Soundsuits hide everything about who is inside: gender, class, race. Only after trying his suit on did Cave realize his movement in it could produce sound. This made him think of the importance of protesting — motion and sound combined to effect change. In this vein, Cave uses his art as an instrument of social reform, transforming recognizable bodies and materials into something beyond our preconceived judgments.

Cave’s artwork pulls me in, but I don’t know why. There is something so relatable about what is profoundly foreign — almost extraterrestrial. He wants to appeal to his international audience while also forcing them to question the many hats — or perhaps suits — that everyone wears in daily life. Each work is a paradox of competing forces. Though his Soundsuits take human form, they look more like an inanimate object than a body. Yet, he animates them through dance, and restores the grace of human motion to the things we have left — in antique shops and flea markets — for Cave to pick up.

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

WEEKEND ROMANCE TIP: Don’t apologize for being “too real”

Because life’s too short to play games. You’ll thank us later.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B11

WEEKEND THEATER

DEBUNKING THE MANDERLEY MYTH // BY MADELINE DUFF For those that crave the macabre over the cloying this Valentines’ Day weekend, try venturing into “The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs” at the Yale Cabaret — if you dare. Québécois playwright Carole Fréchette summons up echoes of Gothic romance (think Daphne du Maurier’s classic novel “Rebecca”) but ultimately conjures voices less supernatural than quotidien. Despite a familiar “girl meets great but mysterious man” premise, this unconventional tale becomes the ideal antidote to the over sugaredspiced-and-everything-niced love story.

The Cabaret’s intimate dinner theater setting makes the show a nearly eHarmony match for the

space. Most of the action déroules on a small riser center stage, but occasionally transitions into the audienc e. In the first, and most striking, of one of the play’s movements, the two actors took seats at the heads of two long, banquetstyle tables filled with real-life theatergoers. Customers’ chatter hushed. I saw one man try to talk to the actress now ensconced to his left. The thespians may have been exposed by their make-up and costumes, but their arrival nonetheless marked a subtle, masterful transition from real to performance. The space is transformed from restaurant to “a sitting room, Vienna 1900,” and, in the end, to a projection of the protagonist’s imagination.

If, as two characters chant, “the human mind is 90 percent unoccupied,” then that of level-headed newlywed Grace (Chasten Harmon DRA ’15) seems to be overbooked. Though seemingly infatuated with her husband Henry (Ryan Campbell DRA ’15), she sub-lets to powerful female voices. Her sister Anne (Elia Monte-Brown DRA ’14) surges forward with the most conviction and

compassion, clashing against the spirit of her rather stereotypical mother, Joyce (Elivia Bovenzi DRA ’14).

Where Joyce rejoices at the thought of domestic bliss for her daughter, Anne cautions Grace against falling for a stranger.

Anne questions whether the couple’s commitment has substance and advises her sister against a cloistered life with Henry in his castle-like home.

dane. When Henry orders Grace never to go into the room at the top of the stairs, surprise, surprise — she does. Upon opening the door, though, (semispoiler alert but don’t worry you see an anticlimax coming) a chute of dirt cascades down on her, not a body, nor dismembered limbs.

But Grace does hallucinate, during several trespasses into the room, that she sees a man and feels his face, and other parts of his body. If only she could’ve seen the dirt, or the simple explanation behind in the “spirit” she believes she confronts.

Grace, portrayed

by Harmon with poise and intensity, almost dominates the plot as a dynamic female heroine (remember, in “Rebecca,” the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter doesn’t even get a // WILLIAM FREEDBERG first name!). Instead of succumbing as a Anne later confesses she knows Mrs. Danvers-bound vicGrace thinks of her as a “dumb tim, Grace manipulates her as dirt” sister who “oversim- maid, Jenny (Mariko Parker plifies” everything. As tension DRA ’14) into keeping her builds, though, we realize this trespass a secret from Henry. perceived flaw of her sister’s And, true to Fréchette’s patcould have been Grace’s best tern of non-convention, the cheerfully malignant Jenny defense.

Grace’s most poignant char- betrays Grace in one of the acter flaw — and the show’s most play’s more gripping draeffective prop — seems to center matic scenes. Intrigue! around a distortion of the munThough the final chap-

ter will be kept a mystery, Henry and Grace’s relationship illuminates a simple reality of love: that it’s terrifying on some level (with or without a Mrs. Danvers or Jenny breathing down your back) to move into another person’s thoughts. Maybe the “man” Grace sees, the one Henry’s afraid to let her see, is not Mr. Hyde, but Dr. Jekyll — not the Beast, but his human form.

Maybe scary can be that “simple.” What, ultimately, isn’t frightening about leading someone into your hallowed ground, and letting another person see who you truly are?

Contact MADELINE DUFF at madeline.duff@yale.edu .

From Woad’s to Wonderland // BY GAYATRI SABHARWAL

// FOLAKE OGUNMOLA

Welcoming its audience to a psychedelic wonderland, Yale’s only tap dancing team, Yale Taps, mashed up neon lights, fluorescent costumes, Disneythemed music and the old-fashioned sound of tap shoes striking a stage, to give their audience “Tappily Ever After.”

Contrary to my expectations of watching an easy to grasp Disney-like show, “Tappily Ever After” has a roller coaster ride of a story, with twists and turns that can leave you falling off your chair — literally. The show

S U N D AY F E B RUA RY 1 6

begins with two disgruntled Yale students looking for Toad’s.

While navigating the streets of New Haven — and failing to find their destination — they magically wander into Disneyland.

From there, a pair of Disney princesses takes over and the Yale students fade into the back-

ground. The princesses speak to the audience, giving the barest context for each dance before they begin. Between numbers, music from old Disney animated films is played, but the dances themselves happen to the beats

of more modern hip-hop.

The show, then, becomes a blend of chaos and extravagance, with a backdrop of brilliant lights and flamboyant dance moves — most based in tap, but executed with energy. As the characters were frequently teleported between New Haven and Disneyland, I too oscillated between states of confusion and delight. I quickly lost track of the plot, but that didn’t matter beyond a point, because I was having fun.

Towards the end of the show, Toad’s Place transforms into Toad’s Palace. Our two Yale students, dressed in sweatpants and sweatshirts, forget all about their ordinary Wednesday night rave, and happily mingle with some really extraordinary Disney characters. Snow White, Minnie Mouse and Aladdin all make appearances, and join together for an exuberant curtain call.

NEW YORK CITY BALLET: COPPELIA Lincoln Center // 3 p.m.

Post V-Day date?

A highlight of the plot, however, was when a Yale student and a Disney princess discover an abandoned shoe onstage.

The quest to find the right foot for the shoe leads into a hysterical interplay of tap dancing and comedy. The princess tries on the shoe, and it doesn’t fit. The Yale student insists the shoe is hers, but, before she gets a chance to try it on, they lead into a tap dancing number, forgetting the shoe in the process.

Still, telling a story was less the point than giving a venue for players’ talents. At one point, the audience was brought in to identify dances by the Disney characters. My audience didn’t prove the best guessers, but the solos were fitting showcases for each individual.

In a show dominated by group numbers, getting the chance to focus on one performer at a time performer

was a welcome change.

But even in these moments, you could never forget that the show was a group effort, a summation of each individual’s skill and group coordination — especially with the show’s lighting.

The players’ shoes and heels hit the floor in unity, and clacking of their shoes was in near-perfect synchrony with the blend of colors on stage. The colors — red and black, blue and red, black and blue — danced across the stage, adding drama and charm to the story. There was a childlike innocence to the perfor-

mance as a whole, the way you ended up most focused on pretty colors and simple rhythmic sounds. It was a primarily visual and auditory delight.

While hard to make sense of, “Tappily” doesn’t claim to offer more than it does: a getaway from the ordinary. So walk into the Off Broadway Theater and let the Yale Taps tap you away from your monotonous existence. Just don’t try to make too much sense of it: This is just imagination.

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

WEEKEND ROMANCE TIP: Love with every single piece of your soul

Even if you haven’t yet found your soulmate, there are still so many things worth loving in this world. Find them.

PAGE B12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

KATHLEEN CLEAVER: A Black Panther Turned Bulldog // BY YVETTE BORJA

Q. To start off and get a little bit of background on your upbringing, tell me about your family and your life growing up.

A. I was born in Texas and also lived in Alabama and North Carolina. My parents were both college-educated and civil rights activists in their own right, so I grew up in an environment that contributed to my own consciousness of justice. As a child, I grew up traveling with my parents because my father was in the Foreign Service. I knew the South because I had lived there, but did not have ties to the rest of the United States.

I lived in India, the Philippines and West Africa. My father’s work was designing projects to elevate peasant farmers, projects dependent on the support of the country.

When the president of the Philippines was killed, support for the project was withdrawn and we had to move. Being abroad I was able to see firsthand and understand that no necessity existed for the white supremacist regime that existed in the United States.

Q. You mention that your parents were civil rights activists themselves. How did that impact your own decision to enter the movement?

A. Well, first, my mother was a schoolteacher and protested segregated schools during the preBrown era, but this was in the 1930s before World War II and before there was hysteria surrounding possible involvement in communist movements. Activity eventually shifted to younger people.

In 1963, I saw high school girls my age protesting against the denial of the right to vote for blacks in Georgia. They were getting arrested for their nonviolent demonstrations and went to jail singing Freedom songs. I was so inspired by their bravery; they attracted me to the idea of nonviolent resistance and following up the resistance of the students who did sit-ins at lunch counters, protesting the denial of the right to be seated at lunch counters. Back then you could shop in the five- and ten-cent stores, and order food to go, but not sit down at the counter and eat it. Stu-

dents challenged the system, and sat down in the seats anyway, in a series of actions across the South.

They became the basis of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), the organization I eventually joined in 1966.

SNCC is difficult to capture in history because it did not have a ‘figurehead’ to write about, but gained the highest respect from activists, from black youth, from the students across the country.

Do you know about James Forman?

Q. No, I don’t think I know who he is.

A. Exactly. He was the executive director of SNCC, but that organization functioned on a different plane to the one which the news media understood. It ran differently. It was a movement of people generating mass mobilization, but there was no figurehead. Being a leader under this arrangement has a different type of commitment — one for all, all for one — the stakes were higher, anyone might get shot, or arrested, or injured. You could be killed.

Q. You were in Algeria for four years.

Can you talk a little about your experience there?

A. Eldridge was a fugitive, which is why we were there in the first place. We were leading the international section of the Black Panther Party, leading solidarity committees. Algeria was one of the only places in Africa with extensive access to the press. It was an outpost and facilitator of solidarity for the Black Panther Party.

Q. How have you navigated elitist spaces (Yale, Yale Law) and manipulated them for the empowerment of your community?

A. My experience at Yale probably did not mold me as it might have done an 18-year-old; I came to Yale when I was 36. I had more ties to the faculty than a typical undergraduate student might, and I also had more ties to the local community since my two children were attending New Haven public school while I went to college.

Yale was a different place when I was here: there was more a carryover from the politics of the

’70s. Income inequality was not as extreme as it is today. Today the students seem to be either from more wealthy or far below wealth, [there aren’t] as many middle class kids as there used to be.

It was the ’80s, when Reagan announced he was a candidate for President he did it in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Why did he do that, when he was the Governor of California? What had happened in Philadelphia, Mississippi — it was the murder of the three civil rights workers — Andrew Goodman, James Cheney and Mickey Schwerner. To announce his candidacy there was to align himself with the white supremacist attitudes of Philadelphia, Mississippi. He took an anti-civil rights stance. I wanted to finish my college education so I could apply to law school, I wanted to do what I had seen Charles Garry — the San Francisco attorney who defended the Black Panthers — do. He was a brilliant, charismatic and highly effective criminal defense attorney. I wanted to know what he knew, and I came to Yale to be able to finish my B.A. and enroll in law school, which I did at Yale.

Q. For those interested in furthering

the causes that you and the Panthers had worked towards advancing, what advice would you give? Do you think that it’s possible to have a movement like that re-emerge?

A. I am not sure if such a movement could happen during this time. The Black Panthers were a product of their time. During the emergence of the Panthers, the Vietnam War was happening, and that caused great social unrest. It is hard to start a movement when everyone involved is either imprisoned or has been assassinated. The Panthers have been demonized.

I am not sure if there are enough young people who would be aware enough to start such an initiative. Young people today are not being educated in public schools.

The prison industrial complex is trapping them. These things happen in waves, so we’ll just have to wait. But I’d like to end on a positive note: I would like to see a day in which the political climate of intimidation and repression dissolves into one rectifying injustice and enhancing social well-being.

Contact YVETTE BORJA at aleyda.borja@yale.edu .

“

ONE FOR ALL, ALL FOR ONE — THE STAKES WERE HIGHER, ANYONE MIGHT GET SHOT, OR ARRESTED, OR INJURED

“

U

napologetic in her efforts to abolish systematic injustice, Kathleen Cleaver ’84 LAW ’89 has long been a leader in radical political circles.

As a Barnard college student, she became inspired to join in the work of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, a youth-dominated initiative that became one of the key civil rights organizations during the 1960s. In 1967, she met and married Eldridge Cleaver, one of the first leaders of the Black Panther Party. Attracted to their Black Power ideology, Cleaver then joined the Black Panther ranks and moved to San Francisco, committed to eradicating the injustices that she continued to witness. Targeted by the FBI for their involvement with the Panthers, both Cleavers fled the United States. Eldridge Cleaver left first to Cuba, which Kathleen thought would be her eventual stopping point. Unforeseen circumstances led them both to Algeria, where they would spend four years in exile, leading the international section of the Black Panther Party. At the age of 32, Cleaver decided to re-enroll as an undergraduate at Yale, with the goal of attending law school upon receiving her degree. At the age of 34, Cleaver attended Yale Law School. Since then, she has dedicated herself to teaching, as a lecturer at Emory Law School, a public policy professor at Sarah Lawrence College and an African-American Studies Professor at Yale College. The exhibit “The Bulldog and Panther: The May Day Rally and Yale” honoring the work of the Black Panthers in New Haven is currently displayed at Sterling Memorial Library and will be up until Friday May 16. She spoke to WEEKEND about growing up in activist communities and navigating elitist spaces.