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WEEKEND // FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2012

LULZ AND VERITAS The loose myth of trolling // BY AVA KOFMAN

CONVERSATION

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MAPS

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MYRTLE

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NOTABLE INTERVIEWS

NEW HAVEN’S GEMS

EXPLORING THE CULT

Read our candid Q&A’s with Shahrukh Khan and John Cho.

Aaron Reiss ’10 previews his newly created map of the city’s hidden treasures.

Yanan Wang finds out why seniors continue to travel to South Caroline each year.

//DAVID YU

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

A chronicle of my first 24 hours at Yale (a.k.a. how not to do Bulldog Days)

BERNHARDT

GRENIER

WEEKEND VIEWS

WHO HAS TWO THUMBS AND IS TOTALLY FINE? // BY AUSTIN BERNHARDT

// BY ANYA GRENIER

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE I BEGAN TO CONSIDER THE POSSIBILITY THAT I MIGHT NOT ACTUALLY BE AS NERDY AS I’D ALWAYS BELIEVED. Ten minutes after arriving on campus we were in the Saybrook courtyard, bickering in Russian about where the dining hall was likely to be, and whether or not it would be closed at this hour. A boy approached us and asked if we needed help, escorted us to the Saybrook dining hall and negotiated with the desk attendant to let us in even though lunch was, in fact, over. My dad, who had never heard of Title IX or Maria Yagoda ’12, decided that this kind of chivalry was typical of the Yale man.

I met up with my host, who I saw for about ten minutes, and whose name I no longer remember. She warned me she had an opera show that night and that she wouldn’t be coming back to her room.

Next we went the extracurricular bazaar, which sort of reminded me of Helm’s Deep.

Down in the trenches, I came to the conclusion that music and politics were the only two extracurricular activities at Yale. I asked several people where to find the publications.

They all pointed me in different directions.

After five minutes I realized that the correct response to “Do you sing?” was “No” and not my rambling existential

F R I D AY APRIL 20

one that went something like, “Well, not in front of people, but yeah, sometimes when I’m doing the dishes and nobody’s home, or I’m walking home from the metro and I think there’s no one behind me but then I turn around and realize there’s this old lady walking her cat…”

At the bazaar I befriended a boy who then declared he was going to MIT. I decided that by this point I had taken too much Dayquil to attract any more potential friends, so I stuck around Ben* (*name has been changed), who was kind of like a more outgoing version of Mark Zuckerberg. He knew a lot about rockets, hacking and was looking forward to joining a “cat frat” when he arrived at MIT. For the first time in my life I began to consider the possibility that I might not actually be as nerdy as I’d always believed.

We went around to many different events with a group of other pre-frosh, most of which revolved around various science and engineering organizations, and where I pretended words like microgravity and calcium oxalate meant something to me. When we couldn’t get through a doorway in Berkley, rather than wait for a student to walk by and let us in, Ben successfully picked the lock.

Some events we selected based on the various exotic foods that were advertised: sushi, mango lassis, ice cream made with nitroglycerin. When we arrived, there would inevitably just be pizza. After one such disappointment, I got severely lost in the basement of Silliman College, after which I decided that I didn’t want to be in Silliman. (Note: I am now in Silliman) In the meantime, my dad was having his own adventures. He sat in on a class and made a few comments about Hannah Arendt. Later on, at a friend’s house about 10 miles from campus where he was staying, he discovered he had forgotten “The City of Man” somewhere around Old Campus. Around midnight, he called the Yale Police to see if anyone had turned it in. They said they would investigate, and proceeded to call him back at around 3 a.m. to let him know that they had found it.

They even offered to drive the 10 miles to return it. My dad assumed that a school whose security services could afford to spend three hours tracking down obscure political texts must not have many problems with crime or underage drinking.

By this time, I was quickly losing coherence and decided to turn in. My host had thoughtfully left an array of tissues and cough drops on the bed. I read a text message from Ben (“just got into a discussion about Korean philosophy with some drunk guys”), smiled and fell asleep.

//TAO TAO HOLMES

Listen, you guys. I know I’ve been pretty dodgy the past few weeks regarding my plans for next year. No, I’m not joining the CIA or waiting to hear back about that internship with the Illuminati, though best of luck to those of you who are. And those rumors about pursuing my concept art alongside Marina Abramovic are just that — rumors — though the “Occupy” piece was great while it lasted, and I’d like to thank the Guggenheim Foundation again for lending their support financially as well as tent-wise.

I’m proud to say that after receiving a generous advance from a publishing house I founded and secured funding for while none of you were paying attention, I will be spending next year writing my novel. It’s basically a stripped-down “Moby Dick”: so like, without the whale and the sea and the ship. It’s about life, and living.

And Bildungsroman-type things. And baseball.

And life. Mostly life.

I know some of you were worried because of that whole ‘incident’ the other day with the Goldschlager and the crying, but don’t be. Because I’m fine. And the novel will be awesome, so …

Yeah, I actually lucked out in terms of finding an apartment, too. I managed to find a really sweet four-bedroom in East East East Williamsburg. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the area, but East East East Williamsburg is like, way out — one of those up-and-coming neighborhoods that hasn’t been ruined by gentrification yet.

I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of it; it’s actually nowhere near the L. In fact, you can’t take a subway there at all, unless you also plan on walking really far. You actually have to take the Long Island Rail-

WEEKEND

The day I was supposed to leave for Bulldog Days I woke up with one of those suddenonset cold sickness things. You know, the kind that seems to strike whenever there’s anything you’re particularly looking forward to and then leave as soon as it’s time to start doing homework again. We decided I would wait 24 hours to see if it went away (it didn’t) and then take the train up with my dad instead of with another girl from my school so that I felt distinctly less cool when I arrived on campus than I had initially envisioned.

On the train my dad read Pierre Manet’s “The City of Man” (a tract on the decline of western civilization), and I alternated between sneezing and staring out the window, afraid that if I fell asleep we would somehow miss Connecticut. (I had never been to New England before, but based on maps, I was pretty sure the entire region occupied about 20 square miles).

Contact ANYA GRENIER at anna.grenier@yale.edu .

BLOOM ON SHAKESPEARE Battell Chapel // 4:00 p.m.

Join Professor Bloom as he reads and explicates passages from plays crucial to his view of the Bard’s achievement.

We’ve missed you, Harold.

road. Right, because it’s on Long Island.

In Roslyn. My hometown.

It’s fine, though. I mean, I totally found some awesome roommates. We’ve lived together before and we totally mesh, so it’s chill. I don’t know if you guys know them … Gary and Audrey? Bernhardt?

Right, like my parents. Yeah, they’re totally chill!

predominantly awesome and it’s not at all awkward when I run into them at 7-11 or the supermarket. They’re all really interesting people with really cool perspectives on life. Take Josh Greenberg, for example. I hear he’s out of rehab. And this guy Seth? He’s going to law school next year! I just really respect that; I think it’s really noble that he’s going to be, like,

SURE, SOME PEOPLE USE THIS TIME TO TRAVEL OR LIVE IN A NEW PLACE FOR A WHILE, BUT ISN’T THE REALLY BOLD CHOICE TO, LIKE, NOT? You know, I considered applying for salaried jobs, and I just thought, like, why would I do that when I have this great opportunity to explore my creativity? I’m only going to be young once. Sure, some people use this time to travel or live in a new place for a while, but isn’t the really bold choice to, like, not?

What?

Of course I know lots of people move back home after graduation. What does that have to do with anything?

It’s called RESEARCH, you guys. The characters in my book are based on all the people I went to high school with who I’ll see when I go back home. Yeah, they’re

making sure the underprivileged get the justice they deserve. I mean, he wants to go into sports negotiation, but still. Not that you would know. Typical Yale bubble, man.

I should’ve figured you guys wouldn’t understand. Guess who’s not going on the dedication page: you guys.

I guess I’ll just see you at the five-year reunion.

Oh, no, I meant next month, with the class of 2007. I’ll be there for the free booze.

Contact AUSTIN BERNHARDT at austin.bernhardt@yale.edu .

Parting words (for now … ) // BY WEEKEND

Hello, you. It’s been a while. Since last we spoke, a lot has changed. We’re a little less sane, a little less social, a lot more sleep-deprived. We can’t really remember the last time we did all our reading, our p-sets, our laundry. We’ve spent some late late late nights in the News’ building, but it’s okay because we have our own lounge — complete with a mini-fridge.

Over the last nine months we’ve had to answer some difficult questions: What are the arts? What is living? How can we talk authoritatively on them both when we have time for neither? But in the process of answering all of these questions, we got kind of distracted, and then had to stay up all night working on papers and problem sets (but mostly papers), and then we crashed all weekend and so we never got around to it.

We hope you’ve enjoyed your ride with us this year. You watched as we uncovered the Maps Department, met the man behind Yale Recycling and

exposed Yale’s ties to the CIA. We’ve been watching you, too. We were there when you supported Occupy, created experimental theater troupes, sang in Russian. We strove to record the “arts” and “living”-filled lives you led.

And now, just as we were getting to know you, the end is upon us. Our senior friends turned in those essays, we survived our last seminar, you acted in your final play of the year. This will be the last you see of us for a while. (Though watch out for our Spring Fling wrap-up next week. You can’t get rid of us that quickly ... ) It’s warm again in New Haven, and that can only mean one thing. We’ll finally get a chance to recharge our robotic heart batteries — and, if we’re lucky, we might even tan.

See you in September.

Contact WEEKEND AT ydnweekendedz@ypanlists.yale.edu .

WHAT ARE THE ARTS? WHAT IS LIVING? HOW CAN WE TALK AUTHORITATIVELY ON THEM BOTH WHEN WE HAVE TIME FOR NEITHER?

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,” Bloom’s tome on the Bard.

Read this masterful mix of insightful commentary and acerbic wit in preparation for Friday’s event.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

RETURN OF THE TROLLS T

here was once a race of carefree woodsloving giants. At some point in Scandinavian mythology, these giants, called trolls, turned into imp-sized remnants of their former adventurous selves and moved from the woods into caves underground. In recent centuries, the evolutionary gap between malicious and benevolent troll species has only widened, with the latter nearing extinction. Pushed further and further underground, the troll had no choice but to emerge from its polarized ancestry as a strange and morally diffuse mixed breed.

Today, the definition of a troll contains the legacy of these contradicting etymologies. In the online community, a troll can be described as someone who seeks to provoke an emotional response, be it pleasure or pain.

There are trolls are who seek to hurt through manipulative pain: They disrupt comment boards with intentionally inflammatory, extraneous, or obscene comments or pranks. There are trolls who seek to help, through humor: They produce memes, they riff on themes, they create absurdist messages.

“

really not,” Rosen said, who went with his “Control, Privacy, and Technology” class to see the show on Friday.

Lulz engaged with the same rhizomatic and oppositional element of troll humor: The audience was never sure what to laugh at and what to take seriously, yet was asked to do both.

“We wanted to have a show in which we take the audience into feeling and experiencing firsthand how fun and surprisingly logical trolling can be in some ways, and also what’s darker about it,” Finley said.

As trolls are often the brunt of their own jokes, “lulz” juxtaposed “in-your-face” direct addresses to the audience with scenes that pushed those moments back into the character’s faces. Two large screens projected classic FailBlog videos before the onset of the show, as audience members were seated so that they could watch each other watching. The opening song established a pithy motto of suffering: “THIS TIME THEY GET KICKED AND YOU LAUGH / NEXT TIME YOU GET KICKED AND THEY LAUGH / EVERYONE GETS KICKED.” Sonnenblick explained that he

town of New Haven, his alma mater Yale, and to his feelings of sympathy and shock for many of the events reported in the News.

Since that September day three years ago, Keane has posted 1,967 comments on the News’ website, sometimes posting multiple times a day. His blog, “The Anti Yale”, has received 21,000 views from over 103 countries. (“I have no idea what that means,” he added about the Google Analytics results. “It may have been search engines or robots.”)

Though Keane himself sees his time posting as “winding down now” (“I think after three years I haven’t got much more to say”), current News online editor Danny Serna said he thinks trolling in general has gotten worse lately.

Staffers and readers have characterized the comment boards across the News’ website as “particularly troll-infested,” “mad bitchy” and “spiteful.”

News readers and writers are familiar with the site’s group of frequent and famous pseudonymous posters: the biting fusillade of RiverTam, the lewd Joey00, the seemingly satirical YaleMom, and so on. RiverTam, Arafat, Penny_ Lane, RexMontrares, Hierony-

NOT ALL TROLLS ARE CREATED EQUAL.

NEXT TIME YOU GET KICKED

Last week the trolls came to Yale. “lulz: A Troll Musical”, written by Cory Finley ’11, Mark Sonnenblick ’12, and Ben Wexler ’11 captured the nonspecific specifics both thematically and structurally as a loose hierarchy of plot cells, a series of musical minigames, a cyborg rhapsody, and a patchwork of flashing lights.

“What ‘lulz’ did well was show how all these people who seem to be part of the same group are

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“

In the figure of the Internet troll, big funny laughable creatures of yore have interbred with their starving counterparts who guard the seedy underbelly of the storybook bridge in the “Three Billy Goats Gruff.”

And what emerges is the troll as playful Dionysian satyr or vengeful bastard, or both.

One schema proposes a taxonomic distinction between playtime trolls (simple 2-D games), tactical trolls (the use of a personality), strategic trolls (a longterm strategy) and domination trolls (an overarching organized message).

But this very fact that there are “species” of trolls is the first important distinction: There is not one definition of a troll, and to reduce subculture to caricatures, even with loose mythologies, does not do anyone any favors. Trolling itself may already be a caricature — a cartoonish antidote for the idea of the Internet as beautiful community.

“Not all trolls are created equal,” Computer Science Department lecturer Brad Rosen ’04 said, emphasizing that both content and intent matter when making sociological distinctions.

“There’s a whole complex and rich subculture here, and to try to sum it up with any label overlooks important distinctions.”

Fittingly, the modern troll is as much of a myth today as it once was upon a time.

was most interested in probing this “human tendency to laugh” at videos like the ones on the FailBlog site. “Where are the lines in terms of interacting with someone. At what point is it too far? At what point do people deserve it?”

Finley, Sonnenblick and Wexler explained that they sought to avoid dogmatic statements like ,“This is trolling,” or, “This is how the Internet is,” and took the musical as an opportunity to look at questions of representation, retribution, and how trolling can have both social and satirical functions. There’s a scene in which trolls post satirical comments on Facebook memorial pages as “grief tourists” to expose what they perceive as the shallowness of virtual human suffering; in another, a graduate student troll explains the theoretical aims of trolls — to shock people into new ways of thinking.

And ultimately, among other things, Sonnenblick explained that the show takes a “moral middle ground. The answer isn’t quite there.” Because the answer isn’t quite there.

mousBosh and FailBoat could not be reached for comment.

No one really knows when the trolls first arrived at the News.

Some say it was in early 2000s, while others guess they’ve been around since 1995 — as long as the yaledailynews.com site has been operative.

Former News editor-in-chief Vivian Yee ’12 said there was a drop in comments with the onset of a user policy change in the fall of 2010, which asked readers to comment on articles only after registering with a valid email address. She said that eventually the commenters — and those whom some called the trolls — slowly returned. “One of the issues during [the past board

transition] was how could we balance stupid, unproductive and spammy comments with having a good flow of discussion. For a while we let it collect steam on its own, but eventually we did hit that balance,” Yee said.

The News now allows users the options of signing in through Twitter, GoogleID and Facebook.

But the majority of users, including those who post frequently, still prefer anonymity to identifiable Internet identities.

In a largely anonymous community of disembodied voices, TheAntiYale is an exception to this rule. He deliberately signs comments with his real name and identifying information: Paul D Keane, M.Div. ’80, M.A. (Middlebury ’97), M.Ed. (Kent State ’72), B.A. (Ithaca College ’68).

Some would argue that Keane isn’t a troll precisely because he identifies himself as Paul Keane.

As Keane confirmed, the TheAntiYale moniker is a succinct summation of Keane’s authored views, rather than the embodiment of a character or the vocalization of an ideology: “Ninetynine percent of what I say is my opinion, but I do jazz it up with a contrived outrage. I pretend to be outraged and am not really. But I never solemnly say something I don’t believe.”

That leads one to wonder whether the voice on the phone is the voice of the TheAntiYale or the sounds of a septuagenarian speaking from his Vermont home. Even for other anonymous users, the pseudonym becomes a persona in time. Yee pointed out that as pseudonymous users continued to maintain a viewpoint or opinion, they acquire consistent personalities rather than simply spout offensive ideas. Paradoxically, as users post more, they lose their ability to inflame other users as effectively as trolls can because they are “consistent in their opinions and identity and seem to forcefully believe in them.”

And yet, like the typical troll, Keane’s posts are generally offtopic. At times they seem as though they’re randomly generated from a thematic memory bank. But this doesn’t bother Keane at all: He views his posts as his own genuine emotional response.

“I’ve been off-topic my entire life and most of the time it’s brought pleasure to people,” Keane said, laughing. When asked if he read the entire stories in the News before commenting, Keane responded, “No, no, I skim them.” He added that that if

the comment section was particularly lively he would sometimes read those before the article, or even instead of it. He said he now plans for the epithet carved on his tombstone to read: “Delightfully off-topic.”

GRAFFITI ARTISTS

Keane said he settled on the name TheAntiYale to represent the “opposite polarity” of “Yale’s elitism. He said he receives enjoyment from comments “popping that elite balloon” and is also drawn to commenting for the “intellectual rapport” he has with other posters.

Though Keane reads The New York Times along with the News with his daily 5 a.m. coffee, he doesn’t comment on The Times’ site because the flood of voices drowns out the chance to playfully spar with personal and immediate feedback. “Several of the posters and I go back and forth, and in a way that’s enriching to me,” Keane said of his experience with the News. “I enjoy hearing what they say. Every once in awhile ‘River_Tam’ hits the nail on the head.”

In at least one comment, River_ Tam seemed to share Keane’s enjoyment from the News comment boards. Underneath a February article about the shutdown of the New Haven Independent’s comment boards, River_Tam wrote: “Most internet comments are not worth reading. I find the YDN comments a pleasant respite from the sewage on reddit and the nytimes and the like.”

But the two do not know each other: as far as Keane knows, River_Tam, who is named after a character from the sci-fi TV series “Firefly,” is “some British scholar studying at Cambridge.”

The other commenters’ anonymity, for him, limits their voice to no more than “graffiti on a bathroom wall.”

While Keane and River_Tam often get attention for their radical positions, Serna said the News tries to moderate “offense not opinion,” though he admitted that striking the balance can be difficult. Yee and Serna both said that readers flagging comments for removal and thus prompting moderators to take a closer look has been effective. In the more contentious debates, many comments that are flagged for removal simply differ in opinion, however radically. But removing contention does not fall under the News’ policy.

SEE TROLLS PAGE B8

FEEDING THE TROLLS

“When I was a kid, troll used to mean someone who hid in the bushes,” Paul Keane DIV ’80 said.

“The last thing I do is hide in the bushes.”

Paul Keane, who posts on the News’ website under the username TheAntiYale, is ostensibly one of Yale’s most famous resident trolls. Though his online comments take the tone of a gleefully indignant teenager, Keane’s voice on the phone is older, more unsure. His fiendish online smirk modulates into a softer, bemused smile when articulated over the telephone.

Keane says he doesn’t really know what led him to continue to comment on the News website after his first post in September 2009. He attributes his serial career to his interest in his home-

CONCERT READING OF “BALCONY SCENE: A NEW MUSICAL” 220 York Street // 7:00 p.m.

A contemporary musical comedy based on the world’s best loved romantic tragedy, “Balcony Scene” is set during the mayhem of tech week for a junior high production of “Romeo and Juliet.”

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Rereading your high school yearbook.

Yes, it’s that time of year, so let your nostalgia get the best of you. You know you want to reread what your crush wrote about you anyway.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND INTERVIEWS

A CONVERSATION WITH THE ‘KING OF BOLLYWOOD’

Meeting my idol // BY SONIA TANEJA

// BY SONIA TANEJA

Shahrukh Khan is revered by billions of fans around the world as the “King of Bollywood.” Apart from acting in over 70 Hindi films, producing several others and taking home 14 out of the 30 Filmfare Award nominations he has received for his contributions to Hindi cinema, Khan is also recognized as an active humanitarian. He has supported projects like the addition of a children’s ward at the Nanavati Hospital in Mumbai, the nationwide Pulse Polio immunization campaign in India and countless others. Khan graced Yale’s campus on April 12 after being named one of Timothy Dwight College’s Chubb Fellows, a program designed to foster interest in public affairs. WEEKEND caught up with Khan at the Shubert Theater where he spoke about his perception of Yale, his humanitarian efforts and the secret to his success.

A. I think [that being a Chubb Fellow is] an awesome thing to do. And I always have wanted to study in an institution like this.

I did shoot a movie here — it was snowing, but it was so beautiful.

I remember I used to keep going out to the small cafes and with the little bookshelves … and it’s just absolutely marvelous. And for me it’s one, very humbling to be in the company of all the people who have been given this fellowship, and apart from that, it’s a great opportunity. I wish my parents were alive so that I could tell them that I have the Chubb Fellowship and have gone to Yale.

And I hope one day that my kids can come and study here.

Q. How do you feel about being named a Chubb Fellow, and what do you hope Yale students take away from your visit here?

A. You know, the reason I keep it low-key is because I only do it when I feel like doing it. When I go over the newspaper in the morning, sometimes I hear the news,

Q. Something about which you have kept a low profile in the past is all of your humanitarian work. What do you do, and why do you choose to do it?

and I feel that, for people somewhere who are perhaps less fortunate than I am, I should just go and help them. Unfortunately it just ends up being material help because I can’t spend time. I am extremely busy with the work that I do … I do things that make me happy. And this [humanitarian work] really makes me happy … And I don’t like to talk about it, I feel very embarrassed, but whatever I do, I like to keep it done in [secret]. Because it just gives me genuine happiness and it gives me happiness that nobody who receives that kind of assistance from me should know how it came about … It’s simple and straightforward and it comes from the heart.

Q. One final thing we would all love to know: To what do you attribute your success?

A. My dimples, I think (Laughs). I don’t know, it’s quite outstanding.

When I came [into the Hindi film industry], the first producer who met me … looked at me and said, “You’re too brown, you’re too

// CREATIVE COMMONS

Shahrukh Khan, the “King of Bollywood”

thin and your hair is like a bear.”

So I was like, “Yeah, but I can still act!” The way I work is very simple. I’m a very shy person personally, but I don’t come across like that onscreen — and I think I have this desire to be someone else all the time because I can’t do a lot of things personally because I’m too shy. I mean, I can’t go to a party alone, I can’t walk into a crowd of 1,600 people unless I’m enacting something. So for me, I think it’s just being able to live another role every moment of my life. And I work very hard at it. I don’t think I have an immense amount of talent, and when I see younger actors or actresses now in Hindi films, they can dance better, they can act better … but I still keep getting opportunities year after year.

I think the belief I have is that whenever I’m going out to work, it’s the last shot I have at it. And I’m as excited as if it were the first

Shahrukh Khan fanatics hardly ever just write fan mail.

They mount his picture on their altars alongside images of holy deities. They wait outside his home for days hoping to see him. One particular fan, Vishal Singh, made it into various Indian news sources for creating a shrine to him, plastering over 22,000 pictures of Khan around his home. He even legally changed his name to “Visharukh Khan.” This vehement adoration is due to pure star power. To have been able to interview Shahrukh Khan, a man who has been equated with God by his admirers, was my dream come true.

Bollywood has always been my safety blanket — a way to counteract the seriousness of darker days with color and flair.

Shahrukh Khan, in particular, is the embodiment of Hindi cinema for me. His very first film, Deewana released when I was just shy of one year old, while his latest film Don 2 was in theaters this past December. I have grown up with Shahrukh Khan and have consistently fallen for his various cinematic incarnations.

When I was 13, Shahrukh Khan released his biographical documentary “The Inner and Outer World of Shahrukh Khan.” I remember standing with my friends amongst hundreds waiting to meet him at a promotional event in New York City. I also remember returning home that night after only seeing the license plate of his car as he drove away.

In response to my disappointment that evening, my grandmother tried to placate me, “Don’t strive be someone who stands in a line of a thousand people to meet Shahrukh Khan. Because I know you will be so hardworking, so good and so successful that one day Shahrukh Khan will push a thousand people aside just to meet you.”

Sure. Easier said than done, I thought. The whole world lines up to see Shahrukh Khan and I did not have the audacity or the patience to simply sit by the sidelines.

When I was first asked to interview Khan, my immediate reaction was a deafening affirmative. But few people know about my surprising

second reaction — the feeling in the pit of my stomach telling me to turn it down because I foresaw myself inadvertently acting like a drooling fan rather than a journalist. But it also hit me that I would not be meeting the on-screen hero. After twenty years of getting to know his characters Raj, Rahul and Aman, I would have to meet the real Shahrukh Khan. I feared that the experience would be disenchanting. Would I have to come to terms with the fact that Raj, Rahul and Aman, the same characters to whom I turn when I need a dose of escapist Bollywood after a tough week at Yale, are exactly what I rationally know they are — fiction?

Encouraged by my close friends who told me that an interview with King Khan is a once in a lifetime opportunity (and many who said they would fight to take my place if I dared turn it down), I of course kept my promise. Did I make a fool of myself? A little. Particularly when I was under the impression that it was safe to perform a little celebratory dance after our chat because he had already been escorted out of the room (he had not). But was I disenchanted? Not at all. He was humble, he was professional, but above all he was still a star.

After speaking with him, however, I did come to terms with the fact that he is human, just a wildly successful human. I learned that he is successful because he is exceedingly intelligent, he is a hard worker, he is in a profession that he loves and he is motivated to work because he wants to improve the lives of those around him. In short, he is someone that we all hope to be.

I hope that my grandmother will be proud that I took this opportunity. It would be wrong, however, to say that it transpired exactly how she said it would, that I had gotten this chance because I am successful.

I had just gotten lucky. But at least I can tell her that she was partly right — Shahrukh Khan kept almost two thousand people waiting an extra seven minutes so that he could speak with me, and I cannot imagine asking for more than that.

Contact SONIA TANEJA at sonia.taneja@yale.edu .

Beyond Harold: A Q&A with John Cho // BY CAROLINE TAN

dirty university … whenever I go back to the Bay Area, I want to say, “It’s okay to urinate in places that aren’t stairwells.”

[Also], I’m stunned at the beauty here and the obvious history in every brick.

John Cho, the Korean-American actor who vaulted to fame after his role as Harold Lee in the “Harold and Kumar” films, visited Yale on April 14. After delivering the keynote address at the Asian PacificAmerican Heritage Month Dinner, he spoke to WEEKEND about his favorite “Harold and Kumar” movie, the role of Asian-Americans in the entertainment industry and how he feels about the term “MILF.” Q. So, how do you like Yale so far?

A. It’s very beautiful. I’m stunned by how clean it is. I went to a very

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Q. Have people ever confused you for any of your characters?

A. Oh, all the time. On a day-today basis. It’s the general state of things.

Q. On that note, how similar are you to your character Harold Lee in “Harold & Kumar”?

Q. You’ve been in a few blockbuster hits and are pretty popular among the college students here. Which movie would you say has been your favorite to shoot thus far?

A. I don’t know, I’ve always said that I was more like Kumar than Harold. But Harold’s Korean and so I’ve found a lot of things to identify with him there.

A. That’s a tough one. I’ve enjoyed them all in different ways. I think maybe the second “Harold and Kumar” was the most enjoyable in the sense that the writers of [the first] “Harold and Kumar” ended up directing that. So it’s the first time I went to a movie just being friends with the director. I just had a longstanding friendship with them at that point … It was the most collaborative I’ve ever been.

Q. You popularized the term “MILF” with your role in “American Pie.” What do you think about your role in shaping teenage America’s vocabulary?

A. It’s a surprise to me. I mean, I stumbled into that not realizing what it would become. I think the movie popularized [the term MILF]; I didn’t popularize it. It’s one of those things. It was like a word that was in the air. It was

used in a very popular movie and then it became part of the American vocabulary. But it’s cool with me. I was afraid, and I still think I might be, that it will be on my tombstone. People were calling me that every day … but now people call me Harold. I went from MILF to Harold.

Q. Can you describe your experiences as an Asian-American actor in the entertainment industry, where Asian-Americans are typically underrepresented?

A. It’s really a change. Asians are looking to conquer the entertainment industry in a way that Asians have excelled in so many of the other professions. And now I notice them a lot. And you know Asians are over-represented on the studio side and executive side. So it’s really progressed a lot in the last 15 years since I started acting, but I’m very encouraged by it, and I hope the trend continues upward.

‘WEST SIDE STORY’

A. I should have an answer to that … Your path can take a variety of forms and you can be focused on a path to success or a path to steady work. Whatever it is, I would encourage you to find a path of self-satisfaction, happiness and pride in what you do. Those should be your goals. Look for parts that

// MENSHEALTH.COM

John Cho, of “Harold and Kumar”

feed your soul. Look, and everything else will take care of itself.

And try to have pride in what you do.

Contact CAROLINE TAN at caroline.tan@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

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

As part of her senior project, Taylor Vaughn Lasley ’12 will explore the differences between Shakespeare’s work, the original musical and the film adaptation as agents of American pop culture and racial relations in the mid-20th century.

Q. Do you have any advice for any aspiring actors and actresses, particularly those in the AsianAmerican community?

Spring.

Finally, it seems to be here. New Haven, please let it stay.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND SPRING

PAGE B5

FLING

BARS, BOOBS AND AUTO-TUNE: THE ALLURING WORLD OF T-PAIN // BY NINA WEXELBLATT

My first experience with T-Pain was during a brief phase of my life when my high school friends decided that sitting in a circle around the one girl who can play guitar was cool. Someone smirkingly learned the chords to the number one hit “Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin).” We all got a bit carried away and memorized the entire Yung Joc verse, which was an intensely positive bonding experience for us at the time. I owe a lot to T-Pain in this respect.

However, I do not follow T-Pain on Twitter because I object on principle to the way he uses Instagram, which he seems to think is a meme-uploading service. When I saw that basically all of his tweets have links to the photo-sharing site, I was so ready to view gently washed out digital images of the rapper and his Nappy Boy crew sitting in front of string lights, the evening glow glinting off the corner of his weirdly boxy white sunglasses.

But instead, we poor viewers get an image of Scumbag Steve with the possibly-original overlaid text: “BUYS FASTEST STREET LEGAL CAR IN THE WORLD / SETS CRUISE

CONTROL TO SPEED LIMIT.” In order to make sure everyone understands that he’s THAT guy who does THAT thing, the caption is “Scumbag T-Pain.”

Fact is, this is an impressively self-aware statement. If you have never seen MTV or the inside of a freshman suite on a Friday night, you will be surprised to hear that T-Pain is arguably one of the best-known pop stars of the past decade, which is inversely proportional to the level of experimentation he affords himself in his work. As the title of his first album suggests, T-Pain (who also goes by the punny nom de plume Teddy Penderass) is a “Rappa Ternt Sanga.” This is a clever turn of phrase that means that his creepy robot voice is occasionally featured on other people’s songs.

A super scientific survey of my suitemates found that nobody knows anything about what kind of music T-Pain makes by himself, but that’s okay. He’s just a gregarious guy, which means his stage banter will hopefully be less about Nazis and evil rich people than Lupe Fiasco’s was, which is a plus in my book. He probably will just say some pretty straightforward stuff about being drunk.

This is not a problem. Like any good artist, he writes what he knows: bars, boobs and the words “shawty” and “sprung.”

T-Pain’s formula of cyborg simplicity can be tantalizing, like on Lil Wayne’s “Got Money,” where T-Pain’s portion of the song consists solidly of a single note and some periodic Auto-tuned “vocal flourishes” (read: moaning) but is absolutely excellent. Granted, the catalogue is not particularly deep here, but it does demonstrate remarkable diversity of purpose: for example, in “Bartender,” he is in love with a bartender, whereas in “I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper),” he is not.

But there’s no denying that he knows his gimmick is absurd.

In the un-subtle jam “Take Your Shirt Off,” he asks a dangerous question: “Answer me this / Is Auto-tune really dead?” Well, Yale, it’s up to you to buy a few dranks and decide.

Contact NINA WEXELBLATT at nina.wexelblatt@yale.edu .

// CREATIVE COMMONS

T-Pain

WILIN’

Passion Pit won’t put you to sleep

// BY ALEXANDER SHAHEEN

// BY CAROLYN LIPKA

I don’t really know how to pronounce “3LAU,” or why someone would choose that name. He will probably be indistinguishable from the mediocre DJ who came last year. But frankly, I don’t care. The least relevant part of the day is the music.

There is only one thing that goes through my mind on Spring Fling: what’s going on. I really don’t know, ever.

So, in celebration of having literally no idea what’s going on, I bring you the first transcription of a song that captures everything about this day in April that deserves to be captured. Here is Lady’s “Smashed”: (Chorus) Oh patron I’m awn and I’ma drink whatever the hell I want I’m out my mind so gone and I’ma do this shit all night long I’m smashed I’m smashed ain’t drunk ain’t tipsy I’m smashed I’m smashed I’m smashed ain’t drunk ain’t tipsy I’m smashed She on champagne but it ain’t strong enough Bartender put some Red Bone in ma cup That beat that Rémy and that pineapple juice (uh huh) Bitches loose motherfucker swinging out the room Don’t care what everybody drank, drank what I want When I give you that look you know I’m in my zone Drunk texting spelling everything wrong I keep drankin’ drank somebody take me home I’m in the mood for some f*****’ tonight Perverted rhumba, hell pull up the white I’m leanin’, listen’ how I talk That gin make ya sin, that Paul make ya ball Chorus

F R I D AY APRIL 20

Don’t f**** with me when I’m on that drank If you ain’t sipping then ya ass shouldn’ta came I’m getting frilly when the liquor start kicking in Don’t smoke a lot but I’ll take a blunt every now and then In the hood we ain’t f***** with no ace of spades Ran out of E&J f*** it get the Tanqueray It ain’t cute when you can’t handle your alcohol Take a couple shots and then I’m feelin’ like my problems solved Drunk some more I didn’t even know it was rosé Should I cart with that Daniels or that José It ain’t a doubt in my mind I’m finna get laid Give it to me straight b****, yup no chase Chorus They say that Four Loko make you go loko One thing that I hate is drinking solo The room spinning I told him don’t give me no mo’ Even had a couple bottles of that Cisco Can’t see a thing sippin’ mad dog 20/20 I’m down for whatever told my bitches g’on’ runnin Drinkin’ beer have ya pissin’ all night Ain’t drinkin’ what they rap about we drinkin’ what we like B.Y.O.B bring ya own, bitch, If you didn’t buy a drank don’t gets none, bitch Straight to the hair how I like my shots Get twisted and we gon’ show ‘em what we got Chorus -Lady, “Smashed,” from the mixtape “Bout Dat Life” Contact ALEXANDER SHAHEEN at alexander.shaheen@yale.edu .

All your manic pixie dream girl/boy Spring Fling wishes will be fulfilled with the impending arrival of Passion Pit on Old Campus’ stage. With only one EP and one full-length studio album to the band’s name, it isn’t overreaching to expect everyone to be singing along with the high pitched vocals of lead singer Michael Angelakos.

This American electropop group won’t inspire the gettingout-of-a-straight-jacket dance moves that last year’s Designer Drugs brought to the festival, or the laid back nostalgia of Third Eye Blind. What Passion Pit’s synthesizer and energetic keyboards (yes, they have two keyboards) will surely bring to the concert is a lot of jumping up and down and

infectious happiness.

They are hip, upbeat and popular enough, but there are some legitimate concerns. Their more popular contemporary, MGMT, performed at Spring Fling two years ago, and from what I’ve heard, it was a disaster. Legend has it that the Wesleyan graduates were zombie-like, their music was virtually stagnant and they refused to play their one hit — the only redemption their performance might have hoped for.

Let me assuage your doubts: Passion Pit knows how to perform. The Spring Fling committee learned their lesson from the MGMT fiasco, and apparently places emphasis on searching for artists who have a good reputation for performing live. Passion Pit has a plethora of fans who have uploaded live videos from their concerts (check, if you want to // CREATIVE COMMONS

Passion Pit

make sure). Also, I’ve seen Passion Pit in concert. Three times. They are lively onstage, and do their hits — “Sleepyhead” and “Better Things” — justice. I cannot guarantee that they’ll be ecstatic to be at Yale, but opening for T-Pain is pretty sweet, so I’m going to assume that they will be.

Passion Pit, 3LAU and T-Pain seem radically different on first glance, but they have a lot in common as performers, which will provide for a smooth Spring Fling lineup. All three of them are pop artists. We will be dancing until our feet fall off, and I’m okay with that. Hopefully they’ll all be good enough that we can forget that it’s supposed to be 48 degrees and raining. I know Passion Pit will do their best to warm us up with lighthearted lyrics and reassuring beats. Better Things are coming; this is more than just an Electric Feel.

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

3LAU won’t interfere with our fun // BY AARON GERTLER He isn’t Girl Talk or Danger Mouse. He isn’t Robyn, Phoenix or Big Boi. His “chief influences” — Deadmau5, Calvin Harris, Avicii — have been known outside their bedrooms for five years, max.

His voice isn’t unnaturally high or pitch-shifted into breathless robo-pop (as far as we can tell, he doesn’t have a voice). So what do we know about this exceptionally faceless representative of a faceless genre?

Well, he titled one of his recent mashups “Yacht Week in America.” So he definitely belongs at Yale. And his mashups are free of surprises: lots of Top 40, basic dance rhythms crafted on America’s most popular synthesizer setting, feminine vocals yanked from pop trance, a little dubstep to break up the electro-sunshine.

If his Soundcloud singles are any indication, don’t expect any “Hey! I know this obscure sample and my friends don’t!” moments during

“A NIGHT OFF FROM SERIOUS THEATER”

his set. Hipsters in need of consolation will have Passion Pit to pacify them. T. Pain, king of Spring Fling, will be in charge of bringing personality to the party. The chief concern for 3LAU: Will he make us dance?

Yes. Yalies would, of course, dance to “Call Me Maybe” followed by “Niggas in Paris,” then followed by “Call Me Maybe” again and so on, but 3LAU won’t interfere with our natural urge to move; his singles are sheer pop pleasure with a more insistent beat. We’ll put our hands up. We’ll shake our hips. We’ll jump and shout. Some of us might embarrass ourselves trying to jerk (I’ve never had excellent foot-ground coordination). Almost certainly, there will be a few transcendent moments in which the major chords and splash cymbals align just right and our hearts leap into our throats and we scream wildly as did our tribal ancestors to the

drums of our sacred ceremonies…

As I was saying, 3LAU ain’t half bad, and if you’re a fan of computer music, you’ll walk away happy (unlike the girl I met at the Commons DJ showdown, who turned to me after Switch’s set, baffled: “Some of that wasn’t even music!”). And his Soundcloud could be deceptive; many DJs save their most creative sampling for live sets and design their albums in four-minute downloadable bursts for mass-market appeal. Besides, anyone who remixes alongside such fine veterans as Kap Slap, Sex Ray Vision and Darth and Vader must be worth the money. (Yes, I’m pretty sure he made up all of those artists. Creative spirit!)

Contact AARON GERTLER at aaron.gertler@yale.edu . // CREATIVE COMMONS

3LAU

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Calhoun Cabaret // 8:00 p.m.

Sure Thing, by David Ives Words, Words, Words, by David Ives The Actor’s Nightmare, by Christopher Durang

Exploring New Haven.

There’s a lot more to see than you might think. See map on p. 6-7.

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND GEMS

I

t’s springtime at Yale, which means papers are finally ending and you can once again get out, read books for pleasure, and otherwise reenter the realm of the living. New Haven lies in wait, so unchain your bike (buy one if you never got around to it) or set out on foot and explore some new places in the city you live in. This map, created by Aaron Reiss ’10, shows 27 New Haven gems within a 15 minute bike ride of old campus and gives a quick introduction to different neighborhoods worth wandering through with your newfound free time. Look for the full version (with 50+ destinations around the city) in dining halls later this month.

Contact AARON REISS at reiss.aaron@aya.yale.edu with any questions or for a digital copy.

S AT U R D AY APRIL 21

“DOC PATTERSON’S DRAGONBONE STORYSHOW” YSD Annex, Room 101 // 2:00 p.m.

An original musical by Mark Sonnenblick and Brendan Ternus.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: “The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos” by Slavoj Zizek, our favorite philosopher.

Here, he rails on capitalism, philanthrophy, and philanthropic capitalism.

S AT U R D AY APRIL 21

THE WASTELAND (POETRY+FILM)

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

212 York Street // 7:00 p.m.

April is the cruellest month.

“Battle Royale”

It’s like “The Hunger Games” but Japanese and way less sentimental. Watch it when you’re angry.

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND GEMS

I

t’s springtime at Yale, which means papers are finally ending and you can once again get out, read books for pleasure, and otherwise reenter the realm of the living. New Haven lies in wait, so unchain your bike (buy one if you never got around to it) or set out on foot and explore some new places in the city you live in. This map, created by Aaron Reiss ’10, shows 27 New Haven gems within a 15 minute bike ride of old campus and gives a quick introduction to different neighborhoods worth wandering through with your newfound free time. Look for the full version (with 50+ destinations around the city) in dining halls later this month.

Contact AARON REISS at reiss.aaron@aya.yale.edu with any questions or for a digital copy.

S AT U R D AY APRIL 21

“DOC PATTERSON’S DRAGONBONE STORYSHOW” YSD Annex, Room 101 // 2:00 p.m.

An original musical by Mark Sonnenblick and Brendan Ternus.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: “The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos” by Slavoj Zizek, our favorite philosopher.

Here, he rails on capitalism, philanthrophy, and philanthropic capitalism.

S AT U R D AY APRIL 21

THE WASTELAND (POETRY+FILM)

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

212 York Street // 7:00 p.m.

April is the cruellest month.

“Battle Royale”

It’s like “The Hunger Games” but Japanese and way less sentimental. Watch it when you’re angry.

PAGE B8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

TROLLING IN THE DEEP

GOLDEN MEAN OF SILENCE

The magic to managing a comment forum, whose owners’ desires may include silencing trolls, lies in moderation.

The New Haven Independent placed a two-week hiatus on their commenting boards in February.

Editor Paul Bass ’82 explained that the “mad rush to try to have all voices represented” overwhelmed editors to the extent that comments that included personal attacks were accidentally approved on the site.

During a long fortnight of deliberations and troubleshooting, Bass posted 50 of the best comments for and against reopening the comment boards on the New Haven Independent, as the issue was “important for readers to get right.” The site’s new policy is stricter: It now requires real verified email addresses and employs two journalists who are not the article’s authors as moderators.

Bass said that so far the new policy has been much more effective in rehabilitating a forum that is the “only place where people from different backgrounds and races and ideologies” can trade stories on local issues, share expertise, and provide feedback for their neighborhoods and for reporters. Though it comes with growing pains, the new era of accountability can provide valuable feedback for student journalists tapping into the pulse of an issue and improving the style and substance of reporting.

Serna explained that at the News and in journalism classes he had taken the conventional wisdom about commenters was changing from “ignore the commenters” to “you can also learn from them.”

When students provide anonymous feedback for their professors, Yale’s Course Evaluation system is preferred to ratemyprofessor.com. Though Yale’s system is somewhat moderated, its ability to ensure that only Yale students who have taken the professor’s actual class can comment makes it a more viable site for students who hope to effectively provide input back to professors they do or don’t like.

But troll dialogue may take this to its extreme. Because some posts are untraceably anonymous, ideas are totally fatherless, orphaned to be picked up and ‘owned’ by whoever responds to them. In some

sense, just by responding to a troll, one becomes a troll.

“The best way to say a directly offensive things is in some coded way,” sociology professor Philip Smith explained. He added that if trolling comes to be established as how things are done in forums, then people may mimic each other. In other words, the problem only gets worse. However in cases where moderators regulate a site, commenters exercise more moderation. But the the mask of anonymity and mobthink can be used for both good and careless means.

DIAL ‘M’ FOR MUTE

Reply-all threads that begin when a mass email is sent out to spread information for parties, events on campus, self-promotional materials, votes, and surveys can spawn up to 63 or more emails. Some suggest cure-alls for the messages: “Yale panlists rely on the concepts of politeness and good faith, and are not technologically immune to abuse.

Don’t be that person.”

For others, these serve as lessthan-satisfactory occasions for more spam: “Number one, who the fuck cares what you think.

Number two, what gives you the authority to do what you just did.

Number three, you’re a prick.”

For recipients who don’t delete or ignore the emails, responses they send back to everyone on the list range from earnest requests and advice for list removal, to cheeky jokes, to seething, blind and all-consuming rage. Chaos ensues at worst, spinning, circular arguments at best. In a recent spat on the Journalism Initiative panlist, a couple of students suggested that those with Gmail press M to mute the conversation thread from their inboxes forever.

This prompted dozens of students — some satirically and others seriously crossing their fingers for a cyber-panacea — to email (everyone) back “M.” For some, this messaging maelstrom was a sort of local trolling where students played on each other’s knowledge of technology “with ironic false earnestness or just sarcasm,” Andrew Freeburg ’13 said.

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins ’12, one of the emailers who suggested the mute function in Gmail via reply-all email in an earnest attempt to “help others put out the fire in their inboxes early” said he realized that nonetheless “some find amusement in watching it burn.” On the other hand,

the student who started the the most recent “truly massive spam reply-all” said he hoped to give the list a nudge in the “delightful direction” but “hid under the Internet’s cloak of anonymity to avoid retaliation.”

Though most students interviewed said they would not consider a one-time email from someone with whom one has one degree of separation a case of overly burdensome spam, many pointed out that emails crossed the line when they were frequent, offensive and/or contained information that would be totally useless for anyone at all.

As sublet emails serve a large enough community that is looking to sublet, students interviewed generally view sublet spam emails as necessary tools that ultimately serve a pragmatic function: No email means no subletters means losing a lot of money. But for some, this pragmatism can extend to mobilizing action for other uses — “If you’re that bored why don’t you help me get revenge on lying-no-good son-of-a-bitch ex boyfriend?” one recipient replied all from her Blackberry.

Whereas some find all such emails to be a superficial misuse of a fundamentally useful system, others find silly emails to be a source of consolation.

“I find it comforting to know that beneath our professional exteriors there is a seething mass that yearns for chaos . ..These big email events unify us in collective annoyance and make me feel less lonely,” Devin Race ’13 said.

“It’s a chance for me to feel smug and superior, too, for I enjoy when people get annoyed about things that I rise above without being bothered — this is similar to the joy I get from having a big smile on a rainy day.”

And those who troll or fan the fires similarly feel that email lists can become a sort of fun game.

Michael Knowles ’12 compared the micro-trolling experience to “performance art.” Knowles once responded to one student’s email advising others in the thread with the sarcastic recommendation: “Press CAPS LOCK to make letters uppercase.”

“These mass panlists are so easily and obviously exploited that the chains almost instantly become a game of one-upping each other,” he said.

TOWARDS A TROLOLOLOL AESTHETIC

In Swedish, ‘trolla’ means “to

charm, bewitch.” Regardless of whether the attention it attracts is hateful or hilarious, trolling, when reduced to its simplest form, is a spectacle.

Aesthetic distance — the viewer’s inability, out of repulsion or fascination, to look away — might itself be a “trolly thing.” “lulz” replicated the “distancing factor” that Sonnenblick said he was interested in exploring in Internet mediation and YouTube videos.

“

with troll-like humor. On the one hand, the limits to what one can say — or what one can reproduce a troll saying — (hiding behind the anonymity of another) are boundless, but on the other, there’s still the hope to create a show that’s engaging and entertaining, rather than completely alienating and offensive for the audience.

Finley spoke about moments, like the spinning sherbet wheel animation from an Apple computer flying into the Twin Tow-

IN A SMALL BACK CORNER BETWEEN AN ELEVATOR AND A TRASHCAN NEXT TO THE BERKELEY MULTIPURPOSE ROOM, SLAVOJ ZIZEK IS EXPLAINING THAT THE PURPOSE OF HIS DEBATE WITH THE YPU, AND SIMILAR SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS, WAS NOT “TO CONVINCE BUT TO CLARIFY DIFFERENCES, TO DISTURB SOMEONE A BIT.” “The whole idea of the show was to make you feel like you should want to look away but you can’t because you’re tempted,” “lulz” assistant director Charlie Polinger ’13 said. “You’re never really comfortable with what’s happening because it’s always new.”

Both experimental theater and trolling can highlight and explore extremes of what hadn’t been done yet, Polinger said. Finley said that in both spaces there are “those who use shocking signifiers purely to shock,” adding that some of Wilde’s disinterested aesthetic techniques might make him “proto-troll.” Which is to say, trolls themselves, and their representations, are theatrical. Andrew Kahn ’14, who is in a sketch group, described YaleMom as a “Shakespearean fool playing in the court of the king.”

The writers of “lulz” spoke about the paradox they faced when creating a troll-like musical

ers, where the jokes were “so tasteless that no one had permission to laugh,” but without which the show would not have been as effective.

He added that none of the humor, including a joke about Terry Schaivo, “was anywhere near as grotesque or offensive as much of the humor on Fourchan’s ‘/b/’.”

Like “lulz”’s aesthetic, Kahn connected the tendencies in trolling — and its ambiguous irony — to the type of comedy they hoped to do in their sketch group. Kahn described seeking to engage with a comedy of aesthetic distance that was, like trolling, removed from fixed social norms to ease the creative process.

But as with a drink of liquor that loosens the tongue or a mystical experience that shatters the ego, the great freedom from inhibitions that anonymity likewise brings also comes with great responsibility. For every whistleblower or artist, there’s also the risk of becoming an asshole.

There are enough of both in the world but the question many have raised is whether these new online spaces explicitly encourage this behavior. When the wrong norms are reinforced, Smith said, it does.

THE ACADEMIC TROLL ™

At its heart, all trolling is a form of of a positive or negative disruption. It can be a disruption that introduces pain and/or a disruption that introduces absurdity — or freeplay — into life.

But even slapping the subjective label of productive or disruptive onto unpleasant speech patterns is not unlike the idea of calling someone who talks excessively or pedantically a ‘section asshole.’ It may well be, however, that vague labels like troll and section asshole, are successful by virtue of their very abstraction and idealization. In generalizing a series of instances to poke fun at a larger system of representations or ideologies, this sort of humor or name-calling removes some of the immediate bite of humor seen as mean and personal.

Turning a person into a character or caricature, shifts the attack from the person to an idea.

The theorist, too, might be a

S AT U R D AY APRIL 21

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (ABRIDGED) LC // 8:00 p.m.

How can the sheer brilliance and splendor of William Shakespeare’s plays be portrayed in a single evening? Show up and see!

sort of troll. An academic troll is “someone who is not afraid of disrupting discussion not only because he or she disagrees, but because they like disagreement,” said Soren Forsberg GRD ’16 , who is Scandinavian but does not believe in biological trolls.

In a small back corner between an elevator and a trash can next to the Berkeley multipurpose room, Slavoj Zizek is explaining that the purpose of his debate with the YPU, and similar speaking

“

TROLLS FROM PAGE B3

engagements, was not “to convince but to clarify differences, to disturb someone a bit.”

Zizek might be an exemplary beneficiary troll as he engages with ideas more than with ad hominem attacks on people — “I almost wanted to write a defense of Madoff — he was a crook — but the problem was not Madoff.

There are always persons. It was the ideas—” Forsberg described Zizek as the “perfect troll, always asking sharp but kind of embarrassing questions. Trolling is people not engaging with people.”

Another public intellectual and perhaps quasi-troll Stanley Fish once said that he was glad he never had to meet Habermas, who he used as his intellectual whipping boy.

Then again, Forsberg pointed out that academics take on and weigh other people’s opinions skillfully and enjoy engaging in rational debate, unlike trolls.

“You’re talking about being outrageous for the sake of being outrageous for the sake of getting attention,” Rosen said. “That’s as old as speech.”

But it’s not like the Internet invented political pundits, marketing campaigns, or a cappella groups singing during lectures — things as old as speech whose codes and norms are something that have been negotiated in real life and are still being worked out.

Encampments on the New Haven Green are bulldozed by the grinning teeth of bulldozers. In cyberspace, the Troll face grin ruins with a newfound ease.

Before it was lulz, it was lol, and lightyears before that, it was the live action of out-loud laughter.

One alum, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of “pissing off any teachers past,” recalled playing a game with friends where they would give each other unrelated words to say in their seminar comments. For instance, the game’s theme was once Will Smith’s movie titles: “I Am Legend,” “Seven Pounds,” “Hitch” … ”I,Robot.”

Contact AVA KOFMAN at ava.kofman@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Befriending a prefrosh.

Oh, wait... they’re gone, you say? Damn..

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND LIFE’S

PAGE B9

A BEACH

TO MYRTLE! COME HELL, OR HIGHWATER // BY YANAN WANG

// C

While most Yale students delve into internships and study abroad programs following the end of exam period next month, many seniors will be spending the final moments of their Bright College Years together on the sunny shores of South Carolina, at North Myrtle Beach.

For decades, graduating college seniors have flocked to Myrtle Beach in the hopes of creating as many college memories in four days as they created in the last four years. The destination is considered by many seniors as a necessary pit stop before they bid their college selves farewell for good. Characterized by excessive alcoholism, non-stop partying and general debauchery, Myrtle Beach brings graduating classes together to revel in all the wild youthfulness that made their college experience memorable. According to the Myrtle Beach Tours website, College Beach Week is a half-century’s old tradition in the coastal city, attracting students from colleges across the east coast.

TIVE REA

CO M

MON

S

So what is the allure behind Myrtle Beach that pulls “everyone” toward it? It seems significant enough to warrant peer pressure, but is it worth visiting over other vacation destinations? *** Several of the seniors interviewed said that there is something about Myrtle Beach that feels quintessentially Yale-like.

They are going there, they said, in an attempt to maximize their Yale experience — it is their chance to create every memory that they didn’t have time for as sleep-deprived, success-driven Yale students.

“It seems like a ‘Yale thing’ to do pre-graduation,” said Lauren Motzkin ’12.

In last year’s Commencement Issue, Cristina Costantini ’11 wrote a WEEKEND view through the perspective of Christiane Amanpour reporting from the front shorelines of Myrtle. As Costantini described to the News, Myrtle Beach is a week-long frat party during which the “raging and fist pumping and ‘fuck yeah, college’ attitude” reigns supreme.

“I’m wearing a DKE Tang tank top and ‘We Love Yale Butts’

AFTER WORKING UNDER A RIGOROUS ACADEMIC CURRICULUM, SENIORS FIND THAT MYRTLE GIVES THEM A CHANCE TO RELIEVE FOUR YEARS WORTH OF STRESS. For some seniors, though, Myrtle Beach feels like more of an obligation than a voluntary celebration. Three seniors interviewed said that while they do not know a lot about the place, they’re heading south to spend time with friends. A couple students acknowledged that there are probably better places to spend dead week — the period of time between finals and Commencement — but no other locale gathers as many fellow Yalies as Myrtle Beach does.

“The only reason I’m going to Myrtle is because everyone’s going to Myrtle,” said Gabriel Barcia Duran ’12. “It seems as though people will hate me if I don’t go to Myrtle.”

S AT U R D AY APRIL 21

THE BATTLE OF THE BANDS

Saybrook College Dining Hall // 10 p.m.

Time to get excited for Spring Fling.

trucker cap which allows me to pass freely amongst the dazed civilians and drunken combatants,” wrote Costantini. “In all of my years of reporting, never have I seen such sustained hedonism on this scale.”

She continued to say that this state of general depravity soon grew tiring, as some seniors began to wonder at the purpose of Myrtle Beach beyond its function as a week-long party: “The Battle of Myrtle has been a harrowing experience for civilians in the region. The fried food and day drinking have clearly taken their toll and nasally complaints of ‘Alright, Myrtle actually kind of sucks,’ have set in with the weak and inexperienced.”

I n July 2011, an article published on the Yale Alumni Magazine blog recounted similar memories of Myrtle and featured a photograph of three young men falling over one another while clutching watermelon chunks in their hands. The introductory paragraph of the piece reads: “Watermelon fights on the beach. Inflatable sharks in the hot tub. Drinks in the hot tub.

Drinks at the Spanish Galleon.

Drinks everywhere.”

The article also attempts to trace the tradition back to when “Dead Week [first] became Myrtle Week.” A letter from Klaus Jensen ‘88 suggested that he and his suitemates started the custom after the beach was recommended to them by a friend attending the University of Virginia. Jensen recalled gathering a band of 20 other students to venture to the resort town with him where they stayed at the Rocking K Motel and partied at Crazy Zack’s night club.

More than two decades later, these places still exist. But most Yalies forego Crazy Zack’s for the Spanish Galleon, which some think of as Toad’s with a Latin twist. *** Although some seniors said that they go to Myrtle Beach to be in the company of other Yalies before graduation, others who are not partaking in the festivities contend that Myrtle isn’t necessary for a fulfilling dead week experience.

Vera Wuensche ‘12, who will be spending the week after finals in Berlin with three of her close friends, said that she opted for an alternative send-off because the idea of a drunken beach vacation does not appeal to her.

“From what friends told me, it is basically a three or four day long pool party,” said Wuensche. “While I do enjoy partying, I want to spend dead week with the people that have become very dear to me instead of being drunk all day.” But she added, “If Berlin hadn’t been an option for my friends, we probably would have gone to Myrtle, and I am sure it would have been fun.”

Shelagh Mahbubani ‘11 did not go to Myrtle her graduating year, choosing instead to stay with a friend who had to remain in New Haven for Glee Club rehearsal. Mahbubani said that she and a few of her friends relaxed on campus and also spent a few days in New York City. She didn’t feel that there was any stigma attached to

s taying behind and said that she was happy with her decision.

Another alumnus from the class of 2011 remarked that while he had a wonderful time during his stay at Myrtle, he also had a group of friends who went to Martha’s Vineyard instead and had a good time.

“You make dead week what you want it to be,” he said. *** Myrtle Beach isn’t the only option for departing seniors, but it seems to have become the favored choice for the herd. The “Myrtle Beach phenomenon” has affected colleges across the country. Yale historian Gaddis Smith ‘54 GRD ‘61 recalled that while he was a member of the faculty at Duke University, “college students from all over” frequently gathered on the beach.

As Motzkin expressed, “It’s a tradition — a good way to hang out with your friends and do something as a senior class before graduation.”

Rather than a “final hurrah,” Myrtle can also serve as a transition between the stressful period of final exams and the traditional activities of senior week. Sarai Meyer ‘11 said that in addition to going to the beach, she also spent a lot of time indoors relaxing, watching TV and cooking. After working under a rigorous academic curriculum, seniors find that Myrtle gives them a chance to relieve four years worth of stress.

In 2009, the beach was set aflame by wildfires that broke out mid-April. 2,500 residents were evacuated and 70 homes were destroyed, the News reported. But the regions of the coast frequented by tourists remained untouched, and seniors interviewed were undeterred even though Parks, Recreation & Tourism spokesperson Marion Edmonds warned that the fires could take weeks to be fully contained.

One graduating student was particularly adamant about his plans to go to Myrtle. “I plan on partying all day on the beach,” Peter Boisi ‘09 told the News.

“And if the beach is on fire I will move into the water — I’m pretty sure that can’t catch fire.”

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

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Remembering Occupy.

Although they’re gone from the Green, the message they sent and the issues they raised remain with us.

PAGE B10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

TWENTY YEARS OF TWEE The battle between stripes and gingham at last week’s Chickfactor indie pop festival in Brooklyn ended staunchly in a tie, with floral-pattern and perennial dark horse candidate, polkadots, trailing just behind. Among the other attire on display on the Bell House dance floor, my floral dress fit in as well as I could have hoped.

I was not, however, carrying a small child in my arms, which seemed to be the amusing if unsurprising trend among the crowd. After all, though the venue was a bar as kidunfriendly as any, the festival was a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Chickfactor magazine, a veritable twee and indie pop bible in print from 1992 to 2002. Those who remember its ingenuous charm best are now old enough to be parents. They demonstrated this on Thursday by proudly displaying their toddlers in bob hair-dos and rainbow-colored earplugs. This was undoubtedly the most earnestly adorable setting I’ve found myself in.

Earnestly adorable has certainly been the aesthetic of choice for the entirety of the indie pop movement, and this festival was no different. Chickfactor was founded in Washington D.C. by Gail O’Hara and Pam Berry, two names that would make any pop nerd smile. Its list of contributing writers includes nearly everyone who was anyone in and around the scene, from Stephen Merritt of the Magnetic Fields to Lois Maffeo of Lois and Stephen Duffy of Duran Duran.

The magazine was so important at the time that Belle and Sebastian immortalized its interview process in an eponymous song (“What was it I saw in New York? I’m not the same anymore,” they aptly muse). Standing in a room of old friends, collaborators and long-time fans of a single forum that had been writing about indie pop for longer than I’ve been alive made me inexplicably proud.

For all these aging popkids with sassy cat-eye glasses poking out from beneath straight

NINA WEXELBLATT PLAYING OFF THE BEAT bangs, the real dream of the 90s had been temporarily relocated from the endearingly gritty Portland of Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein and revived in Park Slope. Before niche genres could proliferate on the internet, zines and well-curated record labels were able to create an entire alternative world of art and fame.

This is perhaps one of the most alluring aspects of indie pop.

sweetly as on any recording.

The humility of all of the performers underscored the fantastical playfulness of the indie pop sensibility. Many of them came out into the audience and danced lankily to the placeholding music between sets, and Pam Berry, to whom credit for not only Chickfactor, but also the band Black Tambourine and the seminal record label Slumberland, is owed, said that she was positively baffled that anyone would be here to see her.

Of course, she must know her place in the culture, but like any-

THE WHOLE THING PLAYED OUT LIKE A GAME OF TAG BETWEEN LONG LOST FRIENDS WHO HAD NEVER QUITE OUTGROWN FROLICKING. In this case, everyone present was invested enough to be star struck by the talent lined up. Boys in button-covered jeans jackets discussed the various merits of the Honeybunch singles available at the merch table, and everyone cheered at the appearance of the MC, drummer and indie pop staple Phoebe Summersquash, whose banter between sets became more and more delightfully anecdotal as she downed her cups of beer.

While she rambled on about her crush on the lead singer of Honeybunch, the atmosphere felt like peeking behind the scenes of the cool sort of mom’s night out.

The whole thing played out like a game of tag between long lost friends who had never quite outgrown frolicking. The special guests included Ladybug Transistor, who played on Team Stripes and whose surprise appearance made me impossibly giddy. Pam Berry graced the stage herself, despite claiming to be terrified of performing, and Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia, the two lovely ladies who make up the Softies, hadn’t played together in a decade but harmonized as

one else there who went on to lead ordinary-person lives, was shocked to see the way it has lasted over decades.

Before the sets had finished, I slipped out past the merch table and bought a commemorative poster. The bulk of the image is a photograph of a spread complete with a papier-mâché cherry tree and trumpet, black and white photographs and miniature instruments. The names of all the performers who had joined in the festival over its three nights were clustered at the top. I walked out into the warm Brooklyn night carrying an alternative pantheon of music rolled up under my arm. A couple in front of me held hands, one in gingham, one in stripes, with a very sleepy little girl in-between. Everyone seemed pleased that indie pop had touched a new generation.

Contact NINA WEXELBLATT at nina.wexelblatt@yale.edu .

//CHICKFACTOR.COM

Every pop nerd’s dream come true

Keeping things tame for the party-goers A few weeks ago I got my business waxed for the first time. I have an extremely low pain tolerance and I’m scared of most things, especially things that are going to get all up in and around my vagina (I’m looking at you, pap smear contraptions). I also hate paying for things that aren’t snacks. Needless to say, I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of having hot wax on my lady bits — and paying for it — but I was going to suck it up. Spring break in Cancun was approaching, and I figured that if I was going to look chunky in a bathing suit, I should at least not be hairy. I had also randomly found myself a boyfriend, who I suspected would appreciate some grooming.

While I had always shaved a bit down there so things didn’t get crazy — I’m Italian and Jewish, the hairiest combination — I never felt too concerned about keeping it neat for the fellows.

I’ve always felt that, as a woman who has to menstruate, bare children, earn less money and have a higher body fat percentage than men, I shouldn’t need to devote enormous amounts of energy and money into making myself hairless. I resented that women were expected to spend hours and hours and hours of their lives ridding themselves of hair on their armpits, eyebrows, legs, genita-

S U N D AY APRIL 22

MARIA YAGODA MARIA DOES YALE lia and the like. For this reason, it was never a priority for my vagina to look pre-pubescent or sculpted like a hedge in Versailles’ garden.

I always figured that if a guy was lucky enough to be interacting with my vagina, he could handle whatever hair arrangement I so chose.

I’m certainly in the minority.

When I talk to my girlfriends, hair is a nonissue — all of it needs to go.

I have one friend who refuses to hook up with a boy if her business is too hairy, unless she’s wasted or “it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity.” Most girls feel similarly. I even know girls who use not shaving as a mechanism of hook-up prevention. One friend tells me, “It’s different if you have a boyfriend because you’re past the we-need-to-impress-each-other stage. But for a random hookup, there is definitely a threshold of hairiness that would put a halt to things.”

The real question for women seems to be whether to wax, which is exorbitantly expensive and painful, but lasts for a while and minimizes bumps, or to shave, which is cheaper and less painful, but often leads to red bumps and

No turning back

ingrown hairs. Most women I’ve encountered either wax or shave it all off, and have done so for years.

This seems to be what the menfolk prefer, as well. One guy tells me that he likes lady parts to be trim, or even better, bare, but anything will do as long as he “doesn’t need a machete down there.”

Shockingly enough, girls also have preferences when it comes to their partner’s grooming situation. One girl friend tells me, flat out, “Man hair is gross; I don’t even like chest hair,” and another recounts having dry heaved in seventh grade when she saw her crush in a speedo and he had thick lower back hair. But most ladies are pretty tolerant and only ask for some sort of manscaping, whether that be a bit of trimming or peripheral shaving in the junk region. Especially if the man is expecting oral pleasure. No girl wants pubes in the mouth, especially if she already has to deal with a whole penis in there.

But there is a limit to grooming.

Shapes and/or bedazzles on one’s business, I would argue, is overkill. And “say no to buttscaping,” one friend tells me, after her boyfriend insisted that she shave his ass. It grew back stubbly.

Contact MARIA YAGODA at maria.yagoda@yale.edu .

The return to New Haven fast approaches.

It’s that time. My gap year must end, preparations must be set in motion, summer must come. The days are getting longer after all.

My thoughts rest on a nostalgic plinth these days (I mean, didn’t you just notice that Nico reference?). The months have passed at a brisk pace: work-stuff, schoollearning, soul-searching, clarity-seeking and sun-basking soaked up all the minutes of my sabbatical. That’s a lot of hyphens, and little time left over for any kind of regret.

No looking back, I say. A gap year cannot afford any doubts, for it requires some degree of planning and control. While prudence doesn’t preclude the certainty of mistakes (or even misdeeds), there is little time for contrition; that faith-based, graver sibling of regret. I know all about contrition.

Growing up Catholic you are encouraged to doubt your motives and in turn, you opt to act with moral conviction. After straying from the Church in not-so-recent times, I found myself throwing excess vacillation out the window.

As a limited resource, time should not be wasted, and it should be taken seriously. As stated in Ecclesiastes 3, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” There is a time for everything, and my gap year had no time for remorse.

I first heard this famous Bible passage in “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” the 1965 hit from The Byrds. I was 10 and a pop culture sponge, and the song came up on the radio. Who knew Hispanic radio could do folk music? It was so sweet, but soon enough I heard someone in the pulpit recite the same words, in Spanish and in a more somber tone.

Roger McGuinn and my preacher both

A CELEBRATION OF CHAMBER MUSIC

WLH Hall, Sudler Hall // 4:00 p.m.

The Yale Department of Music and the students of MUS 221b present works

by Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Schubert, Ravel, Schulhoff, Saint Saens and Dvorak.

JORDI GASSÓ INTERMISSION wanted to make the same point. It’s not about time in terms of finite units. It’s not about being late for a lunch date or procrastinating on your final paper. It’s Time with a capital ‘T,’ periods of your life that cannot be truly defined by hours or days.

There will always be “a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance” (Ecclesiastes 3:4). A sad movie, a joke from your lecturer, the sudden loss of a dear friend, M O D E R N L O V E. You don’t really measure these moments with pros and cons, you focus on living them lest you’re burdened later on with too many what-ifs.

But feeling uneasy about past decisions is just as natural as choosing not to worry at all.

I do mull over the shoulda coulda woulda’s of my gap year, and regret threatens to tinge my budding nostalgia. To counter these toxic feelings, I revel in the knowledge that my gap year was my “time to get” and my “time to keep” (Ecclesiastes 3:6). I spent my time “constructively,” as my dean recommended, and I accomplished what I had envisioned for myself.

Time off from Yale is still time in and of itself, and I’ve tried to wise up about it. Every one of my decisions has had its own time to happen. I may only be spewing out platitudes, but I have the world’s oldest lyrics to back me up.

Contact JORDI GASSÓ at jmgj11@gmail.com .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Dvorak’s “Humoresque” performed by Yo Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman.

You won’t regret it.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B11

WEEKEND THEATER

Reading week?

More like theater week, amirite?

R

eading week is upon us, and while this week, equally glorious and horrible, brings many things, WEEKEND is most excited for the huge number of plays that go up across campus. We thought we’d shake things up a bit and present three of them — “The Girl from Andros,” “West Side Story” and “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)” — in visual form. Enjoy the last theater of the year! Photos by Zoe Gorman, Victor Kang and McKay Nield.

S U N D AY APRIL 22

THE YALE RUSSIAN CHORUS SPRING CONCERT St. Anthony Hall // 7:00 p.m.

The Yale Russian Chorus is a tenor-bass a cappella choral ensemble specializing in sacred and secular Slavic choral music.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Sleep.

We hear it’s, like, pretty good for you.

PAGE B12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

// TELEGRAPH.CO.UK

LEFTIST, PARADOX, WTF? // BY CARL CHEN

T

he hottest philosopher and cultural theorist out of Slovenia, Slavoj Žižek has taken the Western intellectual world hostage over the past 20 years with his lovable accent, perverse insights, Stalinist and Maoist jokes, and Marxist damnation of capitalism. On Tuesday, the Yale Political Union hosted Žižek (pronounced zhee-ZHEK) in their Bulldog Days debate of the topic: “Resolved: Capitalism is the Opiate of the Masses” (which passed resoundingly). SSS 114 was standing room only, and eager graduate students were kindly asked to move to the balcony so that the innocent pre-frosh could be indoctrinated up close. WEEKEND caught up with Žižek after the debate to clarify some of his often-paradoxical thoughts, but instead he kind of ignored our questions and said whatever Hegelian-Marxist-Lacanian shit goes on in that crazy Slovenian mind of his and so on and so on.

A. No, no, let’s not idealize this form. Of course it’s all posturing and like one-, two-sentence phrases. It’s like I said, I meant this seriously at the end. I don’t look at this event as a way to really convince someone. It’s just to clarify the differences, to disturb people a little bit.

You know, maybe one of them will start to think, maybe some of us became a little more aware of what the inquisitions or impositions are. At this level it works.

Otherwise it’s, of course, a spectacle.

Q. But do you think we’ll become fully aware at any point? Will we ever have all the answers? There were many contradictions in everyone’s arguments tonight.

A. Yeah, yeah, but you have to accept them. I don’t think we are in a stage generally to have clear answers. Fuck it, I don’t know what the answers are.

Q. But without the answers, should we act to make change? Or do we have to just keep thinking and worrying?

A. Uh, we have to start thinking, I think, and this may sound very anti-Marxist, but I think thinking even may be more important than acting today, because you know, I don’t believe in this, you know, “People are inventive, you start to act.”

No you don’t, we really don’t know what to do. It’s really tragic; I wasn’t bluffing what I was telling there. For example, when I was in Greece, you asked them, “What do you want?” They are totally perplexed. I simply ask. The guy here [at the debate], at least gave me a clear answer: Scandinavian social democracy. The tragedies that I endure almost every month — I mean it’s falling apart all around.

Q. But could we consider thinking to be a form of acting? So for instance, the Occupy movement, what they’re doing right now doesn’t seem to be like much, but they’re doing a lot of thinking.

A. This is why instead of all the fashionable criticism of President Obama, by the leftists, I mean, you know, some leftists

wrote as if they expected Obama to bring socialism here or something. No, he still did a great thing with the whole universal health care debate. We should engage in acts like this. You know why? For two reasons.

First, it is something which is clearly visible. He didn’t propose some crazy radical measure. Universal health care, more or less, works in Canada and many European countries, so you cannot say he’s planning some Leninist utopia. It can be done within the capitalist system.

Point two, which explains the reactions.

It obviously did touch some very neural core, some nervous part of American common ideology — depriving customers of the freedom of choice. This is an excellent topic for engagement. Again, you do something which really confronts us with the limitations of most elementary everyday ideology, but again at the same time, it is visible. You are not bullshitting. He didn’t propose — I don’t know, “communism,” — you know what I mean.

So I would say that we should start thinking, but at the same time — And this is what my example of Scandinavia or even in Latin America [from the debate] — I agree with those who say Lula in Brazil was much more interesting than Chavez because nonetheless, the existing capitalism is not one big monolithic system, and we just have to sit down and wait and it falls apart. It is a space where a number of things can be done here or there. You know, because if you look at all big social changes, they don’t usually happen so that someone decides that we will now do the big thing. You start to do something small, a small conflict, and all of a sudden it triggers — so we just have to do this and that, and maybe at some point, something will happen and so on.

And on the other hand, I hate this elitist leftist who hates ordinary people. You know, when they told me, “You know, people are so ideologically manipulated.” Well, I tell them, “What do you mean by this?” Like, if I were to be an ordinary American citizen, do you think for whom I should vote? Do you think I would have voted for that communist party of United States, the sort of crazy ex-Maoist kind? Of course the people don’t vote [for the left] because they feel that the left really doesn’t have a serious

program. I mean you can see this tragically today in Europe. In Spain, in Greece, and so on and so on.

Q. So is part of the problem with the left having no new ideas and they need to start thinking more?

A. No, but you know what, because then people can tell me, “Okay, why do you even expect people from the left to do it?” No, all I’m saying is — and here is where my pessimism comes from — if we do nothing, we will be in deep shit — ecologically, socially. So it may well be possible that nothing will happen, that somehow the system will survive. But then I won’t like to live in a society that pretty much 20, 30 years from now — because remember, I’m not talking about 200 years from now, I’m talking about 20, 30 years.

“

Q. It would make it easy.

A. Yeah! There are signs that the ruling class is really losing its ability to rule properly. I mean, there are really signs of confusion. And so on and so on. It’s very tragic. And it’s also clear in Europe.

They’re just reacting to the crisis, no, maybe they know.

For example, China is now in total panic, as you maybe know. They are just getting ready for some — because they got something, the Chinese communists, that you know, when people say the wonderful things about them, how they lifted 160 million people out of hunger, they don’t get it. Revolutions do not emerge when things are really bad. Revolutions emerge when things start to get better and then people want more and are disappointed, which is why — the Communists in China know this — and again, they are just getting ready for some mega mega disturbances. They’re strengthening incredibly the army, the internal security, special police units, and so on and so on. So I really think that like there

MAO HAD THIS WONDERFUL SAYING, ‘EVERYTHING UNDER HEAVEN IS IN UTTER CHAOS; THE SITUATION IS EXCELLENT.’ You can see it in Europe, for example, it was so tragic, you remember, it was a republic here in Greece, but when the crisis began — two, three months, ago, the previous prime minister proposed a national referendum, and whole Europe was horrified. The message was clear, we need now a technocratic government, don’t mess with democracy and so on and so on. And I really think, and right here I am not a leftist paranoid. Okay, I’m not saying that some secret capitalist power center decides the end of democracy. No, it’s the spontaneous logic of the system which leads more and more to

“

Q. What did you think of speaking at the Yale Political Union tonight, using their format, which is not the kind of lecture you’re usually used to?

what some people in Europe call a postpolitical society, where economy is left to the experts and we’re allowed to debate these topics like gay rights and abortion, which are important, but it’s not where money, where things are decided, so now almost the only passionate politics is cultural politics. Other things are left to, and I think really that the tragedy today–I will say something horrible — is that you know this Marxist dream, there’s this secret elite capitalist ruling, it would be good if there were such elite, I think —

are difficult times ahead. Who knows what will happen?

Q. Okay, so given that you are very pessimistic about the future, how do — A. Not very!

Q. Okay, just a little bit, but —

A. Let me give you a paradoxical answer.

For the same reasons, I am optimistic and pessimistic. It is the same when — you know, Mao had this wonderful saying, “Everything under heaven is in utter

chaos; the situation is excellent.”

There is a general crisis. Not economic, but in various areas — no one really knows. These are dangerous times, but at the same time, opportunities. It’s again paradoxical — I am an optimist, for the very same reasons I am a pessimist.

Or my dogma is that things cannot go on the way — OK they can five, 10 years, and so on.

But we see what’s happening in Europe. Maybe it’ll explode, it’s horrible.

And on the one hand, this Greek bankruptcy, on the other hand, the incredible explosion of violent anti-immigrant and other racism, and homophobia, it’s really really horrible. And which is why I was not just licking the ass of the Americans [during the debate, he mentioned America still has a chance]. I really meant it that, we lost every right to be our country — the way Europe is regressing. You know what I mean by regression?

For me, I am always for dogmatism.

For example, the measure of emancipation for me is that certain things — you simply cannot speak, talk like that. And I like this! Today in developed, liberal countries, you cannot argue, “Women really like to be raped.” If you do this, you are simply perceived as an idiot or whatever, and this is good! This should be dogmatic here. I would worry very much to live in a country where all the time I would have to argue that women shouldn’t be raped, you know? And at this level, you will have a regression in Europe. There are racist and other statements which 20 years, ago, even 10, were simply unthinkable to hear them in public. The dirty private secrets — now you can talk like that in public, which worries me very much.

I mean that’s so many dilemmas here.

We really need to start thinking here.

We really live in dangerous times. Great hopes, but deep shit, which is why sometimes I’m a pessimist. You see the Von Trier movie, “Melancholia”? After I saw it, I said, “Maybe, I would agree with the heroine, maybe this is a good thing.” It’s beautiful, it’s a little sentimental, but I always love the end of the world. Maybe we are a shit humanity.

Q. Thank you for coming and disturbing Yale a little bit, do you have any parting thoughts?

A. Do whatever you want, manipulate me, change the order. Did you see this movie, it’s kind of a nice leftist documentary, “The Thin Blue Line,” about some fake case of mistrial or misjudgment, where the district attorney says, “It takes an average prosecutor to have a guilty guy convicted, but only a really good prosecutor can have an innocent guy convicted.” So you know, the average journalist can reproduce what I said. It takes a really good journalist, without falsifying me, just by mixing words, to make me say the opposite of what I said. I expect nothing less than this.

Contact CARL CHEN at carl.chen@yale.edu .