WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 2012

e h t g n i Break r e k a e B Glass

ces? n ie c s e h t in g in g ion lag t a t n e s e r p e r le a Why is fem ELLE HACKM H IC M D N A G N A W N A

BY YAN

AN, PG 3

O

O OH

OH HO

PRIDE

B5

TECH

B6

MARKET

B9

YALE THROUGH THE AGES

A REVIEW OF MODERNITY

A FOOD DEMOCRACY

Akbar Ahmed highlights watershed moments in the history of gay pride at Yale, and asks gay activists what keeps pride going.

WEEKEND asks its most futuristic writers to analyze new technology, from the Yale Wiki to Spotify.

Caroline McCullough profiles the Elm City Market — and tells us why we should look past our preconceptions of co-ops.

PAGE B2

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

RAMADAN & SOARES

WEEKEND VIEWS

ONE LAST SHOT // BY LEENA RAMADAN AND TEO SOARES

MITTAL

// TAO TAO HOLMES

Dear Sirs and Madams of Skull and Bones: We’re writing because we didn’t get our pre-taps last night. You must have forgotten us, which is weird because we’ve friend-requested all 15 of you on Facebook. You may not have noticed, but we’ve spent the past month stalking you in dining halls, at libraries and from behind that dumpster on High Street. We even created a Bonesmen circle on Google+.

Acceptance into Skull and Bones would be the zenith of our time at Yale. Since Bulldog Days we’ve dreamt of seeing our names in your Wikipedia article, sandwiched between “George W. Bush” and “Paul Needham.”

We don’t even mind your tomb’s shitty landscaping or the fact that drunk frat-goers frequently piss on its front door. We believe that we’re a perfect fit. You own an island; we own Sperrys. You pay the highest water bill in New Haven; we take long showers. You’re a dry society; Leena is under 21.

Our entire lives have led us to this moment. Our accomplishments date back to high school.

I once won second place in a tennis tournament’s consolation bracket, and, when she was a senior, Leena captained her JV soccer team. She almost assisted a goal. We were athletic, sure, but also creative. I once wrote a poem, and Leena was cast as Chorus Member No. 3 in her high school production of Guys and Dolls. Her other credits included Chorus Member No. 7 and Munchkin understudy in “The Wizard of Oz.” At Yale, our careers have left nothing to be desired. We’re impressive people, really.

Between the two of us, we’ve completed most of the Cheese Truck Challenge, eaten in 11 of 12 residential colleges and hooked up with a guy in every frat but Zeta (though that was mostly Leena). I’ve been told I’m funny.

Leena hasn’t, but she’s recently learned a funny joke. It involves a priest, a rabbi and a goat.

Academics are important to us, too. If you combine our GPAs, we have over a 4.0. We took Intro Macro with Ray Fair and didn’t skip too often. Leena TAs for Arabic, and most of her students attend section. I fulfilled

my distributional requirements with low-level offerings from the Astronomy Department, but Leena’s taken some real science courses. She’s pre-med and kind of smart that way. Though she didn’t make Phi Beta Kappa, she’s in Kappa Alpha Theta.

We’re involved in things. I once thought about running for YCC, and Leena thought about voting. During Bulldog Days, we wore stickers that said we sang.

Leena is on panlists for ISO, PHC and Silliman IM soccer. I founded an organization last year, and it only died because I didn’t attend the hazing and sexual misconduct training. We’re also popular.

I used to be in SigEp, and at least three brothers knew my name.

Two of them knew Leena, too.

Together, she and I have 1,934 tagged photos, which means that we’ve been to at least six real parties. Rumpus told us that we ranked 51st and 52nd in their list, but they didn’t specify which one was which.

We’re socially conscious. Over Spring Break, Leena posed for pictures with Nepali children.

They got almost as much Facebook traffic as that photo of Old Campus covered in snow. We also care about the environment.

Leena recycles. I own a reusable coffee mug. We don’t use trays.

We know your organization values diversity, so you’ll appreciate the fact that Leena is Middle Eastern and I’m from Latin America. When we travel, TSA screens us for both cocaine and explosive devices.

The fact that you didn’t pretap us must have been a mistake.

We’ve led interesting lives. Our bios would last at least six hours each, maybe longer if I talked about the pet goldfish that committed suicide when I was 12. So we’re writing to give you one last shot. After reading our letter, you must have realized the magnitude of your oversight. There may only be one Brandon Levin, but we’re still the cream of the crop. People like us belong in your tomb.

See you on tap night, Teo Soares and Leena Ramadan Yale University, Class of 2013 Contact LEENA RAMADAN and TEO SOARES at leena.ramadan@yale.edu and teo. soares@yale.edu.

How to get Yalies to come to your (actually) great event // BY DEVIKA MITTAL

If you’re a Yalie through and through, chances are that you have, at one point or another, tried to organize an event. Chances are about four of your friends showed up and the rest of your potential attendees were scattered through the other 30 events happening on campus at the same time.

So how to attract all those Yalies to your event?

1. Promise wenzels: “One does not simply eat a wenzel.” In an ideal world, we’d like to eat as many as we can — after a night on the town, during a reading period mid-day meltdown, when slicing up a body in the morgue (Hey, it was the YCC wenzel challenge) — without paying the cost for any of them. For your event, advertise free wenzels for everyone, even if you actually aren’t handing any out. Once enough people have already come, have faith that their intellectual curiosity will entice them to stay. On the other hand, they may kill you.

2. Promise debauchery and opulence: Think Toads.

F R I D AY APRIL 6

3. Take advantage of Bulldog Days: Come Bulldog Days, there is a university-wide attempt to attract prefrosh.

In a frenzy of prefrosh-focused activities, Yale undergraduates abruptly stop being the centre of the Yale universe. And you know there is just one thing Yalies don’t like: feeling neglected. We solve this by dressing in our best prefrosh uniforms and crashing BDD events. Though your event may not attract pre-frosh (they’re probably at that SAE party), it will definitely attract upperclassmen looking for some free Claire’s Cake.

4. Use frat boys as publicists: Guaranteed to work better than those expensive posters you printed and that Facebook event you made. We at Yale might pretend that we graduated from social ladders and feelings of insecurity when we came to college. This is not true. Upon landing on campus, we realized that while everyone is as nerdy and geeky as us, some happen to hide it under the exterior of rippling muscles and artfully styled hair. Getting those

TITUS ANDRONICUS

Iseman Theater // 4:00 p.m.

“O sweet Revenge, now do I come to thee; And, if one arm’s embracement will content thee, I will embrace thee in it by and by.”

dreamy frat boy/heavyweight rower friends to spread the word will definitely have the effect of Regina George declaring it a party.

5. Start a flash mob in Commons.

Even if your dance routine to loud Indian music has nothing to do with the event, use that sexy behind to your advantage to lure people into coming.

Ask people to join in with the music.

Having their adrenaline pumping will trick people into thinking they’re actually excited (thank you, Psych 101) and maybe even seduce them into coming.

6. Provide illegal substances. The Yale Daily News does not promote underage drinking. However, were you to have an event “exclusively” for seniors, concoctions with coconut or coffee flavours would definitely draw a crowd. All above 21, of course.

7. Bring famous people. Think Morgan Freeman. Or James Franco. Walk around Cross Campus, stop random people and ask them if their parents are famous. Chances are, they’ll say

UPON LANDING ON CAMPUS, WE REALIZED THAT WHILE EVERYONE IS AS NERDY AND GEEKY AS US, SOME HAPPEN TO HIDE IT UNDER THE EXTERIOR OF RIPPLING MUSCLES AND ARTFULLY STYLED HAIR. yes. You just found yourself a guest of honor.

8. Yalies like to be a part of exclusive experiences — secret societies, not-so-secret societies, invitationonly parties. Declare the event inviteonly and make sure that the entire Yale panlist is bcc’ed. M. 9. Copy the Pundits (google: Yale pundits party). As a last-ditch attempt to lure in unsuspecting undergrads,

claim that your event is a themed party. Half way through, BAM. Change of theme. It’s actually a discussion about the impact of Mormons on Native American archaeology.

10. If all else fails, offer a free viewing of The Hunger Games. The odds will be in your favor.

Contact DEVIKA MITTAL at devika.mittal@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Adrienne Rich.

Because she wrote with this goal in mind: “the creation of a society without domination.”

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B3

WEEKEND COVER

WOMEN OF NUMBERS, NOT NEARLY NUMEROUS ENOUGH

S

ince the year 2000, women have come a long way in gaining tenure on Yale’s campus. Recent data compiled by the Women’s Faculty Forum shows an uptick in the number of women who have obtained tenure since the turn of the millennium. Women comprise 29 percent of the faculty members who have gained tenure since 2000 and remained at the University.

That number is more than double the 14 percent of Yale’s faculty in 2000 who were female.

But within the biological and physical sciences, the gains have been less striking. Whereas women represented 12 percent of the tenured faculty in 2000, only 19 percent of the faculty who gained tenure since that date are women.

When asked to explain Yale’s low retention rate of female faculty members in the sciences, astronomy and physics professor Priyamvada Natarajan attributed it to subtle unconscious biases dictating that women are less adept in scientific modes of thinking. Natarajan helped compile the data for the Women’s Faculty Forum.

“It’s difficult to explain this to science faculty and get them to accept it, because scientists consider themselves very objective and fair,” Natarajan said. “But the fact is that these implicit associations are part of all of us.”

In 1996, Robert Birgenau, then-dean of the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, asked a committee to examine the status of female professors within the school, who at the time made up just 8 percent of its faculty. In a landmark study published that year, the committee found that most female junior faculty members said they believed that gender bias would not impact their careers.

Still, tenured female faculty members earned significantly less and won fewer prestigious prizes than their male counterparts. Moreover, many tenured women faculty felt marginalized and excluded from playing a significant role in their departments.

Taken together, the study’s findings suggest that women’s sense of marginalization grows as they advance in their careers.

A MATTER OF ATTITUDE, ENVIRONMENT

When physics and astronomy professor Meg Urry started out as a female scientist in the 1970s, she was told that her career would be easy. Universities were eager to hire women, people said, and women in science were in particular demand.

“In college I was the only woman physics major in my class,” Urry said. “At the time, I kind of relished being a pioneer. But when I entered the work world, I realized that things were a lot harder than people made them seem.”

As both an astronomer and a physicist, Urry found that women were outnumbered in every institution for which she worked. In 1987, while working at an observatory, she began to study the gender disparities within scientific disciplines. A look at the numbers compelled her to become an advocate for stronger female representation in the sciences. Urry noted that there has been tremendous improvement in astronomy since then, with the numbers “tipping over” so that women constitute about half of the faculty in many astronomy departments.

In physics, however, there has been little progress. Despite the fact that physics and astronomy demand the same skill set, Urry said, there are currently only four female professors among the 30 members of Yale’s Physics Department. Urry pointed out that these numbers are equivalent to those of astronomy 30 years ago — a time when the data was so discouraging that she felt drawn into activism.

Since there are so few women in the field to begin with, it is hard for young women to gain confidence, Urry said. She remarked that girls always set much higher standards of success for themselves, and if they do not reach them, they assume that they are not good enough. Male students, on the other hand, seem less

affected by failure.

“I work with a lot of female undergraduates who love physics but think that they’re somehow not intelligent enough to pursue it,” Urry said. “And it makes me wonder, they’re in one of the most competitive colleges, getting A’s and B’s — what are we doing that they think they’re not smart enough?”

Many of the undergraduates interviewed said that they often sense implicit biases against women in science programs that make the environment less conducive to learning. Maya Fishbach ’15, one of four girls in her “Vector Calculus and Linear Algebra II” class, said that while she does not feel that her professor treats her differently from the male students in her class, she also does not feel as confident in the classroom as her male counterparts. Part of the reason for this, she noted, is that many of the guys in her classes do not acknowledge the girls as being a part of the same group and seem oblivious to the difficulties facing women in male-dominated disciplines.

“It’s hard to be friendly with them because all the guys are buddy-buddy with each other, and the girls are on the outside,” Fishbach said.

Even as early as high school, the sciences and math can feel like an old boy network, noted one undergraduate interviewed.

Madeleine Barrow ’15 said that she first noticed the “misogynistic” atmosphere of academic sciences when she represented her native country of Australia in the International Physics Olympiad during her senior year of high school. She recalled that one of the teams had a tradition of putting on a “Miss IPhO” pageant at the end of the competition, in which they voted for the “hottest” woman physicist present.

Barrow added that since there was no “Mr. IPhO,” it made her wonder whether the males present viewed female competitors as legitimate.

It was experiences of this variety that dissuaded Eileen Pollack ’78 from pursuing sciences several decades ago. As a student in

Yale College, Pollack was the only woman studying for a bachelor’s of science in physics, and she had no female physics professors to serve as role models. She said that she spent four years “working herself sick.” Even though she was doing advanced research and getting A’s in her classes by senior year, Pollack had decided that she no longer wanted to be a woman in a scientific discipline. At each step of the game, men seemed to be ahead, and it was a race that she no longer wanted to run.

“I handed in my senior honors thesis,” Pollack said, “and I walked away from physics forever.”

Pollack is now an English professor at the University of Michigan. She returned to Yale two years ago to speak with undergraduate women in math and science: “I found that there are a lot more women in physics and math, but each woman’s individual experiences haven’t really changed from my time. That’s really shocking.”

Meanwhile, some faculty members think that it is only a matter of time before women reach parity with men in science.

“It’s a generational thing,” said Geology & Geophysics Department Chair David Bercovici. “The male tenured faculty were hired in a time when there just weren’t enough women applicants. That’s going to change in the next several years.”

In light of the newly released data, though, it seems unlikely that this kind of progress will manifest itself at Yale anytime soon. When it comes to meeting its diversity goals, where is the University going wrong?

UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE. PH.D. TENURE?

The most striking thing about the Women’s Faculty Forum’s data on female representation in the biological and physical sciences is that up until Ph.D. completion, the ratio of men to women is about 55 to 45. But the gender proportions shift sharply for term faculty, which is 78 percent men to 22 percent women.

This trend continues until the final stage of academia, as women

constitute only 11 percent of tenured science faculty. At each step of the academic career scale, female representation dwindles.

For some disciplines, the discrepancy begins at the undergraduate level. According to Yale’s Office of Institutional Research, only two out of the 20 computer science majors for the class of 2012 are women. Slightly higher numbers are recorded for engineering and applied science, with seven females out of a total 20 biomedical engineering majors.

There is a far greater proportion of women scientists at the undergraduate level than at the tenured faculty level. Scientific disciplines in which women majors outnumber men for this year’s graduating class are environmental engineering (seven women to one man) and biology (51 women to 32 men). But within the biological and physical sciences overall, men outnumber women by approximately 14 percent among the seniors of 2012.

Thus, there is a far greater proportion of women scientists at the undergraduate level than at the tenured faculty level.

What accounts for the lack of women scientists in senior-level faculty positions? Professor Joan Steitz, a molecular biologist and longtime advocate for women’s advancement in science, said that the “drop-off” is a combination of women getting discouraged from being in an atmosphere in which women do not feel appreciated.

“In all the committees I’ve sat on where I was the only woman among 20 or 30 men,” Steitz said, “I didn’t contribute as much as I would have if the situation were different. I just didn’t have the courage to push my perspectives as much as I should have.”

Notably, Steitz pointed out that most of the freshmen she worked with are enthusiastic and seem unfazed by gender disparities. “Things are pretty good for undergraduates — up until you get your Ph.D., things are pretty equivalent in the life sciences.

Undergraduates are upbeat; they feel like it’s pretty much an even playing field,” she said.

OH

OH

HO F R I D AY APRIL 6

SEE WOMEN PAGE B8

RHYTHMIC BLUE PRESENTS: RHYTHM NATION

Off Broadway Theater // 6:30 p.m.

Booty pop.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Foot Deodorant.

It’s that time of year again when open-toed shoes are all the rage.

Make it easy on us, please.

PAGE B4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND ARTS

I FELL IN LOVE WITH THE WOMEN AT THE ROCK SHOW

Diane Arbus gives ‘talk’ through time and A/V equipment

// BY SAMUEL HUBER

// BY CAROLINE TRACEY

Just before the lights were turned down at the “talk” by the late photographer Diane Arbus this Wednesday at the Yale University Art Gallery, History of Art Department chair Alexander Nemerov GRD ’92 turned his audience’s attention to what would be the most salient variable of the presentation.

“Some of you may know that I am related to Diane Arbus,” he said, explaining, with the same meticulous theatricality familiar to his scores of HSAR 115 students, that she was his father’s sister, and that she had committed suicide when he was 8 years old. That part is no secret: Professor Nemerov lectures on Arbus’ work, and each of their Wikipedia pages will tell you about the connection. But he continued: “Tonight will be the first time I have heard her voice.”

As the audio recording of the deceased artist (complied from three talks she gave to fellow photographers) crackled to a start in the now totally darkened auditorium, it was impossible not to wonder what this scholar-nephew would experience at hearing the sound of the voice of his artistaunt.

And what a surprise I imagine it was! Arbus’ speech from the beginning was peppered with ahahs, unexpected upswings and cringes in the middle of words, which seemed to dive close to sadness and by the next syllable came back up into the realm of giddy. My expectations — set by a combination of her photographs (giants! drag queens! all the weird of New York City in the ’60s!) and photographs of her, which seem tough and austere — were immediately challenged by her speech’s simplicity, its markers of a socialized femininity, its levity and its humility.

“I think of photography as a mysterious sort of body thing,” she said in one of many moments in which that humility pierced her artists’ aura. “Certain things mean more than others. Our own photographs mean the most … you show them to others and can say, ‘I was there! And you can only see an inkling of it.’” With her famous photograph “Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967” on the slideshow, she said, “I can’t really explain it, that just knocks me out

It would be really easy to start this review with some grand claims about rock music’s present and future. I could label some trends, chart a trajectory, invoke a metaphorical finger and find a pulse to put it on. If I were confident enough in my prognosis, I might even mention the zeitgeist. Most of today’s rock bands, selfconsciously committed to either perverting or preserving the genre, demand it. Generic reflection and Chicken-Little posturing are the name of today’s game.

But Wild Flag, who at Toad’s last Friday, March 30 played the best concert I’ve been to in months, don’t seem to give a shit. No one I’m familiar with more comfortably and completely embodies the genre’s original ideals of raw power and impudence, what Ellen Willis called “a sense of entitlement to seize the world.” Which, of course, makes them all the more fertile a subject for that type of tired tropes I said I would abandon.

Rewind: I was raised on rock music. My dad inculcated me with a love of the greats, both within and outside of the canon.

Every so often, his car stereo would offer up a female voice — Patti Smith, Rickie Lee Jones and Liz Phair were all early mainstays. But, in keeping with the regrettable reality of music (and every other) history, the most storied and acclaimed stars, the ones who packed the biggest punch and filled the biggest stadiums, were men.

Fast-forward: in September, Wild Flag released my favorite album of 2011. The band is something of a super group, consisting of four impeccably credentialed women: Carrie Brownstein (vocals and guitar) and Janet Weiss (drums) made their names in Sleater-Kinney, the most successful and longest lasting band to emerge from the early ’90s Riot Grrrl scene, while Mary Timony (vocals and guitar) and Rebecca Cole (keyboards) cut their teeth playing with Helium and the Minders, respectively. Given the group’s impressive pedigree, I prepared myself before their self-titled album’s release for a solid but underwhelming exercise in nostalgia. While these women are all too good at playing and performing by now to affect irreverent amateurism, the album is neither wary nor conservative. Their sound is informed by — but distinct from — each member’s earlier projects. And it rocks.

Hard.

At last Friday’s concert, the crowd reflected both the band’s long history and its fresh energy, made up of equal parts screaming teenagers and baby boomers. From the very first song, it was clear that we were in for a capital-R, capitalS Rock Show. Cole bounced and swayed behind her keyboard; Weiss pounded at the floor tom as if punishing it for something; Timony and Brownstein kicked, snarled, ducked, and strutted across the stage (in

… It’s just identical twins.”

Then she turned to her audience. “Is anyone here a twin?”

Evidently, someone in the unseen, half-a-century-forgotten crowd was. “Is it true,” she continued deferentially, “that there is always a stronger and a weaker twin?”

The audience member gave some answer. Arbus followed: “May I ask which one you are?” Never, it seemed, must she have passed an opportunity to better understand the world.

Acknowledging her inclination towards the deformed and deviant, Arbus explained: “I think of them as the natural aristocracy — they’ve already lived through something.” But a simple “photographer of freaks,” as she must so often be efficiently described and dismissed, she clearly was not.

Her questions pointed to a curiosity much larger than the documentation of society’s cruelty and aberrances — to a search for a fuller whole, a search to find a greater understanding of the texture of society and share it. “I think there are things no one would see unless I photographed them,” she closed.

“I do think I have some specific corner on the quality of things.”

When the audio finished and the lights came back on, Professor Nemerov responded to the recording. Two things, he said, had struck him.

“Her voice was a lot sexier than I would have guessed,” he said first, cuing the affirmative laughter that followed. But then he described her words as “floating and refusing to pinpoint,” and “a contrast to what I’ve come to know as serious.” In that analysis lies the distinction between the artist and the scholar, between the creator and the analyzer. Nemerov gave the assessment with the precision of a scholar; he admitted, though, that Arbus’ refusal to reach an economic, distilled “meaning” for her works did not leave the listener wanting. Rather, Nemerov’s observation offers entry into a lesson on the blessings of an unsure view: one can acknowledge one’s inability to master the world precisely, and let the awareness of the futility of that goal guide a visceral and gracious creation.

Contact CAROLINE TRACEY at caroline.tracey@yale.edu .

heels!) with more swagger than the Stones.

But when they came face to face with one another, they were all smiles.

And this (for me) is Wild Flag’s great work of magic: the band closes the gap between killer rock star and adoring fan, managing to kick serious ass without the attendant alienation of arena-rock theatrics or bar-band hostility. They owned the stage, unequivocally, but invited the audience to share in that power. From the second row, Timony’s booted foot planted on the monitor five feet from my face, they looked both ferocious and endearing. I spent the whole night wavering between wanting to be their groupie and wanting to be their friend. Honestly, I’d take either.

Between songs, Brownstein bantered obligingly. She described the game playing over the bar as “like Friday Night Lights, but basketball” (the TV was turned off by the next mic break) and thanked us at the end of their set “for being so … vociferous?” But when the music picked up, she

// SAMUEL HUBER

Wild Flag at Toad’s could howl like an animal. Timony, her recorded voice thick and round, yelped and pouted through her verses as if for her own amusement. They closed their last song before the encore with an extended jam, Brownstein and Timony trading guitar solos, the familiar riffs unraveling into something looser, less melodic, more primal. At one point Brownstein shook off her guitar strap and lifted the instrument above her head. I froze, waiting for her to smash it to the ground. Instead she just held it there, one-handed, her back to the audience, as if the guitar were no heavier than a glass of water. She had no discernable point to make other than the sheer fact of her own strength. And man, did she make it.

Contact SAMUEL HUBER at samuel.j.huber@yale.edu .

‘MFA Sculpture Show Part II’ confuses, enlightens // BY JACK LINSHI

“The information on the left is wrong. Call me … if you figure out the right information.”

I’m not sure what to think when I see these words on the wrinkled notebook paper tacked to the wall inside Green Hall. It’s in the portion of the “MFA Sculpture Show Part II” that belongs to Kit Yi Wong ART ’12, who also goes

by Ali Wong. To the left of a sheet is a sort of artist’s statement that reads “Kit Yi Wong Presents: Ali Wong Presents: The Autobiography of Ali Wong, by Kit Yi Wong.”

It’s confusing, inverted, self-referential and of course, wrong — but also so right.

The entire show is, in some way, summed up in Wong’s words, in the way that introspection — from self or from an outsider, welcomed or unwelcomed — plays a critical role in the experience of the show.

If Kit Yi presents the personal artworks of Ali, then it’s not Ali’s — so it’s wrong, and vice versa. Wong’s

F R I D AY APRIL 6

// JOY SHAN

“MFA Sculpture Shjow II” in Green Hall works especially seem to tackle the tension between the interior self and the self one sees in the mirror, flaunting feeling and emotion more than sheer technique. Her work includes a series of paintings on strangely shaped canvases, and they are at once both calm and anxious. Some canvases are covered in silky smooth colors; others have bright, unsettling shapes resembling a microscopic view of deadly bacteria.

One room over is the thesis show of Kevin Beasley ART ’12, whose collection of seemingly disjointed works produces a different kind of tension. Right in the middle of the room is a large sculpture that resembles a piece of rusted, antiquated machinery. Its powerful nature and gritty design is in stark contrast to the clean, white space. The visibility of the piece is in even greater contrast to an image of a flame on the wall, hidden by a white curtain that easily

blends into the walls and ground.

Beasley’s works call for an immediate questioning of the relationship between the pieces. Perhaps there is none, and that is precisely the answer.

Walking down the stairs to the middle gallery, it’s extremely easy to miss the work of Stephen Decker ART ’12. For a second, I even wondered if Wong’s “This information is wrong” also applied to the gallery guide. But Decker’s work is there; its presence is just soft.

In this gallery, quiet piano music plays from speakers suspended in the air, haunting the empty space.

A projector, nestled comfortably on the ground against the far wall, plays a video of a dark human figure sprawling around in suspension, or more likely, in water. The buoyancy and effortlessness of the man’s existence along with the accompanying music playing from 10 feet above the ground create an eerie and mysterious environment.

CABARET

Morse/Stiles Crescent Theater // 8:00 p.m.

Heavier than the Berlin we all want to hang out in today, but amazing, we hear.

There is no traditional sculpture in this section, but Decker’s ability to sculpt the space with such ease and delicateness is equally impressive.

Florencia Escudero ART ’12 and Constance Armellino ART ’12 occupy the lower gallery, which spans two stories of open space.

Escudero’s work hangs with immediacy and urgency in that there is a shattered plate of glass that seems to have purposefully fallen from a suspension above. Yet it is obvious that the suspension, a rectangular frame holding objects on strings, was never holding this plate of glass. There is a sadness in the dusty shattered glass, clearly having been stepped on with soft footprints left on the surface. It appears that the suspension has somehow abandoned this glass sheet, mercilessly and wrongfully dropping it to the ground in neglect. I cannot help but think of the implications of Wong’s earlier

statements, in which Kit Yi presents Ali who presents Kit Yi, and it is all so wrong that one part leaves the other. But in the case of Escudero’s work, it’s actually possible.

Escudero’s work, which also ranges from sensational amalgamations of household objects to painted cloth, is divided from Armellino’s work with a giant white curtain. Armellino’s work is significantly less colorful and elaborate, yet also evokes similar questions and feelings. There is a pyramid of 33 martini glasses that, at first glance, are so transparent that it worries me that if I can’t see it, I might run into it. Yet at the same time, even though the martini glass is such a recognized shape that its silhouette is easily identifiable, in this case even a pile of them is nearly invisible. The same notion of deconstructing and reconstructing object is evident in

a series of images in which a standard enveloped is cut, splayed open and folded into a variety of unrecognizable shapes.

Ultimately, the MFA Sculpture Show demonstrates a mastery of manipulating space, objects and, most importantly, thought.

The placement of Wong’s section at the front of the gallery is especially astute, the lingering confusion of her words guiding the viewer through the rest of the exhibition. As a result, those who view the show with an eye of suspicion will be rewarded in understanding not only the objects but also their intent.

“MFA Sculpture Show Part II” goes until April 10 in Green Hall.

Contact JACK LINSHI at jack.linshi@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Nail polish.

Did you know it’s the fastest-growing segment of the beauty trade?

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B5

WEEKEND PRIDE

PRIDE AT YALE 2012 // BY AKBAR AHMED

INTERVIEW: Hilary O’Connell ’14, organizer of Pride Q. Why did you want to be one of the organizers of Pride@Yale?

A. It’s part of my job as Co-op president, but even if it had not been, I still would have tried to get involved this year. For me, personally, pride is such a divergence from the shame I associated with my queer identity in high school. Going from that to feeling proud enough to organize this scale of event for the Yale community — developing that pride — has been, probably, the most important part of my experience.

Q. What do you hope to accomplish with Pride@ Yale this year?

1977: Professor George Chauncey ’77 GRD ’89 and a group of other undergraduates organize Yale’s first Gay Rights Week, the event from which the current Pride@Yale claims ancestry. In a 2009 article in the Yale Alumni Magazine, Chauncey described the event as “one long effort to encourage people to come out: first by asking them to staff tables outside every college dining hall — where, ultimately, we collected 2,000 signatures in support of the Connecticut Gay rights bill; then by asking everyone to wear pink triangles (we were a bit ahead of the curve, so we couldn’t buy buttons and had to make them out of construction paper); and then by staging the first-ever gay rally — and dance — on Cross Campus.”

A. When we went into it, we went in trying to make this really a grassroots-scale event. Pride is huge — it’s six weeks of one, sometimes two, events almost every day. One thing Pride has attempted to do in the past, and that we really wanted to do this year, is reach out to other communities. We’re becoming aware that to be LGBTQ is not to not be anything else. There are subsets of the queer, feminist, anti-racist and culturally concerned communities that should all be working together towards a larger project of equality. People whose identities are tied to minority groups often feel marginalized in LGBTQ discourses. So that’s been interesting for me, with examples like the “Are we there yet?” talk on Christianity and the “Out and Asian” event. We’re reaching out to communities where queerness might not even be that visible.

Q. How have you found the experience of reaching out to different organizations?

A. There’s been a fantastic response from the community.

Just as Co-op coordinator, I’ve been surprised by the number of groups you wouldn’t ever expect to contact me, saying, “We’re having an incredible event; do you want to cosponsor

it?” Coalition-building has been an important part of being coordinator. A lot of those relationships will last for years to come. Maybe the most important thing about Pride is bringing communities together.

Q. What have your personal favorites been?

A. I have a lot of pet events this year! Our keynote event was the “Love Makes a Family” exhibit.

Family is a topic that gets brought up a lot in the public discourse around queerness. It’s a word that brings with it feelings of pride and shame for people of this age, particularly for people coming out, some of whom had bad experiences with their families. We invited Diana Adams, a polyamory advocate and family law attorney, who will talk about the changing face of the family. Another event I anticipate is our talk about frats, sororities and athletic teams as allies. To have Greek life is so unexpected, but it’s really important — I mean, talk about an invisible population: consider queer members of Greek life. They’re in a community thought of as very heteronormative. I’m also looking forward to “Beyond Butch/Femme,” as someone who identifies with particular parts of dyke femininity. We’re just going to let people talk, because nobody talks about butch and femme identity; people think about it as a dichotomy, being only one or the other, but that’s nonsense.

Q. What do you make of recent developments in LGBTQ support at Yale?

A. Maria Trumpler [the director of the Office of LGBTQ Resources] is my hero. With the insititution and LGBTQ-specific things, I wouldn’t honestly say there’s been that much change.

Sexually, the campus is making good steps; the introduction of programs like the Communication and Consent Educators is a good step.

The Office of LGBTQ Resources is a big deal.

The expansion of gender-neutral housing is a huge win for the entire campus. Ideologically speaking, it’s a huge win for the LGBTQ community, and, practically speaking, it’s a huge win for LGBTQ — particulalry trans — students.

The sexed housing Yale assigns from freshman year on can be hugely problematic for students whose legal sex does not match with their felt gender. Another note about the campus’s general policy is that we have seen great strides for L, G, B and Q students, but not the same care for trans students. I’m hoping to see Yale take steps to fix that.

Q. What do you foresee as the future of Pride@ Yale?

INTERVIEW: Ryan Mendías ’13, organizer of Pride Q. Why did you want to be one of the organizers for Pride Month?

A. As LGBTQ Co-op Coordinator last year, I had to – it’s one of the main responsiblities.

I spent the entire year involved with Pride Month programming. It’s one of the most visible reminders that we have an active, really diverse LGBTQ community on this campus.

Q. What were the highlights of your Pride Month experience?

A. The talks by Austin Scarlett, a finalist on Project Runway, and Krista Burton, who writes the blog Effing Dykes, whose events drew well over 50 people each. A lot of the people weren’t queer in any way, and it was exciting to see them be part of it, with even straight allies and Yalies not involved with anything LGBTQ attending. I appreciate anything that brings them in. For me, one of the best events was a discussion called “Am I Gay Enough: Whose LGBTQ Community Is It Anyway?” It reflected this division over the years between people who are active and affiliated with the Co-op and people for whom getting involved just isn’t what they want. Those people who aren’t involved sometimes think the Co-op is trying to prescribe a way of being gay. People in the Co-op think that people who aren’t involved unfairly jugde those who are. The tension has been reducing over the last few years, and at that event we had a room full of people who’ve never really been at a Co-op event before, talking about what kind of community they want to be involved in. I think the parties are always really great too.

Since I’ve been a freshman, there’s been a real renaissance: there were almost none my freshman year, and they were in sketchy basements. Moving them to a more visible

F R I D AY APRIL 6

1980: David Norgard DIV ’83 founds the Gay and Lesbian Co-op.

place was a big step.

Q. Based on what you’re heard anecdotally, how did Pride Month come to its modern form?

A. Early on, Gay Rights Week at Yale was very, very political, about getting sexual orientation added to the list of protected categories in Connecticut. There was a political goal people were trying to achieve.

The early ’80s were a similar period, with an added focus on doing less explicitly political work and trying to raise awareness more generally — that’s why the event was called Gay and Lesbian Awareness Days. It showed that gay people are our friends, our roommates, our classmates, not this isolated community that exists nowhere near us. With the emergence of AIDS, that political focus just got a lot stronger. The early ’90s were a really political time for gay and lesbian student activists, because people were literally dying; Yale students were getting sick. A community a lot of Yale students were a part of was facing this horrendous challenge that provided political impetus. I don’t know if we have lost that political angle. I know a few years ago we had Pride Week at Yale, and Pride’s become so big that we have a lot of things that are political but aren’t explicitly so; for instance, some people would say that some of the cultural stuff we’re doing is [political]. That’s part of the expansiveness. which is less focused on specific political goals and more about LGBT progress and community-building.

Q. What do you think is the external impression people had of Pride Month?

A. We sent an email to the entire school.

People are generally pretty receptive to

THE POKÉMON MUSICAL

Davenport/Pierson Theater // 8:00 p.m. ehh … I will trade my Pikachu with your Charmander, I guess?

A. From Gay and Lesbian Awareness Days to Pride Week, from Pride Month to our nebulous six weeks of Pride@Yale, we’ve seen a lot of change. One of my

it; we sent this to basically every Yale student, and we didn’t get the kind of responses you do to emails sent to panlists, which are “Take me off, take me off.” People accept this as something that happens every year, the same way Latino Heritage Month might happen. For people who are really involved, it’s the high volume of programming they’re already used to. For people who aren’t involved in the Co-op at all, Pride provides at least one event they want to go to. The LGBT community has an almost constant presence on campus, [so] that some people who aren’t that involved don’t realize that Pride is a separate month of programming. I told one of my friends that Pride Month was starting, and he said he feels like every month is Pride Month at Yale.

friends said to me recently, “How are you doing Pride Month? It’s crazy!”, and then she goes, “Isn’t your life just Pride days all the time?”

That’s what I want to see for the LGBTQ community and their allies at Yale. It’s not enough to see that once a year. The ever-increasing pride on campus is symptomatic of that — we don’t have enough time! I could envision the whole year being a Pride Year at Yale. Practically speaking, we could add another day every year.

Pride as an ideal is really important. Another celebration Yale has been participating in more recently, another way of making pride an ideal, is IvyQ, the conference open to undergraduates throughout the Ivy League. Yale is bidding to host IvyQ next year — if that’s in February and Pride is in April, it’s going to be a Pride spring!

Q. What does it mean to have these events?

A. The fact is that Pride is not only widely advertised but also widely supported by campus institutions, including Yale College itself and offices like the Office of LGBTQ Resources.

Controversies like the one about Sex Week happen because we don’t think of sexual expression, sexuality, all these things, as being completely natural, normal parts of our daily lives.

What’s remarkable about Yale and not necessarily true of other spaces in our lives is that we’re in a place where being LGBTQ is seen as being normal and natural. That’s an important general indication of this community. That’s not to say homophobia and transphobia don’t exist; it’s just that the visibility of events like Pride makes it unacceptable for these views to be voiced in public. It’s the first of many important steps. Especially for students who aren’t out, it’s important to see that celebration is the norm, not the exception. People going to events and not being in the community is fantastic; I couldn’t ask for more than that. If we can have that, like with our “Reclamation!” event where half the room was LGBTQ-community folks and the other half was linguistics majors, we’ll be bringing together people.

Q. Thirty-five years on, what do you want Yale’s LGTBQ scene to look like?

A. I’ll be 55, returning to Yale for GALA (formerly Gay and Lesbian Alumni Association) events.

Coming back to campus, what will be so beautiful about our queer future will be that we won’t even consider the question of whether others will challenge our celebrating pride. We won’t need to change our perception of the American family, we’ll need no change in our perception of the American family — the family will look bigger than it does right now, With issues of marriage, we won’t think of it as a fight. Hopefully, in 35 years, there will be no question of whether a same-gender couple can raise a child as well as a heterosexual couple. I hope Yale’s LGBTQ community can celebrate without fear of censorship, or fear of criticism, without any regard of what people think when they hear those words.

1987: The Wall Street Journal publishes “‘Lipsticks’ and Lords: Yale’s New Look,” the story containing the “1 in 4” statistic. University President Benno Schmidt ’63 LAW ’66 disputes this idea of Yale as “a gay school” in a letter to alumni and donors.

In the same year, Yale’s new Lesbian and Gay Studies Center, one of only two in the United States, hosts its inaugural conference.

1982: The Co-op launches GLAD — Gay and Lesbian Awareness Days. After a week of lectures, poetry readings, and film screenings, the event concludes with the first-ever gay rally on Cross Campus.

Yale has had a similar event in April every year since, with the program growing from GLAD to Pride Month to its current incarnation.

In addition, the Yale Corporation alters Yale’s antidiscrimination policy, arguing that Yale has a commitment to “respecting an individual’s attitudes on a variety of matters that are essentially personal in

Q. What do you think is the future of Pride Month?

A. One thing I’d really be excited about is more connections with alumni. I think that especially because the community has changed a lot. The full acronym LGBT only really made sense to a lot of alums 10 or 15 years ago. The Co-op was organized in a very different way then. Forty years ago, a visible organized LGBT community didn’t really exist. So I would like to see more and more engagement with people who have graduated. GALA, the LGBTQ alumni organization, is already modeling what I want to see in the future. They’re great, and I appreciate their relationship to Pride Month.

2006: Yale hires Maria Trumpler to serve as the “special assistant to the deans for LGBTQ affairs.”

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Asking big questions on Seder.

Because, Rabbi Steven Greenberg tells us, “tyrants are undone and liberty is won with a good question.” Down with the tyrants, we say.

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND TECH

WITRICITY

WEEKEND DOES TECHNOLOGY

The Future: pulling the plug? // BY JACOB EVELYN Everything is going wireless. Phones used to be bound by those curly wires that allowed you to walk a daring 10 feet away from the kitchen telephone jack, and before that an operator had to sit at a telegraph machine all day, receiving messages from London via a cable running across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Then (skipping over a remarkable sunlight-based wireless telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter in 1880), radio came along and became the first-ever widely used wireless communications technology, with the exception of delivering mail by horse.

Then came pagers, then cell phones, then Wi-Fi. Today you’d be hard-pressed to find a college student who connects to Facebook by any means other than the magical Internet that floats around in the air.

Interestingly, our concept of The Future doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of creativity here. What comes after Wi-Fi? Sure, lots of sci-fi involves faster-than-light communications (probably originated by Ursula K. Le Guin in 1966), but the actual things being transmitted wirelessly (electromagnetic waves) seem to have plateaued in our imagination.

Not so in science, friend. In the late 1800s, Nikola Tesla managed to illuminate phosphorescent (and a few years later, incandescent) lamps with electrostatic induction — that is, wirelessly. Here’s something Le Guin never thought up: the wireless transfer of electricity.

You may have heard of newfangled wireless chargers for iPods, iPhones, iPads, and, hell, BlackBerries or whatever else old-fashioned people use. Though we’re only just getting them now, these wireless “induction chargers” use the same basic technology Tesla used over a hundred years ago, leveraging magnetic fields to transmit electricity instead of that tangled mass of wires behind your desk. Induction chargers are now being made for everything from laptops to electric cars. The Age of Induction means no more cables, no more exposed metal.

As you might expect, wireless induction is less efficient than standard conduction charg-

YALE WIKI

SPOTIFY

The way we listen now // BY BAOBAO ZHANG “Spotify is the greatest thing since sliced bread!” my friend proclaimed this summer when the music streaming service arrived in the U.S. I rolled my eyes. “What’s the big deal?” I thought. Haven’t we seen Napster, Limewire, Pandora and Grooveshark come and go? After my friend kept waving her Spotify app in my face, I begrudgingly downloaded the program.

Nine months later: I am addicted to Spotify. I open it more often than I open my iTunes or turn on my iPod. Originally critical, I was soon won over by the program’s clean graphics, expansive catalogue, and extensive sharing features. (The ads are pretty annoying, but I’d rather not pay a monthly fee to avoid them.) Most importantly, I felt good about using Spotify because I wasn’t breaking the law.

Little did I know Spotify was killing my music listening habits. Unlike Pandora, which generates a virtual radio station based on a song, an album, or an artist, Spotify allows users to choose what exactly they want to listen to. During the first month of using (it’s like a drug), I was overwhelmed by the freedom. I felt like a five-year-old at Hershey Park.

Slowly, the magic wore off. Instead of exploring new music, I kept returning to the same old tunes. I must have listened to Brahms’ “Ein deutsches Requiem” 50 times, featuring a dozen different orchestras — I’ve even heard the fourhand piano version! Worse still, instead of listening to a whole album, I would fixate upon a song till it grew tiresome.

In my pre-Spotify days, I was an adventurous music listener. Because I reviewed music for “Scene,” WEEKEND’s predecessor, I needed to keep up with the latest bop right off the block.

I obsessively followed podcasts from NPR Music, WNYC and KEXP. I read everything from Rolling Stone to Paste to Pitchfork. Every time NPR’s “Exclusive First Listen” came out with a new album, I would set aside time to listen to the entire thing. Some of the music

I encountered, like Dirty Projectors’ “Bitte Ocra” or Eric Whitacre’s “Choral Music,” never quite won me over, but they were worth the listen. But I also discovered some of my favorite albums, such as PJ Harvey’s “Let England Shake” and The Black Keys’ “Brothers,” through this same process of exploration.

Most importantly, I listened to an eclectic mix, from bluegrass to gospel, from piano virtuosos to Azerbaijiani singers. I listened because they were the only things available to legally stream on the internet. (Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, or rather their labels, didn’t let their entire albums stream on the web.) As a broke college student, I could neither afford to buy music, nor did I want to illegally download music. (Limewire can give your computer viruses — it’s not a myth.) So I listened to whatever I could find; incidentally, these sounds broadened my musical horizon.

The unfettered freedom of Spotify ironically limited my appreciation for new music. Too much freedom of choice is not necessarily beneficial — take cable news, for instance. Jurist and economist Richard Posner argued that the explosion of cable news programs made news shows a lot more partisan.

In the pre-cable days, there were only a few news programs, so they did their best to be “fair and balanced” to appeal to the median viewer. (To all you political scientists and game theorists out there, it’s the Downsian model!) Nowadays, in the world of the 24-hour news cycle, networks find it more profitable to target partisan, niche markets.

Bill O’Reilly and Rachel Maddow stay on the air because people like to watch news that confirms their political views.

Spotify is not nearly as bad as Fox News, I’d like to tell myself. But, just as I had stopped watching TV, I might have to delete Spotify from my computer soon.

Yale Wiki: Because the Common Good and Stuff // BY AARON GERTLER So here we have a website that could potentially be the most useful thing ever and is definitely not just the quickie creation of someone who wants to run for YCC. I happen to live above someone who wants to run for YCC, and was thus recruited to join staff. So now, whenever I write anything, I get to thinking “hey, why aren’t I on Yale Wiki, contributing to the sum total of all human knowledge?” It’s because I know that I only write to see my name on things, like everybody except the unselfish human beings/saints who built the Yale Wiki from the ground up.

But actually, this is a good site (and one you should write for), even when it deviates from traditional Wikipedia formatting.

Take “Making the Most of College,” for example. Some stressed-out senior wrote a long, heartfelt essay about everything from constructing the ideal Four-Year Plan to keeping yourself physically healthy. But that wasn’t the end of it. Someone else got to swoop in and make the infinitely useful contribution of adding an embedded link to a half-baked Yale Wiki article on physical fitness that they spent an hour writing solely so they could embed it everywhere and feel useful. Ahem.

Yale Dining, Computer Stuff Yale Pays For, Where To Buy Things — really, Yale Wiki is HackYale for people who don’t know how computers work but still want to make their lives easier. If people read this website, Yale might start giving us some money, which means we could make an app and devote more time to content creation and possibly start embedding videos and

fancy interactive polls (read: the Favorite Sushi War to End All Wars). We’re creating a mass-information system that compiles and applies student wisdom in ways the University can’t match, so if you have some wisdom, visit yalewiki.org today (tomorrow, next week, no rush) and tell us all of your secrets (and recipes; we need recipes).

Plus, this is where all the Harvard kids who didn’t get into Yale will eventually be spending their time. Crying, I hope.

Contact AARON GERTLER at aaron.gertler@yale.edu .

TELLING RHYMES

APRIL 7

Kate Tempest raps poetry, speaks music, loses us in the intersection.

LC 209 // 2:00 p.m.

Contact JACOB EVELYN at jacob.evelyn@yale.edu .

L

A

E IPHONE

A New Composition // BY CAROLYN LIPKA The most popular camera in the world is the iPhone camera. Apparently, people use it for more than just snapping photos of their drunk friends with red solo cups or James Franco in Starbucks. Although I think the mupload itself is an artform, the camera on the iPhone is fast becoming a legitimate tool, increasingly endorsed by artists of many mediums. An HD camera for both still photography and filming, the iPhone provides virtually anyone with the opportunity to make a professional looking film or take a high quality photograph.

This method of photography was recently validated as art with the new exhibition “Call to Everyone” at the Donald Mitchell Library in Westville, CT. The exhibit, curated by photographer JoAnne Wilcox, features photos taken by cell phone cameras printed on card catalogues and due date cards from libraries.

Contact BAOBAO ZHANG at baobao.zhang@yale.edu .

S AT U R D AY

Y

ing, and typically requires charging objects to be placed on top of a charging pad. But a company spawned by research at MIT, cleverly called WiTricity, is looking to change that.

Using resonance to amplify the induction, WiTricity claims it can produce highly efficient power transfer across a few meters of air — a feat that trumps all other wireless charging companies by a wide margin.

But wireless charging, in any form, still requires a wire: from the outlet to the charger, perhaps, or from the power line to the outlet.

Nanotechnology company Nanoholdings has developed materials allowing electrons to be captured from sunlight, stored on any surface, and beamed around the home or around the block or wherever need be. Though these nanomaterials appear to be in relatively early stages of development and testing, if Nanoholdings founder Justin Hall-Tipping’s claims are true, we won’t need power plants or electrical lines any more. “The grid of tomorrow is no grid,” he proclaims in a TED talk, “and energy, clean efficient energy, will one day be free.”

Wow. One of the problems with this sort of future, however, is the idea of beaming energy from place to place. Typically, receiving energy in this manner is relatively inefficient. That may be changing, however, with results from NASA’s Beam Power Challenge (later renamed Elevator:2010). The goal of the competition is to create an efficient cable-climbing robot powered by infrared energy beamed from lasers on the ground (eventually NASA hopes to use this technique to power an elevator to space, a very cool idea I will tease you with but not delve into).

The NASA challenge was won by a company called LaserMotive, and if their energy beaming is indeed efficient enough, the final key may be in place. Long-range charging, off-the-grid energy transfer, and efficient solar energy capture all point toward one thing: we may finally be able to make electricity, itself, wireless.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: The Oxford & Cambridge Goat Race.

“Two goats, one glorious race.” It’s all going down today.

“People are realizing that there’s something in their pocket that can put them into a creative space any time in their day,” Wilcox said. “My goal as a photographer over the years has been to always have my camera on me, and suddenly I found myself using my cell phone camera all the time.

This kind of exhibit is just the beginning of a slow recognition of cell phone photography as a more legitimate artform. Although the photos that result from phones are perhaps not as easily manipulated as an SLR, and take much less work than an actual film camera, they still allow virtually anyone to become an artist.

Camera phone photography brings about a debate in the art community about what defines photography as an artform. Critics argue that the phone limits your ability to frame and compose a shot outside the confines of a very limited zoom. Purchasing

S AT U R D AY APRIL 7

“apps” can give your phone a fisheye lens, but an artificial one at that.

So is iPhone photography really art? Or does is just impersonate it?

Wilcox sees her camera as a tool to create art, and her cell phone similarly. WIlcox said that she believes the camera doesn’t affect the eye of the photographer, but merely limits them to the modifications that a cell phone camera has. At the end of the day, it won’t be the same as having a digital SLR, but that doesn’t negate the art it produces.

“It’s an excellent tool for honing your eye and playing with composition and framing,” Wilcox added.

Photography is not the only visual art people are exploring on their cell phone cameras.

The capability to record video on a cell phones has further expanded the base of people able to make films.

More people have access to HD video cameras, and with that, more peo-

SLAMLET

WHC Auditorium // 7:30 p.m.

Teeth Slam takes on Shakespeare, a worthy adversary through and through

ple are able to experiment with the medium.

Qualities that are symptomatic of filming on one’s phone, like shaky film or a slightly elevated view with restricted frame, have been adopted as techniques by the actual film industry. Yale Film Society President Becca Edelman ’14 sees this style employed by big budget films like “Paranormal Activity” and “Project X.” She also sees increased use of the phone camera as characteristic of a larger trend in film.

“It is [part of] the movement toward producing films on a lower budget,” Edelman said. “It’s great that anyone can make a film, although I’m not sure how easy it would be to create an entire film on an iPhone.”

Making film on the iPhone is hard, but not impossible. Manipulating the zoom is a little complicated, and the cameraman is restricted to two aspect ratios, the widescreen or

long shot. In order to make the camera still without extensive post-production tricks, the cameraman needs a tripod, not something really made for camera phones. The lack of viewfinder and one’s ability to make small modifications, like setting the white balance or adjusting the sound, only add to the user friendliness of the device, but simultaneously take away the nuance needed to implement certain artistic visions.

Despite its pitfalls, the iPhone camera rocks. It allows everyone with a cell phone to make calls, play “Scramble With Friends” and make art. Developing an artistic eye and playing around with composition is vital to the creation of a photographer and a filmmaker. The popularization of the cell phone camera allows all of us to be Scorsese or Leibowitz.

Contact CAROLYN LIPKA at carolyn.lipka@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Learning the names of all your classmates.

Both male and female. Read the cover to find out why.

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND TECH

WITRICITY

WEEKEND DOES TECHNOLOGY

The Future: pulling the plug? // BY JACOB EVELYN Everything is going wireless. Phones used to be bound by those curly wires that allowed you to walk a daring 10 feet away from the kitchen telephone jack, and before that an operator had to sit at a telegraph machine all day, receiving messages from London via a cable running across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Then (skipping over a remarkable sunlight-based wireless telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter in 1880), radio came along and became the first-ever widely used wireless communications technology, with the exception of delivering mail by horse.

Then came pagers, then cell phones, then Wi-Fi. Today you’d be hard-pressed to find a college student who connects to Facebook by any means other than the magical Internet that floats around in the air.

Interestingly, our concept of The Future doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of creativity here. What comes after Wi-Fi? Sure, lots of sci-fi involves faster-than-light communications (probably originated by Ursula K. Le Guin in 1966), but the actual things being transmitted wirelessly (electromagnetic waves) seem to have plateaued in our imagination.

Not so in science, friend. In the late 1800s, Nikola Tesla managed to illuminate phosphorescent (and a few years later, incandescent) lamps with electrostatic induction — that is, wirelessly. Here’s something Le Guin never thought up: the wireless transfer of electricity.

You may have heard of newfangled wireless chargers for iPods, iPhones, iPads, and, hell, BlackBerries or whatever else old-fashioned people use. Though we’re only just getting them now, these wireless “induction chargers” use the same basic technology Tesla used over a hundred years ago, leveraging magnetic fields to transmit electricity instead of that tangled mass of wires behind your desk. Induction chargers are now being made for everything from laptops to electric cars. The Age of Induction means no more cables, no more exposed metal.

As you might expect, wireless induction is less efficient than standard conduction charg-

YALE WIKI

SPOTIFY

The way we listen now // BY BAOBAO ZHANG “Spotify is the greatest thing since sliced bread!” my friend proclaimed this summer when the music streaming service arrived in the U.S. I rolled my eyes. “What’s the big deal?” I thought. Haven’t we seen Napster, Limewire, Pandora and Grooveshark come and go? After my friend kept waving her Spotify app in my face, I begrudgingly downloaded the program.

Nine months later: I am addicted to Spotify. I open it more often than I open my iTunes or turn on my iPod. Originally critical, I was soon won over by the program’s clean graphics, expansive catalogue, and extensive sharing features. (The ads are pretty annoying, but I’d rather not pay a monthly fee to avoid them.) Most importantly, I felt good about using Spotify because I wasn’t breaking the law.

Little did I know Spotify was killing my music listening habits. Unlike Pandora, which generates a virtual radio station based on a song, an album, or an artist, Spotify allows users to choose what exactly they want to listen to. During the first month of using (it’s like a drug), I was overwhelmed by the freedom. I felt like a five-year-old at Hershey Park.

Slowly, the magic wore off. Instead of exploring new music, I kept returning to the same old tunes. I must have listened to Brahms’ “Ein deutsches Requiem” 50 times, featuring a dozen different orchestras — I’ve even heard the fourhand piano version! Worse still, instead of listening to a whole album, I would fixate upon a song till it grew tiresome.

In my pre-Spotify days, I was an adventurous music listener. Because I reviewed music for “Scene,” WEEKEND’s predecessor, I needed to keep up with the latest bop right off the block.

I obsessively followed podcasts from NPR Music, WNYC and KEXP. I read everything from Rolling Stone to Paste to Pitchfork. Every time NPR’s “Exclusive First Listen” came out with a new album, I would set aside time to listen to the entire thing. Some of the music

I encountered, like Dirty Projectors’ “Bitte Ocra” or Eric Whitacre’s “Choral Music,” never quite won me over, but they were worth the listen. But I also discovered some of my favorite albums, such as PJ Harvey’s “Let England Shake” and The Black Keys’ “Brothers,” through this same process of exploration.

Most importantly, I listened to an eclectic mix, from bluegrass to gospel, from piano virtuosos to Azerbaijiani singers. I listened because they were the only things available to legally stream on the internet. (Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, or rather their labels, didn’t let their entire albums stream on the web.) As a broke college student, I could neither afford to buy music, nor did I want to illegally download music. (Limewire can give your computer viruses — it’s not a myth.) So I listened to whatever I could find; incidentally, these sounds broadened my musical horizon.

The unfettered freedom of Spotify ironically limited my appreciation for new music. Too much freedom of choice is not necessarily beneficial — take cable news, for instance. Jurist and economist Richard Posner argued that the explosion of cable news programs made news shows a lot more partisan.

In the pre-cable days, there were only a few news programs, so they did their best to be “fair and balanced” to appeal to the median viewer. (To all you political scientists and game theorists out there, it’s the Downsian model!) Nowadays, in the world of the 24-hour news cycle, networks find it more profitable to target partisan, niche markets.

Bill O’Reilly and Rachel Maddow stay on the air because people like to watch news that confirms their political views.

Spotify is not nearly as bad as Fox News, I’d like to tell myself. But, just as I had stopped watching TV, I might have to delete Spotify from my computer soon.

Yale Wiki: Because the Common Good and Stuff // BY AARON GERTLER So here we have a website that could potentially be the most useful thing ever and is definitely not just the quickie creation of someone who wants to run for YCC. I happen to live above someone who wants to run for YCC, and was thus recruited to join staff. So now, whenever I write anything, I get to thinking “hey, why aren’t I on Yale Wiki, contributing to the sum total of all human knowledge?” It’s because I know that I only write to see my name on things, like everybody except the unselfish human beings/saints who built the Yale Wiki from the ground up.

But actually, this is a good site (and one you should write for), even when it deviates from traditional Wikipedia formatting.

Take “Making the Most of College,” for example. Some stressed-out senior wrote a long, heartfelt essay about everything from constructing the ideal Four-Year Plan to keeping yourself physically healthy. But that wasn’t the end of it. Someone else got to swoop in and make the infinitely useful contribution of adding an embedded link to a half-baked Yale Wiki article on physical fitness that they spent an hour writing solely so they could embed it everywhere and feel useful. Ahem.

Yale Dining, Computer Stuff Yale Pays For, Where To Buy Things — really, Yale Wiki is HackYale for people who don’t know how computers work but still want to make their lives easier. If people read this website, Yale might start giving us some money, which means we could make an app and devote more time to content creation and possibly start embedding videos and

fancy interactive polls (read: the Favorite Sushi War to End All Wars). We’re creating a mass-information system that compiles and applies student wisdom in ways the University can’t match, so if you have some wisdom, visit yalewiki.org today (tomorrow, next week, no rush) and tell us all of your secrets (and recipes; we need recipes).

Plus, this is where all the Harvard kids who didn’t get into Yale will eventually be spending their time. Crying, I hope.

Contact AARON GERTLER at aaron.gertler@yale.edu .

TELLING RHYMES

APRIL 7

Kate Tempest raps poetry, speaks music, loses us in the intersection.

LC 209 // 2:00 p.m.

Contact JACOB EVELYN at jacob.evelyn@yale.edu .

L

A

E IPHONE

A New Composition // BY CAROLYN LIPKA The most popular camera in the world is the iPhone camera. Apparently, people use it for more than just snapping photos of their drunk friends with red solo cups or James Franco in Starbucks. Although I think the mupload itself is an artform, the camera on the iPhone is fast becoming a legitimate tool, increasingly endorsed by artists of many mediums. An HD camera for both still photography and filming, the iPhone provides virtually anyone with the opportunity to make a professional looking film or take a high quality photograph.

This method of photography was recently validated as art with the new exhibition “Call to Everyone” at the Donald Mitchell Library in Westville, CT. The exhibit, curated by photographer JoAnne Wilcox, features photos taken by cell phone cameras printed on card catalogues and due date cards from libraries.

Contact BAOBAO ZHANG at baobao.zhang@yale.edu .

S AT U R D AY

Y

ing, and typically requires charging objects to be placed on top of a charging pad. But a company spawned by research at MIT, cleverly called WiTricity, is looking to change that.

Using resonance to amplify the induction, WiTricity claims it can produce highly efficient power transfer across a few meters of air — a feat that trumps all other wireless charging companies by a wide margin.

But wireless charging, in any form, still requires a wire: from the outlet to the charger, perhaps, or from the power line to the outlet.

Nanotechnology company Nanoholdings has developed materials allowing electrons to be captured from sunlight, stored on any surface, and beamed around the home or around the block or wherever need be. Though these nanomaterials appear to be in relatively early stages of development and testing, if Nanoholdings founder Justin Hall-Tipping’s claims are true, we won’t need power plants or electrical lines any more. “The grid of tomorrow is no grid,” he proclaims in a TED talk, “and energy, clean efficient energy, will one day be free.”

Wow. One of the problems with this sort of future, however, is the idea of beaming energy from place to place. Typically, receiving energy in this manner is relatively inefficient. That may be changing, however, with results from NASA’s Beam Power Challenge (later renamed Elevator:2010). The goal of the competition is to create an efficient cable-climbing robot powered by infrared energy beamed from lasers on the ground (eventually NASA hopes to use this technique to power an elevator to space, a very cool idea I will tease you with but not delve into).

The NASA challenge was won by a company called LaserMotive, and if their energy beaming is indeed efficient enough, the final key may be in place. Long-range charging, off-the-grid energy transfer, and efficient solar energy capture all point toward one thing: we may finally be able to make electricity, itself, wireless.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: The Oxford & Cambridge Goat Race.

“Two goats, one glorious race.” It’s all going down today.

“People are realizing that there’s something in their pocket that can put them into a creative space any time in their day,” Wilcox said. “My goal as a photographer over the years has been to always have my camera on me, and suddenly I found myself using my cell phone camera all the time.

This kind of exhibit is just the beginning of a slow recognition of cell phone photography as a more legitimate artform. Although the photos that result from phones are perhaps not as easily manipulated as an SLR, and take much less work than an actual film camera, they still allow virtually anyone to become an artist.

Camera phone photography brings about a debate in the art community about what defines photography as an artform. Critics argue that the phone limits your ability to frame and compose a shot outside the confines of a very limited zoom. Purchasing

S AT U R D AY APRIL 7

“apps” can give your phone a fisheye lens, but an artificial one at that.

So is iPhone photography really art? Or does is just impersonate it?

Wilcox sees her camera as a tool to create art, and her cell phone similarly. WIlcox said that she believes the camera doesn’t affect the eye of the photographer, but merely limits them to the modifications that a cell phone camera has. At the end of the day, it won’t be the same as having a digital SLR, but that doesn’t negate the art it produces.

“It’s an excellent tool for honing your eye and playing with composition and framing,” Wilcox added.

Photography is not the only visual art people are exploring on their cell phone cameras.

The capability to record video on a cell phones has further expanded the base of people able to make films.

More people have access to HD video cameras, and with that, more peo-

SLAMLET

WHC Auditorium // 7:30 p.m.

Teeth Slam takes on Shakespeare, a worthy adversary through and through

ple are able to experiment with the medium.

Qualities that are symptomatic of filming on one’s phone, like shaky film or a slightly elevated view with restricted frame, have been adopted as techniques by the actual film industry. Yale Film Society President Becca Edelman ’14 sees this style employed by big budget films like “Paranormal Activity” and “Project X.” She also sees increased use of the phone camera as characteristic of a larger trend in film.

“It is [part of] the movement toward producing films on a lower budget,” Edelman said. “It’s great that anyone can make a film, although I’m not sure how easy it would be to create an entire film on an iPhone.”

Making film on the iPhone is hard, but not impossible. Manipulating the zoom is a little complicated, and the cameraman is restricted to two aspect ratios, the widescreen or

long shot. In order to make the camera still without extensive post-production tricks, the cameraman needs a tripod, not something really made for camera phones. The lack of viewfinder and one’s ability to make small modifications, like setting the white balance or adjusting the sound, only add to the user friendliness of the device, but simultaneously take away the nuance needed to implement certain artistic visions.

Despite its pitfalls, the iPhone camera rocks. It allows everyone with a cell phone to make calls, play “Scramble With Friends” and make art. Developing an artistic eye and playing around with composition is vital to the creation of a photographer and a filmmaker. The popularization of the cell phone camera allows all of us to be Scorsese or Leibowitz.

Contact CAROLYN LIPKA at carolyn.lipka@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Learning the names of all your classmates.

Both male and female. Read the cover to find out why.

PAGE B8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

THE CATCH-22 OF UNDERREPRESENTATION WOMEN FROM PAGE B3 But within the engineering and applied sciences, some female undergraduates said they feel the limitations of gender as early as freshman year.

Catherine Harmer ’15, who is considering a major in either physics or engineering, said that she dropped her electrical engineering class not only because of overall workload, but partially because she felt less confident as a student within such a maledominated environment.

“I didn’t feel that I was inferior to the men,” Harmer said, “but I felt that the class was geared towards them and that there was something ‘off’ about the atmosphere that made me somewhat socially uncomfortable. I’m not sure if it had to do with the professor or the gender ratio, but it was definitely a more difficult environment to learn in.”

At the faculty level, the issue is more than a question of confidence or how conducive the workplace is to success in both genders — when it comes to who gets tenure and who does not, the problem is systemic.

“The tenure system needs to evolve,” Bercovici said, adding that the rigorous process undergone by tenure-track candidates was initially designed for “men who had wives to raise their kids for them.”

“I’m not saying women can’t do it,” he continued, “but it’s a timing issue.” Bercovici expressed optimism for the future of women faculty, predicting that as more females are hired by departments, they will modify the tenure system so that it is more amenable to everybody.

Karen Seto, a professor at the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, agreed that family responsibilities can make an already challenging career even more difficult. However, she added that women academics looking to raise families should choose spouses with schedules that complement theirs: “One of the best pieces of advice I got early on in my career was, ‘To be a successful scientist, you need to choose your spouse very carefully.’” Seto said that she is able to put in as many hours as she does at work because her husband does “the lion’s share of the homemaking.”

Other professors interviewed are less hopeful about future prospects of gender equality in academia. If there are so few female faculty members to begin with, they asked, how will they be able to transform the system into

one that identifies the professional successes for both men and women? Furthermore, as Natarajan pointed out, most men and women academics today have comparable curricula vitae — the “timing issue” does not seem to have a significant effect on women’s performance.

Natarajan said that “the main handicap for women in science at Yale is subtle, unconscious bias issues.” The debate should no longer be about whether women are less evolutionarily equipped to study sciences, Natarajan remarked: “Stuff like that detracts from the main issue, which is the following: how can we make the experience of doing science just as rewarding for both men and women?”

IMPLICIT BIASES

When assistant professor of psychiatry Hedy Kober signed in for her first day of work at the Yale School of Medicine, the clerk behind the desk looked up at her and said, “Oh, aren’t you cute!”

After that, she said, she changed her attire and hairstyle in order to look more serious. “I try to make a point of seeming adult-like, so there won’t be any chance that anyone will look at me and say, ‘Oh, look at that cute girl!’” she said.

Kober, a cognitive neuroscientist, says that relatively few women go into her field, and that the professional environment isn’t necessarily conducive to values that women hold in the personal lives. She cited family, children and relationships as examples that interfered with the work-life balance considered fitting within the cognitive neuroscience field. As a result, Kober says, “I almost have to forget that I am a woman — so that it doesn’t influence anyone else’s perception of me.”

Nearly all of the women interviewed for this story cited certain implicit biases that make working in scientific fields more challenging for them as females. Research shows that, when women are even subtly reminded of their gender, it triggers negative stereotypes about women, and that reminder is enough to make them perform worse. In other words, a person’s performance can be affected by the stereotypes of his or her social group when that aspect of his or her identity is made salient — an effect known as the ‘stereotype threat.’

In a 1999 study, Nalini Ambady of Harvard University and her colleagues asked Asian-American girls to take a math exam.

Before they began the test, they

were instructed to check a box demarcating either their ethnicity or gender, while a control group did not check off any demographic information. The researchers found that the girls who had been subtly reminded of their ethnicity prior to starting the exam performed better than the control group, while girls reminded of their gender performed worse. These findings correspond to the stereotypes that Asian-Americans are better than average at quantitative thinking and that girls are worse than boys. Ambady’s group subsequently found that children as young as 5 years old both understand these stereotypes and can be affected by them.

Whenever people worry that they may confirm a stereotype about the social group to which they belong, they are more likely to confirm that exact stereotype.

For women climbing the scientific research ladder, the threat is likely to worsen the further they progress, because they tend to have fewer females surrounding them. And as the number of females dwindles, the association between masculinity and science grows stronger.

Marianne LaFrance, a professor of psychology and women’s, gender and sexuality studies, says that the rate of attrition is so high in the sciences because, in a male-dominated environment, women get the message that they don’t fit.

“The climate is not actively hostile,” LaFrance explained.

“It’s not like the old days where women were just not given access to any resources. It’s that they don’t quite feel comfortable, they just feel a little off.”

A more recent study out of Rice University may have pinpointed one of the sources of stereotype threat in academia. The researchers analyzed letters of recommendation — which are essential to obtaining tenure — and found that letter-writers use different terms to describe men and women. Men are more likely to be praised for their independence and intelligence, while women are more often described as cooperative and personable.

This finding held steady whether the letter writers were male or female. Evaluators, the analysis found, are more likely to choose a candidate with qualities such as independence, which are associated with men.

Kober said that she is only able to succeed despite these stereotypes because she concentrates on her identity as a scientist rather than as a woman. “I don’t

give anyone the chance to dwell on it, so it isn’t really a point of discussion,” she explained.

As of late, psychologists have begun exploring ways to extinguish stereotype threat. A team from the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany sorted eighth graders into either same-sex or mixedsex physics classes. After a year spent in class, the researchers found that the girls in the allgirls classroom exhibited more self-confidence in their physics abilities. By contrast, the girls who spent a year in a mixed-sex classroom had lower self-confidence, and boys’ self-confidence in a single-sex classroom was unaffected. In a 2010 investigation at the University of Colorado, researchers found that asking girls at the start of a 15-week college physics course to write about their most important values led them to perform better on exams and boosted their selfconfidence.

“All of us — including women — hold unconscious biases that favor men over women, because our culture views science as a man’s domain,” Steitz said.

CLIMBING SCIENCE HILL

While progress on eliminating and making people aware of implicit biases remains slow, women scientists at Yale are working on other fronts to fight gender disparities. This January, the University hosted the fifth annual Northeast Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics in memory of the late Michele Dufault ’11, who was in charge of running the conference before she passed away in a laboratory accident last April.

“Michele was an incredible mentor to me,” said conference organizer Ariel Ekblaw ’14. “Ellen Klein ’12, my coordinator, and I wanted to host the conference because we thought this would be an important year to honor her passion and dedication to the sciences, as well as to do right by her memory.”

Dufault’s former suitemates are also working on continuing her legacy in the form of a summer research fellowship in her name. Merlyn Deng ’11, one of the people who founded the Michele Dufault Summer Research Fellowship and Conference Fund, said that they hope to raise $100,000 over this year, which will enable them to endow the fund in perpetuity.

Events such as the Northeastern Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics not only bring women scientists together to share in one another’s experi-

ences, but they also enable students to interact with established female leaders whom they can look up to as role models. In a professional environment where there is such low female representation, it is crucial for young women to know that success is possible, a sentiment that was reiterated by both students and faculty members interviewed.

“Yale is very lucky to have a good number of simply terrific women on the physics faculty — but even then the maleto-female ratio is nowhere near unity,” said mechanical engineering major Jerry Wang ’13, who attended the conference. “The scarcity of women in physics in the first place also contributes to a negative feedback loop — prospective female physics majors are less likely to stay in the field when they don’t see many other women in their classes or at the blackboard.”

Pollack, who studied physics at a time when there were no women professors in the department, said that the lack of role models was a big factor in discouraging her from further pursuing the discipline.

“None of my professors said to me, ‘Are you thinking of going on in physics?’” she added. “So I thought, they didn’t really think I had what it would have taken to go on.”

At every rung of the academic ladder, female scientists are confronted with implicit biases that make it more difficult for them to attain the next level. As a result, the number of women role models remains low. This is the crux of the problem: as long as men outnumber women in higher education, subconscious prejudices will persist, but it’s these same biases that prevent institutions from achieving equality in the first place.

Despite the challenges that continue to confront women in science today, both faculty and students interviewed still expressed optimism for the future of female scientists. As Wang most aptly put it, “The big picture isn’t about women in science or men in science, it’s about doing good science. And good science just doesn’t happen when half the brains in the world face major systematic disadvantages entering and rising in the field.”

Contact YANAN WANG and MICHELLE HACKMAN AT yanan.wang@yale.edu and michelle.hackman@yale. edu .

O

O S AT U R D AY APRIL 7

A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY

Yale Repertory Theater // 8:00 p.m.

The performance of the 2012 Freshman Show you won’t want to miss.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: A stuffed armadillo.

To hearken back forever to the boy with the wrecked voice.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B9

WEEKEND MARKET

FINDING ITS PLACE Elm City Market democratizes New Haven’s food sources // BY CAROLINE MCCULLOUGH

In a recent White House Blog post

by Kathleen Merrigan, deputy secretary for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, New Haven’s very own Elm City Market received praise. The post, titled “Increasing Access to Locally Grown and Healthy Food,” pointed to the cooperative as the exemplary model of the ways in which the USDA is helping to expand the availability of local food sources to “community members that previously lacked access to the products grown just miles away from them.” The Elm City Market opened in November 2011 through the help of the USDA’s Business and Industry Guaranteed Loan Program, which offers loans of up to $10 million to help businesses that support local food sources.

Located just a few blocks from campus on the corner of State Street and Chapel Street, Elm City Market functions as a hybrid cooperative, a business in which customers can buy a membership, or partial ownership, for about $200. A membership of the Elm City Market not only provides discounts but also allows the customer to help make decisions about the store, such as what products are carried. Members are also encouraged to volunteer at the store. The website defines a hybrid co-op as providing “local, natural, organic and conventional products and groceries.”

In other words, Gabriela Millsaps, a sophomore at New Haven’s High School in the Community, can still find “normal-people cereal” as she shops with her vegan mother, Linda Morales.

Amy Christensen-Regni, Elm City Market’s marketing director, explained that this blend of products was an important strategy to help those unfamiliar with food markets feel more comfortable. She hopes that a customer such as Millsaps might happen upon some handmade granola as she looks for her conventional cereal.

Christensen-Regni said, “When those items are next to each other on the shelf, [shopping[ can become more of an exploration.”

The Elm City Market is a recent, and growing, edition to the New Haven community. Although it is the kind of place where you are likely to bump into a Yale professor or two, the majority of the customers interviewed by the News were other New Haven residents or people who work within walking distance of the store.

Last November, the store’s future and potential impact on the surrounding area was anticipated with much enthusiasm. Now, almost half a year later, the same optimism remains strong as the store continues to find its place within the community, although the store is still working to defeat the preconceptions that cooperatives and larger natural food vendors cater to a wealthy, select group. As of the opening, the co-op consisted of 750 members and now has almost twice as many, about 1500. Roughly 10 percent are Yale students or faculty.

“Poor access to whole, unprocessed, nutritionally dense food is as endemic [to] New Haven as it is nationwide,” Jacqueline Lewin, events and outreach coordinator for the Yale Sustainable Food Project, wrote in an email, “and Elm City is a part of the solution.” *** Jennifer Daddio, Elm City Market’s community outreach manager, wants people to understand that the market is the first of its kind. Not only is the market the city’s first cooperative, she said, but it is also the first time the city has had year-round access to healthy, sustainable, natural, organic food.

“We are reaching out to schools, senior centers, and health centers. We

are attending the open houses and family days at the two biggest health clinics in the impoverished area of the city,” Daddio said, “We are teaching the people there how to get to the Elm City Market, even potentially going as far as giving out bus passes to get here.”

The coexistence of “organic food” and “reasonable prices” in the same sentence might seem like a paradox, but Elm City Market has made a top priority of ensuring a democratization of the access to affordable and healthy food. Compared to major chain stores, like Stop & Shop, regular items are competitively priced, although certain special organic foods can be on the expensive side.

Because the Elm City Market is a member of a the National Cooperative Grocers Association, the store benefits from the group’s collective buying power, which allows Elm City Market to keep its prices in relation to chain stores.

But despite the store’s efforts, Elm City Market continues to combat the stereotype that healthy food is necessarily expensive. In fact, some of the store’s assets, its brand new feel and aesthetic appeal, may deter potential customers who read “sleek” as “pricey.” Though Christensen-Regni said the store’s interior was meant to look urban and clean, Anna Han ’14 remarked the store’s interior “looks a lot like Whole Foods,” an example of an expensive organic food store.

“When we go to our community outreach events, we explain that we are a hybrid store and we are cheaper,” Jennifer Daddio, Elm City Market’s Community outreach manager. “If you see a price for the same product that you found cheaper somewhere else, we will change it on the spot. We are trying to accommodate the customer in every way possible.”

For example, Elm City Market accepts payment from individuals on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program. In addition, the store attempts to entice customers with access to free parking, a café with Wi-Fi and regular community events.

On Wednesday afternoon, the store held a demonstration of natural egg dyeing, utilizing ingredients like blueberries and beets. The show drew quite a little crowd.

This demonstration is indicative of the store’s emphasis on education.

“We just embarked on our full-blown community outreach as of a couple days ago,” Daddio added. “We are going to start teaching cooking classes using our fresh ingredients. There will be a spinoff program about healthy eating for New Haven schools. Many people need to be educated on how to do that.”

Although some of these goals have yet to be implemented, the store is filled with accessible information to educate customers, including brochures outlining allergies, ideas for healthy recipes, and a clear labeling system marking items as “local” (0-200 miles away) or “regional” (201400 miles away).

Beyond education, another one of Elm City Market’s contributions to the community is “definitely jobs,” according to Anthony Cruz, the self-proclaimed “main seafood guy” behind the deli counter, who has been an employee of the store since its opening last fall. The White House Blog post stated that Elm City Market created 100 new jobs for local residents with salaries starting at twice the minimum wage.

Daddio cited the store’s employment of individuals through re-entry programs, which support the reintegration of formerly incarcerated res-

idents into the New Haven community. Recently, the Board of Aldermen created the Collateral Consequences Ordinance, which will place more restrictions on employers’ use of criminal background checks when hiring. “I am so proud of the people I work with,” Daddio said. “I love coming to work.

No matter what kind of day I’m having, when I get to work, it gets better.” *** Customers must feel similarly about entering Elm City Market’s atmosphere because, all and all, most customers interviewed agreed with New Haven resident Jennifer Trosko’s statement that the food is “a little pricey sometimes, but you are paying for what you’re getting.” The problem seems to come from a lack of awareness about the store and its mission.

“There was a great need for a grocery store like this,” Liz Sylvia, a daily customer and employee of Beauty Plus on Chapel Street, said. “I have found the employees to be well-trained and friendly. Not including the cost of gas or the trouble of getting in and out of the car, going to a huge supermarket just to buy a gallon of milk isn’t worth it.”

Other customers prefer Elm City Market for its selection of products.

New Haven resident Bill Iovanne explained that he had been to three different grocery stores until he finally found Earth Balance Butter at Elm City Market. Linda Morales was also excited to find Earth Balance Butter, especially on sale for $3.59, exclaiming, “Hello, that’s good!”

For the relatively limited space, Elm City Market packs in lots of variety.

“I’m pretty particular about cheese, and I find that Elm City’s selection is the best in the city outside of Caseus’ Cheese shop, which is obviously dedicated to that product,” Lewin wrote in an email. “In some markets curating and maintaining a nice selection of local, regional and international varieties can be a challenge, but they seem to be doing it very well.” Ray Xiong ’12 particularly likes the bulk section, with products ranging from quinoa to lentils, because it allows customers to bring their own food containers and purchase the exact amount desired.

In addition to organic fruits and vegetables, the Elm City Market sells high-quality meat products. Daddio said the store prides itself on its selection of grass-fed beef, a rarity in New Haven’s grocery stores. He added that the market buys its beef products whole, “so our meat will never contain any of that ‘pink slime’ the news has been talking about.”

What people should be talking about is our local cooperative that got a national shout-out. Despite the challenges, employees and customers alike share great optimism for Elm City Market’s future. Indeed, Linda Morales and her daughter Gabriela believe that word of mouth is the best form of advertisement for Elm City Market. People trust people they know, Morales added.

“I’m excited for the market to evolve and develop its own personality; one that truly reflects its constituents, like co-ops I’ve shopped at in other cities,” Lewin wrote. “I suspect that becoming deeply embedded takes time, and will deepen as more and more as citizens sign on as owners.”

As a cooperative run by a community, for a community, Elm City Market provides lots of ways to get to know our own neighborhood.

And, the United Nations has declared 2012 the Year of Cooperatives.

Contact CAROLINE MCCULLOUGH at caroline.mccullough@yale.edu . // VICTOR KANG

S AT U R D AY

Off Broadway Theater // 8:00 p.m.

APRIL 7

A Different Drum: we hear it in our eyes.

SYNESTHESIA

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: The Temple Street Garage.

Peering out from the top of Paul Rudolph’s parking garage provides a view like no other in New Haven. And, if you get over the fact that it serves the unglamorous function of storing cars, it’s a breathtaking piece of architecture.

PAGE B10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

‘HUNGER GAMES’ IS NOT THE NEW HARRY POTTER

I really want to keep this point direct and clear: “The Hunger Games” is not the new Harry Potter franchise.

This shouldn’t become a rant. I want to stay civil and controlled; I don’t want to preach for 700 words. But people always fall for the latest hype, and we — meaning the writers watching over all this — have to respond. Usually, it’s a struggle. This time, it’s easy.

This is an open response to the many (more and more by the day) critics and bloggers writing that the recent release of “The Hunger Games” signals the dawn of a new era. As they put it: Meet the next Harry James Potter. Here’s the hook of my argument: How dare you all.

So what exactly is “The Hunger Games?”

It’s very much like “The Most Dangerous Game.” (You know, the old Richard Connell short story? The one about the biggame hunter that gets lost at sea and winds up on the island of a crazy Cossack out of touch with the times? A crazy Cossack that hunts him like a beast?

You know, that one?) But in the world of “The Hunger Games,” the big-game hunter is replaced by a gaggle of teenagers, and the crazy Cossack is a sadistic, centralized, authoritarian state that uses a gladiatorial competition to prove a point: Don’t ever dream of rebelling (again).

“The Hunger Games” samples several different tropes of the genre (a cross-section between young adult and dystopic fantasy), but it’s still an intriguing narrative nonetheless. I want to know who the main character is; I want to know why she’s participating in these games; I want to watch her overthrow the system. (Because what else would a reasonable protagonist do in this situation?) But you can’t found a wide-reaching cultural phenomena based on intriguing plots. If they did, then the original “Indiana Jones” trilogy was the Industrial Revolution, while the fourth “Indiana Jones” movie was the South after the Civil War: bombed, depleted and aggressively ashamed.

Seriously, though, I like “The Hunger Games.” But it’s no Harry Potter.

I know we’re only a year removed from the release of the final Potter film, and I know we’re going to have to deal with the

MICHAEL LOMAX CINEMA TO THE MAX repercussions of the empty void that the franchise left in the market. But now we have Hollywood studios slapping a Potter teaser on every book-to-screen adaptation on the block. Of course we can’t blame them. But we don’t have to accept it.

Our generation (defined here as anyone born between 1980 and 1996) swallowed Harry Potter.

His story was more than intriguing — it was fresh and relatable.

What kid hasn’t sat alone in bed wishing that there was something more out there? After devouring the first 100 pages or so of “The Sorcerer’s Stone,” who didn’t (from then on) wish that an owl would come tapping at their window? Or who didn’t start regarding every motionless cat as a secret witch in disguise keeping tabs on them?

Harry Potter tapped into the childhood collective unconscious. It didn’t so much create a fantastic world as much as it allowed the reader (and later the viewer) to project their own fantasies, and to envision their own adventures. “The Hunger Games” is a fun watch; Harry Potter was a lifestyle.

Because of this, people dove into the series like a holy text: People stood in lines for days to secure midnight copies. Whole Internet communities sprang up out of the woodwork to address readers’ concerns (and read readers’ often deplorable fan fiction).

The series was so popular that videos of people shouting “Snape kills Dumbledore!” went viral.

After the release of the final book, NBC (and this is half-conjecture) shelled out their Christmas savings to get the first televised interview with Rowling herself.

“The Hunger Games” enjoys no such popularity. It’ll make a lot of money, but it’ll never “Reducto!” the bank like Harry and his friends did. (See what I did there?) I mean, I’d rather buy seven wands and a Mars Inc. chocolate frog than anything I could get in “The Hunger Games” that wasn’t a weapon or a person.

That doesn’t mean that the product is bad — I’m just saying this to prove a point.

Honestly, I could go on and on.

I could keep spitting out cleverly

// CREATIVE COMMONS & USMAGAZINE.COM

The Hunger Games is no Harry Potter

abrasive non-statements. I could start throwing statistics at you.

(The seven Harry Potter books have sold more than 450 million copies combined. The three “Hunger Games” books have sold about 25 million. Basically, that’s 8 million copies per book against 64 million copies per book. That’s eight times bigger. Eight!) But at the end of the day, it’s better for me to just keep this column simple (and keep my editors happy).

Though both book series give us strong protagonists that think with their hearts and have nothing to lose (so they save the world), that’s where the similarities end.

Harry Potter serviced an entire generation. He grew up before our also-growing eyes. He didn’t give us something to aspire to; he gave us a character and a storyworld in which we lived. “Hunger Games” will no doubt be profitable, but so was the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise well into its fourth installment. To be honest, it isn’t much more than that: a new, profitable series, one as equally spectacular and dismissible as the kill-or-be-killed plot at the center of it all.

I mean, the girl can’t even speak Parseltongue — what more needs to be said?

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

Me against the music Some of my friends/housemates/musical cognoscenti (who for the purposes of this column, I will collectively refer to as Latrice Royale) accuse me of liking and listening to the same six songs over and over again. Despite my many attempts at disproving them, the allegation is accurate. A few caveats for the sake of feeble redemption: I constantly rotate my roster of said six songs. Plus, whereas Latrice knew all about Animal Collective and Kate Bush in elementary school, I was once ridiculed into tears when asked about B-Spears’s latest album during my fifth grade Secret Santa.

In the piece of mountainous land I call home, there is no such knowledge of Pitchfork or indiepop, so I had to fend for myself

S U N D AY APRIL 8

JORDI GASSO INTERMISSION in the safe vacuum of my bedroom when it came to new music.

As such, I bounced around the genre. At 13, I bobbed my head to the stale beats of arena rock, and for that I’m not sorry. I developed a fondness for European electronic/house music that I never quite outgrew. Le gasp! I even had one of those screamo phases, checkerboard Vans shoes included and the latest of The Blood Brothers single always in queue!

In high school, MTV Latinoamérica introduced me to Interpol and the band became my gateway drug to “better” music.

Down the hole I went, experiencing one epiphany after another as I bumped into new discoveries.

From Queen to Daft Punk, from Beck to Zoé and now that hot bitch Azealia Banks — my quest for new tunes is akin to the trajectory of a floating leaf.

That’s not to say I’m aimless. I may drift but I still control the direction of my musical winds. For instance, I don’t guide my search for new music based on artists. Liking a band’s new single does not imply I will enjoy all of their work. I only have one MGMT song but I hate the rest of their material, yet I recently downloaded the entire New Order discography because I adore them.

The question: “Can I dance to this song and/or do I want to lis-

OUT IN THE WOODS

Phelps Gate // 10:30 a.m.

Hike to Sleeping Giant Park with Yale Outdoors and the LGTBQ Office! Come one, come all, come out.

ten to it 10 times in a row?” is now the yardstick by which I measure all prospective entries into my iPod, and the answer must always be yes. It might be why I have no favorite artist. Yet taste can only go so far, and mine is certainly limited and asymmetrical, unapologetically so.

A couple of ground rules: No rap music for my Zune — nice job Tha Carter but your lyrics are unintelligible to my slow ear.

My heart has a sweet spot for female vocalists: Blondie, Robyn, Grimes. I barely own more than 600 songs and I assume that a third of them are just women telling my whole life with their words.

Latrice, on the other hand, has almost 25,000 songs in her music

catalogue! What the what?! I could never hope to achieve such a dubious prowess. For someone with narrow preferences like myself, it would take me years of searching, horizon-expanding, and illegal downloading to reach those levels of conspicuous consumption. I’m a curator and Latrice is a collector.

After all, I don’t think Latrice can claim to like every song in her iTunes. She definitely has songs with a play count of zero. I can’t help but wonder if Latrice only downloaded these particular tracks so she can merely claim to have them, as if she’d been a lame Charlatan otherwise.

I realize that my music library will always be playing catch up with that of my savvy pals, and I’m okay with that. Indeed, it

may mean Latrice will become an influential music critic while I punch the clock at McKinsey.

But such a probable fate makes me all the more proud and grateful to learn from them now, while they can still deign me with their carefully constructed playlists. In fact, musical snobbery (or a vast appreciation of music history and various genres, ya-da ya-da ya-da) has sometimes become a bit of an essential when gauging how much I esteem new acquaintances. As disingenuous as I may sound, if you only listen to BritBrit these days: begone!

Contact JORDI GASSO at jmgj11@gmail.com.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: “13 Simple Steps To Get You Through A Rough Day” Google it. We promise you a baby hedgehog wearing a Santa hat.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B11

WEEKEND THEATER

‘TWO DURANG SHORTS’ BRINGS THE SITCOM LAUGHS // BY JOSEPHINE MASSEY // SELEN UMAN

How I met your mothjer? Gee, good question, honey.

If short sitcoms are your style, you’ll have no lack of laughs at “Two Durang Shorts” in the tiny yet contained JE theater.

“Two Durang Shorts” one a parody, one a sitcom, oddly pair together to provide a full hour of attempted hilarity. The first delivers better if you have seen Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” which it mimics.

If you haven’t, you can still be touched by its insight into caring for loved ones.

Amanda Chang ’13 directs the first of two Christopher Durang’s short plays, “For Whom the Southern Bell Tolls.” The story parodies Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie.”

If you haven’t seen the original, Durang’s take might lose you at moments meant to entertain. Amanda, a Southern mother self-described as “charming and vivacious,” is frustrated with her highly sensitive and limping son Lawrence who refuses to socialize and only enjoys playing with his glass cocktail stirrers.

Lawrence’s older brother Tom brings home a female caller that Amanda hopes will take a liking to Lawrence but turns out to be an almost-deaf lesbian. Although none of the characters are particularly likable, with the possible exception of Lawrence (because he is just so pitiful), Ngozi Ukazu ’13, who plays Amanda, is worth the watch, for she brilliantly portrays the dutiful mother who — although she seems cruel at times due to her exasperation with her son’s failings — is able to overcome her frustration and humor her son’s childish ways.

Although the play might be going for humor, it succeeds in finding a glimmer of hope in the struggle and sadness that results from the obligation of caring for others.

The second play, “Wanda’s Visit”, is like a really good episode of long-running sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.” Marsha and Jim are in a slump after 13 years of marriage when a letter arrives from Jim’s old classmate, Wanda, asking to visit. Predict-

ably, Wanda is still in love with Jim, and Marsha is jealous while Jim enjoys the attention. However, there’s a twist. Wanda may or may not be psychotic. Ali Viterbi ’14 creates a character that goes in and out of sanity — one moment she hysterically laments Jim’s marriage to Marsha, the next she claims to accept it. For some reason, the couple puts up with Wanda’s blabbering on and on about her years of promiscuous behavior and incarcerated boyfriends, all of which Viterbi delivers with such ease you might be afraid that she’s actually Wanda in real life (I hope not). Charles Margossian ’15 and Katharine Konietzko ’14 also do an excellent job as captives of Wanda’s madness — Margossian playfully hops from dutiful husband to intrigued recipient of flattery, while Konietzko captures the annoyed wife with spunk.

Wanda’s unwelcome visit ends up helping Jim and Marsha’s sex life, and it might just help yours.

The play speaks to the ability of

an extremely unpleasant event to remind us to appreciate our humdrum lives.

These plays might seem to have nothing in common beyond their author and their suburban settings. And yet there is some logic to the juxtaposition: both tales center on the importance of sustaining the family. Both plays feature characters like ones on TV: larger-than-life and archetypal.

The sparse stage-setting helps amplify the characters’ idiosyncracies, and in the contained JE theater, there is added pressure and higher stakes for the simple plotlines. Despite their status as caricatures for the sake of comededy, this cast shines light on the values and relationships that tie us together.

“Two Durang Shorts” will run in the JE Theater on Saturday at 2 p.m.

Contact JOSEPHINE MASSEY at josephine.massey@yale.edu .

A praise for ‘Owen Meany’ // BY LIZ RODRIGUEZ-FLORIDO

‘Mew-sical’ toys with meta-nostalgia // BY JACKSON MCHENRY

“Oversimplification!” is what Owen Meany (Jessica Miller ’15) says is wrong with society in this year’s freshman show, a rendition of “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” But “Oversimplification” is not what you would say when describing the titular novel or play.

The story deals with a grown and depressed John Wheelwright’s (Tim Creavin ’15) reflections on his dearest friend Owen Meany — who believed he was God’s instrument — and their childhood in a heavily religious small town in New Hampshire before and during the Vietnam War. John shares with us how Owen led him to regain his faith in God. I didn’t go to the Yale Rep with the most open mind. The story of Owen Meany — in book and in stage — is all over the place with rants on religion and no acknowledgement of chronological order.

But this production makes the tale not only bearable but enjoyable. This cast brings in humor to better grapple with the serious subjects, such as faith, organized religion, war and sexuality, that are approached.

Miller accomplished the ultimate.

She had us forget she was a girl, for one. On stage, she turned into a selfrighteous and at times horny little boy with a strange voice and a blood-curdling scream.

But let’s be clear: not even Miller’s notable performance could make transparent Owen Meany’s rants, which are at times exasperating. His personality is ideological, political and theological, and at one point he even breaks the fourth wall. This moment is powerfully delivered but feels out

S U N D AY APRIL 8

of place, like a few scenes throughout the play.

Another scene which had me asking “Is this really happening?” occurred when Owen propositioned a fellow classmate’s mother after she mentioned that his beloved President Kennedy was carrying on an affair with Marilyn Monroe. It was just awkward.

No amount of acting would have me believe the scene was natural or that a mother would stroll into her 16-yearold son’s all-boys school for a simple tryst.

Scenes that didn’t deal with Owen Meany were not given enough time in the script. Topics left underdeveloped included John’s suppression of his sexuality, his relationship with his grandmother, his life spent fatherless and his anger at Owen’s role in the death of his mother.

Creavin possessed the hard role of playing both narrator and character.

He was adept in portraying himself as a shy and scarred youth through his physical acting, although I would have liked to see more of older John in the first act of the story so that his monologues during the end of the production would have been less confusing.

As is, they leave the audience questioning whether they are facing a present-day John or young John. He played a character, who is supposed to be overshadowed by Meany and had to compensate for a performance intended to be over-the-top.

The staging by David Shatan-Pardo ’15 walked the line between bold and understated. The stage is a baseball diamond which has a second and third base raised on a platform. There

YALE SWING & BLUES SUNDAY PRACTICUM

Slifka Chapel // 8:00 p.m.

Yes, that’s right, this dance is social.

Now swing those knees, grandpa.

// ZEENAT MANSOOR

“Owen Meany” at the Yale Rep is metal fencing in the background, on which different props (window frames, crosses) were hung to mark significant changes as the plot proceeded.

The set had to accommodate a complicated story, one composed of quick flashes, occasionally with three, sometimes four, plotlines occurring at once. The minimalistic setting saves time but requires audience members to use their imaginations, which places more emphasis on the performances of the play’s actors; something that could have gone horribly wrong if the cast hadn’t nailed their performances.

The ponderings of John Wheelwright begins when he is a young boy and continues until he is 45. The crediblity of a cast of 18- to 19-yearolds aging from prepubesence to old age was greatly aided by the costuming (done by Abigail Carney ’15). The period garb not only established characters’ changing ages, but also showed the changing times of the development of John and his friends — from the placid 1950s to the troubled ’60s.

All in all, an expertly chosen cast and continuous humor make “A Prayer for Owen Meany” a fun show, while still adhering to the tone and message of an American classic.

“A Prayer for Owen Meany” is playing at the Yale Repertory Theater on Friday, April 6 at 8:00 p.m. and Saturday, April 7 at 2:00 and 8:00 p.m.

Contact LIZ RODRIGUEZ-FLORIDO at liz.rodriguez-florido@yale.edu .

Implicit in the production of “The Pokémon Mew-sical” is the notion that Ash Ketchum, his spunky sidekick, Pikachu, and their attempts to catch all of the pseudo-magical wildlife surrounding them will never be forgotten by our generation. Why? Every 10-year-old wants to go on an adventure. Most had to substitute a television or a GameBoy cartridge.

Written by Gabe Greenspan ’14 and Ryan Bowers ’14, “Mew-sical” attempts to recreate that elementary school sense of wonder by taking Yalies on another adventure with old friends: recklessly enthusiastic Ash, played by Mark Trapani ’14, and Pikachu, played

by Jen Mulrow ’14, who communicates a lot with three syllables. Along the way, they team up with the resentful Misty (Laurel Durning-Hammond ’14) and the luckless-in-love Brock (Nelson Madubuonwu ’13). Ash fights with rival Gary (Greenspan) who revels in the ooze of frat-boy self-assuredness.

And, of course, the inept Team Rocket trio of Jesse (Lucy Cabrera ’14), James (Matthew Prewitt ’12) and Meowth (Jake Backer ’14) tries several suitably ridiculous schemes to steal Pikachu.

“Mew-sical”, however, tries to build beyond Saturday morning anime with a load of self-reference almost too heavy for the fourth wall. Much of this is accomplished through Greenspan and Bower’s original score, which has characters sing what they want, how they feel and exactly what they’re going to do about it. While this doesn’t make for memorable music, it allows easy ways to comment on the ridiculousness of the Pokémon world (every plan that Team Rocket suggests relies on the use of a large Magikarp submarine), the banality of pointing out the ridiculousness of the Pokémon world (the revelation that “Ekans is snake backwards!” dawns on several characters) and even on the show’s premise itself, hanging several lampshades on its more absurd conceits, especially near its end. This builds to a mass of references that is simultaneously complex (diehard Nintendo fans will love tracking every sidebar) and accessible (most of the obscure references are lampooned a beat later for their own obscurity).

If “Mew-sical” does not assume a level of Pokémon proficiency, it at least demands Pokémon enthusiasm.

Brock’s rap, for instance, would lose a lot of its hilarious swag if you can’t enjoy the fact that, yes, Madubuonwu just dropped a rhyme with “Seaking.” Occasionally, the show takes the audience for granted and becomes overconfident in its ability to register. Some scenes, like Ash’s summoning of Charizard, insist too strongly on being important, and, in their silverplatter delivery, drive the show away from its more free-form fun. The plot involving Giovanni’s (Jordan Ascher ’14) attempts to capture Pikachu, in particular, smacks of contrivance, built mostly off of having a “real” but deranged person deal, using violence, with Pokémon’s alternate reality.

Part of the appeal of being ‘meta’ is that it makes it possible to perform a “Pokémon Mew-sical” without it being entirely Pokémon. Characters swear, everyone makes fun of Ash’s complete ineptitude, and the audience feels that it’s watching something more knowledgeable, and more knowing, than the original product.

The standard feeling is “I liked that as a kid, but now I can laugh at that kid.”

“Mew-sical” does a lot of work there, but its strongest moments come when it identifies with the childish love it occasionally lampoons. A set piece scene convinces you to root for Pikachu against a horde of Spearows. In Durning-Hammond’s portrayal of Misty, you get a glimpse of a believable 10-year-old girl who can hold a vendetta against the boy who broke her 5000-pokédollar bike while still resenting the fact that he cares more about his Metapod than her. Pokémon was always set a fake world, but the kids who conquer it have to be real.

They have to be us. The occasional moments when “Mew-sical” sweeps the audience into its world rely on the audience’s identification with the kids they once wished they were. Though it may occasionally hide under several layers of reference, the heart of “Mewsical” rests in the conviction that this was our adventure, and that it still can be.

“The Pokemon Mew-sical” is running this Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. in the PiersonDavenport Theater.

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

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: “That’s Me — That’s Not Me” Who does child-granny better than Cindy Sherman in the mid-to-late 70’s?

PAGE B12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 2012· yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

JOHN IRVING

// CREATIVE COMMONS

American Storyteller, English Professor, Wrestling Coach // BY JOY SHAN

Q. You come from an academic background: college and then an MFA program at the University of Iowa. What made you decide to get an MFA instead of just jumping into writing?

A. I think the choice to go to an MFA program in creative writing was guided by the fact that I was a very young father. I became a father in my early 20s … before I graduated from college.

And in those days, there were really only two MFA programs in creative writing. I know that sounds inconceivable, but the only two that had any kind of credibility were in Iowa and Stanford. And Iowa had a better reputation because they put more of an emphasis on your writing and there were fewer academic requirements … If you were accepted at those programs at that time, you’d go to Iowa if you cared about your writing.

Q. Your academic life didn’t end there — you went on to teach creative writing.

What made you decide to teach the craft as well as practice it?

A. I knew at a young age that I wanted to write novels, and I wanted to write long novels. The prospect of writing journalism in order to support my writing habit was very unappeal-

ing because I felt certain that I would have less time to do the writing I cared about in that circumstance than I would have if I had a college teaching job. And I also had a background as a wrestler, so I could enhance my teaching position with a coaching job. So between the coaching and the teaching, I didn’t have to worry about money. That was huge … there was no commercial burden. I could take as long as I wanted to write a book.

The fact that I didn’t have to associate writing with making money means that I could write novels as ambitious as I wanted … I didn’t find teaching distasteful, I didn’t dislike coaching, I was in both cases talking about something I thought I knew. I felt qualified … It wasn’t until my fourth novel in 1978 that I had my first bestseller, and I became self-supporting as a writer. I never expected that to happen.

Q. Most people know that writing is a pretty emotionally wrenching and unstable career path. What would you tell your students who wanted to be writers?

A. I told them that if they were thinking of writing as a so-called career of choice, they might consider selling drugs or betting on horses. If they were

in it because they thought there was a career to be had in it, they were in it for the wrong reasons. It was not a choice for me. I started writing at the age of 14, the same age I started wrestling.

It was a compulsion. It was a physical and psychological need. I knew I was always compelled to be writing stories.

Q. Earlier, you remarked about the necessity of time, about taking your time to make your books as ambitious and long as you wanted. If you’re reading someone else’s work, can you tell whether or not the writer was rushed?

Can that come through in the work?

A. The judgment that the writer was rushing is nothing more than an intelligent guess. What you can tell is that the writer didn’t reread and rewrite the material, for whatever reason. Maybe they weren’t rushed. Maybe they thought two passes were okay. When you read something that’s sloppy and incomplete, and the architecture can stand to be a little better … whatever fault you find, it simply comes down to not enough attention to detail, not enough passes to catch your own mistakes. If you’re in the business of making something, you know when someone’s craftsmanship is shit, you just know.

Q. Let’s talk about craftsmanship for a second. Writing is a craft, but how much of it can be learned? For someone to be a great writer, does he or she have to have something innate, something that can’t be taught?

A. Well, sure. You can teach anyone who’s not physically disabled how to wrestle, how to ski, but there’s a limit to how much they can utilize the technique that they learn or that they practice. You can’t teach balance, reflexes, quickness … people either have it or they don’t. And I believe you’ve got to have an imagination that keeps going, that says, “So, what if this guy goes home? It’s spring break, his dad is dead. But what if his dad isn’t just dead, his dad’s a ghost, and his dad is angry about being a ghost?

Well, what’s he angry about? His wife was with someone else. Who? The uncle? He’s hiding behind the curtain … ” So your job is to say that this is a simple story, but it’s not a simple story. Because Shakespeare kept saying, “What if?” You can’t teach that.

You can say, “This is how iambic pentameter works, this is how alliteration works.” You’ve got to have a gift, of course … When I taught, there were already writers [in my class]. I knew … so I said, “That’s good, that’s good, just keep doing what you’re doing, and don’t listen to anybody.” Kurt Vonnegut was my first teacher and he told me this.

Q. Do you believe there are any new stories left to tell, or that writers are simply recycling the same material over and over?

A. I think there is a time in your life when you’re a new writer, when you think the most important thing about your writing is that it’s new. But you realize that the most important thing is that the language is as good as you can make it … that these people are

true to the way human beings behave.

I’ve been in an audience of “King Lear” with a 12-year-old who I could tell clearly understood perhaps one-third of Shakespeare’s language. A 12-yearold who, in Act I, Scene i, already knew that this story is about a king who’s a fool. You can miss two-thirds of the language, but you understand the most important thing about Lear: he has it completely wrong. This is the whole story. You learn it in Act I, Scene i, but that doesn’t get old. What gets tiresome is when someone doesn’t know how to tell a story. The play I’m coming to [Yale to] see is about a boy who loses his friend because of the war in Vietnam … I suppose if you look in a library it’d be categorized under “Vietnam novel” or something. I couldn’t deny it. But it’s a novel about a certain age — your age. That’s all. That time in your life when you’re supposed to be going forward and you lose somebody … that’s what “A Prayer for Owen Meany” is about.

Contact JOY SHAN at joy.shan@yale.edu .

“

THE FACT THAT I DIDN’T HAVE TO ASSOCIATE WRITING WITH MAKING MONEY MEANS THAT I COULD WRITE NOVELS AS AMBITIOUS AS I WANTED.

“

J

ohn Irving, one of America’s greatest storytellers, is the novelist behind bold, sprawling sagas that have topped bestseller lists, such as “The Cider House Rules,” “The World According to Garp” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” But Irving is more than just an author: in his career, he has been an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, an English professor and a wrestling coach (in fact, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1992). This week, Irving chats with WEEKEND about his role as a teacher and coach, the qualities of fine craftsmanship and writing as “profession,” with a few thoughts on Shakespeare thrown into the mix.